Posted on 12/02/2008 6:57:32 AM PST by prplhze2000
came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What was interesting was that it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan and concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far.....
U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nations number one economic problem" in 1938...
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
That has very little to do with the thrust of the article (sorry Justice Burger), which is the policies of the federeal government (influenced in large part by Northern capitalists) kept the region poor and stifled economic development or when it did occur, it was to the detriment of the South. The freight rates imbalance is what sticks in my craw more than anything.
That is the most profoundly stupid statement you’ve ever made. And you’ve made a bunch.
That would probably be a good idea anywise, just on general principle.
War was the remedy the confederacy chose. They can't blame anyone but themselves that it didn't turn out the way that they had hoped.
Truth hurts, huh?
That is not the point. Read the article itself.
You would know.
>>War was the remedy the confederacy chose. They can’t blame anyone but themselves that it didn’t turn out the way that they had hoped.
And if the word “Confederacy” were replaced with “Founding Fathers”, I suppose you would say the same thing? The South was beaten because of an insufficient industrial base. That won’t happen again.
bump
I read the article. The South rebels, launches a bloody and protracted armed conflict which it loses, and I'm supposed to feel sorry for it. Sorry, but I don't. Say what you will, no other rebellious people was welcomed back into the body politic and returned to power faster than those in the Southern U.S. In any other country their actions would have brought a much more severe punishment down upon them.
So two generations later it was fine to set the freight rates so that Southern industries couldn’t compete.
There were, of course, other factors. The punitive Versailles Treaty after WWI was a demonstrable failure, and the Berlin Airlift helped the Western cause by turning the occupiers into defenders in the eyes of the German population.
If the Founding Father's had lost, I suppose I would. But they didn't.
The South was beaten because of an insufficient industrial base. That won’t happen again.
The lack of a sufficient industrial base didn't stop the Founding Father's from winning. I guess they just wanted it more, huh?
That won’t happen again.
Why try it again The South has been running this country into the ground for decades now. LBJ, Clinton, Carter, both Bush's. The only real conservative in any sort of leadership position was Ronald Reagan, from my own state of Illinois by way of California.
I'm not defending it, but I'm not shedding any tears for the South either.
Good point. Go further than that.
Look at what the Allies did to France after waterloo. VERY lenient terms. They didn’t want to have a vengeant France in 20 years starting another war. Also helped that Napoleon was pretty lenient towards those he conquered as well.
read later
ping
The North plundered the South and took all of its riches and continue to this day to call us ignorant hillbillies. I got news for them. They may have taken everything away but its all coming back. The South has something they can’t take away. The people are a genteel people. They have strength and class. They are no longer dirt poor. Money goes a lot furthur here than up north. But mostly they have dignity. The North tried to take away that dignity and failed. You can wear a flour sack dress and eat nothing but beans but you can still have dignity and class. We don’t abort our babies. We love our babies, guns, and Jesus, as Rush would say. Living in the south is more like what America used to be. And as far as race relations go, we don’t have riots, etc, here. Our people, black and white, get along just fine.
Racism was a masterful political “divide and conquer” strategy for the Southern Democrats. It kept poor whites and poor blacks, who had far more in common than they had differences, from joining forces, and thus kept both from having any real political power.
Not by a long shot. Sherman's "bummers" burned my patriarchal home to the ground. Later, when Yankee carpetbaggers came South and infiltrated Southern government bodies, they raised the taxes on my ancestral estate and demanded payment in gold or union greenbacks. My ancestors had put all they had in Confederate State securities so had neither; consequently they lost the place.
Incidentally, the property was a couple of thousand acres on Hilton Head Island and surroundings and it would be worth a bundle today.
Accordingly, I say "NEVER" and it is especially a hell no never considering four of the worst presidents in American history!
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