MY favorite anecdotalist among Southern politicians, Brooks Hays, the former Congressman from Arkansas, is fond of quoting a summary judgment to the effect that, "Next to fried food, the South suffers most from oratory." One might add that the South today may suffer almost as much from an excess of political and social analysis as it does from fried food, and more than it does from the declining art of oratory. Forces of circumstance, however, have tended to turn recent analysis away from the attempt to explain why the South was politically intransigent for so long (and what it would take to move it in almost any direction) and toward a concern for the rapidity of recent change in the region (and what form of stability might eventually emerge when and if the flux abates). The fact of political change of great magnitude in the South since World War II is not in dispute; but the causes, extent and ultimate direction of that change are avidly debated in scholarly and popular literature, as well as in the more practical arenas, such as the communications