| In 1934, with the South's chronic pattern of rural poverty thrown into sharp relief by global economic crisis, Paul Washington Terry and Verner Martin Sims began work on the book that follows this essay. Funded initially as part of a larger information-gathering effort by New Deal agencies, the survey of a tiny rural locale in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, quickly out-grew its bureaucratic purpose. When finally published in 1940 the book carried a titleThey Live on the Landthat was almost an anachronism. What Terry and Sims had produced was more nearly an eleventh-hour snapshot of a way of life doomed to rapid extinction in the wake of World War II. Viewing their subject through a lens untinted by sentimentalism, the authors collected and analyzed a staggering amount of evidence obtained from interviews, questionnaires, standardized tests, and firsthand observation during visits to 196 of the 209 families residing within the twenty-one-square-mile area identified by the fictional name "Upland Bend." In seeking to reveal "who the people were, what they thought, and what they did," the authors began with local history and went on to explore the entire spectrum of social, economic, political, psychological, and demographic information available during the mid-1930s. Organized around such themes as religion, education, leisure, civic life, and economic activity, the book's eleven topical chapters left few subjects untouched, including potentially explosive matters like race relations and injustice stemming from class stratification. Even gender, a category alien to most scholars of the authors' generation, received thoughtful consideration in a separate section of the chapter on local leadership. Only a few community studies, before or since, have attempted so much in a single volume. |
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