Revisiting Issue 1
43 Years Later, the Issues & Mission Remain
"The farmer who does not control the land he works does not control his own destiny" (Singh 1983:127).
"What happens when an industry leaves a community?" (Howie, Phillips, and Wade 1983:54).
"Overparticipation in government programs often receives much publicity, while the question of underparticipation by those eligible is seldom addressed" (Wheelock et al. 1983:97).
Among small farm families in Southwest Virginia, "overall quality of life rather than economic benefit" appeared to be the measure of success (Caldwell et al. 1983:29).
These four quotes are drawn from the first issue of Southern Rural Sociology from 1983. Read today, they still sound current. Who controls the land? Who benefits from development? Why does eligibility fail to guarantee access? Whose labor holds the farm household together? What should count as rural prosperity?
Volume 1 was an experiment. For years the Rural Sociology Section of the Southern Association of Agricultural Sciences had bound its meeting papers into unedited proceedings. In 1983 it tried a peer-reviewed journal instead. The founding editor, Richard Wetherhill, called it a "fledgling effort" and thanked his board as "islands of stability in the chaos from which this publication emerged." The journal's concerns would be southern, he wrote, but he hoped they were "not merely parochial" (Wetherhill 1983:1).
Land has always been central. By 1978, almost 94% of the Black farms counted in 1920 were gone. Surendra Singh, writing from Tennessee State, placed that loss within the mechanization of Southern agriculture. Then he named what the mechanization story leaves out. Black farmers were shut out of credit, denied their share of farm programs, and lost land to "partition sales, tax foreclosures, and other devices" (Singh 1983:127-28). Partition sales of heirs' property are now the subject of a research field of their own.
Industry was the South's development promise in 1983. Marguerite Howie, Robert Phillips Jr., and Sharon Wade of South Carolina State went into eight counties, from Horry on the coast to Greenville in the upstate, to ask what it had delivered. Most residents welcomed new industry. Many also believed a single plant could raise or lower a county's population. The researchers asked whether people living through the change were "in reality change agents or change victims" (Howie, Phillips, and Wade 1983:58). Rural development has been asking that question ever since.
At Alabama A&M, Gerald Wheelock and his colleagues turned the usual complaint about public assistance on its head. Instead of asking who used too much, they asked who qualified and went without. In three rural Alabama counties, about a fifth of eligible households went without food stamps, and nearly half went without Medicaid. Some did not know the service existed. Some had no way to get there. One household told an interviewer, "our uncle is a (public official) and forbids our participation" (Wheelock et al. 1983:103). Today we call much of this administrative burden. Volume 1 put it more plainly: a program can exist, a family can qualify, and the help can still fail to arrive.
At Virginia Tech, John Caldwell and his colleagues handed time diaries to farm families in Lee, Washington, and Smyth counties. The diaries showed women tending dairy cattle, setting tobacco, and baling hay on top of the housework. Women with jobs at the store or the sewing factory came home and went out to the hay. When women left the farm, men and children picked up little of the slack. The families' own goals were modest: keep farming as a way of life, and keep debt low enough that growth never put the farm at risk. That raises a fair question: development by whose measure?
A lot has changed since 1983. Farms have consolidated, rural labor markets have been rebuilt, and public programs have been rewritten more than once. The authors of Volume 1 named the relationships beneath those changes: land and autonomy, development and dependence, eligibility and access, the household and the farm.
Each study started in a handful of Southern counties and ended on a question that expands to state, regional, and national concerns. This pattern remains among the most common conclusions moves in JRSS still today. Maybe that was Wetherill's hope? "If this publication is to survive for many years to come," he wrote, it should keep its regional orientation and speak to larger concerns. Forty-three years and a new name later, the journal is still publishing. The issues, mission, and work remain.
References
Caldwell, John S., Michael French Smith, Vicki Karagianis, and Ruth D. Harris. 1983. "Time Use by Small Farm Families in Southwest Virginia: An Approach for the Inclusion of Household in Farming Systems Research and Extension." Southern Rural Sociology 1(1):25-53.
Howie, Marguerite R., Robert L. Phillips Jr., and Sharon L. Wade. 1983. "An Analysis of the Impact of Industrial Development in Selected Counties in South Carolina." Southern Rural Sociology 1(1):54-75.
Singh, Surendra P. 1983. "Position and Prospects of Black Farmers in the South." Southern Rural Sociology 1(1):115-141.
Wetherhill, G. Richard. 1983. "Editor's Preface." Southern Rural Sociology 1(1):1.
Wheelock, Gerald C., Joseph Befecadu, Arthur Okoro, and Priscilla Salant. 1983. "Use of Government Services by Low-Income, Rural Residents in Alabama." Southern Rural Sociology 1(1):97-114.
The full issue is at egrove.olemiss.edu/jrss/vol01/iss1.
