The Land of Milk and Money: The Creation of the Southern Dairy Industry by Alan I. Marcus

Abstract

The Land of Milk and Money explains that the southern dairy industry’s rapid rise in the 1920s had as much to do with corporate decision-making rooms and small-town boosters as with pasture grasses. Marcus argues that the Borden Milk Company’s selection of Starkville, Mississippi, as the site of a milk-condensing plant was the act that jumpstarted southern dairying, first in northeastern Mississippi and then region-wide.That Starkville is central to Marcus’ book is not surprising. Marcus composed the book from his position at Mississippi State University (located in Starkville) during the COVID-19 pandemic when travel restrictions compelled historians to focus on local sources. But this Starkville-centered story is not simply rooted in research expediency. As Starkville flourished, stories about the town’s economic transformation circulated throughout the South, inspiring civic leaders throughout the region. The book’s first few chapters examine Starkville’s and Borden’s histories prior to their partnership, whereas the final chapters consider how Starkville served as a regional model for leaders in Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas.Marcus’ book deepens understanding of the place of condensed milk and the small town to southern agricultural history. A rarely used pantry item today, condensed milk proved a linchpin in the early twentieth century—a key ingredient of infant feeding regimens, an important export during World War I, and a significant retail good in the South, where lack of livestock and adequate refrigeration stymied fresh-milk consumption. Condensed milk became critical to Borden’s corporate strategy. In times of shortage (such as during the 1916 milk strike), Borden marketed milk destined for condenseries as fresh. In times of fresh milk surplus, the company could maintain their fresh milk market prices by redirecting surplus fresh milk to condenseries. Processed as condensed milk, that surplus milk could be marketed in the future. By the 1920s, Borden had located condenseries in far-flung places like Kansas and Mississippi. In these geographical backwaters, Borden could pay farmers less for milk than they could in districts where dairy farmers could get better prices from dealers who marketed fresh milk.Land of Milk and Money relies heavily on local regional newspapers to trace how small-town southern bankers and businessmen courted the investment of northern dairies with an eye toward securing long-term prosperity, viewing dairy as less subject to volatility than export crops or the boom-and-bust cycles of logging. At the same time, these local elites also tried to convince farmers to invest in the animal husbandry and agricultural practice that would ensure the dairy plants’ success. Starkville’s business community mastered this intermediary role first, drawing not simply the Borden Company but also champions of other small towns, who made pilgrimages to Starkville in hopes of learning how to emulate the town’s success.Land of Milk and Money adds a new perspective not simply to southern agricultural history but also to Mississippi histories of the interwar period. Rather than depict Mississippi’s small towns as reactionary strongholds, Marcus views business and community leaders as committed to a vision of economic growth that boosted the future of Mississippi across the color line. Unlike histories that stress Mississippi’s economic elites’ hostility toward northern “labor agents,” the leaders that Marcus profiles embraced and courted representatives of Borden, Kraft, and Pet Milk.Marcus’ history would benefit from explaining how and why Mississippi’s dairy boosterism conflicted or intersected with the broader histories of political oppression and economic exclusion in the interwar period. Were Black tenant farmers who enjoyed greater economic prosperity by selling milk to Borden more likely to challenge political exclusion? Did dairy-rich Oktibbeha County send more or fewer migrants to northern cities during this period? Did the perspective of Black civic leaders, including African-American county agents, use the same language as white civic leaders to describe the promise of a rural Mississippi dotted with small-town dairies? Moreover, by positioning his history relative to social histories of the state, Marcus might have offered a better explanation of the power, and limits, of the shifting dairy economy on the states’ economic and political life.The book’s conclusion suggests that focusing on small-town southern boosters might help to recast northern-centric narratives of corporate relocation and deindustrialization. Further consideration about whether Starkville’s story inspired both southern small-town leaders and northern capitalists seeking to match Borden’s success in the subsequent decades would have helped Marcus to underscore the broader significance of this intriguing and understudied chapter in southern economic history.