Pre-Depression South

Our history has thus far dwelled on hegemonic northern/midwestern Big Cities. “Away down South in the land of Dixie,” however, is another world entirely. The contrast is almost breathtaking. Southern realities are the best starting point to understand variation within American economic development. The South’s ED is not warmed-over Big City ED. Southern ED should be understood on its own terms, in that it confronted its own regional realities. Moving south of the Mason–Dixon Line, our history changes tone and content, goals and strategies.

When last we left the South in Chapter 2, our discussion ended with southern settlement and the resulting cotton plantation-based export economy. The southern policy system was characterized as feudal (Nicholls, 1960, p. 44ff), resting on slave-dominated, low-wage, white subsistence agriculture. The agricultural export nexus went through southern port cities—but ships leaving southern ports often headed north to New England textile mills (Doyle, 1990, p. 4). We left the South as a developing nation with a feudal-like policy system, shipping raw materials to an industrial world.

Then the South lost the Civil War.

WHERE, OH WHERE IS THE SOUTH’S INDUSTRIAL CITY? THE SOUTHERN CONTEXT

The North was home base for the American version of the industrial city. Northern growth, fueled by Yankee innovation and a cutting-edge interstate transportation system, produced manufacturing-dominant jurisdictional economic bases. The arrival of foreign-born immigrants translated into a cheap workforce and a host of intense urban problems and trends. Northern ED strategies/tools were conducted within a growth environment, expanding urban areas and pushing into hinterland peripheries and new markets for firms in the jurisdiction’s economic base. The North’s relevant competitive hierarchy was mostly northern; the North competed with itself—not with the South or West.

These conditions are absent in the post-Civil War South. This section summarizes critical features that distinguish southern from northern ED. These features combined constitute “the southern context” within which “southern-fried economic development” developed, operated and evolved. Southern ED marched to the tune of “Dixie,” not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Pre-1930s’ contextual differences between North and South include:

• the lack of sizeable urban areas and minimum industrialization;
• an almost complete absence of foreign-born immigration;
• a southern economic and political system manipulated by conquering northern states and their well-developed industrial economies—a northern hegemony many believed rendered the South little more than a colony of the North.

Urbanization and Industrialization

In comparison to the North there were few southern Big Cities. In 1860 New Orleans (population 169,000) was the nation’s sixth largest urban area; next largest was Louisville (68,000); 22nd ranked Charleston (41,000); 25th ranked Richmond (38,000); Memphis 38th (23,000) and Mobile (29,000) were the South’s largest cities. Thirteen Confederate cities were in the 1860 top 100 (such as Atlanta, 9500). In South Carolina, Charleston and the state capital, Columbia, had populations slightly exceeding 2500. The nineteenth-century industrial revolution had mostly bypassed the South. In 1850 Louisiana and Mississippi, the heart of the Cotton Belt, had only three cities that exceeded 2500 population.

Plantation agriculture, and the cotton crop … required only minimal urban development … Southern urban development was mostly limited to seaports and a few river ports … ports were usually linked to river systems … [that] penetrated the agricultural hinterland and bound the plantations to the coastal cities. (Doyle, 1990, p. 3)

Big City economic development was not relevant to the post-Civil War South. Post-Civil War (1870) top 100 urban areas, however, included only ten cities from the Confederacy—four less than 1860. New Orleans had fallen to 9th (191,000), Richmond climbed to 24th (51,000), Charleston was 26th (49,000), Mobile 27th (32,000) and Atlanta, despite William T. Sherman, was 61st (21,000). To put this into perspective, New York/Brooklyn had a population of 1.2 million, Philadelphia 675,000, Boston 250,000; and Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee just under 100,000. The war drove population into some southern cities, but northern growth pushed others off the list. An observable trend was that the older port cities (Charleston, Savannah, Mobile and New Orleans) were doing markedly less well than new up and comers like Atlanta, Memphis and Birmingham—and Texas.

Fast forward to 1900 and, aside from New Orleans (which again dropped to 12th), Memphis Tennessee (37th) was the only Confederate city above 100,000 (at 102,000). Atlanta was 43rd (8000), Richmond 46th (85,000), Nashville 47th (81,000), Charleston 68th (56000), Savannah 69th (54,000) and San Antonio 71st (53,000). Overall there were 13 Confederate cities in the top 100, seven of which had less than 50,000 residents (four with less than 40,000). There was not a single city in North Carolina with a population attaining 25,000, and only six greater than 10,000. New York, on the other hand, had 3.4 million, Chicago 1.7 million and Philadelphia 1.3 million. The Gilded Age witnessed the rise of the Snowbelt—an age of immigration and industrial cities that drove economic growth.

So, in 1900, we can ask: “Where oh where are the South’s industrial cities?” Atlanta … a regional symbol of growth and prosperity … was little more than a large country town in 1900. Its area, despite annexations, was four times less than Boston and thirty times less than New York, It was still a walking city. (Goldfield, 1982, p. 103) The South Central states’ urban population reached 11 percent in 1900, and the South Atlantic states (omitting Maryland, DC and Delaware) region was only 9 percent urbanized. In comparison, the North Central states were 31 percent and the North Atlantic states 59 percent urban. For all the vaunted poverty of the Big City immigrant, however, nothing compared with poverty found in the South. In 1880 the per capita wealth of New England and Middle Atlantic states was $1353, compared to the South’s $376 (US Census; Woodward, 1981, p. 111).

Absent immigration, manufacturing and the big industrial cities, the landscape of the South bore little or no resemblance to the North and Midwest. The Parks Movement, the rise of planning and Progressive social reform mayors/movements are muted to absent in the Deep South. Not having immigrant slums, smaller southern cities had little motivation to imitate their northern neighbors.

The late 1890s through the World War I, however, was a period of southern urbanization and industrial growth. There was little, if any, lag in diffusion of technological innovations (“from electricity to architectural innovations”) and:

[The] lexicon of “urban problems”—housing, transportation, sanitation, congestion, police protection, and a full panoply of needs requiring expanded city services—was universally applicable to all cities regardless of their size, or regional location … . As southern cities grew, their class structures began to assume the familiar cast of those of northeastern and Midwestern municipalities, and patterns of land use and population distribution were basically the same in cities throughout the country. (Brownell, 1975, p. 9)

Southern cities did not expand dramatically post-Civil War, but they were not technological backwaters. Rural areas, where most of the population lived, were another matter.

Southern CBDs fared well—especially during World War I. Skyscrapers were built in middling-sized cities, more for local pride than economic opportunity: “Hating and Imitating, Muddled for sure”—an attempt to “out-Yankee the Yankee” (novelist Sherwood Anderson; Goldfield, 1982, p. 130). Southern CBDs developed robustly after 1900:

The erection of business blocks and the differentiation of commercial activities reflected the emergence of downtown retail centers … The establishment of department stores with local capital, such as Rich’s in Atlanta and Neiman Marcus in (1907) in Dallas—testified to an increasing urban vibrancy in the South’s larger cities. (Goldfield, 1982, p. 129)

Southern Progressive community development languished in the absence of immigrant neighborhoods. The southern City Beautiful, if not stillborn, served Redeemer elites and expressed itself as an initial planning exercise that ultimately produced a City Functional response. It wasn’t for lack of trying—John Nolen between 1906 and 1925 developed plans for 13 southern cities (Silver, 1984, p. 25).¹ Still, a smaller-scale CBD evolved in the South much as in the North. The physical landscape of the smaller, less industrial, non-immigrant urban South (muted) was similar to the North.

The South and Immigration

Let’s get to the point. Immigration was a northern phenomenon (Fleming, 1905).

The flood tide of European immigration, in 1899–1910, swept past the South leaving it almost untouched and further isolating it in its peculiarities from the rest of the country. New Hampshire received more European immigrants in that decade than the total received by North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Kentucky. Connecticut got many more than the whole South combined … moreover, all the Southern states, save Oklahoma, Florida and Virginia, lost more than they gained [through foreign immigrants]. (Goldfield, 1982, p. 130)

As far as population goes, the South, despite the fertility of its residents, witnessed an on/off regional exodus of both white and black. Embedded (chained) as both were to subsistence agriculture, the South lacked surplus labor for manufacturing expansion. Initially it was hoped foreign immigrants could counter the post-war exodus. As early as 1876 the New Orleans Chamber organized a convention to attract immigration into southern states. Co-organizer of the conference, the newly formed International Chamber of Commerce and Mississippi Valley Society, “wanted to bring the world to the lower Mississippi region. Its president was none other than Jefferson Davis himself” (Mead, 2014, p. 109). The initiative failed.

Around 1900 a serious southern economic development immigrant attraction strategy developed momentum.² Southern leaders founded (1898) the Southern Development Association, dedicated to “promot[ing] the colonization and the improvement of the South” (Woodward, 1981, p. 291).³ Railroads joined in, and southern state governments also participated:

state bureaus, land companies, and numerous immigration societies of businessmen took part in the movement. Each state had an immigration bureau of some sort by 1900, and most of them had agents in New York and the West, and some in Europe to spread propaganda. Their effectiveness was limited, however, by small appropriations. (Woodward, 1981, pp. 297–8)

People recruitment, however, also failed miserably. The lack of foreign immigration and the exodus of resident populations left their effects on the course of southern economic development: “The largely internal regional migration to [southern] cities produced a more homogenous ethnic pattern than that which existed in the North, and the small town [remained] more significant within the southern urban configuration.” Further, “the comparatively greater number of rural people and the greater reliance on an agricultural and commercial economy, and the large concentrations of blacks with their distinctive subculture—all had an impact on southern cities” (Brownell, 1975, pp. 9–10). The South would develop its own characteristic policy systems—systems that would set different priorities and goals from the North.

Post-Civil War Jurisdictional Landscape: The Cotton Town

The cotton town was the jurisdictional workhorse of the South’s agricultural economy. Cotton was grown in the “Cotton Belt,” a loosely defined collection of 600 counties scattered through the South, but concentrated in Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia. East Texas, southern Louisiana (Mississippi delta region) and northern Florida were the most dependent. Cotton towns dotted the landscape through the 1920s and were the South’s most common jurisdictional policy system. Cotton required urban centers for bale compressing, cottonseed/oil processing, cotton gin maintenance, logistical/finance/shipment/storage—and consumer purchasing and government. Cotton towns ranged between 5000 and 10,000 residents, rarely growing beyond that. Since cotton was shipped to regional centers (Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans) or sent by rail to northern cities, there was little opportunity for innovation or entrepreneurial activity.

Depressed sharecropper/subsistence farms kept discretionary income low in cotton towns. Whatever excess population was generated made its way to larger cities. Otherwise, people simply left the South for “warmer and colder” suns. Mark Twain described these 1880s towns as being composed of:

a fine, big mill for the manufacture of cotton seed oil … There were several rows and clusters of shabby farmhouses and a supply of mud sufficient against a famine in that article for a hundred years … There were stagnant ponds in the streets … Still, it is a thriving place. (Goldfield, 1982, p. 88)

Thriving place in 1880 the South might have been, but by 1930s Depression it decidedly was not. From such a cotton town (Columbia Mississippi), the South’s most controversial economic development innovation, the BAWI industrial development bond, would emerge.

The cotton town was the South’s jurisdictional backbone—cultural home to agricultural, low-tax/service/regulation voters who dominated state legislatures, setting the course for the South’s business climate and state-level ED. The South’s urban hierarchy and style of state/sub-state politics were characterized by second- and third-tier municipal, intrastate competition that played out within the Democratic Party’s state legislative delegations. The South’s jurisdictional configuration meant that, in large swathes of the South, municipal corporations were fewer, smaller and weaker than their northern and midwestern counterparts. Tons of small rural towns/cities dominated the South’s jurisdictional landscape, surrounded by expanses of unincorporated areas. Counties assumed an important role in southern ED, but often lacked powers. State governments were drawn into ED because of this jurisdictional landscape. Nineteenth century southern state legislatures, more unconsciously than planned, set in place the now-famous southern business climate.

[Southern] Business progressives concentrated on the economic problems of the South— building roads to enhance the region’s transportation networks, maintaining the South’s wage advantages in industry, luring capital for the textile mills … Low taxes remained a central feature of their program so … despite the 1920’s Southern state debt and revenues were rising at a faster … than in the rest of the nation … per capita tax collections remained well-below national norms. The South’s business progressives erected a minimal infrastructure for industrial growth, without threatening the Redeemers commitment to low wages, unregulated business and low taxes. (Schulman, 1994, pp. 10–11)

With the turn of the century, commission (Galveston) and city manager (Sumter SC) forms of government first developed in the South. Spreading across Texas (called the “Texas Plan” so widespread was its adoption there), the commission was copied throughout the South. The city manager was adopted nationally following its adoption by Dayton in 1914. The motivation behind adoption of commission/city manager government was often frustration with the Jeffersonian–Jacksonian fragmented policy system. In the South those governments were unduly dominated by unresponsive city hall/county courthouse cabals, unwilling and incapable of installing the new-fangled infrastructure (paved roads, water/sewerage, telephones, electricity and the like). City manager government thus became a vehicle for southern modernization. Southern municipal policy capacity was accordingly enhanced in the first decades of the twentieth century.