CHAPTER I 



COTTON AND REGIONALISM 

 THE REGIONS OF THE UNITED STATES 



THAT THE extraordinary diversity of geographic con- 

 ditions in the United States is accompanied by a sur- 

 prising uniformity of economic opportunity and social 

 conditions and a similarity of culture has often been 

 commented upon. Russia, for instance, is the only nation 

 which compares with the United States in the variety 

 and extent of agricultural regions. Dr. Oliver E. 

 Baker * has traced our unity of culture amid diversity of 

 environments to three factors: (1) the strong pressure of 

 economic competition, (2) the facilities for the dissemina- 

 tion of new ideas, (3) and the mobility of capital and 

 labor. "I suppose," writes Professor E. A. Ross, "no 

 large population shows so faint and doubtful a response 

 to region as we Americans. Never before were folk of 

 forest or valley, of sea or river delta, so little insulated. 

 Our education, reading matter, films, sports, standard- 

 ized articles of consumption, religious denominations, 

 trade and professional unions, political parties and com- 

 mon institutions pull us into a national or at least a sec- 

 tional plane." 2 Frederick Jackson Turner sees in the 

 cultural homogeneity of the United States a lack of the 



1 See his "Agricultural Regions of North America," Part I, in 

 Economic Geography (Oct., 1926), pp. 459-93. 



2 In his Introduction to Regional Sociology, by R. Mukerjee, p. ix. 



