TV was to the civil rights movement—eventually achieved some reform. Mill owners fought against the reformist onslaught in the legislature, arguing that the mills had saved white Southerners from the ravages of poverty, a generally accepted perception at the time; further, mill owners argued that mill parents would migrate to Georgia if the children’s income stopped.
A partial victory for reform was won with the reluctant compliance of Governor B. B. Comer, himself a textile magnate. Even the minimal, sixty-hour week for children under fourteen proved unenforceable. Reform got another boost in 1911 when the National Child Labor Committee convention was held in Birmingham. Former President Teddy Roosevelt told a packed house that Alabamians, who had recently improved their livestock breed, should put equal effort to raising their children.
An exhibit of Lewis Hines’s photographic essay on child labor dramatically galvanized public opinion. Photography was as new to the eyes of early twentieth-century citizens as television was in the 1950s and ’60s. A shocked Birmingham Age-Herald reporter wrote, “There has been no more convincing proof of the absolute necessity of the child labor laws . . . than by these pictures. They . . . depict a state of affairs which is terrible in its reality—terrible to encounter, terrible to admit that such things exist in civilized communities.” With the election of Thomas Kilby as governor, reform finally triumphed. In 1919, the Legislature passed an act reducing to forty-eight the maximum number of hours that children under fourteen could work. In addition, child workers were required to complete the fourth grade.
Working-class Southern blacks and whites, rescued from share-cropping, were in turn exploited by Southern mill owners, and also fell victims to national political and economic forces—the part Calvinist, part Darwinian belief that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” No Marshall Plan cushioned the South’s recovery from the error of attacking the great industrial nation to the north. When the war ended in 1865, capital in the South vanished. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. A hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice as much bank capital evaporated. Merton Coulter, who authored the Reconstruction volume for the LSU History of the South series, estimates the lost capital from the emancipation of slaves to have been between $1 and $4 billion. The desolation couldn’t have been more drastic if mid-nineteenth century Europe had been transformed into the Indian subcontinent.
A society without any currency, and few opportunities to earn any, must invent its own peculiar economic and social system. Of course, a nation without capital will not grow industries and cities where the arts, finance and health care are connected to vibrant, life-giving golden arteries. The shrunken economy of the South, a region as large as Europe, invented the crop-lien system—essentially, a barter economy that perpetuated poverty and such pastoral flowers as Erskine Caldwell’s famous Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road.
Of course, there were exceptions such as the entrepreneurial McGowin clan of Chapman, Alabama. Their unique story is a metaphor for how the South could have grown if national policy had been development instead of regional advantage. James Greeley McGowin was one of those rare people who, set down on the surface of the moon, would invent some way to develop an interplanetary market for dead rocks and a personal life of high culture. From a class of farmers, small-town merchants, and sawmill operators in the pine wilderness of south Alabama, James Greeley McGowin—in a single generation—created a land barony, jobs for impoverished backwoods people of both races, and an aristocracy.
The handsome Greeley and his talented, desirable wife Essie Stallworth McGowin crafted a family heritage of refinement from the materials of culture, education, hard work and travel, set upon a bedrock of indomitable will. The boys’ education included graduate study at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the daughter at Vassar. Essie’s insistence that they all master a musical instrument filled the thick, moist night air of their mill town and the surrounding pine forest with sounds to compete with the symphony of cicadas and bull frogs—a family string quartet. If Chapman’s baronial seat, Edgefield, was a center of civility, grace and learning, life in the “benign dictatorship” of the company town was a far sight better than the rutted, hopeless, treadmill existence of sharecropping. The company provided a steady job, a place to live with a garden, schools, and churches for blacks and whites, as well as a clinic staffed by a doctor and a nurse.
The McGowins could make money from their lumber mills and live baronial lives because they were in a free zone untouched by the punitive economic policies laid down by the Radical Republicans after the Civil War, and perpetuated into the middle of the twentieth century by the interests they protected. Essentially, the South was to be a producer of raw materials in a revival of the mercantile system abandoned by the British in the 18th century. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad provided the company access for its lumber to markets in the northeast and abroad through the port of Mobile, and later to markets in the middle west. When Greeley died in 1934, his sons Floyd, Earl, and Julian, continued to operate the company and used imagination, salesmanship and inventive reforestation to govern Chapman as a highly profitable enterprise, owning some 222,000 acres. As in most enterprises owned by large families, the pull of distant family members who own stock worth millions but wonder if they can afford a new car eventually dismantled the family business, and the company was sold to Union Camp in 1966. By then, a New South was in economic ascendancy and the Old South was about to become a fictionalized memory. The “boys” are long since dead, the mill town has vanished, Edgefield was put up for sale and family cellos and violins no longer competed with crickets and frogs. The entrepreneurial spirit, however, still courses in the veins of the third generation. A grandson, Earl’s son, Mason, has installed a $30-million computer-driven machine to process smaller pine trees (overlooked by previous generations) into lumber. Mason, a big, friendly, emphatic man, likens himself more to his all-business grandfather, Greeley, than his charming father, Earl, but good-naturedly takes his pretty wife Suzie’s ribbing, “The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy.” Sawmills can do what Mason’s magical machine can do, he says, “but not as fast, as much, as cheaply.” Edgefield still stands, as a museum that recalls the charms of a life that was but will be no more.
Railroads provided the McGowins a way to create a good life, because they fit the colonial mercantile system erected by Eastern politicians and interests: Ship us the raw materials and we’ll send them back as finished goods. Henry Grady lamented the South’s peonage in the story of a Georgia funeral in which the casket came from Cincinnati, marble and nails came from New England, and all Georgia supplied “was the body and the hole in the ground.” As if to ensure that the South would not rise from its humid cage, the dominant East imposed a system of discriminatory freight rates that inhibited the growth of industry, cities and capital in the region. Complicated rule making by the Interstate Commerce Commission had this effect: a refrigerator manufactured in Birmingham would cost more to ship to Pittsburgh than the same appliance shipped from Pittsburgh to Birmingham. Why build manufacturing plants in the South if you had to pay an extra tariff to ship the product?
Southern governors, frustrated by the added barrier to development posed by these discriminatory freight rates, formed what became the Southern Governors Conference. In 1937, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves filed a complaint with the ICC on behalf of the Conference. The issue won the sympathy of President and Mrs. Roosevelt. FDR and his chief of staff, Harry Hopkins, cited unfair freight rates as central to the South being “the Nation’s number one economic problem.” The cause of reform was pushed along to the U.S. Supreme Court by Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, but was not finally resolved until the spring of 1952. I was a seventeen-year-old fifth-former at the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut. That year in Mr. Grover’s class I wrote an enthusiastic essay about the South’s growth rates exceeding that of the nation, and got an “F” on the paper. Exuberant Dixie chauvinism met precise Yankee superiority, and Yankee superiority won.
Still, that year, the economic shackles had been struck from the limbs of the South. The economic stimulus of World War II, elimination of the freight rate differential, and the delightful invention of New Yorker Willis Carrier—air conditioning, which became widely affordable in the 1950s—combined to give the South its economic takeoff speed. Irony of ironies,
