In this week's reading on the post bellum industrialization of the Piedmont (Allen Tullos, A History of Industry, Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1989), an intelligent and thoughtful historian tries his hand at economic analysis. The result is an uneven little ramble, at all times engrossing in its details but alternating rapidly in big-picture terms among flashes of native insight, theoretical fallacy, and buffoonish ideology. Dr. Tullos bends and squeezes his rich narrative of Tar Heel industry more than a little in order to fit certain theories of economic history, which are regrettably neither particularly historical nor the least bit influenced by economics.
His treatment of the railroad offers a capsular summary of the problem. The 1870's and 1880's saw the establishment of the first major commercial rail networks in North Carolina, which would evolve into the great Seaboard Air Line Railway by the turn of the century. Dr. Tullos, who holds a Master's in Folklore from our baby-blue brethren in Chapel Hill and a doctorate in American Studies from Yale, eagerly disabuses us of the illusions propounded by the railroad's early boosters: "With the coming of the railroad...Piedmont farming moved toward one-crop dependence upon either cotton or tobacco. Disastrous years lay ahead for farmers who, linked by merchants and landlords into the international cotton market or pressed to take the tobacco monopolists' price, were forced in unprecedented numbers into tenancy and off the land" (135). There follows a rising chorus of chaotic cotton and tobacco price swings--then, the sonorous final judgment: "Independence and the self-sufficient farming ideal gave way to the fear and the reality of debt and dependence as tens of thousands of rural folk became part of an industrial working class" (ibid.).
Without ever suggesting the exact or even the inexact number of yeoman farmers impoverished by the railroad, Dr. Tullos complains that it exposed our hardworking, formerly self-sufficient ancestors to the vicissitudes of international markets. Instead of enjoying the freedom to grow all their own food and make modest trades among cozy networks of friends and neighbors, North Carolinians had suddenly to depend upon the whims of a merciless market system, controlled by "New South capitalists" best characterized as "ambitious, agressive [sic], and exploitative" (148).
Well, this is rubbish. Every corner of historical experience reminds us that the only freedom enjoyed in the state of perfect self-sufficiency is the freedom to choose your own form of poverty. If you make your own clothes, your own food, and your own shelter, then you have got just about enough time left over at the end of each day to gather kindling, light a fire, and boil your roots for dinner. The ability to communicate in trade with your fellow men equals the ability to specialize in your area of comparative advantage--so that I can grow food, you can build houses, Thomas Scott can run railroads, Dr. Tullos can complain about the railroads, &c. As any freshman economics student and perhaps even Paul Samuelson knows, free trade occurs only when it results in a net benefit to both parties--an achievement by each trader of a consumption level that he was unable to reach on his own. This homely theory of comparative advantage is the sole reason that I am able to sit at a sturdy desk (which I did not build) and use a modern word processor (which I did not encode) to type these comments into my computer (which I could not even explain, let alone build), all while listening to Johnny Cash croon the arrival of that Orange Blossom Special on a 78rpm record (which, mirabile dictu, you can still find at Schoolkids Records). More importantly, comparative advantage accounts for why the fastest-growing, most economically dynamic states in the Union--and those with the fastest-growing standards of living--boast the fewest restrictions on trade, labor, and production.
So much for the notion that our ancestors dwelt in a pre-trade paradise before the advent of the railroad. What of its aftermath? Dr. Tullos claims, again with more basis in vivid language than verifiable fact, that the rail-based New Southerners "restructured" the industrial economy "[u]pon the auction block of distressed farmers and farm labor" (171). Amid the mixing of metaphors, let us recall that Tar Heel farmers voluntarily decided to forsake subsistence and specialize in cotton or tobacco, just as their sons decided to leave the farm and enter the factory--motivated in the first case by higher profits, in the second by higher wages. The author almost begrudgingly notes that the textile and tobacco plants created a middle class; but he clearly considers the achievement barely noteworthy alongside the hypothetical exploitation of labor by capitalism in the persons of D.A. Tompkins, Moses Cone, James B. Duke, et al. Actually there was an economic system based on the exploitation of labor; it existed in the South for some time (perhaps Dr. Tullos has heard of it).
Such an eminent and eminently likeable author knows better, or ought to. While he indulges in this proto-socialistic-world-systems-theory-multi-hyphenated-moonshine all too often, it hardly detracts from the evocative power of his carefully researched, nuanced portraits of the industrialists themselves--Tompkins, Duke, R.J. Reynolds, and the rest. The shame is that Dr. Tullos evidently feels impelled to dress up his rich history in that still-regnant moral fashion, Shades of Gray. No feat of innovation, no glorious steam engine, no meteoric rise by a Loblolly-pine youngster to the helm of a great corporation, must be celebrated without the ceremonious painting of Gray Areas. No feats of (private) enterprise, even those that built our state, must be honored--not without careful hedging and brittle sermonizing and invoking dogmas of exploitation. By allowing such fashions to dominate his narrative at the expense of actual moral nuance, the author engages in a kind of historical vandalism--splattering Gray with abandon, even a touch of malice, all over the textile plants, Duke Chapel, the Bright Leaf districts, and that Orange Blossom Special.
No comments:
Post a Comment