The South as a Colony
Vann Woodward (1981, pp. 291–320) asserted that North/Midwest/Wall Street exercised control of the South from the “commanding heights” of its industrial economy. He outlined how this hegemony opportunistically garnered control of southern railroads, steel and coal industries, and much of the South’s basic extractive industries (timber, sulfur, fertilizer, manganese, bauxite). Southern finance and lending, dominated by New York City money-centered banks, was largely restricted to agricultural-related lending— diverting investment away from new industries. Only the furniture, tobacco and textile industries were southern financed. Statistics mostly support Woodward’s contentions— whether they account for southern underdevelopment is a more complicated and open question.
The metropolitan North retained … the more profitable functions of transporting, processing, and distributing of goods. The large extent to which ownership of the South’s transportation, communication, financing, and manufacturing corporations was centralized in the cities of the Northeast, as well as the considerable degree to which ownership of the region’s natural resources … Cut off from the better-paying jobs and the higher opportunities, the great majority of Southerners were confined to the worn grooves of a tributary economy. (Woodward, 1981, pp. 317–18)
How one interprets Woodward’s “colonial metaphor” affects our judgment concerning the goals behind southern state/municipal ED policy-making. Woodward argues that a “new business class” contested colonization and insisted the South install key infrastructure so that industrialization could proceed, thereby challenging, or at least mitigating, northern control over the South’s economy. Woodward’s critics counter that the southern planter class maintained its sustained dominance over most southern state and local policy systems, and opposed “commercial and industrial interests by using the power of the state to thwart … [such interests] by deliberately arresting technological innovation and economic development that would undermine the plantation system” (Doyle, 1990, pp. xii–xiii). These critics contest Woodward’s so-called “divided mind” of the post-Civil War “New South.” That divided mind, however, is central to our “southern-fried ED approach” that will be presented in the next section.
Historian Eugene Genovese (1967) asserted that planters in the South deliberately stymied—or when necessary, sponsored and controlled—urban and industrial developments in the region. They feared that cities and factories would provide foundations for social classes hostile to their regime and a threat to its hegemony. While not wishing to insert ourselves into this debate, it cannot be avoided. Our research (and the position, arguably, of most contemporary historians) is that both were right—and that Woodward was fundamentally correct in asserting the South’s divided, indeed conflicted, policy systems. Time periods matter. Indisputably, a new South business elite did arise in many (maybe most) southern cities, especially after 1900. There is also little doubt that the default in most state legislatures was toward planter dominance in policy-making; and that planters were not accepting of industrialization, but were willing to accept, indeed foster and support, transportation infrastructure from which they benefited. It is also indisputable, and we provide evidence to that effect, the South did industrialize and urbanize: Birmingham’s steel mills, for instance, exist, and substantial rail infrastructure was installed.
This history agrees with Doyle/Goldfield that planters supported economic development from which they benefited—that planters were “heavily involved in the South’s industrial and railroad ventures, often in partnership with urban industrialists and city boosters. Southern economic development was necessary in order to assure genuine independence from the North. There was … a basis for class alliance” (Doyle, 1990, p. 7; Goldfield, 1982, Chaps 1 and 2). Moreover:
[An] urban business class played a prominent role in shaping … the modern South … though uneven and varied its impact was in different types of cities … A business class took form in the cities of the New South … created a set of formal [EDOs] … fostered a social affinity among themselves and … form[ed] a common view of the goals they wanted to pursue for their cities, their region, and themselves. (Doyle, 1990, pp. xiii–xiv)
The reality of being both a defeated and a developing nation, the divided mind of southern state/municipal policy systems and the contest between agriculture and industrialization (focused heavily on infrastructure) created a distinctive set of policy systems through the South—clearly supporting our contention that the South, and southern economic development, proceeded along a different path than our Big City North.
Ron W. Coan 