Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865-1965.

Abstract

Southern Paternalism and American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in South, 1865-1965. By Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie. Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. (New York, Cambridge, Eng., and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 170. $49.95, ISBN 0-521-62210-7.) Economists Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie argue that paternalism, which they define as the complex system of reciprocal duties and obligations that had bound agricultural employers and their (p. 1), arose in postbellum cotton South as a means to attract and motivate low-cost labor. Planters created a kind of welfare state on their plantations. They protected workers from violence and provided benefits such as old age assistance, unemployment insurance of a sort (carrying tenant through a poor season), medical care, intercession with legal authorities, recreational amenities, housing, garden plots, fuel, hunting privileges, general advice, credit, donations to schools and churches, and aid in times of emergencies, among others (p. 13). In return, tenants and croppers provided their labor, working harder and shirking less, thereby increasing output and keeping planters' supervision costs low. The planters opposed changes that threatened their paternalistic control and its economic benefits. The authors very briefly consider how planter domination of state legislatures allowed them to diminish merchant competition, to weaken legal protection of workers, croppers, and tenants, and to block alternative job opportunities in or outsiLde of plantation area. But they devote most of their discussion to how planters' domination of key Congressional committees allowed them to block national welfare reforms that might replace their paternalism. Mechanization of cotton production, however, meant a declining economic incentive (p. 133) for paternalism, and, therefore, southerners, although still powerful in Congress, ended their opposition to federal welfare programs. Indeed, welfare reforms, with their emphasis on urban areas, now provided planters an economic benefit by encouraging labor made redundant by mechanization to leave plantation areas. The concept of paternalism suggests an interesting and potentially important tool for understanding postbellum southern history. Unfortunately, Alston and Ferrie's discussion of concept is too narrow, mechanical, and static to realize that potential. In arguing that paternalism was ubiquitous and designed to diminish shirking and poor work while keeping supervision costs low, they largely ignore important variations and changes in tenure forms over time, from place to place, and by race. In some areas, for example, planters in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consolidated holdings, developed larger plantations, introduced more scientific methods, and instituted closer supervision of workers--all changes that increased total costs including costs of supervision but with goal of increasing efficiency and profits. …