The Uninventive South? A Quantitative Look at Region and American Inventiveness DAVID L. CARLTON AND PETER A. COCLANIS Historical economists studying the United States have typically been preoccupied with explaining the American economic success story. With their gaze firmly set on the national level, it is not surpris ing that they have stressed the role played by the creation of a highly integrated national economy in furthering growth. Although econo mists’ fascination with the benefits of free trade, factor mobility, and the division of labor is justifiable, that same enthusiasm has led them to downplay an important countercurrent, that of persistent dispar ities in regional development. Yet, beginning with the SunbeltFrostbelt controversy of the late 1970s, we have seen increasing indi cations that, despite the prophets of “convergence,” regions have con tinued to matter greatly in our economic life. The major exception to this neglect of region by economic histori ans is the American South, whose observers have long been preoccu pied with the paradox of persistent regional backwardness in a land of progress. An especially striking instance of this paradox has been the South’s experience with industrialization, particularly prior to World War II.1 Despite impressive growth in manufacturing output Dr. Carlton is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. A student of the industrialization of the American South, he is the author of Mill and Town in South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1982) and “The Revolution from Above,’’Journal of American History 77 (1990): 445—75. Dr. Coclanis is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His writings deal with southern and comparative agriculture and include The Shadow of a Dream (New York, 1989) and “Distant Thunder,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 1050-78. The authors would like to thank Stanley Engerman, Robert Gallman, Robert Higgs, Robert Margo, Paul Rhode, Donald Winters, the panelists and audience attending their session at the Orga nization of American Historians meeting in Chicago, April 3, 1992, Philip Scranton, and the Technology and Culture referees for their suggestions. 'See, e.g., Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986); Warren C. Whatley, “Southern Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechanization,” Journal of Economic History 47 (March 1987): 45—70; Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy,© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0005$01.00 302 A Quantitative Look at Region and American Inventiveness 303 in the half century after 1880, the South remained far below national norms not only in income per capita but in a variety of other indexes associated with socioeconomic development. To be sure, the lack of stimulation imparted by manufacturing to southern economic growth was in part a function of its relatively small share of regional employ ment; however, it was also in great measure a product of the character of southern industrialization itself. Not only was southern manufac turing generally plagued by low output and value added per worker, with resulting low wages, but its industrial structure was heavily skewed toward industries, such as cotton textiles and lumber, whose wealth-producing ability was especially low.* 2 Why was this the case? Were these problems merely functions of lagging development, the recapitulation of a stage passed through earlier by the manufacturing belt? Or was there something about the South—its society, culture, or values—that impeded the region’s progress down the classic indus trial road to modernization? In view of the sheer obduracy of southern problems, simple eco nomic factors have never seemed sufficient to explain them. While some observers, especially in the 1930s, have looked to constraints from without, for example, “economic colonialism,” as the key to southern industrial underdevelopment, more have been drawn to broadly social and cultural explanations, popularly in images of the “lazy South” and intellectually in visions of the region as an “agrarian” Economic Development, and the Transformation ofthe South, 1938—1980 (New York, 1991); James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877—1984 (Lexington, Ky., 1985), and “Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South,” Jour nal...
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Nov 1, 2003
John G Treble 
Open Access