Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900

Abstract

In his provocative analysis of southern exceptionalism, The Mind of South, W. J. Cash searched for meaning behind skyscrapers that Progress, New South style, had built among stark and simple red clay hills of Carolina Piedmont. In particular, Charlotte-based journalist sought to explain how Babbittry and Rotarianism could thrive in a region where hundreds of rustic yeomen had rallied behind scores of proud planters to defend slavery and southern way of life just over a half-century earlier. Unlike filiopietistic school of Progressive historians who praised rise of New South as the progress of a mighty people, Cash was not deceived by seductive and self-congratulatory rhetoric of New South propagandists. Cash, after all, wrote his epic during crippling depression of 1930s, or Great Blight, as he preferred to call it. He had only to look around his native Piedmont to see farmers battling both boll weevils and bankruptcy or to view part of region's cracker proletariat walking out of textile mills on strike. Moreover, just three years before his book was published, Cash heard Franklin D. Roosevelt administration label South nation's number one economic problem. With poverty and wrenching class tensions so visible all around him, Cash knew that champions of New South Creed had promised far more than they had delivered. Still, despite, or perhaps because of, New South's failings, Cash remained intrigued by rapidity with which a new business civilization had been grafted onto remains of Old South. ' Ultimately, after grappling with issue through several hundred pages of eloquent and often emotional prose, Cash concluded that emergence of New South was a testimonial to persistence and adaptability of Old