Southern exposure

HURRICANE KATRINA has taken its place as the worst natural disaster in American history, an immensity underlined by the unprecedented scope of the recovery plan outlined by President Bush in his speech from New Orleans' Jackson Square on Thursday night. But in many ways, so far little discussed in the national media, it can also be understood as a distinctly Southern disaster, bringing to the fore many of the characteristics that historians say have long defined the Deep South.

Most glaringly, countless articles and photographs have made clear what was always true, if seldom acknowledged: Even as the region has grown in population and economy, it has left hundreds of thousands of people, largely but not exclusively black, behind. Unlike even the rest of the South, vast swaths of the Deep South-including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, along with parts of Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas-are still mired in the sort of poverty documented over 60 years ago by James Agee and Walker Evans in the Depression-era classic ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

''The Deep South has for a long time been poorer than the rest of the country, and the region has not benefited from growth elsewhere," said historian John Barry, a visiting scholar at Tulane University's Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the author of 1998's ''Rising Tide," a history of the 1927 Mississippi flood. ''In that sense [the aftermath of Katrina] is uniquely Southern."

To be sure, it is easy to read too much into the ''Southernness" of Katrina, and some historians warn that such a focus simply reinforces what they see as the centuries-old effort to use the South as a scapegoat, focusing on its ills while ignoring what are in fact national problems. There are other parts of the country, they note, that are just as poor-according to the 2000 Census, for example, Hartford, Conn., is poorer than New Orleans. But it is in the Deep South, more than perhaps any other region, where poverty, poor health care and education, and a weak social safety net have resulted not just from economic change but a conservative political culture distrustful of government, combined with the residual effects of slavery and Jim Crow.

''[The Deep South] has always had an economic disadvantage. Partly it was imposed by discriminatory [national] regulations on rail and trade, but also a very large portion has to be accredited to policies of strict segregation," said David Donald, an emeritus professor of history at Harvard University and a native of Mississippi. ''These things together, combined with the absence of major industry, have kept the area backward."

And the ''Southernness" of Katrina's devastation cannot be understood simply in socioeconomic terms, say some historians. While poverty is a significant explanation for why so many people stayed behind in the face of the hurricane-whether to protect their few belongings or because they lacked transportation-scholars argue that it can also be linked to a combination of an often religious fatalism and a devotion to one's immediate surroundings that they say is more visceral in the South than in other parts of the country.

''You see a distinct sense of fatalism in the resignation both in advance of and after Katrina in terms of seeing these things as more a matter of God's will than anything under man's control," said James Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia and the author of ''Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity," published this month by Oxford University Press. ''This interacts with a stronger attachment than most other Americans have to a particular place to produce a willingness to risk death and destruction in a familiar setting."

Understanding the Deep South, these historians suggest, is essential to understanding the social and economic aspects of Katrina that have puzzled-and outraged-so many Americans. It may also be essential to understanding the challenges that lie ahead for the region as it struggles to recover.

During the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and '60s, the Deep South was at the forefront of the national consciousness. But it has since receded, as overt racial tensions subsided and large parts of the South-with increasingly diverse, affluent populations ensconced in sprawling suburbs-began to appear indistinguishable from the rest of the country. But Katrina has largely shattered the illusion that the Deep South had fully joined the booming Sunbelt economy.

Of course, it is true that the Deep South has made great strides over the last half-century. The growth in international trade has been a boon not only for ports in southern Louisiana but along the Alabama and Mississippi coasts as well. Louisiana has experienced a boom in the petrochemical industry, Mississippi in gambling, and Alabama in automobile manufacturing.

But the hurricane has forced the nation to confront what many shocked observers describe as ''third-world" conditions in the Deep South. ''This event has pierced the reality of the ballyhooed 'Sunbelt' South in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama," said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of ''The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory," recently published by Harvard University Press. ''These three states are economic backwaters distinguished by extreme disparities in wealth and life opportunities...so they were unprepared to deal with a disaster of this magnitude and are ill-equipped to recover."

In fact, what viewers see on television is only a glimpse of the poor quality of life that remains endemic across much of the Deep South; while the reporting has largely focused on urban poverty in New Orleans, similar destitution exists in large pockets across the region. Numerous public health statistics paint a grim picture. A July report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation ranked Alabama the worst state for overall child well-being, while Mississippi and Louisiana are tied for the highest infant mortality rate. All three have the highest adult illiteracy rates and some of the lowest high-school graduation rates.

And unlike other regions of the country, scholars argue, the Deep South's chronic poverty and poor public health are the result of a political culture in which decades of calculated decision making, centered around low taxes, anti-unionism, and an obsession with small government, has undercut the sort of social safety nets that exist for the poor and working class in other regions.

''The levels of poverty in the Deep South are historic rather than simply cyclical or the result of urban 'decay,"' said Steven Hahn, a southern historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of ''A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration," which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. ''Wage levels, in part because of the historically lower rate of unionization, have always been very low relative to the rest of the country, just as have literacy rates."

But for many Southern scholars, endemic poverty alone does not explain the ravages of Katrina, or why so many people stayed behind, not only in New Orleans but across the Gulf Coast. A full explanation, they say, must also take into account the region's traditionalism and the strong ties that many Southerners feel to their home region. Indeed, even as most of America-including many of the Deep South's wealthier residents-has become increasingly rootless, the South as a whole has the lowest out-migration rate in the country, according to the 2000 Census.

''The folks who live in southern Louisiana, whether in New Orleans or the bayou, tend not to want to live anywhere else.... The folks in the 9th Ward are as likely as not the descendants of people who have lived there for generations," Brundage said. ''These people, in other words, are not your typical footloose Americans."

Local attachments are reinforced by the region's particular brand of religiosity, both the evangelical Protestantism of the Gulf Coast and northern Louisiana and the Catholicism of New Orleans and the bayou. ''The upshot," Cobb said, ''is a readiness to accept deprivation and suffering as natural and unavoidable aspects of life and to believe that suffering is better born in the familiar circumstances of home."

But not all Southern historians are eager to see the storm through Southern eyes. ''Stranded people might have stayed as much in [Northern cities] as those in New Orleans," said Michael Perman, a Southern historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago. ''To single out fatalism and sense of place as distinctively 'Southern' and operative in this instance is speculative, I think. After all, the better-off had little sense of fatalism or place that impelled them to stay at home, and they presumably are also Southerners."

Others take the criticism farther. ''Whenever Americans have the divisions and illnesses of their society revealed to them forcefully, they tend to distance themselves from the revelation by invoking otherness," said J. Mills Thornton, a Southern historian at the University of Michigan. ''All of the social pathologies that are often identified as 'Southern' are in fact American."

But if it's true that such pathologies exist in other parts of the country, it's also true that the Deep South represents a unique intersection of socioeconomics, conservative politics, and complex racial histories unique in the United States, an intersection in turn reinforced by an intense regional identity and culture. The Deep South has long stood apart from the rest of the country-a fact that must take center stage in any plan to rebuild.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.