Comments Elsewhere

Kevin: Actually, Rad Geek, that was just an indirect paraphrase of Jeffrey Tucker’s two examples of forced industrialization.

Fair enough. I thought you were accepting what he claimed as well as paraphrasing; if that was too strong a reading, my bad.

Kevin: Along the lines of what Adam and AWolf said, it also occurs to me that the state-created and state-subsidized railroads, with their discriminatory pricing had a lot to do with driving farmers into the whole. And the banks and railroads fought what amounted to a war against farmer attempts at cooperative finance, crop storage and marketing.

Sure, but that doesn’t, as far as I know, have much to do with the South specifically; it happened in the South, as it did everywhere, but the area where this was most intense was by far the West (for obvious reasons). To tip my hand a bit, the reason I ask is because I don’t know of much in the way of land-grab politics that were specific to the South in the immediate post-war period (the New Deal era thievery by the TVA etc. clearly belongs to a different, albeit related historical era). That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, but if it did I’d need to hear more about it and I expect most other readers would as well. What I fear is that Tucker has the usual Von Mises Institute / Gone With The Wind picture of Reconstruction in mind rather than something rooted in historical fact, and is using comparisons to Stalinist Russia in order to beat one of the VMI’s favorite dead horses. I would like to be proven wrong, though.

Kevin:, And that’s not even getting into the black sharecroppers, working land that should have been theirs, who got tractored off after WWII and flooded northern cities with destitute and unemployable refugees.

This is quite true. In fact I’d say that the legitimation and complicity with the plantation system after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and the refusal to recognize slaves’ rights to the land that they had worked all their lives (an idea put into practice only by wild-eyed radicals like Czar Alexander II), amounted to the final stamp of federal approval for one of the largest and most destructive land robberies in American history. (The coerced Black exodus northwards towards industrial centers began well before WWII, for what it’s worth — under pressure from both state coercion and freelance racial terrorism.) But what I suspect is that this isn’t quite what Tucker had in mind. (If it is, I’d enjoy being proven wrong.)