Fact Man

A big, crimson-faced man in an impressed suit, who looked and talked like a farmer, waved his long arms in sweeping gestures at a group of pedagogues in Chapel Hill, N.C. last week. They had come from all over the South to survey the South's next decade with the speaker, the University of North Carolina's famed Sociologist Howard Washington Odum. Surrounded by charts, maps and graphs representing mountains of facts collected by himself, Dr. Odum exhorted the teachers to make their schools centers of research in local problems, put their students to work, community by community, on the enrichment of the South.

Soil v. Blueprints. In Professor Odum's view, World War II is only an incident in the long sweep of history; he believes that in the long run U.S. destiny will be determined not by victory in war or by spacious blueprints but by the stubborn facts of soil, climate, folkways and the local application of intelligence. But educated Southerners consider Dr. Odum himself more than an incident: many believe his big work, Southern Regions of the United States, will affect the South as profoundly as Uncle Tom's Cabin did the North.

When Georgia-born Sociologist Odum began collecting facts at North Carolina 22 years ago, many Southerners took umbrage at any suggestion for improvement of the South's backward economy. Dr. Odum made no suggestions; he just went on laboriously piling up his facts. He turned up some whopping ones: e.g., with much of the richest soil in the U.S., the Southeast spent 7% of its gross income for commercial fertilizer, almost as much as it spent on education (it bought two-thirds of all the fertilizer used in the nation). Reason: its cash-crop, soil-consuming system (cotton and tobacco). But Dr. Odum impressed Southerners most with another big fact: that the Southeast possessed resources of power, climate, soil and men--if they could be kept from emigrating to other regions--that made it potentially the richest region in the U.S.

Beside the Bible. Dr. Odum's fact-gathering eventually began to move mountains. Thousands of young Southerners went to Chapel Hill to study with him, then went forth to help him collect more facts. Today Odum disciples--teachers, preachers, researchers, government officials, newspapermen, businessmen--are at work in nearly every Southern county.

The president of Alabama Power Co., Thomas W. Martin, knows much of Southern Regions (a 603-page book) by heart. Alabama's Governor Frank M. Dixon is said to have studied it in preparation for taking office. A well-thumbed copy stands beside the Bible in many a local sheriff's office. It inspired at least ten other major books (e.g., Gerald Johnson's The Wasted Land). It also won the distinction of being banned by Georgia's gallus-snapping Governor Eugene Talmadge. Thanks to Dr. Odum, Southerners talk frankly and learnedly about once unmentionable taboos: hookworm, poverty, farm tenancy, poor schools.

Man and Bulls. Like his famed Northern counterpart, Yale's late great Sociologist William Graham Sumner, Professor Odum is better known for his work than as a man. But his disciples know him as a great and lovably rumpled character, a striking campus figure with a breakneck stride. In class he flings paper and books around, makes his points with mighty gestures. When a student worries the class with too earnest an exposition of a tense social problem, Professor Odum likes to unhorse him by growling Odumishly: "What of it?"

As a scholar, Dr. Odum overpowers readers and listeners with the sheer weight of his facts and his steamroller style. His well-known collections of Negro songs and his trilogy of novels (Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, Wings on My Feet, Cold Blue Moon) have also won him the nickname of Poet in a Cow Pasture.

Dr. Odum is as eminent in cattle-breeding circles as in sociology. On his farm near Chapel Hill he has one of the finest collections of blooded bulls and cows in the South; his chief pride is an imported $6,000 prize Jersey bull named Wonderful Louisoxford. The professor's cattle-breeding, like his fact-gathering, is a sociological project: his bulls have sired offspring for farmers throughout the South and his announced goal is "to give the farmer a 5-or 6-gallon cow instead of a 2-or 3-gallon cow." His favorite classroom joke: "So far my bulls have been worth more than my books."

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