Regionalism

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Regionalism. Regionalism has persisted in the United States in spite of social and economic mobility and telecommunications innovations that tend to homogenize culture and diminish geographic isolation. Studies of regionalism may be divided into two groups: those that emphasize material factors and those that emphasize ideas. The first considers the region as a form of classification that differentiates cultural traits geographically. These classifications identify culture areas, which become the basis for cultural‐diffusion studies. Questions of regional identity may arise in such studies, but more often the analysis is limited to material culture and folk art and crafts. The second type of study views regionalism as a form of collective solidarity and identity, often set against a national identity of the standardizing forces of modernization and globalization. Attempts to construct a theoretical understanding of regionalism have tended to conflate these two emphases, as was the case with early twentieth‐century theories of environmental determinism and folk sociology.

The story of regionalism in American history begins at different times, depending on which view of regionalism is given greater importance. For example, indigenous North American populations developed regionally distinct ways of life associated with different resource bases and forms of social organization. Clearly, distinct culture areas existed before the arrival of European settlers, but speculation about regionalist sentiment makes little sense in light of the strength of tribal identity and the absence of any compelling reason to conceptualize one's place in the world in terms of territorial parts in relation to a whole.

Similarly, in the early Colonial Era, particular ecological settings and different national and religious identities of European settlers led to distinct culture areas and forms of life within the colonies. These differences were associated with regional identities, however, only after being cast in relation to a spatially more extensive protonational spirit. Differing colonial experiences and the settlement of the western frontier created strong and persistent regional political interests. The unique ways of life that divided the northern and southern colonies and the trans‐Appalachian West, and that set individual colonies apart from one another, helped to shape American politics through the nineteenth century, despite the strong sense of continentalism that dictated the federal government's geopolitical strategies.

The Civil War was the most violent and destructive expression of these competing sectional interests. The war's decisive military outcome did little to diminish the sense of separateness between the North and the South, as reflected in the several regionalist movements associated with southern intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter half of the nineteenth century also witnessed a growing sense of the particularity of western political interests. Here, regionalism provided a frame for the economic interests of an industrial, commercial, and urban Northeast; an agricultural and rural South; and a transitional Middle West, astride a burgeoning industrial belt and rich agricultural lands; and an American West rich in natural resources and characterized by extensive agriculture. To the American eye, the nation was a federal union made up of distinct regional societies and cultures. To others, and especially to Europeans, what most characterized American culture was its homogeneity.

The importance of regionalism in twentieth‐century American intellectual life varied widely. It also underwent a gradual semantic shift. Once an expression of subnational political interests, it gradually came to refer to antimodernist cultural themes. In this respect, regionalist movements were influential in painting, literature, and architecture, usually as a counterpoint to modernist canons. Regionalist movements in planning, sociology, and human ecology emphasized decentralization and presented the region as an effective antidote to the perceived placelessness of an increasingly urban, corporate, and bureaucratic America. Such diverse American intellectuals as the philosophers Josiah Royce and John Dewey, the historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb, and the sociologist Howard Odum and geographer Carl Sauer expressed concern about the loss of regional sentiment in twentieth‐century America. The urbanist Lewis Mumford championed a relatively unique regionalist vision that he though compatible with urbanization, technology, and professional planning.

Many of these writers shared a utopian communitarian vision of an America composed of decentralized democratic polities. Regionalism was thus one defense against the perceived coercion associate with centralization. In fact, however, it has more often been associated with isolation from the mainstream, which explains in part why regionalism as a concept has been more important to folklorists and American Studies specialists than to political scientists, sociologists, and economists. Regionalism has, however, played a role in subdisciplines that focus on social and economic ties between cities and their hinterlands, such as urban sociology or functionalism or regional economies.

The social scientific study of American life has tended to view regional studies, outside of urban regions, as nostalgic and conservative, especially in relation to divisions of social life along class and ethnic lines. This perception changed gradually at the end of the twentieth century, however, as regionalism gained some prominence in postmodernist studies and as attachment to places and regions figured in discussion of modern identities. Environmentalist thought also turned its attention to regionalist themes, as in the concept of bioregionalism and in other attempts to conceptualize the relation of human communities to the natural environment.
See also Nationalism; New England; Social Class; Social Science; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Howard W. Odum and and Harry Estill Moore , American Regionalism: A Cultural‐Historical Approach to National Integration, 1938.
Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America, 1965.
Michael Steiner and and Clarence Mondale , Region and Regionalism in the United States, 1988.
Barbara Allen and Thomas J. Schlerth, eds., Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures, 1990.
David M. Holman , A Certain Slant of Light: Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction, 1995.
James M. Dennis , Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, 1998.
Bruce Katz, ed., Reflections on Regionalism, 2000.

J. Nicholas Entrikin

Regionalism. A movement in American painting, flourishing chiefly in the 1930s, concerned with the depiction of scenes and types from the American Midwest. The term is often used more or less interchangeably with American Scene Painting, but Regionalism can be more precisely thought of as the Midwestern branch of this broader category. Like all American Scene painters, the Regionalists were motivated by a patriotic desire to establish a genuinely American art by using local themes and repudiating avant-garde styles from Europe. Specifically they were moved by a nostalgic desire to glorify, or at least to record, rural and small-town America, and it was on this that their widespread popularity depended. The period when they flourished coincided with the Great Depression, and at this time of profound national doubt, they reasserted America's faith in itself, giving the public pictures with which they could readily identify. Robert Hughes has pointed out the irony ‘that Regionalism, supposed to be the expression of American democracy, was in its pictorial essence the kissing cousin of the official art of 1930s Russia. If socialist realism meant sanitized images of collective rural production, green acres, new tractors, bonny children and muscular workers, so did the capitalist realism [of Regionalism] … Both were arts of idealization and propaganda.’

The three major Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, who were all Midwesterners but differed greatly in temperament and style. They scarcely knew one another personally, but the idea of a group identity was skilfully promoted by Maynard Walker, a Kansas art dealer. Walker got a Benton self-portrait onto the cover of the Christmas 1934 issue of Time magazine and this largely created the image of Regionalism in the public eye; thus, as Robert Hughes writes, ‘it became the only art movement ever launched by a mass-circulation magazine', or as Benton put it: ‘A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.’ Benton was the most vociferous of the group and in his autobiography An Artist in America (1937) he summed up the attitudes he shared with the other Regionalists: ‘We objected to the new Parisian aesthetics which was more and more turning away from the living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty pattern. We wanted an American art which was not empty and we believed that only by turning the formative processes of art back again to meaningful subject matter, in our cases specifically American subject matter, could we expect to get one.’ The fanatically patriotic critic Thomas Craven (1889–1969) was an even more strident spokesman for the Regionalists: ‘He attacked not only the contemporary French painters but American expatriates, and tossed in New Yorkers for good measure: they were all iniquitous and effete, compared with the artistic renaissance taking place west of the Mississippi. Craven undoubtedly overpraised these painters. Wood and Curry, at least, died unhappy, haunted by the contrast between Craven's claims of greatness for them and their own knowledge of themselves’ ( E. P. Richardson, A Short History of Painting in America, 1963).

On the fringes of the Regionalist movement were Charles Burchfield and Ben Shahn. Burchfield's work has a streak of fantasy absent from that of the others, and Shahn was driven by a spirit of social protest. Among the other artists who are sometimes considered part of the movement are painters of the rural scene in other parts of the USA during this period, for example Peter Hurd (1904–84), brother-in-law of Andrew Wyeth, in New Mexico and Paul Sample (1896–1974) in Vermont. Specifically local styles did not develop anywhere and Regionalism died out in the 1940s in the more international spirit that prevailed during and after the Second World War, although individual artists, notably Benton, continued working in the style long after this (Curry and Wood were both dead by 1946).

Regionalism. A movement in American painting, flourishing chiefly in the 1930s, concerned with the depiction of scenes and types from the American Midwest. The term is often used more or less interchangeably with American Scene Painting, but Regionalism can be more precisely thought of as the Midwestern branch of this broader category. Like all American Scene Painters, the Regionalists were motivated by a patriotic desire to establish a genuinely American art by using local themes and repudiating avant-garde styles from Europe. Specifically they were moved by a nostalgic desire to glorify, or at least to record, rural and small-town America, and it was on this that their widespread popularity depended. The period when they flourished coincided with the Great Depression, and at this time of profound national doubt, they reasserted America's faith in itself, giving the public pictures with which they could readily identify. Their work was often produced under the auspices of the Federal Art Project and it was supported by the fanatically patriotic critic Thomas Craven (1889–1969).

The three major Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, who were all Midwesterners but differed greatly in temperament and style. They scarcely knew one another personally, but the idea of a group identity was skilfully promoted by Maynard Walker, a Kansas art dealer. Walker got a Benton self-portrait onto the cover of the Christmas 1934 issue of Time magazine and this largely created the image of Regionalism in the public eye; thus, as Robert Hughes writes, ‘it became the only art movement ever launched by a mass-circulation magazine’, or as Benton put it, ‘A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.’ On the fringes of the Regionalist movement were Charles Burchfield and Ben Shahn. Burchfield's work has a streak of fantasy absent from that of the others, and Shahn was driven by a spirit of social protest. Specifically local styles did not develop anywhere and Regionalism died out in the 1940s in the more international spirit that prevailed during and after the Second World War.

Regionalism A movement in American painting, flourishing chiefly in the 1930s, concerned with the depiction of scenes and types from the American Midwest. The term is often used more or less interchangeably with American Scene Painting, but Regionalism can be more precisely thought of as the Midwestern branch of this broader category. Like all American Scene Painters, the Regionalists were motivated by a patriotic desire to establish a genuinely American art by using local themes and repudiating avant-garde styles from Europe. Specifically they were moved by a nostalgic desire to glorify, or at least to record, rural and small-town America, and it was on this that their widespread popularity depended. The period when they flourished coincided with the Great Depression, and at this time of profound national doubt, they reasserted America's faith in itself, giving the public pictures with which they could readily identify. Their work was often produced under the auspices of the Federal Art Project and it was supported by the fanatically patriotic critic Thomas Craven. The three major Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, who were all Midwesterners but differed greatly in temperament and style. They scarcely knew one another personally, but the idea of a group identity was skilfully promoted by Maynard Walker, a Kansas art dealer. Walker got a Benton self-portrait on to the cover of the Christmas 1934 issue of Time magazine and this largely created the image of Regionalism in the public eye; as Benton put it, ‘A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.’ On the fringes of the Regionalist movement were Charles Burchfield and Ben Shahn. Burchfield's work has a streak of fantasy absent from that of the others, and Shahn was driven by a spirit of social protest. Specifically local styles did not develop anywhere and Regionalism died out in the 1940s in the more international spirit that prevailed during and after the Second World War.

Regionalism, term applied to literature which emphasizes a special geographical setting and concentrates upon the history, manners, and folkways of the area as these help to shape the lives or behavior of the characters. It generally differs from local color in that it lays less stress upon quaint oddities of dialect, mannerisms, and costume and more on basic philosophical or sociological distinctions which the writer often views as though he were a cultural anthropologist. One major form of regionalism flourished in the South, particularly among the Agrarians of the 1920s and '30s. Its adherents contended that their ideas were based on a creative, scientific approach to the cultural, geographic, and economic differences of particular sections of the U.S. This detached view necessitated scholarly antiquarianism in studying the relation of folklore to literature, and led away from realism toward a critical interpretation of historical backgrounds. Allen Tate, one of its proponents, declared, “Only a return to the provinces, to the small self‐contained centres of life, will put the all‐destroying abstraction America safely to rest.” Tate collaborated with J.C. Ransom, Donald Davidson, and R.P. Warren in publishing The Fugitive (1922–25) and the symposia I'll Take My Stand (1930), Culture in the South (1934), and Who Owns America? (1936). These works assert that as people adapt their lives to the geography of a region and create an economic system that gradually becomes natural, this pattern in turn becomes aesthetic. Their program was intended to combat the Northern drive toward industrializing the South, which would have made for eclecticism and standardization; to champion an agrarian economy; and, as Davidson said, to “speak for the South as a living historic entity which is separate from America though bound to it.”

REGIONALISM. A term in LINGUISTICS for a WORD or other usage belonging to a region, either of the world or a country. An Americanism is a regionalism of English in world terms, while a Kentuckyism or New Yorkism is a regionalism in US terms. See ISM. Compare LOCALISM.