It’s coming!
But this meme…
…seems rather apt at the moment.
So in the meantime, I have a throwback to my first book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century. I was thrilled to see in today’s NYT that Jamelle Bouie (probably the best-read person in America, these days?) included Dollars for Dixie in his exploration of anti-union politics in the South, broadly speaking.
In short, capital in the South has long sought docile and cheap labor, and business leaders have gone to extensive lengths to secure it. As the New Deal threatened to undermine the South’s separate wage structures based on racism and exploiting poor southerners both white and black, business leaders crafted a re-fashioned and modernized idea of “free enterprise” to crack union influence and preserve shop floor power.
Looking at this cover, you can probably start to understand why I boomeranged to college radio as a topic after slogging through records related to southern cotton textiles in the 1930s. I have an entire chapter on railroad freight rates. (They are actually really important!). But this subject makes FCC rules look like BookTok recommendations.
But you don’t have to peruse the details of fights over wage differentials for the South’s glove manufacturers: instead, check out Bouie’s fabulous overview of the South’s politics regarding wages, unions, and power.