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How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy
How the American South Drives the Low-Wage EconomyBy Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect
http://prospect.org/article/how-american-south-drives-low-wage-economy#.VabKvjJgSus.reddit
"SNIP................
antayana had it wrong: Even if we remember the past, we may be condemned to repeat it. Indeed, the more we learn about the conflict between the North and South that led to the Civil War, the more it becomes apparent that we are reliving that conflict today. The Souths current drive to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rightsthrough the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Partyresembles nothing so much as the efforts of antebellum Southern political leaders to blunt the Norths opposition to the slave labor system. Correspondingly, in the recent actions of West Coast and Northeastern cities and states to raise labor standards and protect minority rights, there are echoes of the preCivil War frustrations that many Northerners felt at the failure of the federal government to defend and promote a free labor system, frustrations thatironicallyled them to found the Republican Party.
Its the resilience of the Southern order and the similarities between the Old South and the New that are most surprisingat least, until we disenthrall ourselves from a sanitized understanding of that Old South. Its taken nearly 100 years for the prevailing image of the preCivil War South to become less subject to the racist falsifications that long had shaped it. The malign fantasies of 1915s The Birth of a Nation and the Golden Age hooey of 1939s Gone with the Wind have given way to the grim realism of 12 Years A Slave. Through all its incarnations, however, the antebellum South has retained its status as a world apart from the rest of America, whether (as D.W. Griffith would have it) for its chivalry or (as the historical record shows) its savagery.
Southern exceptionalism has also extended to the views of the Souths place inor more precisely, its purported absence fromthe development of the modern American economy. The slavery-saddled South was often considered the quasi-feudal outlier in the earlyand presumably Northerndevelopment of 19th-century American capitalism. While finance and factories rose north of the MasonDixon Line and railroads spanned the Northern states, the South was an islandwith just a sprinkling of banks and rails and virtually no factories at alllargely detached from industrial capitalisms rise.
In just the past year, however, a spate of revisionist histories has made significant additions to the historical literature that persuasively dispels this image. To be sure, the South was short on factories, trains, and banks, but its brutally productive slave economy spurred the development of the first factories of the industrial age, the textile mills of Massachusetts and Manchester, England, and the railroads that moved their goods. It was also key to the creation of modern finance and such pioneering industrial financiers as the Baring Brothers in Britain and the Brown Brothers in New York. Empire of Cotton by Harvard University historian Sven Beckert, which won this years Bancroft Prize, and The Half Has Never Been Told by Cornell University historian Edward Baptist, which won this years Hillman Prize, both document how the industrial and financial capitalism of the 19th century arose as a direct result of the conquests, expulsions (of Native Americans), and enslavements that turned the Deep South into a vast slave-labor camp that generated unprecedented profits for manufacturers and bankers who lived hundreds or thousands of miles from the Mississippi Delta.
................SNIP"
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How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy (Original Post)
applegrove
Jul 2015
OP
haikugal
(6,476 posts)1. Rec and kick!!
raccoon
(31,112 posts)2. So many Southerners who would be helped by unions are very anti-union.
I believe it's because they are brainwashed.
fasttense
(17,301 posts)3. So the money from the Southern concentration camps slave labor
Went to capitalize the factories in the north. So Scarlet didn't actually live on Tara. She lived up north.
raccoon
(31,112 posts)4. I found this of particular interest:
The Southern slave economy was simply too big and profitable for Northern and British banks to shun... The ties between Northern bankers and Southern slavers were so strong that as the South seceded in 1860 and 1861, New York Mayor Fernando Wood urged his citythen as now the center of American financeto secede as well. New Yorks British counterpart was Liverpool, the port city to which Southern cotton was shipped en route to Manchester. Liverpudlian bankers were major investors in the slave economy, and during the Civil War they not only extended credit to the Confederacy, but also funded the manufacture of arms bound for the South and the construction of Confederate warships.