Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind (an excellent blog that everyone who appreciates American history and culture should read) has a wonderful entry on the disappearance of the "South." The problem that he underlines (through a newspaper article written by his friend) is the disappearance of Southern culture as it is preserved in rural society.

You could argue that the farm South wasn't the only South. There was the small-town South of Andy Griffith, the mill village South of Norma Rae. ... Yet both of those Souths had roots in and lived on top of the foundation of the rural South.

The journalist continues:

I wonder how the young urban people of today can have a consciousness of being Southern. When I see them on their skateboards or in bands wandering through the mall in [a North Carolina city], it doesn't seem possible they could be any different from kids in California or Michigan.

The journalist whom Mr. Simmons quotes faces a classic dilemma of modernity: the disappearance of one's milieu in the face of progress. Europeans began lamenting the decline of rural society in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1870 English aristocrats stopped earning significant rents from their country lands. It became more of an obligation to manage the resources of their lands and to deal with the requests of their tenants (whom increasingly were small agricultural capitalists than peasants). The productivity of their lands dropped as grains and meats from Australia, South America, and USA drove down the productivity of farming. At best, they could profit from animal husbandry. Most aristocrats sent their children off to the urban world. They took advantage of the privileges of rank to profit from service to the government (there are historians who would relate the intensification of British Empire to the boredom of the elites). The Germans had a unique reaction: the Heimat movement: preservation of ruins, objects of everyday life, dialect, history, study of geology, museum making, etc.

The part of Germany that most resembles the South is Bavaria. Despite its large cities, Bavaria is rural. It has one of the lowest population densities in the country, even with the large cities of Munich and Nuremberg. It has a unique culture whose distinctiveness is widely celebrated (Oktoberfest is more of a Bavarian event than a German event). And it has its own history of particularism and isolation:

•    when the Second Reich was formed, the king of Bavaria was able to keep broad powers, including this own army, currency, and postal service, partial diplomacy;

•    it featured a strong peasants' party that advocated for confederation (rather than federation, but let's stay out of that comparison for now);

•    it had a moment of separation when Kurt Eisler declared an independent republic at the end of WWI (he was shot less than six months later on the streets of Munich; I have a picture of the
meager memorial that I might post later);

•    it hosted one of the most notoriously racist political movements (yep, that one).

Bavaria has maintained rural life despite urbanization. Town and city life has expanded. What has remained the same is the distinction between the urban and the rural. Farmers (no longer peasants) live closely together in villages and drive out to their plots of land. People move into cities: a premium is placed on being within the city rather than developing areas in an anonymous manner. Do Bavarians complain about the modern world? You betcha! They are still the foot-draggers of Germany, maintaining separate apparatuses for the German political parties (the recent failures of the CDU can be tied to the CSU, including Edmund Stoiber’s idiotic candidacy) and fierce cultural pride.

I think the problem is not so much the growth of the city (or urbanization) but (what Mark Clapson calls) the dispersal of the urban. The problem for rural America is that too many elements of urban life are allowed to seep into the rural world, and rural villages and towns never had sufficient organization to provide for an independent cultural life. It became more necessary to leave one’s hometown to get what one needed, and much easier to reach a place to get it.

I have complained about the same process happening here in the Pioneer Valley. It might be difficult for some to see this, but Hampshire County, MA (or what is left of it) is largely urban. Granted, it has no major cities, but it is the cities that largely determine culture and politics in this area, and the influence of farming is slight. And the biggest problem for the valley is de-urbanization.

But how different is urbanization from de-urbanization. Both refer to the construction of malls. Both refer to the decentralization of economy into office parks and industrial parks. Both refer to planned communities. I assume that re-segregation is as much a problem in the rural South as it is in the urban North. I don’t want to raise the complaint about having a Starbucks in every Wal-Mart, but the rural and urban worlds are becoming too similar. And culture is preserved by the balance between the two.

If the South disappears, it will not be because the kids moved to the Big City. There are plenty of Southern institutions available to preserve the distinctiveness of the region. My feeling is that the fate of the South is something more like Bavaria–perhaps less picturesque and without the tragedy.