How and why did Southern Whites become poorer than non-Southern Whites?

How and why did Southern Whites become poorer than non-Southern Whites?

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those liberated workers are damn cheap labor that's why

because the Borderlands Hypothesis.

Read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rednecks_and_White_Liberals

yankee carpetbaggers looted the south

Care to give us a summary?

Occupation by a hostile nation for 150 years.

Dumb ass people in power

Africans were newly appointed in power , this is a racist statement

what I want to say is inbreeding, but it is low historical industrialization and a resource extraction/cash crop economy, which went hand in hand with low levels of urbanization and immigration. There's also a cultural factor, more of a historical emphasis on landholding and military honor than dollar wealth or academic success, and a low cultural investment in and predilection for education

Andrew Johnson and Grant.

They gave up on doing Reconstruction properly. Instead they just finished tearing up the South. Then sending all new development west.

the yankees had oil, coal, and iron ore. so they did wonderfully during the industrial revolution.

West coast was then built up after ww2. To provide for the military industrial complex.

The guy is wrong in regards to Dunbar high school.

What?

What does "personal property" encompass specifically? Do slaves compose "personal property"?

after the war, all the whites in the south were disenfranchised by the Union military occupation governments. while all the blacks were enfranchised and supported by northern republicans.

whites couldn't vote and blacks could. so blacks became disproportionately powerful in southern state government seats.

this all of course caused the Jim Crow laws as a reactionary movement. Once the southern whites were allowed to vote and hold office again. they took back political power and made sure the blacks couldn't get any.

All the answers in this thread so far are retarded. I'm no expert, but I took a couple of college classes in the history of the American South, so I'll give my shot. It's really all about agriculture and slavery. Any answer to southern poverty that does not reference this just doesn't go back far enough.

Before the abolition of slavery, the lower South made cash crops while the upper South and southern Appalachia produced food crops and livestock. This was accomplishable because each deep South plantation, being relatively centralized, had the capital to import food from elsewhere while maintaining just a small portion of the plantation for the barebones food production. After the abolition of slavery, plantations still more or less functioned under the new sharecropping system, but each sharecropper had to devote a larger portion of his land to a garden for food. This decentralization (not necessarily the abolition of slavery itself) lowered the productivity of the region.

So, what does that mean for whites? Well, it deprived the whites of the upper South and southern Appalachia of a market for their foodstuffs. It's not as profitable to send food hundreds of miles and attempt to sell individual cows to individual people. For those whites of the deep south, the slaveowners obviously lost that capital. But it's important to remember that most whites did not own slaves. So their loss of income came from the dramatic fall of the price of cotton over the following decades. And most did produce cotton. The price of cotton eventually fell to about 20% of pre-CW prices if I remember correctly. That's because during the Civil War, the Confederacy was blockaded and could not ship out cotton, so the English invested in cotton production in Egypt and India, greatly increasing supply, and subsequently lowering the price.

This is part 1. Part 2 in next post.

>After the abolition of slavery, plantations still more or less functioned under the new sharecropping system, but each sharecropper had to devote a larger portion of his land to a garden for food.
If the plantation owners could buy imported food, why couldn't the sharecroppers?

Going to need statistics to confirm this.

Southerners are just trash. You can't change them; the best you can do is ignore them and keep them out of the government.

because all the smart ones moved away from the niggers

Part 2.

The history of the Southern economy post Civil War is bleak. Industries were primarily low-wage, extractive, and owned by northerners.

Textile mills became relatively popular along the coastline. They moved into the South because, due to the massive drop in cotton prices forcing people of their farms, they could pay their workers really low wages and still have a healthy supply of labor.

Steel was a fairly large industry around certain parts of the South like Birmingham or Knoxville that had trouble getting off the ground due to low railroad infrastructure. But eventually, railroads covered the South, so there must be other explanations. One thing I remember that really fucked the steel industry was that, for quite a while, steel prices were based on "Pittsburgh prices," or something like that. Pittsburgh prices had a formula: "price of steel + cost to ship from Pittsburgh." So even if you were in Alabama getting steel from Birmingham, you had to pay enormous prices because the price of steel was much higher than it made sense to be. (Remember this is the age of the robber barons, there weren't enough competitors to compete on price.)

Coal was another big extractive industry, especially in Appalachia. But coal had a really brief window in which it was useful in very large quantities. The Southern coal industry expended rapidly from 1880 to 1900, then entered a gradual decline due to mechanization of coal jobs and a shift to petroleum fuel, with the exception of a short uptick in the 1917-1918 Great War years.

Then the Depression hit, and it hit the hardest in the South, because all these extractive industries depend on a global demand originating outside the South. When that global demand shrank, Southerners lost their employment en masse, and struggled to get by on pennies. One thing about economics is that it's really hard to make big bucks when you're starting out with nothing, and the Great Depression put many people back to zero.

Not him and I have no stats on me, but sharecropping was basically the agricultural version of wage-slavery. A sharecropper would never be able to afford both the landlord's rent and the cost of importing food.

>If the plantation owners could buy imported food, why couldn't the sharecroppers?
See pic related.

Before the Civil War, the price of cotton still fluctuated, but it had an upward trend. After the Civil War and the opening of the cotton markets in Egypt and India, cotton prices went down and they stayed down. However, the amount of labor that one acre of cotton required stayed constant, so the farmers who were previously making enough money to eat well were now working just as hard but having to grow their own food to get by. The fall of cotton prices forced many previously independent (white) farmers into sharecropping as well, so it wasn't a system that only affected blacks.

The value in a slave is their labor

too many irish, not enough germans

So beforehand the landlord decided it was more profitable to buy imported food rather than use land to grow food to feed the slaves and afterwards the sharecroppers found imported food more expensive than growing their own food. What could have changed? Some technical details about the way food was distributed and sold? Seems like something really difficult to conclusively prove.

That chart starts at the end of the war when there was still a cotton shortage. According to this, prices weren't that much different from the 1850s. Sorry if it seems like I am throwing a spanner in your works but it doesn't add up.

Markets are fluid and adaptable and it is important to incorporate this into your theories.

It's all economics. The southern economy was agricultural, as is the mid-west and other areas, but the industrial revolution changed everything. Sure there were many factors, but to me this is the most important. The southern belt couldn't compete with the rust belt or other regions, especially at a time when the economy was so fragile, such as during the great depression.

Also having spectacularly lost a war where a great number of your young men die probably had a pretty significant impact as well, not just politically but psychologically, existentially. Large parts of the south still feel very strongly about their identity and pride in the confederacy. Even though it was built on slavery.

I'm from the south, but I don't look back on those times fondly. I think of other great civilizations built on horrors such as cannibalism, warfare and the like that completely vanished, I think we should be grateful that we still exist and we should use knowledge of that time as a lesson to create a brighter future. Whether we need statues in our streets of confederate "heroes" is a different story.

all accurate

>Blacks claim their current economic disparity is a result of slavery and segregation.

>Southern White response: that was decades ago! There's no racism anymore you don't have any excuse!

>Southern White response to current southern economic disparity: fuckin yankees took our slaves that's why!

Explain it to me Veeky Forums.

>they took back political power and made sure the blacks couldn't get any.
So why is the region still a shithole if the superior whites regained power?

it's like whites vs jews and blacks vs whites in the eyes of the alt right redditer.
if you ask some tariq nasheed tier black nationalist, there is a massive white conspiracy to hold down blacks in modern times. things like comedians making edgy jokes or donald trump becoming president is part of a conspiracy to bring back slavery and kill all negroes. to these people, it has nothing to do with cultural differences, IQ, etc. they'll do whatever it takes to be the victim.
now look at stormies/TRS transplants from reddit, jews being in charge of everything is because of a vast conspiracy stretching literally thousands of years at this point. it has nothing to do with jews have higher IQs, jews being the only ones who could run banks in medieval europe, etc. no, it's just a massive conspiracy. so the responses you're seeing aren't based on reason, it's just stormniggers who are obsessed with remaining the victim

Because they're less intelligent.

This kind of attitude needs to stop on Veeky Forums.

hmm, this makes too much sense

Southern whites literally have lower iq than northerners

hemispherists have no place on Veeky Forums

Northern states for the northern whites
Stop the invasion

Shit climate meant workers would literally die in a factory because of overheating, meaning only smaller industry could be built and agriculture was the main branch of the economy. It wasn't until modern air conditioning was developed that the industrialization of the US South really began.

comfortfutures.com/early-ac-and-architecture/

>muh yankees
>niggers
>le dumb southerners XD
>muh X ethnicity is better

Kill yourselves

Yeah, I mean, I don't really know. As I said, I took a couple college classes in this, so I'm no expert.

As you may know, there's a lot of misinformed narratives surrounding the South and the Civil War. The narrative I learned was that drop in cotton prices and the decentralization of the plantation caused the postwar slow down in agriculture and poverty for agricultural workers. That could just be another false narrative, and if it is, then fuck, I guess I learned wrong.

But the other arguments I listed may stand up (textiles, other extractive industries like coal, steel, and timber) to scrutiny and may be enough to explain southern poverty among other types of workers or a lack of investment in the South by big industry. But I admit that I do not have the evidence to really back up my argument regarding cotton, and the evidence that you have found seems to refute it.

Religion and hookworms.

What do you have to say about the US military placing their training facilities primarily in the South or southern half of the United States, then?

A simple Google search reveals that all of the current military training bases are in the South or southern half [military.com/join-armed-forces/basic-training-the-places-youll-go.html], but I know that they have generally been in the South for the decades prior to air conditioning.

I learned about this a while ago, and the stated reason I learned for this trend was that the warmer climate of the South actually allowed for year-round training, while the North became too snowy or cold for troops.

If the military determines that the South is preferable for their troops, who are outside physically exerting themselves and training day in and day out, and they don't really have to worry about the physical ills of being in the heat, then why would it be particularly problematic for factory workers?

Lots of correct answers.

Also in group out group dynamics. Southern elites could credibly claim to be part of the same in group as poor southerns. They got elected by vowing to fight out of region elites.

You didn't have the same degree of class based politics (also because of less factories). As a result, elites were more entrenched and had less incentive to provide benefits to the poor.

Even today the South ranks dead last in social mobility for Whites. Any thing that redistributes from rich to poor just gets reframed as from White to Black and Whites reject it.

Not him, but obviously because working in a factory with poor ventilation and large machines running hot with maybe hundreds of other people makes for a way hotter environment than being outside in open spaces.

Because working in an enclosed 19th century factory for many hours is just as dangerous, if not more than training in an open space, like said.

Also I'm no expert but why wouldn't a modern army have military training bases in a cold area. Soldier need to be trained to survive and fight in a variety of conditions, including.harsh winter.

They're descended from scottish-irish who are genetically different from northern anglo-saxons.

Sauce? Id want to read more on this if it's legit

>why wouldn't a modern army have military training bases in a cold area
Well, I mean, it's not like the United States has no military bases elsewhere in the country. See pic related (image too large to post on Veeky Forums): [upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/U.S._Military_Installations_Map.jpg].

It's just that they're not for BASIC training. For basic training, you need to churn out thousands or even tens of thousand of troops (in times of conflict) per year, year-round. So agreeable climates work best for such a purpose. I'm also not an expert, but I'd imagine the smaller bases scattered throughout the United States are for smaller detachments, military exercises, or training specialized troops. See all the little bases in Alaska in the image, including some on the northern (!) coast.

The U.S has military bases in all types of climatese

It's just that something like 75% of all its military recruits come from southern states. It's just as easy to train a southerner to handle the cold as it is to train a Yankee to tolerate the heat, it has more to do with local culture and family lineage, which of course is being influence by its environment.

also, makes a salient point about putting your basic training bases in places that you can be running around outdoors all year long.

Because the south had it's infastructure in tatters and it's state governments put in debt slavery by railroad companies. For example VA had it's state railway company sold off for pennies to a private company during reconstruction by the military but the state was held liable for the loans it took out to fund the company. Railway company influenced politics and therefore determined the rate at which the state had to pay back the loans. This actually caused a regional political party to form, the Readjusters, with the sole purpose of telling the railway companies to go fuck themselves for being Jewish since 90% of the states outgoing payment was going to the railway company during part of the period. Because of this standardized schooling for all children got off to a slow to no start in the state which means the state had low investment in human capital.

Not to mention the convict leasing system which further undermined a fragile economy. If you had power you could just rent a few convicts from a prison, work them to death, and then the state would eat the bill for burial.

>Have a Civil War
>Union Navy blockades all major southern ports. Europe doesn't give a shit because they can make up the lose in trade from Africa and India.
>All your infrastructure burns down when Sherman marches to the sea.
>Lose the War. Forced to pay reparations.
>Get fucked again during reconstruction.
Its not hard to see why.

correct answers

>If the plantation owners could buy imported food, why couldn't the sharecroppers?

Plantation owners have increasing returns to scale and specialization and better credit-worthiness than sharecroppers and smallholders

Having blacks in your midst. Imagine you have two basketball teams. One is composed of 12 above average players of relatively equal ability. The other has 4 really good players 4 really bad players and 4 okay players. Who is going to win? The team with more depth and uniform ability. It's hard to hold up the dead weight; they have to be supported or oppressed and this causes a great deal of social dislocation which could be spent trying to actually improve society and get down to work.

Its their fault for bringing in nogs then

Keep The North Great

It gets hot in the north too dumbass as if horrible working conditions ever kept people from working in factories anyway, you /pol/tards are a real trip.

Same reason the North of Ireland is a shithole compared to the south- Protestantism

>Pay reparations
Bitch where? What, were the blacks give $2 and some change? I'm gonna need a source for that.

1865-1964
>The south
>Supporting blacks
Pick one

The Civil War and Reconstruction absolutely destroyed the South. The nigger infestation doesn't help either.

It's hotter for a longer time and temperatures are much higher, and yes environmental conditions do keep you from working if you're DEAD.

>see post telling racists to kill themselves
>call him a /pol/tard
What did the complete retard mean by this?

slavery was not an efficient economic system in the first place, then add to that the effects and fallout of the civil war