Posted on 07/14/2015 6:35:16 AM PDT by prplhze2000
This 1938 Jackson Daily News article tells the story of how the Southern governors fought to level the playing field with the North when it came to railroad freight rates. The railroad commissions kept the freight rates very slanted towards the North. Canada, yes- Canada, enjoyed lower freight rates on railroads than did the South; so slanted weighted against the South were the rates. Thus a builder in New Orleans could get steel shipped more cheaply from Pittsburgh than he could from Birmingham....
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
war on the south still goes on today by the north east especially.
It’s their own damn fault. They voted for Roosevelt and his new deal.
The Republicans weren’t (and aren’t) all that great, either.
Very true. The railroad barons worked hand-in-glove with Andrew Carnegie and William Clay Frick to keep Pittsburgh the king of steel. Walk around town here and look at buildings from that period and the opulence is just amazing.
The South could split the North today and no one would do anything about it
1) Obama is too politically driven to have an interest in a “Union”
2) Congress is spineless
3) I would guess that most people in the military come from the South.
interesting, thank you.
yeah...although now it is a real occupation
I'd say the main reason is smaller families. The average household has 2 children. Presumably one of those is a son. No way any Union government could bear the 500K dead only sons it would take to hold the country together against a determined secession effort by the red states.
Because the Republicans had done soooooooooo much for the South at that point.
FDR was the first national leader to recognize the problem of an impoverished South. I don’t like his solutions, but he was the first one to say something was wrong. At least he backed the South on the railroad fight.
Very interesting!
Carnegie and Frick (Henry not William) were long dead and gone before the feds started setting rail road rates. And the mills in Birmingham and the mills in Pittsburgh were owned by the same companies. Why would they conspire to limit the market for their own mills in the South?
I've read that trucking regulations were similarly skewed to favor northern shippers and it was Jimmy Carter who ended that.
A $300k house in rural NY state will cost you $10,000 in property taxes.
A $300k house just off the beach in Brunswick County NC will cost you about $1,200 in property taxes.
On the other hand, I’ve read that the politicians that ran rural Southern counties wanted to keep industry out so that power would be maintained.
The big fights over railroad rate fixing were in the late 1800’s. The National Grange among others was engaged in fights over that. And Carnegie himself had extensive railroad holdings. He stood to benefit either way.
Pittsburgh is a nice place, but it would not have become so opulently wealthy if the fix had not been in.
>> Why would they conspire to limit the market for their own mills in the South? <<
They wouldn’t, of course.
But let’s not allow rational economic analysis to intrude upon a good old-fashioned populist screed against the evil capitalists.
That is true. Mississippi, for example. The planter class wrote the 1890 constitution, which is still in force today. They placed the colleges in rural areas so only the well to do could gain an education. They discouraged industry. It was a true ag mentality.
Guess you never heard of crony capitalists.
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