The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of Rural White Southernness, 1960-1980

Abstract

This dissertation argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of Americans, including television and film producers, journalists, rock `n' roll fans, novelists, counterculturists, presidential candidates, and George Wallace supporters, looked to an imagined rural white South as a repository of supposedly discarded values. In the shadow of the civil rights movement and the South's increasing modernization, these individuals often perceived such "southern" traits as family-centeredness, closeness to the land, common-sense thinking, manliness, pre-modernity, and authenticity as both a welcome refuge from and an antidote to concerns about "rootlessness" in U.S. society. This sense of rootlessness was grounded in the vague belief that Americans had lost touch with cultural traditionalism. It combined contemporary anxieties about social unrest and government deceit with longer standing worries about suburban blandness, the shift from producerism to consumerism, social anomie, and the increasingly technocratic nature of modern America. My work traces the allure of the rural white South by detailing the region during the 1960s civil rights movement; country-rock music and the South in the countercultural consciousness; the Masculine South(s) of George Wallace, the novel and film Deliverance (1970, 1972), and the film Walking Tall (1973); the contrasting southernness of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band; and the appeal of Jimmy Carter's "healing" southernness during the 1976 presidential campaign. This study expands the scope of historians' recent investigations into the South's burgeoning influence in national politics and culture. It directs a much-needed focus to Americans' perceptions of rural white southernness, and more specifically, to how they formed and utilized these understandings, and what this information reveals about U.S. society and culture. In addition to emphasizing the malleability of race and the southland's image in national discussions, this dissertation underscores the imagined South's role as a safe area of contemplation in which Americans could address their conflicted thinking about a variety of national trends, from changing gender roles to evolving family structures to consumer culture, without ever having to resolve any incongruities. Finally, this work employs a new angle for integrating southern history into the national narrative while paying attention to the ways in which post-World War II Americans continued to cling to the idea of southern distinctiveness.