The percentage of farm population in the eleven ex-Confederate states in 1925 ranged upward from 20.7 for Florida and 36.6 for Louisiana to 53.2 for Arkansas and 63.1 for Mississippi. ...For the Southern Agrarians, this was not a source of social or economic concern, much less a sign of backwardness. It was not a sign of lagging development, for which causes might need to be sought in the apartheid system of Jim Crow race relations or the deficient public schools.
The South's greatest activity is that of cotton-growing, and this agricultural pursuit is the bsis for cotton-milling, the South's greatest manufacturin enterprise. ...
Agriculture, directly and indirectly, furnishes the major share of Southern income, and it is significantly true that in 1927 the South's relative stag of industrialization as compared with the nation as a whole was about the same as in 1880, with little change from the relative status of 1860.
In his economic history of the region, he incorporates the Lost Cause version of the benign nature of the slavery system and its evolution:
Along with this broadening of agriculture [in the antebellum South], the seemingly dominant trinity of land, slavery, and cotton was in the 'fifties stimulating and releasing activity for non-agricutural purposes. ...Everything would have been fine if those damnyankees hadn't forced the Southerners to attack Fort Sumter!
Southern industiralization had by 1860 assumed essentially the general direction and gradual pace, limited by agrarian interests, that have tended to mark its post-war growth. The Civil War was not necessary for Southern industrial development, and, if there is any meaning in a suggestion by W.L. Fleming or a definite interpretation by C.W. Ramsdell, this war was not necessary for the fairly early termination of slavery. The so-called old South, with its recruited aristocracy, was working toward a balanced industry, a reformed agriculture, and a free school system for the yeomen, when the war upset the orderly proces of evolution. This fact is not subject to modificatio by any final verdict of war-guilt. [my emphasis]
Nixon argues against "the evils of a discriminatory encouragement of rapid industrialization in their section. They can profit by recalling that the decline of the Roman Empire was accompanied by the neglect of agriculture and the growth of an idle urban proletariat of unwieldy proportions." He doesn't elaborate on who constituted the "urban proletariat" of Roman times.
He does warn against the imperialist impulses associated with national industrialization, citing John Maynard Keynes and John Hobson as witnesses. In the end, though, Nixon joins his fellow essayists in stating in a vague and sentimental way the importance of agrarianism in the supposed fundamental cultural superiority of the (white) South to the rest of the United States:
But the human civilization now based on Southern agriculture is in no little peril and industrial civilization under the capitalistic system does not offer a satisfying substitute in human values. If Southern farmers can be saved from exploitation and serfdom, it is possible for the South, which has had experience with slavery, to subordinate industrial processes to the status of slaves, not masters, and, thus escaping industrialism, to exemplify a cultural emergence from a too acquisitve society. The South is no longer conquered territory, not quite conquered, but a protest, articulate and constructive, is needed against another conquest, a conquest of the spirit. From a dull industrialism Southern civilization should be preserved with its supporting agrarian economy.If we leave aside the puffy phrases and the regional cheerleading, in the South of 1930 this comes down to a defense of chronic poverty and underdevelopment for the vast majority of Southerners, white and black.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
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