And until quite recently, as the census records show, the agricultural society was our prevailing society. Moreover, the 1960 census figures on urbanization, within the context of the South, can be highly misleading. A great part of this statistically “urban” population lives in towns so small that the towns are spiritually and economically a part of the rural countryside around them. There were in 1960 only seventy metropolitan areas of more than 50,000 population in the thirteen States, and twenty of these were in Texas. In Mississippi, Jackson has edged past 100,000, but no other city in the State is even close to that mark. Outside of Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas is a State of small towns. This is even truer of North Carolina; fewer than one-fourth of the State’s four and a half million residents live in the six principal cities (the largest is Charlotte, with a metropolitan population of 272,000). The others are scattered through scores of towns and villages. Georgia is statistically “urban” now, but urban attitudes are largely concentrated in Atlanta, and perhaps four other cities. Beyond Charleston, Columbia, and perhaps Greenville, South Carolina is almost as countrified today as it was in the time of Calhoun.
The slowness of life in the country, where diversions are few and the reasons for haste almost nil, tends to breed men who are highly resistant to change. They know, as well as they know anything, that change and progress are not necessarily to be equated; and for all the tub-thumping that goes on in local chambers of commerce, many a Southerner is not so sure he is in favor of progress anyhow. The Northern Neck of Virginia, for one example, has a positive antipathy to altering anything.
The conservatism that is identified with the South, as W. J. Cash remarked in his great work, _The Mind of the South_, runs continuously with the past. It embraces also a strong sense of community, of _place_, of local institutions and families and classes. Primogeniture vanished with the American Revolution, but its vestigial spirit may be observed at every hand; whole generations of Randolphs have been lawyers, and whole generations of Tuckers have been doctors and ministers. The South is a land not only of “Juniors,” but of “IIIs” and even “IVs.”