The Ambiguous Legacy
Ed Kilgore has a really interesting post on Southern political history that gets into the winding and complicated manner in which racial politics has interacted with other issues in Dixie:
But there any “seamless web of reaction” theory about the South begins to break down. The two decades after the Compromise were characterized by savage political warfare across the region between supporters and opponents of capitalist development and corporate subsidies. And no one embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth more than the southern Populists, who viewed antebellum southern “civilization,” accurately, as anti-capitalist. The great southern Populist Tom Watson of Georgia, who once called himself a “red socialist through and through,” and who did actual jail time in opposing U.S. entry into the “imperialist” World War I, was a disciple of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and an unequalled romaniticizer of the Lost Cause.
This period also illustrated the highly ambiguous nature of the race issue in the South. The Populists initially appealed to African-American voters, but eventually championed disenfranchisement of blacks as the only way to build a class-based political movement among whites. And while hardly any notable white political figure in the South in this era was anything less than a thoroughgoing racist, the “New South” apostles, and the “Bourbon Democrats” who succeeded them and characterized one element of the Southern Democracy right on up to the Civil Rights Movement, often postured as paternalistic defenders of African-Americans against the violence of redneck populists.
One thing I might add is that perhaps the defining picture of contemporary southern politics is that this sort of thing has ceased to be the case. Overall, the region is clearly — like the rest of the country — much more progress on racial matters than it was during Watson’s time. But unlike in the past, basic left-right economic issue disputes are now very closely aligned with people’s attitudes toward racial questions. In general, over time American politics as a whole has shifted from a two-dimensional conflict to one-dimensional conflict and this has had particularly acute consequences in southern states where racial polarization in attitudes is higher-than-average and where you often see an unusually large black population. But this world is actually a consequence of the Civil Rights era that replaced an earlier, more complicated dynamic.
69 Responses to “The Ambiguous Legacy”
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December 30th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
No excuses. Southern states delivered us a second term (and first legitimate election) of Bush, after his despicable exploitation of 9/11. Notice how McCain/Palin criticized the West Coast/New York/DC “elites”. Republicans were singing a different tune at their convention in NYC, 2004, crying over the WTC rubles and swearing to get Bin Laden.
As far as geography goes, 80% of the country has this to say to the GOP: We won’t forget what you did to us.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
As far as geography goes, 80% of the country has this to say to the GOP: We won’t forget what you did to us.
Um… 46% of the country voted for John McCain… over 40% of Congress is Republican. Settle down now.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Um… 46% of the country voted for John McCain… over 40% of Congress is Republican. Settle down now
I was referring to the current popularity levels of Bush and Cheney. Of course some people don’t like Republicans very much today, but hate Democrats even more. And many forget fast the lessons of the past. It is just not that easy when you live near Wall Street.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Um… 46% of the country voted for John McCain… over 40% of Congress is Republican. Settle down now.
How much do the numbers change if you remove the states that committed wholesale treason from the counting? I doubt that gets us to 80%, and given VA and NC the picture might be complicated. But it would be interesting to know.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Is it really news to anyone that the early progressive and populist movements were extremely hostile to blacks, even by the standards of the time? Don’t they cover that at Harvard?
December 30th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
“And no one embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth more than the southern Populists, who viewed antebellum southern “civilization,” accurately, as anti-capitalist.”
Not only is viewing antebellum southern “civilization” as anti-capitalist completely incorrect, it actually also would render anyone who believes that to actively be unable to understand that “civilization”.
The antebellum South was certainly a capitalist society – the slavery plantation system was entirely dependent on modern financial structures, extensive use of long-distance shipping (the end markets of the South’s cotton and tobacco were usually in European metropoli thousands of miles distant), rationalized factory-like work planning, extremely heavy use of industrialized agricultural technology, plant and biological research being rapidly turned into profit by entrepreneurs, etc.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Matt, I think that you’re too enamored of that voteview nonsense. There’s no way Poole and Rosenthal’s math can distinguish b/w partisan voting and ideological voting. So the second dimension of region disappears into the first dimension of . . . ??? Ideology is the usual interpretation, but the more likely explanation is party voting. Party voting does not necessarily equal ideological voting.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
The antebellum South was certainly a capitalist society
I think Jefferson would like to have a word with you…
December 30th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
“And while hardly any notable white political figure in the South in this era was anything less than a thoroughgoing racist”
I.E. effectively, there was NO real dissension in the South on what was the most salient issue in the region’s politics. I don’t see why it isn’t perfectly accurate to say, on a wide range of it’s major issues, Southern views were in fact uniform, universal (in a political sense), monolithic and unchanging for very long periods of time.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other issues where views in the South were significantly less uniform or changed more frequently.
“the “New South” apostles, and the “Bourbon Democrats” who succeeded them and characterized one element of the Southern Democracy right on up to the Civil Rights Movement, often postured as paternalistic defenders of African-Americans against the violence of redneck populists.”
I.E. the range of views in the South ranged from “extremely racist” to “gibbering genocidal maniac”. Perhaps that’s not precisely uniform in a technical sense, but that range is extraordinarily narrow.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
One of the great debates amongst historians of the antebellum South — and early America more generally — is how capitalist or anti-capitalist it was. As a historian-in-training who focuses on this question, I feel I can say with some confidence that there’s no simple answer.
However, burritoboy is correct that the Southern _planter_ class was certainly capitalist in important ways. They were intimately tied to transnational commodity markets, their factors in Liverpool and New York controlled their finances after the failure of the Southwestern “wildcat” banks in the 1830s, they were dependent in important ways upon the factory-owners of Manchester and Lowell. These planters were Whigs, and by the latter end of the 1850s, had begun to use slaves not only in staple crop production, but also in factories, and mines. This scared all hell out of the Free Labor forces in the North, who suddenly conjured visions of the newly-acquired spaces of New Mexico and California, etc., overrun with slave-operated mines and a South with slave-run factories.
The yeoman class of small farmers who made up the majority of white (men) in the South were not capitalist at all. They hated and feared the market; indeed, in the backcountry settlements North and South, in Alabama just as in Illinois, small farmers depended for their livelihood, if not on outright squatting, then at least running their hogs and cattle on the unfenced open range (much of that range was forest, but hogs like acorns). When that range/Commons began to be claimed at Land Offices by wealthier settlers and fenced off, these smaller farmers were squeezed out until they moved further west and began the process over again. These tended to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.
Two good books on this are J. Mills Thornton’s POWER AND POLITICS IN A SLAVE SOCIETY, which is on Alabama between 1820-1860, and John Mack Faragher’s SUGAR CREEK: LIFE ON THE ILLINOIS PRAIRIE.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
unlike in the past, basic left-right economic issue disputes are now very closely aligned with people’s attitudes toward racial questions.
I wonder if this is really the case. Racist-ish whites do tend to vote for GOP candidates who espouse right-wing economic views, but I suspect that by and large they are voting in spite of their economic policies, not because of them.
If I’m right, this means it could well be disastrous for the GOP to nominate somebody like Bobby Jindal for president. Take race out of the equation, and you just might be taking away the one reason to vote Republican for a lot of people. NASCAR racists forced to choose between two non-whites will think: might as well vote for the dark-skinned guy who will put more food on your family.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
“I think Jefferson would like to have a word with you…”
Thomas or George?
December 30th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
“The yeoman class of small farmers who made up the majority of white (men) in the South were not capitalist at all.”
Even if we agree that’s true, antebellum Southern society was dominated economically, politically and socially by the planter class. It’s more or less like arguing that, for example, San Diego in the 1950s wasn’t capitalist because it’s economy was driven by the US Navy and defense contractors.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
“antebellum Southern society was dominated economically, politically and socially by the planter class.”
That’s not really true, at least in any clear cut sense, which I think you’ll find if you delve into the topic. The planters had to convince the yeomanry to secede, were an absolute minority, usually lost elections, etc. It was a contest, in other words, not a clear-cut case of hegemony or domination. This view of a slave-ocracy is an old one but not one that’s really supported upon closer scrutiny.
I also think your San Diego analogy is just strange and inapposite. Arguments by analogy also tend to ellide historical truth for the sake of polemical success. Just sayin’.
I am back to writing a paper on, coincidentally enough, antebellum Florida, but hopefully you take my point(s).
December 30th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Matt, you should check out T. Harry Williams’ biography of Huey Long. Really well-written and well-documented account.
I wrote a couple days ago that the “50-state strategy” will come under assault by the “fuck the South” crowd as soon as Dean leaves as chairman. If anybody else but Dean had been championing that, a lot of the same liberals praising him for his vision would be condemning efforts to build up party infrastructure in Southern states as a waste of resources.
As for the 80% figure, the South provided about one-third of the votes this year. Back in 1960, the South provided 16% of the popular votes. Its share of congressional seats and electoral votes will increase after the 2010 Census. And no, Tom Schaller, you can’t make up for that with gains in the Interior West, except at the margins. Its share of the popular vote is still in the single digits.
South: (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA) 42,711,161/131,370,177 = 32.5%
Interior West: (AK, AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY) 9,188,631/131,370,177 = 7.0%
32.5% > 7.0%
Obviously, white Southerners will never become the Democratic Party’s main base of support, as much as a few Southern Democratic consultants like James Carville or Mudcat Saunders want them to. But giving the South the metaphorical finger and screaming, “BWA HA HA HA! FUCK Y’ALL, YOU ASSHOLES! VICTORY IS OURS AT LAST!” probably isn’t the smartest strategy either.
As far as the South goes, the Democrats should just maintain the party infrastructure, and keep their eyes open for opportunities like anywhere else. They probably won’t carry it outright unless there’s a national earthquake, but that doesn’t mean they need to lose it by 15-20 point landslides.
Plus, as I’ve said before, in quite a few of these Southern states, the majority of the Democratic electorate is African-American, and they’ve been probably the Democratic Party’s most loyal base of support for decades. “Fuck the South” includes them too.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Could we really call any economy that was dependent on slave labor “capitalist”?
December 30th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
There’s something really weird about how this is phrased. It’s not exactly wrong, but it sort of elides the constant and often violent and terrorist battle that both black Republicans and white politicians (and voters) who supported Reconstruction / Populism faced as a basic part of the nature of what was going on.
I mean, when your local wealthy elites are hiring terrorist paramilitaries to harass, threaten, injure, or kill anyone opposing their white supremist and Redeemer agenda, it’s kind of obvious to expect white politicians of all stripes to adapt to that agenda.
Yeah, I guess I would wish that white politicians in the ex-Confederate South had been more like superheroes and defied the entire panoply of threats and harassment that the miserable system threw against them, but I’m not surprised that they weren’t.
Like in any place or any period, you can look for admirable people and organizations and initiatives which bucked a miserable trend; but this is a pretty bad period to try and use to suggest that the dominant Southern system was not as fundamentally rotten as many think.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
“But unlike in the past, basic left-right economic issue disputes are now very closely aligned with people’s attitudes toward racial questions.”
What about attitudes toward women and gays? The Obama coalition includes people who are as opposed to equal rights for gay people as FDR’s southern Democrats were opposed to equal rights for African-Americans and they happen to be in a number of cases African-American and Hispanic.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
And as a lifelong Southerner, one of the best things for both the region and the nation would be for the pivotal choke hold by Southern conservatives to be broken.
It’s not “F*** the South” for me, it’s “F*** the Southern right wing sh*t heads who do nothing but try to destroy this nation and its people at every turn,” because for me “Party” is irrelevant — Southern conservatives are one similar miserable, country-destroying bunch and legacy whether they’re planter bastards bringing on a Civil War to protect the slave-based economy, to the assholes destroying our first moment of racial political equality and pushing it formally back another 70 or so years, to, yes, the right wing freaks who became Reaganite right wing Republicans so that crude-piles like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and Phil Gramm could rape and pillage this nation like the treasonous monsters that Southern conservatives have ever been.
We’re just god-damned lucky that FDR and Southern white supremacist segregationist Southern Democrats happened to be (a) of the same party and (b) willing to partake largely of those sweet, sweet New Deal federal development monies, otherwise I’m sure that Southern conservatives would have worked as hard as they could to make sure the Depression destroyed us.
Southern conservatives always had their bullsh*t terms for people defying their system — “scalawags” for whites who supported Reconstruction, for example.
But I’m sorry, complexity or not, one real constant in this nation is the drive and ability of Southern conservatives to harm the nation in pursuit of their manipulative greed, addiction to authoritarian hierarchy, and hatred of democracy in general.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
“That’s not really true, at least in any clear cut sense, which I think you’ll find if you delve into the topic. The planters had to convince the yeomanry to secede, were an absolute minority, usually lost elections, etc.”
We’ll have to disagree. I think you’re disregarding the overall course of Southern history – that the planters made the most decisive political decisions, that the economy was moving in their direction and so on for comparative trivia. Further, I’d challenge that the yeomanry was against capitalism in any coherent sense. Certainly, they disliked various aspects of capitalism that worked against their particular interests, but they had no coherent, stable or consistent anti-capitalist critique. In short, I think Owsley’s wrong.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Too Many Steves,
Yes. By analogy, apartheid South Africa was a capitalist state heavily dependent on forced labor, as was Nazi Germany. One can even have a _socialist_ state that makes heavy use of forced labor, as was the case in Stalinist Russia.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Ed Kilgore’s essay is almost mendacious. I agree with burritoboy and to a lesser extent JBC.
In any event, one has to explicitly ignore the South’s negative role in US politics post-civil war. They were a bastion that elites in the North and South could use to undermine some pretty essential modernizations. Race was a lever that was pretty often used, and really? Advancement in the US is just a tad too often led at the advance with bayonets in the South. Coercion of the region has often been important, and I don’t think this dynamic will change.
as an aside, his characterization of Andrew Young is absolutely unfair, and of Zell Miller, just a bit too sunshiny.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Could we really call any economy that was dependent on slave labor “capitalist”?
Er, why not? The antebellum southern economy was built around plantations, which were business enterprises designed to use forced labor purchased in a transatlantic labor market to produce mass quantities of crops to be sold in a transatlantic market. Much early capitalism, especially in the New World, made extensive use of forced labor, both slaves and endentured servants; most people who came to the New World before, say, the late eighteenth century came as bound workers. For that matter, the early factories of the Industrial Revolution made extensive use of children, especially orphans, who weren’t exactly “free.” The conflation of capitalism with “free labor” is a very late development historically; indeed, I’d argue that the most sophisticated business enterprises in pre-Revolutionary America were plantations. In the long run, the plantation economy was a dead end for the South, but not because it wasn’t “capitalist.”
December 30th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
“Could we really call any economy that was dependent on slave labor “capitalist”?”
Yes. Capitalism doesn’t necessarily equal “freedom for everybody”. There’s all sorts of compelled labor in every capitalist society (military drafts, forcing prisoners to labor, parents forcing children to do chores, etc) so if you’re arguing “any level of forced labor = no capitalism” then there have never been any capitalist societies anywhere on earth.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Fair enough, I could be wrong. There are many things that go into any good definition of “captialism.” But I think one of them would be the establishment of prices through trade and market competition. Labor would have to included there. Yes, there are various kinds of forced labor in every capitalist society, as burritoboy points out, but a system that’s dependent so heavily on forced labor as the confederacy was seems different than “forcing children to do their chores.”
December 30th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I think the only person who believes that Southern “civilization” was anti-capitalist is Eugene Genovese, who started out as a Stalinist and ended up a reactionary. Poor whites were not capitalists, but they lived in a capitalist society. As one historian wrote about the freedmen, they were “in but not of the market.” To argue that the South was not capitalist because the yeomen were not capitalist is like arguing that apartheid South Africa was not capitalist because the majority of the population (ie the indigenous black population)was not capitalist.
I also question Kilgore’s claims about Populist support for disfranchisement. (By Populist, I am specifically reffering to the members of the People’s Party.) The definitive work on post-Reconstruction disfranchisement in the South is J. Morgan Kousser’s The Shaping of Southern Politics. (Kousser wrote it as his Ph.D thesis at Yale under C. Vann Woodward; Yale University Press published it. I believe that it is now out of print.)
Kousser demonstrated that disfranchisement was an elite led and supported movement. It usually followed a lower-class, inter-racial political insurgency, such as a Greenback (ie white) and Republican (Black) alliance; a Populist-Republican alliance; or some similar alliance. The elite led disfranchisement efforts resulted in the disfranchisement of not only the majority of Black voters, but also a substantial fraction (however, not a majority) of white voters, in this case lower class whites. (I would provide the Kousser’s figures, but my wife and I live in a one bedroom apartment in New York City, so most of my books, including Kousser, are in New Jersey.)
Kilgore claims that the Populists supported disfranchisement of Black voters to bring about straight class conflict between wealthy and poor whites. Yet, that means the Populists also approved measures which disfranchised poor whites, who were the Populists’ primary supporters. That would have been a bit counter-productive. In fact, on the whole, Populists opposed disfranchisement efforts.
Certainly Tom Watson ended his career as a vicious racist, but that was long after the collapse of the Populist movement. One additional point about the People’s Party: it was a class-based party. The majority of its supporters were lower class land owning whites. Within a generation or two of disfranchisement, many of those whites had lost their land. In effect, the class that supported the Populists had disappeared.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
“Yes, there are various kinds of forced labor in every capitalist society, as burritoboy points out, but a system that’s dependent so heavily on forced labor as the confederacy was seems different than “forcing children to do their chores.””
Remember that, at that historic moment, childrens’ chores could include anything from 18+ hours of daily work on the farm to 18+ hours of working in a factory. The primary way that the antebellum slavery economy differed from modern capitalism is that some of the surplus value of some of the labor was involuntarily rerouted from that labor itself (the slaves) to the owner of the labor (the slave-owners). A difference, but not one that makes antebellum slavery something other than capitalism.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Also if the idea is to correlate concerns about the size of government and tax rates with racial prejudice that strikes me as demagogy.
Today’s GOP is out there in a whole bunch of ways but the idea that one party is better than the other on race matters is silly.
Civil rights – on the basis of race and ethnicity – are not up for referendum or even debate anymore but neither party is likely to do too much about the tens and tens of thousands of African-Americans in jail, and the many more living in poverty; Obama – if anyhthing – may by virtue of being half-black (not to mention incidentally the likely descendant of slave-owners on his mother’s side) be compelled to curtail even end federal, race-based preferences.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Looks like some commenters here know as much as or more than I do on the subject of southern history, but also a lot more than is exhibited in the simplistic interpretations I was trying to dispute.
Burritoboy, while it’s certainly arguable that the antebellum south was capitalist in key respects, there’s no question that hostility to “northern capitalism” was part of the secessionist plea, and was definitely key to the southern populist understanding of the confederacy and reconstruction.
Sha8, you seem to think I’m being “almost mendacious” on grounds that I am defending this or that element of the southern tradition; actually, I’m not, I’m just trying to describe it, and express justifiable skepticism that it’s all that uniform. I actually view much of southern history prior to the civil rights movement as an ongoing tragedy.
As for Andy Young and Zell Miller, I didn’t make plenary judgments about either of these men (Lord knows I’ve written more hostile words about Miller than anybody you’ll ever meet); I was simply talking about their approach to economic development in 1990 and (in the case of Miller) later. Young did indeed talk incessantly about bringing prosperity to Georgia through personal industrial recruitment (one of his slogans was “it’s not about black or white, but green”) efforts, and Miller did indeed express contempt for the smokestack-chasing, subsidy-granting strategy. If that’s unfair to Young or too “sunny” about Miller, be specific.
In any event, this is a good discussion.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Thanks to Bill for including a better recollection than I could imitate by Googling. Ideally you don’t want words such as “eventually” describing Reconstruction-era movements to include the attitudes of Populists well up until WW1.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
“Burritoboy, while it’s certainly arguable that the antebellum south was capitalist in key respects, there’s no question that hostility to “northern capitalism” was part of the secessionist plea, and was definitely key to the southern populist understanding of the confederacy and reconstruction.”
But that doesn’t make you anti-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. It could mean that you merely wish to control the rules of capitalism to benefit yourself – i.e., you yourself are an excellent capitalist!
A possible analogy is: two high-ranking medieval aristocrats are arguing over who should be King. They have differing opinions over what are the virtues of the best king – Duke Alberic argues that piety is the superior virtue, and since Alberic is well-known for his attendance of daily Mass and generous patronage of the Monastery of St. Irwin, naturally Duke Alberic should be King. Count Sheldon argues that ability in war is the superior virtue, and since Count Sheldon famously defeated the Romulans at Landshut, naturally Count Sheldon should be King. But NEITHER of the two are democrats, they’re both monarchists!
December 30th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Bill: it may interest you that spurred by your mention I stumbled across this 2004 work which specifically seeks to challenge & revise the Kousser / Woodward consensus on “plain white” opposition to disfranchisement which would later harm them as well. It’s The Disfranchisement Myth, by Glenn Feldman.
Since I’ve only read the scanned pages, it’s not disputing the elite-organized origins of major disfranchisement initiatives, but does argue that the support by “plain whites” (meaning non-elite) for disfranchisement was much greater than the Kousser / Woodward approach would suggest, based on empirical re-evaluation of evidence from Alabama’s initiative on the matter, though again, since it focuses on 1901, for me by 1898 the last of multiracial democracy had already been destroyed.
In any case, it seems to be a great review of the strengths and weaknesses of Woodward, Key, Kousser, and others. Yet, in the end, he entirely agrees that whatever degree of support disfranchisement received among all whites of all classes, and no matter how much it would end up to be a big shooting-self-in-foot moment, it was a movement entirely driven by privileged whites.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I don’t know about the ante-bellum South. That was something akin to feudalism, perhaps. And perhaps also to the ruthless colonialism of the Caribbean.
But the post-bellum plantations of the Mississippi Delta portrayed in James C. Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford U Press, 1992) were definitely capitalistic: in one word, this was the cradle of agribusiness. Cobb argued that far from being an isolated “Third World” region of the United States, the Delta was emblematic of trends that pervade in the entire nation.
The predatory planters in league with bankers (often the same people), contrived to dispossess the small white farmers of their land — if it had any potential value. When they could, these went West and became Populists, while the black farmers were reduced to debt peonage. Certainly, scientific racism, as championed by 19th c Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, aided these predators in their tasks.
The populists were against bankers. The linking of racism to populism has been overdone.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Thanks, JBC, for making some excellent points. I look forward to reading your dissertation.
To many others who are weighing in with their simplistic descriptions of the antebellum South, slave societies, and capitalism itself, all I have to say is: these things are all quite a bit more complex than you are allowing, and as far as I can tell, as a historian myself (no, not CVW, but still) this JBC person has read deeply in the historiography and clearly engaged in deep primary research as well. That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with him, but maybe you should think about his points a bit before rushing to dispute them.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Oops, posted this after a significant amount of time had passed and a number of very sharp commenters weighed in. Now I sound like a pedantic curmudgeon. Which I am. As most specters of Yale faculty are.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
As yet another Souther historian, I have to weigh in with a hearty “What BurritoBoy said!” The claim that slavery was anticapitalist was created by procapitalist, antslavery Northerners who insisted that slavery was inefficient–even as it provided over half of the exports of an export-led economy. My sole possible contribution to this discussion at this point is to ask a simple question: Why has it been/is it still so rhetorically important to so many to argue that the South (usually, but not always the antebellum variant) is non/anticapitalist? Why the insistence, in the face of so much evidence? What is at stake?
December 30th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
“To many others who are weighing in with their simplistic descriptions of the antebellum South, slave societies, and capitalism itself, all I have to say is: these things are all quite a bit more complex than you are allowing, and as far as I can tell, as a historian myself (no, not CVW, but still) this JBC person has read deeply in the historiography and clearly engaged in deep primary research as well. That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with him, but maybe you should think about his points a bit before rushing to dispute them.”
Oh, stuff it.
First, you’re arguing based on authority: that JBC is writing a dissertation doesn’t translate to his arguments being right, or even necessarily more worthwhile of being responded to than anyone else.
Second, sometimes, things just AREN’T more complex than they seem to be. A more typical person who hasn’t done much thinking or reading might believe the stereotype that the South was monolithic in its racism, in this instance, actually more correct than some of the historians who incorrectly overemphasize the divisions (yes, the divisions existed, no, they simply weren’t very important in the end). In this instance, the stereotypes are actually correct and the nuances just don’t add as much value as you think.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Ed Kilgore–
I didn’t have an especially detailed response to your post because I had a “That’s not even wrong!” emotion when I read it. No, I am not an expert in Southern political history, but neither am I ignorant of Southern political history. Frankly, from *my* estimation, you show absolutely no judgement in the pieces of evidence you chose to use.
For example, from what I understand, the South as a whole has never supported enfranchising black people, populist or not. Populist support for black enfranshisment was always externally imposed by super-regional farmer’s or labor groups. To suggest that there was ever any more support for black voting rights aside from the nominal rights that allowed Republicans to steal elections in the South by counterfeiting black votes in places like Georgia was, well, highly misleading. Populist leaders have always been anti-black because to be vocally otherwise was a good way to get killed. Also, the use of forcibly cheap black labor as a means of breaking nascent unions drove alot of the dialogue in the South.
Look, I say Kilgore’s post is almost mendacious because he’s taking these single events and taking them out of context. Yeah, the yeomen had issues with the capitalist structure, but just about all of that was in the context of carpetbaggers with local elite help plying extractive trades. It was never a socialist movement per se, not even of the kind the agrarian wing of the Nazis offered. It’s akin to deliberately conflating globalization with capitalism so as to defend bad practices in third world countries. Most of his other points are the same. The post was a classic work of “contrarian pundit craft”, trying to countervail reality so as to have something to say.
I’ll stand by what I said about Andrew Young and Zell Miller. No, you really didn’t understand what that was about, or you are misremembering. I do not actually deny that Andrew Young ran as a business friendly canidate. That, however, is so typical of mayors running for governers, that it isn’t remotely interesting. Bloomberg and Bill White are both about to do the same, and none of the people here were first-wavers! Andrew Young was not talking about textiles and chicken farms. If you want to say that he is, then you might as well say that Lee Yuan Kew was a first waver. Georgia, particularly the Atlanta area, has been too expensive for first wave tactics since the late 50s. Andrew Young vs Zell Miller is the same classic downtown vs upstate conflict that has happened since forever, and is very much not remarkable.
That was one part of how I knew you didn’t know squat.
The other was the whole slamming of general revenue-sharing. Most of the announced proposals are targeting things that tends to be federal in scope. Medicaid budget refills, for example. Moreover, we do not actually have the capability to make Republican governers and congresses see sense and do the right thing. To not act based on that is utterly self-defeating given the urgent need to counteract vicious cycles and not allowing the states to push the deflationary edge. We need everyone on the same page.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Shah8:
I don’t know why you feel compelled to adopt such a nasty and imperious tone. But for the record, your very narrow definition of “first-wave” development strategies is alien to everything I observed while working in community and economic development in Georgia in the 1980s. It was ALL about incentive-driven industrial recruitment, though Georgia did have a tradition of eschewing big-ticket competition for foreign auto plants and such. And also for the record, “general revenue sharing,” by which I mean the actual federal program that existed from 1973 until 1981, was by definition not targeted to anything; it was no-strings money. That’s what I was criticizing.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
“Populist leaders have always been anti-black because to be vocally otherwise was a good way to get killed.”
I think it’s a lot more extreme than that, actually. A relative few people could have created enough violence to kill populist pro-black leaders in the South. A violent minority could theoretically dominate a non-violent majority.
But I don’t think it was primarily the threat of violence was what was putting off populist Southern leaders from being pro-black.
Part of the explanation is there was simply no popular support for being pro-black. As Ed admitted, the range of white opinion (at least, in the relevant political sense of enough people to be political viable) went from “extremely racist” to “gibbering genocidal maniac”.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I have to agree with Burritoboy on this one. In my view, the argument over whether the antebellum south was capitalist or non-capitalist is two steps past meaningless. It’s about as useful as the contents of my cats rectum.
For one thing, the argument seems to lack any kind of precise yet inclusive definition of capitalism. Without an effective definition, it lays open to each side to move the goal posts wherever they feel. That’s kind of amusing, but it’s not useful debate.
Even if we get into debating a definition of capitalism, I’m not sure that’s all that useful. Given the debate so far, the temptation of each side is to start moving around a more primordial set of goalposts. Again, amusing but useless.
I suppose that eventually, arguments of integrity would eventually rephrase the question so as to hold forth as to whether the Antebellum South was capitalist in the manner in which capitalism was practiced and understood in agrarian and early industrial societies circa 1750 – 1850. That might produce an answer. But would the answer be useful? Not at that point.
You’d have to take it a step further and relate the concept and practice of capitalism then to capitalism as understood and practiced two centuries later. There’s an exercise with so many variables as to allow for any answer in any form.
In the end, the bottom line has to be who cares. This sort of fine parsing is meaningless except to apologists and idiots.
The truth is that sometimes, as someone said, things really are that simple.
The simplicities of the south is that it was a virulently racist society, which used racism first to justify slavery, and later to disenfranchise and oppress blacks in a manner as close to slavery as they could get.
That the oppression of blacks, and their uses as cheap labour sustained a semi-feudal agrarian economy and a backwards repressive culture. It also allowed the ruling classes to neutralize any political or economic aspirations of poor whites by both undercutting their ability to bargain their labour, and providing sufficient profit to shut out competitors.
In the American south, a few people did very well, a lot of people did very badly, democracy was merely populist theatre, the rich ruled with as much violence as necessary, a few good writers and much bad art was produced, and the entire region steeped itself in a culture of lies and dishonesty.
Nuff said.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
There is a need for a narrow definition. Would you really call Atlanta’s effort to get the 1996 Olympics to be a “first wave” effort? Does the fact that a sports team moves to another city because it offers free land, new stadium, and subsidies count as “first wave”? Or is it just boosterism?
Look, I get that you’ve done things and seen things, but just because industrial recruitment is incentive driven does not mean that it’s first wave. There is nothing like the kind of Special Economic Zones that existed in Shenzen, or even in Alabama, for that matter, in Georgia. Yes, there was development work to be done in rural areas, but there is *always* development work to be done in rural areas. First wave, second wave, third waves are about developing nexuses of economic activities. It’s the sort of tactical setup that small towns in the middle of nowheres but close to 2nd tier cities like Nashville or Birmingham use to try and bring jobs to a state. Those guys are trying to build anything modern industry to bring up living standards. They need new Huntsville, AL. Georgia has always been more developed than any of its neighbors (I’m not inclined to include Fl since the developed part is so far south, and is not truly Southern). It has always been a matter of developing more rural areas–same as what New York State does, and adding new and complimentary industries to Atlanta, Macon, and Savanah. Andrew Young simply promised to bring his boosterism to the state as a whole, and his contrast with Zell Miller was almost exclusively city/rural divide, and had nothing to do with what Zell Miller promised.
My issue with your revenue sharing was that Nixon’s plan was systemic and longterm. What is likely to come out of Obama’s policymaking axis is almost certain to be temporary and probably on a one time basis only. That makes for vastly different nuances as to what will cause problems, and I think this should be obvious to you.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:43 am
El Cid: Thank you for the reference to the Feldman book. I was unaware of it and it looks like an interesting book. One caveat: Evidently, Feldman only focuses upon Alabama, so even if he is correct about disfranchisement in that state, the history in states might be different. Nevertheless, I may order the Felman book. I also hope that there is or will be a wide ranging discussion of Feldman’s findings and methodology. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that Feldman is incorrect. From what I can tell, Feldman seems to have relied upon a fairly traditional approach while Kousser used both traditional methods and quantitative analysis. I am interested in which approach works better.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:04 am
One reason why this is important: Defeating people like Sonny Perdue and his fellow governers or Mitch McConnell and his fellow senators is going to be about defeating the current Southern polity. It will never be about coopting Southern opinion, but about utilizing an urban population that is national and international in outlook to drag everyone else out of the stone age, whether they like it or not.
Moreover, we really have to expand our focus here. The South was never a country unto itself. It has always had northern beneficiaries among the elites that relied on the South being the way it is. The North and the West has always had input to Southern nature. North being conservative and West being populist and sometimes progressive. Not to say that the reverse hasn’t been true, but it’s more often aligned this way. Think Woodrow Wilson as compared to the Wobblies. In many ways, what ultimately broke the police-state phase of the south was the super-oil infused-industrialization in Chicago and Detroit and California which could soak up black labor and deprive the South of labor and conflict needed to maintain the Status Quo. There is no accident why Huey Long appeared when he did.
We have to have a similar understanding of the cheap-labor conservative axis in order to appreciate how we should approach Southern votes. I’m in favor of driving West and finish off the Mountain West first and drive all Republicanism into the South, and then do a new Sherman’s March. A new narcissist party needs to be crafted for our rightwingers of all colors, sexes, religions, and sexualities. We are never going to be able to coax votes in the South in large numbers as long as parties here are racially seperated.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:31 am
For the first, middle and last words on Southern politics and race, I refer y’all to the chorus of Randy Newman’s “Rednecks.”
December 31st, 2008 at 2:43 am
Interesting thesis, Shah8 (@ post 44). On the face of it, it’s an attractive thought. Do you have any references to back this up?
“In many ways, what ultimately broke the police-state phase of the south was the super-oil infused-industrialization in Chicago and Detroit and California which could soak up black labor and deprive the South of labor and conflict needed to maintain the Status Quo.”
December 31st, 2008 at 3:48 am
Nicely put allbtsareoff.
I like history, but go more in for the fun Old World history. Anyhow, what I know is that politicians with southern accents have been tearing this country to pieces for the entirety of my political life and now many men with southern accents have now done their level best to nurture the third greatest threat the human race has ever faced (Toba is 1, Nuke War is 2) in Climate Change.
Note: I was 12 as of the 1994 election.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:11 am
shah8: You have to recall that most Americans are unaware of the Great Migration and Second Migration at all.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:14 am
Bill: Feldman is actually arguing that Kousser’s quantitative approaches were fundamentally flawed, on quantitative grounds, for example in making ecologically fallacious estimates of likely local activity patterns from more generalized data when the relevant microdata was not available.
December 31st, 2008 at 8:42 am
I’ll stand by what I said about Andrew Young and Zell Miller. No, you really didn’t understand what that was about, or you are misremembering. I do not actually deny that Andrew Young ran as a business friendly canidate. That, however, is so typical of mayors running for governers, that it isn’t remotely interesting. Bloomberg and Bill White are both about to do the same, and none of the people here were first-wavers! Andrew Young was not talking about textiles and chicken farms. If you want to say that he is, then you might as well say that Lee Yuan Kew was a first waver. Georgia, particularly the Atlanta area, has been too expensive for first wave tactics since the late 50s. Andrew Young vs Zell Miller is the same classic downtown vs upstate conflict that has happened since forever, and is very much not remarkable.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Thanks to the specter of Woodward for his kind words. (though most of my primary source research is on northern yeomen rather than slavery; apologies for inside ball/self-regarding academic shop-talk.
As far as anti-capitalism goes, I just don’t see how you can actually examine what small farmers were saying and doing and detect anything but hostility to a transnational market.
Just surveying the discussion as a whole, I’d have to seriously dispute this notion that sometimes things are in fact as simple (simplistic?) as they seem. Yes, the South was a virulently racist society, but so was the North (check out antebellum Ohio’s notorious black codes, or the disenfranchisement movements in the North in the 1810s, 20s, and ’30s), so simply saying “racism” doesn’t have much explanatory value when we’re talking about something as huge as the Civil War and the South’s peculiar political history. Contra someone upstream, recognizing that historical reality was actually complicated and complex and variegated does not make one either an “apologist or an idiot”; it means you’re thinking like an historian. The idiot might be the one, rather, who simplifies. I myself held similar views to many of you about the necessity of reconquering the South until I met a great number of Southerners who were humane, intelligent, and wise. They’re human, too, even the slaveholders. It really just isn’t that simple, and it’s arrogance in the extreme to think it so. The Civil War was fratricide, and as Grant told his cheering troops after Appomatox Courthouse, facing the dejected Confederates: quiet boys, they’re your countrymen now.
Also, whomever mentioned “Rednecks” by Randy Newman only got half the point, which is sort of what I (a New Englander) wanted to make — that song ends with a litany about the right of black Americans to be “free to be put into a cage” in Harlem, the South Side and West Side, Roxbury, Fillmore, East St. Louis, and other northern ghettoes. Its message is to take the beam out of thine own eye. We are all implicated in these crimes, not just one region — though that region persisted longest in defense of the indefensible, even unto disunion.
After all, it was New England merchants and sailors who did much of the slave-carrying for all the Atlantic; just look at the source of Brown University’s start-up funds and original endowment.
With malice towards none, and charity for all….
December 31st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
With all due respect to your thoughts JBC, which I agree and disagree somewhat, I want to emphasis that war against the southern polity is a war against the *polity* and not Southerners of any kind. The problems that are being pointed out has to do with a focus on irrelevant complexity. Yah, race is complicated in the South, and yah, there were really nice slaveholders.
But in the end…They were slaveholders, and the a majority of the South desperately fought for the right NOT to be brothers(and sisters). There is just not so much to be said besides that they were human, and that is but the least of things to say.
Look, Ed Kilgore’s essay just another (or a close cousin thereoff) DLC whingefest of “What about the white menz!?!” “We need more whites!”. Democratic Party politics is irresolutely coalition based, and has been ever since LBJ. We will never win the white men’s (especially in the South) vote unless we bring back Dixiecrats. I am profoundly gratefull that the species is extinct.
We have been making it harder and harder for a race-based party to thrive, and the people, including whites, out West vote for Republicans for profoundly different reasons than people in the South. Creating a political and social penalty for demanding a side of race with their politics like what the head of the South Carolinian Republicans dished up is not being harsh, nor will we as Democratic party member lose anything by it. It’s just normal civilized life.
P.S.
Nobody has ever argued that farmers didn’t like transnational markets. Railroad guys rather spread that hatred everywheres. We just argued that that didn’t make them anticapitalist
December 31st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
You have persuaded me. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “We can sit here all night arguing about who slept in and left who stranded at the baseball field for nine hours, let’s just admit we were both at fault.”
It seems that two wrongs do make a right. Or at least that one wrong excuses the next one. The sins of the north wash the south clean. That what counts is that the Khmer Rouge general turns out to be a charming and insightful human being so let’s ignore the mound of corpses he built.
What utter tripe.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
By the way, what the hell does farmers like or dislike towards transnational markets have to do with capitalism? Apples and oranges.
December 31st, 2008 at 8:29 pm
“Yes, the South was a virulently racist society, but so was the North”
And who’s simplifying now? The reality is that there is almost no daylight between Southern politicians in terms of racism, the range of acceptable opinions was extraordinarily narrow, and consistently so for an extremely long stretch of time.
That’s not the case with Northern political figures. Not that there was any shortage of Northern politicians (perhaps a strong majority) who fully shared the opinions of their Southern counterparts. But, in the North, we see a much broader range of acceptable opinions on race, we see a less consistent body of opinion (which means political possibilities that were simply impossible to contemplate in the South), we see the body of opinion amenable to changes (and sometimes even undergoing rapid changes) – none of which we see in the South.
“Contra someone upstream, recognizing that historical reality was actually complicated and complex and variegated does not make one either an “apologist or an idiot”; it means you’re thinking like an historian.”
Thinking like a historian isn’t like an ultimate good towards which all people strive or something. It may well be that thinking like a historian may prove to be negative, in some circumstances, for people who are not historians. Historians don’t seem to have a particularly well-developed argument for why the methodologies of modern historians are inherently superior to other potential modes of analysis. And historians are susceptible to objecting to popular understandings of historical events not so much to increase understanding of those events, but primarily to make splashes within the history profession and increase their professional reputations.
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