Three Southerners

BROADUS MITCHELL

The Johns Hopkins University

It is not often that an individual, in however long a life, compasses, in its emergence, development and fulfilment, an entire social epoch. Robert Owen was one of these. During his nearly ninety years the domestic system of manufactures was swallowed into the maw of the Industrial Revolution, mercantilism gave way before the strident self-sufficiency of Manchester optimists, and the claims of these were in turn refuted by the early Utopians, the ill-starred Chartists, the philanthropists of the Factory Acts, the little circle of Christian Socialists and, last, the solemn savagery of "Das Kapital." The draper's apprentice lived to know Karl Marx.

If this is rare, how much rarer for one to be able, at a point of time, to talk with those who represent the several successive phases of a long development. Lately, in a trip through the South undertaken to discover how the section sprang from agriculture, slavery and separatism into manufacturing, wage labor and national participation, I met (in three days) three men who, each in his distinctive way, make up the whole story. Thus I had the Southern industrial revolution, from first to last, in a focus. The panorama was uncannily contracted, as when one looks through the wrong end of a telescope.

I

In a shoddy little city which gives no hint of the importance that lies in the buzzing mills that encircle it, I was told to go first to see Colonel MHis home was a dingy, rambling frame building. A dusty vine looped itself about the porch pillars and cast shadows through the open door into the hall. I clanged the bell and stood looking at the bare, unwashed floor, the rigid old sofa and a smoked kerosene lamp on a tilting table. After long waiting and more jangling of the bell, an old colored woman came shuffling out from the back to tell me that the Colonel was away, but that if I would come through the house "Jeems" would direct me to him. The

back yard was weed-grown to the kitchen windows; two old brick servants' houses stood away from the dwelling, and between these an ancient darkey was sawing firewood.

"You don' know whar de Cunl's office at?" he asked in genuine astonishment. "Why, de Cunl's office, hit's cross fum de cote house whar got de clock in de tower."

The second-floor room in "lawyers' row" was like many another Southern attorney's den, and yet was peculiar to its occupant. The air was gray with stale tobacco smoke, the drab walls were fly-specked, the furniture, upholstered in worn horse-hair, was piled with dirty papers. A load of yellowing sheets had accumulated on a center table, and this pile was surmounted by a topless panatelas box filled with granulated burley and a dozen clay pipes, their long curved stems in a jackstraw jumble. Summoned by my footfalls, the Colonel, the genius of the place, entered seemingly from nowhere. I could catalogue him at the first glance. He was of the old school, and could have been cast for the stage without the stroking of an eyelash. A Prince Albert coat, over-long, turning a bit greenish, and with silk-faced lapels, hung limp and loose about his tall frame. Imperious eyes looked at me from under tufted brows, his tobacco-stained moustache and goatee worked spasmodically, and when he lifted off his great flopping straw hat his hair was purest white.

I explained my errand and, not without some examination, was bowed to a seat and offered a pipe. "That's all stuff and nonsense about the war (to him there had been but one in the history of this world) making the Southern people change their way of life," he exploded. "We have always been business people around here from the first-manufactured in iron and wood and cotton. The war kind of broke us up, and we had it pretty hot during Reconstruction, but afterwards we just got back on the track."

In a front office the Colonel's nephew, clad in perfectly pressed Palm Beach and perched on his desk, interrupted us by telephoning to the station agent, between puffs at his cigarette, to deliver a crate of beer he had ordered.

I asked whether it was mountaineers who came down to supply hands for the cotton-mill renaissance of the 'eighties.

He was indignant. "Magazine writers from the North tell you that!" In his excitement he commenced knocking the lit ashes out of his pipe, covering his knees with sparks and ashes, and immediately began refilling the bowl. "Magazine writers from the North, I say! The mill people came from right 'round here, and they weren't any paupers either. They'd been farmers before, and lots of 'em owned their land, too." Only the thudding tick-tock of a wall clock broke the old gentleman's satisfied silences. I could not disabuse his mind of the conviction that the South had never been brought to resolve upon a new policy when it had forgotten Calhoun in the lesson of Appomattox and despaired of political revenge through the tortured years of Radical Rule. As he has countenanced no improvements in his own dwelling or the property surrounding it, so he has clung affectionately and proudly to a social and economic system that is over, stoutly resolving not to recognize its decay.

II

The next town I visited is one of bitter memory. Near it, during the Civil War, was one of the worst of the prison camps, where men dug holes in the earth and, in their starvation and frenzy, were more degraded than wild beasts. The Confederacy, starving and frenzied itself, was powerless to prevent the wretchedness of its captives. Twenty years after the war the town had not roused itself. Its inaction and its poverty made a vicious circle. It sulked and drank and nursed its rancor and despaired. It came to have no excuse for being.

The fairy story of its revival was told me by the president of the principal bank. A man of fifty-five, a strange mixture of vague dreaminess and keenness, he first answered me that he was a poor informant on the cotton manufacturing growth of the place. But I had been warned of his hesitancy, and when the local clearing house had adjourned from the directors' room, he ushered me in. He leaned carelessly against the table while in an intense voice, as though the events were fresh upon him, he explained that in the late 'eighties a Presbyterian minister had come to the town to hold a "protracted meeting." The morbid introspection of the people lent itself

to the evangelist's purposes. They flocked to the tabernacle from miles about. Disobeying ministerial traditions, the preacher analyzed the need as that of material improvement, a new social objective. The unemployed in the town and the pauperized poor whites of the district needed means of support. He hit upon cotton mills as the cure. He related moral woes to physical depletions. All the people needed to pull together in a common cause. He fired them to a new purpose, so that the town tingled with his strictures and took hope at his encouragements.

A mass meeting of citizens was held in a warehouse, was opened by prayer, and subscriptions were taken toward the establishment of a cotton factory which would initiate activity. Three ministers took prominent part in the organization, and their helpers were pillars of the local churches. The amount contemplated was over-subscribed. The mill thus founded took the name of the town and has been more than ordinarily successful from the outset. It has never had a company store, never permitted night work, never employd any but the "home people" for whom it was inaugurated, and almost no shares have been held outside the immediate community. Other companies followed, and as mills increased saloons disappeared, streets were paved, better homes were built, and wealth was more evenly distributed.

My informant brought from the safe an old leather-bound ledger in which the minutes of the organization meetings were taken down in the not very clerky hand of the preacher-promoter. As he read aloud over my shoulder I could feel that he was only sorry for the social plan of the Old South from which he and his friends had emerged young enough to help make the New South. The conversion to manufactures had broken suddenly and powerfully upon them; the religion of industry had been a psychical experience. The Old South, he understood, had given to the New South only a sense of obligation and an idealism which, tutored in a better school, had worked a blessed miracle.

III

I reached my next town in a long downpour of rain that had soaked the muddy streets, stained the cheap clap-board houses, and brought with it a wet mantle of soot from the palisading factory chimneys. In spirits none too good anyway, I received a damp welcome in an up-to-date mill office on the main street. The fingers of a brisk little stenographer were twinkling over her keys. I waited a half hour for the busy president, and finally almost forced my way in, to find him dictating in summary sentences while he chewed angrily on a dead cigar. A glance at my brief case persuaded him I had something to sell, so he had few words for me. When I explained that no dissertation could ever hope for purchasers he relented, and wanted to know what I was after. A thick-set man of forty, with a mass of very red hair in waves and mats, a face almost equally red and perspiring freely, his dress untidy, he snapped his brevities at me vigorously.

When he learned I could speak his language, he abruptly offered to run me in his roadster around the ring of mills that lay just beyond the town limits. He handled his battered, muddy little car ruthlessly, and kept nervously banging the windshield up and down to see whether the rain would come in. He was little disposed to rationalize the growth of cotton manufactures in the South, but dwelt upon immediate problems. He wanted a protective tariff, and cited differences in labor costs in England, France, Germany, and Japan to back his point. He was sure the ownership in the Southern industry was being concentrated; he himself had bought up most of the shares in his company, whether held by local investors or Northern commission firms and machinery makers. The South, he declared, is the inevitable location of the world cotton manufacture, but there was a hard-headed conservatism in his outlook too, and he thought the section would have to win out through a well-pursued business policy.

His mill was the last word in engineering achievement, with every provision for expansion, fire prevention, and transportation. He waved his hand proudly toward the glass sawtooth roof of the low weave sheds, and pointed out new devices