The Southern Gap: Underdevelopment in the American South

[Celerity]

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south





In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report, Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment. Although controversial, Roosevelt’s comments were historically accurate. The president’s well-read and highly educated young southern advisors had convinced him that the South’s political problems were partially a result of ‘economic colonialism’ – namely, that the South was used as an extractive economy for the rest of the nation, leaving the region both impoverished and underdeveloped. Plantation slavery had made the planters rich, but it left the South poor.

Unlike the industrialising North and, eventually, the developing and urbanising West, the high stratification and concentrated wealth of the 19th-century South laid the foundations for its 20th-century problems. The region’s richest white people profited wildly from various forms of unfree labour, from slavery and penal servitude to child indenture and debt peonage; they also invested very little in roads, schools, utilities and other forms of infrastructure and development. The combination of great wealth and extreme maldistribution has left people in the South impoverished, underpaid, underserved and undereducated, with the shortest lifespans in all of the United States. Southerners, both Black and white, are less educated and less healthy than other Americans. They are more violent and more likely to die young.

Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Georgia. June 1941. Photo by Jack Delano/Library of Congress

Now, 86 years after Roosevelt’s report, the South has returned to historically high levels of economic inequality, lagging behind the rest of the US by every measurable standard. The plight of the South is a direct result of its long history of brutal labour exploitation and its elites’ refusal to invest in their communities. They have kept the South in dire poverty, stifled creativity and innovation, and have all but prevented workers from attaining any kind of real power. With the rapid industrialisation spurred by the Second World War, the South made great economic strides, but never quite caught up with the prosperity of the rest of the US. While the South’s gross domestic product has remained around 90 per cent of the US rate for dozens of years, deindustrialisation of the 1990s devastated rural areas. Since then, hospitals and medical clinics have closed in record numbers, and deaths of despair (those from alcohol, drugs or suicide) have skyrocketed, as has substance abuse. Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.



The American South is typically defined as the states of the former Confederacy, stretching north to the Mason-Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania, and west to Texas and Oklahoma. Today, one-fifth of the South’s counties are marred with the ‘persistent poverty’ designation, meaning they have had poverty rates above 20 per cent for more than 30 years. Four-fifths of all persistently poor counties in the nation are in the states of the former Confederacy. The data is clear that most Southern states continue to be impoverished and politically backwards. Whether measured in terms of development, health or happiness, the region is bad at everything good, and good at everything bad. The recent popularity in liberal circles of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) to explain the region’s exceptionalism has slowed in recent years. The NHC emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, as one historian wrote, by claiming ‘slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.’ It seems likely that during the post-Cold War triumph of capitalism, a subset of historians began trying to tie much of the past to the term – with the most extreme instance being the insistence that slavery was the key to American capitalism. While the NHC scholars rarely define terms like ‘capitalism’, the problems with their theories are more than academic. Unfortunately, presenting enslavers as cunning, profit-driven businessmen not only obscures important features about the past, it also downplays immense regional differences in economic development.

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[J_William_Ryan]

1. "...has left people in the South

impoverished, underpaid, underserved and undereducated, with the shortest lifespans in all of the United States. Southerners, both Black and white, are less educated and less healthy than other Americans. They are more violent and more likely to die young.”

And consequently more likely to be Trump voters.

[modrepub]

2. Not What I've Seen

The area of Pennsylvania I live in was home to lots of manufacturing into the 1970s. Massive knitting mills in a nearby city supplied parachutes to the US armed forces for WW II. After the war, these mills made clothing and women's nylons.

This went on for many decades until the 60s and maybe 70s. Slowly companies began shifting production south to save on wage costs. Most of the mills and other industry in my area went silent while I was in high school if not before lured to new factories in the South.

But what goes around, comes around. Those factories that relocated to the South in the middle of the last century eventually succumbed to the same market forces when China was granted most favored nation status and nearly all our manufacturing went over seas.

Now there's a big push to bring manufacturing back into the US. I'd say most of that is occurring in the South. Partly because state governments are willing to acquiesce to whatever businesses demand. Be that lower wages, faster permits or other some other items that the new industry would like to have.

Sorry, I don't agree with this narrative as far as the South being under industrialized. That's not what's going on now.

[Ursus Rex]

3. They are often modern plantations.

Consider that most of the South is "right-to-work" and has very pro-"employer" legal traditions, it's frequently direct from usually mediocre high school to the same low- or unskilled job for a lifetime, and there is still very little generational wealth created outside families with existing wealth, and it's easy to see that it's still quite regressive. Not exactly slavery, but still different from the way that the North and other countries were able to transform industrialization into economic and social progress (however difficult that was).