Rise of Dixie
70 years ago the average income in America’s “South” (the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) was $314 a year. In current dollars that would be about $4,400, meaning that southerners then were about as rich as the people of Botswana are today. Half the workers in the South in the 1930s were farmers, and half of those did not own the land they farmed. The average landless cotton farmer made $73 a year ($1,023 today). Small wonder that by the late 1930s a quarter of those born in the southern countryside had emigrated to the north or to southern cities.
In 1937 southern incomes were only half the American average; today they are 91% of it. If you allow for the lower cost of living in the South, the gap all but vanishes. Since the 1960s, more whites have moved to the South than have left it. Since the 1970s, the same has been true for African-Americans. The South’s share of America’s population has risen from just over a quarter in 1960 to a third today, making it the most populous American region.
The civil war wiped out two-thirds of the South’s wealth. Roughly a quarter of able-bodied male southerners were killed or wounded. In the first year of peace, Mississippi spent a fifth of its state budget on artificial limbs.
For nearly all of its recorded history the South has been ruled by violence, or the threat of it. From 1619 until 1865, slaves had to work or be whipped. From the end of Reconstruction until the triumph of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, southern blacks who tried to vote risked a beating or worse.
The South’s share of American GDP has risen from 22% in 1963 to 31% today.
“Goodbye to the blues,” by Robert Guest