Tag Archives: The South

Unbalanced and Ignorant, Even Today

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Henry Adams was an historian and journalist, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. Forty years after the Civil War, he wrote an autobiography in the third-person: The Education of Henry Adams.

This is an excerpt from chapter 7, “Treason (1860-61)”:

“Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination — haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent morbid excitement, but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close [sic] society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands”.

This description reminds me of certain players on the contemporary political scene, many of whom live in the South even today. 

The Southern Strategy

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In an article about the “Southern Way of Life”, Michael Lind argues that cheap labor is the basis for the South’s economic and political system, not racism. Slaves were surely low-paid workers, but so far the Southern system has survived whether cheap labor was provided by slaves, sharecroppers, indentured servants, the poorly educated or the supposed beneficiaries of “right to work (without unions)” laws:

“From the 19th century to the 21st, the oligarchs of the American South have sought to defend the Southern system, what used to be known as the Southern Way of Life.

Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race.  Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy.  The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Anything that increases the bargaining power of Southern workers vs. Southern employers must be opposed, in the interest of the South’s regional economic development model.  Unions, federal wage and workplace regulations, and a generous, national welfare state all increase the bargaining power of Southern workers, by reducing their economic desperation.  Anti-union right-to-work laws, state control of wages and workplace regulations, and an inadequate welfare state all make Southern workers more helpless, pliant and dependent on the mercy of their employers.”

It’s obvious that the Republican Party, which draws many of its leaders and much of its electoral strength from the South, is trying to convert our whole country to the Southern system. It’s class warfare, but in some quarters it’s considered impolite to say so.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/slave_states_vs_free_states_2012/