A) Henry Grady – editor of the Atlanta Constitution; declared that the in his New South Creed that the old South of slavery and agriculture had to give way to a new South of diverse industry and racial harmony (note: he does not proclaim the need in the South for racial equality).
1) Textile mills
2) Tobacco (the Duke family and the establishment of the American Tobacco Company)
3) Coal and iron ore – Birmingham is discovered as a source of low grade iron ore, and the city begins life as a manufacturing center
4) Lumber
5) Petroleum
6) Hydroelectric power
Most of these industries were based upon either extracting raw materials from the ground (and sending them elsewhere, or they were based upon agricultural practices). Even textile mills were dependent upon the supply of cotton that southern farmers could provide.
C) Agriculture in the New South
1) Problems
(a) Land ownership
(i) Sharecropping
(ii) Tenant farming
(b) Credit—the crop-lien system – farmers in the South, both sharecroppers and tenant farmers, operated in mostly a cashless society
(c) Collapsing prices – prices worldwide for farm products were spiraling downward throughout this period, meaning that farmers got less and less return on their investment per year.
2) Result: Stagnation. The concentration of ownership of the land, while tying people to the land through the system of sharecropping and tenant farming, kept wages depressed that resulted in economic stagnation.
B) The Political Leaders of the New South
1) Who and what was a Bourbon? – the same as a Redeemer, only named by an enemy rather than a sympathizer.
2) Bourbon ideology
(a) Allied politically with eastern conservatives – interested in seeing the powers of the Federal government reigned in
(b) Allied economically with eastern capitalists – Bourbons were closely allied with eastern capitalists because this is where they obtained most of their financing; southern banks were too small to handle the financing needed by most Bourbon planters.
(c) Retention of current social and economic system – Bourbons were most interested in retaining the then current social and economic system, because this system no only allowed them to retain control over southern blacks, but also over southern whites. This allowed them to maintain lower wages than the national average for both whites and blacks – another consequence of the “wages of whiteness.”
C) Effects of the Bourbon retrenchment
1) Greatly reduced government expenditures
(a) Slashed spending on education
(b) System of convict leasing (Parchman Farm and system of arresting blacks for “vagrancy” during harvest times; system also depressed wages for industrial workers
(c) Repudiation of state debts – refused to pay state debts incurred during Reconstruction.
2) Blacks and the New South
(a) Flexibility in Bourbon race relations
(i) Black voting – the rights of blacks to vote in elections was little disturbed during the early years of Bourbon rule—although steps were taken to ensure that blacks would have little say in the government composed as a result of these elections.
(ii) Little strict segregation
III) Rise of Populism – Populism today used to describe anyone who can be characterized as a demagogue; in the past, historians have often considered Populists racists and small minded.
A) Farmer’s Alliance
1) National Farmers’ Alliance (Northern Alliance)
2) National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union (Southern Alliance)
3) Colored Farmers’ National Alliance (also southern, covering black farmers who where not allowed into the Southern Alliance)
B) Popularity – Populism in general, and the Farmers’ Alliances in particular, were enormously popular, and threatened to become a viable third party when the group organized politically as the People’s Party. Strength was particularly in the Plains states of Kansas and Nebraska, as well as the southwestern states of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana
1) 1890 Election
(a) Kansas – Alliance supporters won 4/5ths of the seats in the legislature
(b) Nebraska – allied with Democrats to elect governor, and young William Jennings Bryan courted Alliance voters in his successful bid for a Senate seat.
2) Tom Watson – Georgia politician who exemplified to tentative efforts of southern populists to cross-racial boundaries. Poor whites were beginning to realize that they had more in common with poor blacks than they did with the rich Bourbon whites.
(a) Playing the race card – by judicious use of election time violence and racial epitaphs to discourage abandoning the Democratic Party, as well as appeals to Southern sympathies to those people who removed the Yankee threat and “redeemed the South.”
C) Institution of Jim Crow
1) Purpose – to divide poor whites from allying with poor blacks by allying poor whites more closely with middle class and upper class whites through a system of white privilege.
2) Political disenfranchisement
(a) Mississippi plan
(i) Residency requirement – had to live at the same address for two years (difficult for poor farmers to meet this requirement)
(ii) Disqualifications for certain crimes, usually crimes against property which were more likely to be perpetrated by the poor (both black and white)
(iii) One in the southern prison system, many prisoners were hired out by the state to work on large plantations in competition with free labor, which again helped depress wages (most famously at Parchman Farm, place where such African American blues performers as Huddie Ledbetter and Bukka White did time—as well as Angola Prison in Louisiana)
(iv) Poll tax
(v) Literacy test (with understanding clause)
IV) The New Old South
.
A) Segregation in the South
1) Supreme Court
(a) Civil Rights Cases (1883) – Supreme Court decided to allow individuals to discriminate, which meant that blacks could legally be forced to use segregated public facilities (restaurants, hotels).
(b) Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – Plessy was hired by the railroad to violate the ordinance in New Orleans because they wanted to avoid the expense of having to have separate railroad passenger cars for whites and blacks. Established the legal fallacy of “separate but equal”.
B) Organized violence against blacks
1) Lynching – more than just vigilante justice; a system of terror utilized to ensure that blacks behaved in the “proper manner”—that is, in a subservient manner.
(a) Ritualized mutilation – ears, fingers (used as “souvenirs”), and genitalia.
(b) Ritualized torture – burning, mutilation
(c) Public spectacle
(d) Done not only in the South, but in the North as well, particularly as more African Americans moved to the North and became more of a perceived threat.
2) Leo Franks case – Mary Phelan, who worked in a factory of Franks (who was Jewish) in Atlanta, was found raped and strangled at the bottom of an elevator shaft in the factory. Even though evidence in the case pointed toward the African American janitor as the culprit, a jury in Marietta found Franks guilty, and the citizenry of the city stormed the jail and lynched Franks.
V) TR the President
A) Expansion of the role of President – Roosevelt had an activist bent that led him to try (largely successfully) to expand the role of the president. Chief executives since Lincoln had been rather weak administrators who were inclined to follow the lead of Congress. While TR was expanding the role of chief executive, however, he was expanding it for fundamentally conservative principles.
1) Trust busting – Roosevelt’s reputation as the “trust-buster” is largely undeserved—his successor, the lethargic William Howard Taft and his administration actually brought many more suits against trusts than did the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt felt that monopolies were a logical consequence of capitalism; unlike many of his Progressive cohorts, he welcomed this development—as long as the government controlled these monopolies.
(a) Northern Securities Company – TR and his administration did pursue a case against the Northern Securities Company, which was a holding company for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads; railroads were largely unpopular still, and a strong case could be made that the railroads were in fact engaged in interstate commerce, a crucial factor when the case went to the Supreme Court.
(b) Swift & Company v. United States – government contended that meatpackers combined together to restrict competitive bidding for livestock to slaughter; Supreme Court issued ruling using the “stream of commerce” doctrine, which held that some manufacturing processes did indeed take place in interstate means, and therefore were liable to federal regulation under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
(c) Bureau of Corporations – most trust regulation was handled by the newly formed Bureau of Corporations. The Bureau was charged with gathering information about corporations, in order to help them from violating the law. Roosevelt was less interested in busting trusts than he was in regulating them. He divided trust into good trusts and bad trusts; the determination into which pigeonhole a trust fell into was completely arbitrary. The good trusts were those whose officers came to the White House and had dinner with the president, and who cooperated with the Bureau; bad trusts did not do these things.
(d) Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) – although the ICC was established in 1887, it was little used until the Roosevelt administration. TR’s advocacy of regulation was resented by some businessmen (particularly Henry Clay Frick, who complained that “the son of a bitch” wouldn’t stay bought after many businessmen contributed heavily to his 1904 campaign); however, because these regulatory commissions tended to be staffed with officials from the industry the commission was charged to regulate. The Hepburn Act gave the ICC the right to set maximum freight rates, and it outlawed the payments of kickbacks to large volume shippers. Essentially what the ICC did was to allow the railroads to collude and set rail rates—something they had been trying to do for approximately thirty years anyway, and something farmers and workers had been working to prohibit for the same length of time.
(e) Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act – Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in early 1906, a hard-hitting expose of working and living conditions in the packinghouses and their environs in Chicago. That part of the book received very little notice, however; as Sinclair himself described it, “I aimed for people’s hearts, and hit their stomachs.” His descriptions of sausage making (combining putrid meat, rat shit, the occasional part of an extremity from a worker, and a blend of original spices) stirred TR and Congress into action.
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