A Review of James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy, Punished with Poverty: The Suffering South (Shotwell Publishing, 2016)
A Real South
For the redoubtable Kennedy brothers, James Ronald and Walter Donald, there simply is a coherent set of places called the South and people who are Southerners. Conventional wisdom aside, these folks have more in common with each other than with outsiders. The Kennedys are here to make a historical and moral case for that lasting South. Many non-Southerners will find this all rather jarring.
Rather than just being jarred, Americans ought to read this impassioned book and ponder its well-sourced matter. This might have interesting repercussions for their view of the American past and present. They might see that sharecropping by black and white Southerners was an inevitable outcome in the new economy whose new overlords had gone to war in 1861 precisely to bring it about. After their famous victory in 1865, Northern interests seldom let their whip hand slip.
A Semi-Colonial Economy 1789-1861
On entering the union of 1789, the Old South was visibly more prosperous than the North, despite slavery. The plain folk did well growing selected crops and keeping animals on the open range. Tradesmen’s wages were high. There was a leisurely, seasonal pace of life. Yet the South was soon becoming an “internal colony.” Tariffs, shipping subsidies, and rivers and harbor bills favored the North at the expense of the South, and Northern politicians conveniently discovered the immorality of slavery after they had made their money on it.
These developments led to torrents of Northern abuse of the South in what Clifford Dowdey has called a “Cold War.” The nicest Yankees—clergymen, lawyers, intellectuals, and politicians—long expressed an intention to reduce the wicked and haughty South to poverty and consistently spoke of the wonderful things they could do if Southern resources ever fell under their control. In time, they kept those promises. It only cost about a million lives.
War and Reconstruction
The victors’ peculiar way of “preserving the Union” involved burning and shelling cities, looting, and wholesale destruction of animals, crops, and farm buildings and equipment. By war’s end, unknown numbers of civilians (black and white) were dead of malnutrition and disease. In the circumstances, it would have been a mighty task for Southerners to restore their devastated economy to good working order. Emancipation, alone, would have necessitated major adjustments.
Safely restored to (or imprisoned in) the Union, the South seemed destined to provide cheap labor, natural resources, and ample cannon fodder for future overseas adventures. Under new Northern rules affecting banking, railroads, land holding, and the scope of government, rebuilding the South was especially hard, so much so that the South still remained an internal colony down through World War II. Some might add that the famous Southern prosperity celebrated in the 1980s still hid some underlying colonial realities.
Did run-of-the-mill New South politicians do much in the way of protecting their own people in that era? Did they show much interest in stewardship? Perhaps not. Nor did Southern capitalists of the New South, who cooperated with those politicians. They over-adapted to the Northern model. Insufficient attention to this fact has left us in the hands of such critics as Allen Tullos, whose work on the industrialization of the Carolina piedmont, useful as it is, leaves larger North vs. South power relations largely out of the picture. But those relations are the Kennedys’ entire point.
Consider George W. Cable’ ongoing polemics in The Silent South (1907) on the convict lease system, which affected whites and blacks alike. (The section in Gone with the Wind dealing with convict leasing was not in fact an endorsement.) Yankee timber interests in the Florida panhandle come to mind. Here was such a “human erosion system” (in A.B. Moore’s words) that the section fell into permanent torpor only partially relieved by the arrival of Big Traffic on I-10.
It is interesting that when a northern state undergoes a noticeable period of corrupt rule, much complaint can be heard in liberal quarters (Nation, New Republic). When corruption is spotted in a southern state, the shrugging putdown that it’s always that way in that state, or that the people of that state richly deserve it, is about the best we can expect. The Kennedy brothers are tired of this double standard, if it is a standard at all.
The biggest abuse was an economy of scarcity for most Southerners based on the sharecropping or “furnishing” system, which the brothers compare unfavorably with its predecessor: slavery. Here, a so-called tenant, who was actually a wage laborer who worked his whole family but got no wages, shouldered most of the risks of farming and gained only the barest living from it.
A combination of mechanization compounded by New Deal farm subsidies finally eroded sharecropping as we approached World War II. Meanwhile, two giant diasporas—white and black—reduced pressure on Southern land.
After Reconstruction ended, a new Southern political class associated with “New South” sloganeering ran interference for Northern interests and looked after themselves, employed racial demagoguery and imported the Northern system of legal segregation. The Kennedys call them “bad” leaders, who ran the Democratic one-party system down into the 1960s. Shortly thereafter, “ugly” Republican party hacks soon displaced the old line Democrats by attracting white Southern votes, leaving the Democratic party to rely on a captive black voting bloc.
Not entirely tongue-in-cheek, the Kennedys sketch out a plan of Reparations for the South as such.
A big lesson in all this is that, as Raimondo Luraghi and Ludwell Johnson have told us, agriculture always pays for industrialization. The lesson learned in some quarters was that if it took 150 miserable years to industrialize England, Stalin must do it in twenty years, or Mao in ten. Perhaps rethinking industrialization as such (and its pace) might have been useful.
As for details, the Kennedy brothers’ jeremiad for the South, in the South, and by the South has plenty of them. Richard Weaver implied more than once that we needed an internal, Southern critique of our ills. In its absence, we would merely find ourselves adopting a hostile Northern one. Not so with this book.
A real strain of libertarian populism runs through the later chapters. I admit to enjoying the brothers’ rhetoric involving “crony capitalists,” “running dogs,” “lackeys,” and “bad” or “ugly” politicians. If the Kennedy twins had joined the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) back in the day [the late Sixties], history might have been different! They could at least have stated a case for the South as such before being expelled from an outfit already mostly in hock to the external (Northern) critique of the South and later suppressed by the Northern nationalist New Left.[1] But no matter, the brothers’ unique contributions to making a case for the South hold up very well on the ground they have chosen.
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[1] On the taming of SSOC, see Leonard P. Liggio, “State of the Movement,” Libertarian Forum, May 15, 1970, 4; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 137, 233, 369-70, 411. For a sample of SSOC’s Jeffersonian rhetoric, see Norman Pollack, “Southern Populism,” New South Student, 5: 1 (February 1968), 4-7. There is of course a Wikipedia article on SSOC.
“Tariffs, shipping subsidies, and rivers and harbor bills favored the North at the expense of the South, and Northern politicians conveniently discovered the immorality of slavery after they had made their money on it.”
This historical notation has been bounced around for years by at least by a league of writers (I remember comments in David Lawrence’s ‘U.S. News and World Report’ in the 9th grade). However, to get the North (and its Yankee soulless minds) to confess it through the media, press or any academia north of the Mason-Dixon line is like asking an armadillo to watch out for traffic.
Not even those up yonder who are “fair and balanced” will resound its glaring truth!
Every slave ship built in the New World was built in New England…every slave ship was financed by a New England or British bank.