Robert H. Zieger, "Southern Workers in a Changing Economy" (Introduction to "Life and Labor in the New New South:  Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950," edited by Robert H. Zieger  forthcoming, 2011, University Press of Florida.

 During the subsequent three decades, the pace of change has quickened. Indeed, in terms of patterns of economic activity, employment profile, and demographic composition, the South of 2011 is as different from the South of the 1970s as was the latter from the classic South of C. Vann Woodward, William Faulkner, and W. J. Cash.⁽²⁾

The Southern Economy, 1945-1985: Progress and Poverty

In the four decades after the end of World War II, southern workers made significant gains both in absolute terms and in relation to workers in other US regions. Writing in 1984, economist Robert Newman observed that in the 1960s and 1970s, "the relative earnings position of male workers in the South improved dramatically." The positive impact of civil rights legislation in expanding job opportunities for African Americans is responsible for some of this gain, especially during the 1970s.⁽³⁾

In addition, the departure of low-wage agricultural workers, tenants, and small farmers from the agricultural sector and the simultaneous large-scale expansion of employment in manufacturing, urban services, and construction boosted wage profiles. Thus, between 1950 and 1975, both the number of southern farms and the proportion of them worked by tenants fell precipitously.⁽⁴⁾

As early as 1953, journalist William Polk declared of his beloved traditional South, "Now it is becoming urban, industrial, hard-working, comparatively prosperous and relatively standardized." In 1958 C. Vann Woodward wrote of the "Bulldozer Revolution" that was transforming the South.⁽⁶⁾

Despite these positive developments, however, most southern states continued to fall below national norms in key socio-economic indicators. Newman's assessment of "southern" economic performance, for example, rested in part on a definition of the "South" that included Maryland and the District of Columbia, both high wage jurisdictions buoyed for large-scale federal employment.⁽⁷⁾

Writing in 1984, historian James Cobb, while duly noting economic advance, stressed the South's ongoing problems. Of all southern states, only Texas stood above the national per capita income average. Over 40 percent of the nation's poor people lived in the South, which, in his view, "remained the nation's number one economic problem." Indeed, Cobb noted, much of the region's growth was confined to the seaboard periphery; between 1960 and 1980, six southern states, including North Carolina and Georgia, lagged behind growth in terms of the national per capital income average. Rising standards largely bypassed the Appalachian South. The share croppers, tenant farmers, rural laborers, and smallholders driven off the land were rarely able to compete for high-tech jobs or housing in expanding metropolitan areas such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, and other booming cities. Urban poverty and crime rates soared. Despite incessant celebration of the emerging "Sunbelt" as the nation's new engine of progress, the South continued to trail the rest of the country educational attainment, health care, and income. Southern elites continued to appease their "desperate hunger for more growth" by trumpeting the region's low wages, low taxes, and anti-unionism in continuing efforts to attract industry.⁽⁸⁾

The New, New South

Since the 1980s, change has accelerated. The textile and garment industries, which only 25 years ago employed over a million southern workers, are now in free fall. Agricultural employment has shrunk to about one percent of the region's workers, while mining and other extractive industries register ongoing job losses. Whole new industries such as poultry raising and processing have emerged, employing thousands, many of them recent Central American migrants. Southern employers, among them Wal-Mart and Federal Express, have pioneered in developing new employment and industrial relations paradigms, establishing patterns of labor use and management practices widely emulated elsewhere. Urban hubs such as Houston, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia have continued to grow as centers of information- and research-based white collar and professional employment. But, as one Research Triangle think tank notes, the "rise in high-end jobs comes accompanied by a surge in low-skill employment." Workers with good jobs "in offices, labs, schools, hospitals, and a variety of creative pursuits. . . increase the demand for shopping, restaurants, and services," sectors dependent on low-wage workers, most of them black or Hispanic and/or female. Indeed, for all the vaunted modernization of the southern economy, it is low-wage retail and service sector work that has been expanding most dramatically.⁽⁹⁾

Continuity and Change

To be sure, continuity has accompanied rapid change. Despite its recent high-tech progress, southern states continue to occupy the lower rungs of most socio-economic ratings. In particular, the interior states of the Old South lag behind both their coastal cousins and non-southern states. In the words of a leading southern economic development consortium, "Poverty remains a characteristic blot upon the face of the South, a region with large swaths of rural destitution."⁽¹⁰⁾

The region's ongoing lag in per capita income, personal wealth, school leaving rates, and poverty levels carry on its reputation as an area apart. However, other significant indices point toward convergence with other parts of the country. Thus its employment mix over the past generation has become more like national profiles than at any time in US history. Once marked as a pariah region on account of racist and segregationist pubic policies and social practices, it now leads the nation in the numbers of black elected officials. Its public schools, while hardly paragons of biracialism, are less segregated than their northern counterparts. Southern universities and high-profile employers eagerly recruit African Americans. In metropolitan areas at least, shopping malls, restaurants, and other public venues exhibit a degree of racial integration inconceivable fifty years ago. The outflow of African Americans from the region has stopped and in the decade of the nineties, almost 600,000 African Americans relocated to the South, a trend that has continued into the 21^st century.⁽¹²⁾

Ethnic diversity, if not the fabled melting pot, has also come to the contemporary South, mainly in the form of the large-scale migration of workers from Mexico and Central America. Florida and Texas continue to host the largest concentrations of Hispanic workers but in the 1990s the Latino population expanded everywhere, especially in Georgia and North Carolina, which together added 300,000 Hispanics. In that decade, the Latino population doubled and more in six southern states. "Even outside of Texas, Latinos are the south's fastest growing population among young adults and children," notes one recent report. In 1980, 2.5 percent of the South's population was Hispanic; by the mid-2000's the figure had climbed to over 8 percent. Remarks historian Leon Fink, the country's "latest immigrant wave. . . speaks with a Spanish accent. . . and nowhere more dramatically than among the formerly ethnically insular southeastern states. . . ."⁽¹³⁾

Moreover, recent historical scholarship has blurred the traditionally stark contrast between southern racial injustice and putative northern enlightenment. For example, historians have been laying bare the discriminatory racial policies of the northern-based trade union movement.⁽¹⁴⁾

Political Scientist Anthony S. Chen documents the fierce resistance of northern politicians and other citizens to equal employment legislation while Thomas Sugrue analyzes the tenacity of housing, employment, and educational segregation in northern states and cities.⁽¹⁵⁾

Sugrue, Arnold Hirsch, Robert Self, and other scholars have amply documented the potency of northern racism in postwar housing, employment, and education patterns.⁽¹⁶⁾

Meanwhile, historians such as Patricia Sullivan, Michael Honey, and Robert Korstad have celebrated the existence of genuine inter-racial activism in the postwar South, while lamenting its all too rapid decline.⁽¹⁷⁾

Politics

Nowhere is the theme of "Southern Exceptionalism" more contested than in the political realm. The region's post-World War II transformation into a Republican-leaning two-party system reinforces the theme of sectional convergence. A number of scholarly studies have documented this shift, the most authoritative of them stressing the role of suburban white voters in propelling GOP advance in the South, just as suburban voters undergird the Republican Party elsewhere.⁽¹⁸⁾

To be sure, through the first six decades of the twentieth century single party rule characterized Dixie, making it "exceptional" in an otherwise two-party nation. During and immediately after the heyday of the Civil Rights movement (ca. 1955-75), racial polarization characterized the southern electorate, with massive defection from the once unchallenged Democratic Party occurring, independent of voters' class standing. Indeed, this abrupt transformation in the behavior of the southern electorate was the mirror image of its previous allegiance to the segregationist Democratic organizations that characterized the pre-1965 South. As the national party came to identify ever more closely with the black freedom struggle, a development culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, white southerners turned against the party's presidential candidates. This trend peaked in the election of 1968 when party standard bearer Hubert Humphrey could win only 12% of the votes of white southerners.⁽¹⁹⁾

Political observers, however, have charted a recovery of Democratic fortunes among white voters through the later 1970s and into the Nineties. Between 1976 and 1996, when southern governors Jimmy Carter (1976, 1980) and Bill Clinton (1992, 1996) headed the ticket, white defection from the Democracy began a mild reversal, bringing party identification and voting preference statistics closer to those of other regions. Moreover, while white working class support for Democratic candidates in the South lagged behind that evident in more heavily unionized northern states, blue collar workers, white and black, were consistently more Democratic than were middle- and upper-income suburban whites. Throughout the late twentieth century, the South was distinctive in that white voters there, regardless of class position, were more likely to vote Republican and to identify themselves as "conservative" than their counterparts in the Northeast, Middle West, and West Coast. But in the South, as elsewhere, the white working class showed higher levels of support for Democratic candidates than was exhibited by middle- and upper-income whites.⁽²⁰⁾

Polling data and election returns from the 2008 presidential election provide evidence both of exceptionalism and congruence in the contemporary South. On the one hand, in a pattern mirroring the region's uneven economic development, "Deep South," states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi-states that have continued to lag in income, educational attainment, and economic growth-exhibited an apparent return to race-influenced voting behavior. Thus, for example, exit polls in November, 2008, show that Republican presidential candidate John McCain gained the votes of about 87 percent of Alabama's white voters. Similar findings were reported for Mississippi and Louisiana. (By way of comparison, white voters in Wisconsin gave McCain's opponent, African American Barack Obama, about 54 percent of their votes).

The white South's emphatic preference for the Republican candidate was apparent in other states but by substantially lower margins (75 percent in Georgia; 67 percent in Arkansas). Moreover, several of the Atlantic Seaboard southern states, notably Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, bucked the trend and exhibited voting patterns closer to national norms. Thus, in Virginia, McCain captured only about 60 percent of the white vote and did only marginally better in Florida. Meanwhile, in another trend edging some southern states closer to the national experience, Hispanic/Latino voters weighed in heavily in these immigrant-attracting states. Indeed, in Florida Hispanics accounted for a larger portion of the electorate than did African Americans (13 percent to 12 percent), while in Virginia they accounted for about 5 percent. In these states, as in northern and western states with large Hispanic populations supported Obama by wide margins (57 per cent in Florida, 65 percent in Virginia).⁽²¹⁾

Broadly speaking, then, the emergence of a competitive two-party political process in the South reinforces the theme of southern congruence with national patterns. On the other hand, there is the divergence between the economically more dynamic and culturally diverse Seaboard South and the less vibrant and demographically less diverse interior South. Politically, southern exceptionalism, once stark and unambiguous, remains but now as a counterpoint to a southern electorate that otherwise tracks national patterns.⁽²²⁾

Deindustrialization

Patterns of deindustrialization reinforce the theme of convergence. Southern states have joined their northern and Middle Western counterparts in feeling the impact of plant shut-downs and relocations. For generations southern boosters, entrepreneurs, and politicians have sought to address the region's chronic impoverishment by luring northern manufacturers to Dixie, stressing the region's low wages, low taxes, and successful union avoidance. Over the past two decades, however, southern promoters have felt the sharp reverse edge of the relocation sword. Globalization, national trade policies, and stock-market-driven corporate strategies have made towns in Tennessee and Alabama as vulnerable as their counterparts in Ohio and Connecticut to the quest for ever cheaper labor and ever laxer labor and environmental standards. In the 1990s, manufacturing employment in the South dropped by 7.7 percent even as total employment grew by almost 5 percent. Between 2001 and 2004, over 20 percent of the of the national decline in manufacturing jobs occurred in the South. During this period, virtually every southern state suffered a double-digit decline in industrial employment. Alabama, among the most industrialized of the southern states, lost one-eighth of its manufacturing jobs in the first two years of the new millennium as even once depression-proof industries such as paper making, a leading southern employer, slashed payrolls in the face of international competition. Clearly, remarks historian Timothy Minchin, "deindustrialization cannot be dismissed as a regional phenomenon."⁽²³⁾

The Rise of the Service Sector

Just as in the older industrial regions, the decline in relatively well-paid industrial work has been accompanied by a surge in service and retail work. Since 1990 the proportion of southern workers in services, trade, professional, and managerial employment has expanded remarkably. By some calculations, at least seventy percent of wage-earners in the South are now properly classified as service, retail, and white collar workers. In part, this trend reflects the growing importance of education and research oriented activity, bringing highly credentialed and well-paying jobs to southern university towns and metropolitan centers. Thus in the period 1998-2003 IRS tax returns from the southern states showed a dramatic increase in the numbers of tax payers in the upper brackets. At the same time, however, the vast majority of the service sector jobs being created were at the lower end of the wage curve. Just as in Michigan and Ohio, downsized and displaced factory workers have found it difficult to find jobs that matched the wage and benefit levels of industrial employment. As in the country overall, since the mid-1990s the disparity in income separating affluent workers from low-end wage-earners in the South has widened. Those concentrated in the low-wage sectors were hugely disproportionately black, Latino, and/or female. In the words of one authoritative report, "Low-slung brick plants were abandoned, while glassy suburban office buildings [have] sprouted . . . ," but the office parks "sprouted" primarily in the expanding metropolitan centers while the "brick plants" that once produced cloth, garments, and furniture stand idle in the old manufacturing belt. Meanwhile, the enjoyment by affluent professionals, knowledge-based, and managerial workers of the entertainment and cultural amenities of bourgeoning metropolitan areas rests critically on the ill-paid work of service, retail, and custodial workers.⁽²⁴⁾

Unions?

The expanding service, retail, health care, and entertainment sector, employing as it does over a million low wage workers, would seem to be an inviting target for hungry labor organizers. After all, while an electronics plant or a textile mill can be relocated to Honduras or Bangladesh, a shopping mall, restaurant district, or health care facility must remain in situ. Despite some promising initiatives-such as the one described in Bruce Nissen's contribution to this volume-, however, organized labor has been unable to exploit the putative potential for growth represented by these low-wage workers.

In part, of course, unions today, as historically has been the case, face southern political and economic elites determined to fight worker organization. Ten of the 13 states with the lowest proportion of union membership are in the Confederate South; all 11 "Old South" states have constitutional or statutory provisions that bar union security arrangements (so-called "Right to Work" provisions). Even otherwise liberal economic development institutions, while decrying income disparities and lamenting the low wages that keep the black, female, and Hispanic workers who toil in the expanding service sector from sharing adequately in the South's economic progress, ignore organized labor as a potential force for wage enhancement.⁽²⁵⁾

Indeed, southerners have pioneered in the establishment of what might be called an anti-New Deal labor relations regime. Even during the heyday of organized labor's national strength, the 1950s and 1960s, the unions' inability to organize substantial numbers of workers in the South's signature industry, textiles, set the region apart from the labor relations regime associated with the New Deal order. Many observers perceived the South's exception to the relatively union-friendly post-war order as an anachronistic throwback to an earlier era of labor-management confrontation. By the 1980s, however, with organized labor's ranks diminishing virtually everywhere, the southern pattern began to seem prototypical rather than exceptional, as once-unionized northern industrial giants slashed payrolls, hired replacements for striking union members, and embarked on systematic campaigns of union diminishment and avoidance.⁽²⁶⁾

The southern "exception," it turned out, was becoming the new national norm.

The Wal-Mart Paradigm

Nowhere was the "southernization" of the US labor relations regime more graphically illustrated than in the rise of Wal-Mart. From its beginnings as a handful of general merchandise outlets in rural Arkansas, Sam Walton's empire has grown to mammoth proportions and global significance. Thus, observes historian Bethany Moreton, it is "the American periphery-Wal-Mart Country-[that has] won the economic commanding heights in the second half of the century." Walton and his carefully selected managers virtually re-invented the logistical and organizational aspects of retailing, first in the US and eventually throughout the world. Using its enormous market power, the firm has imposed a low-wage, cost-cutting production regime on its increasingly dependent suppliers, both at home and abroad. Exuding contempt for the regulatory regime associated with the New Deal order, Wal-Mart has repeatedly ignored or violated minimum wage, fair labor practices, and health and safety regulations. At the same time, it has inculcated a culture of loyalty and even self-sacrifice among store level managers, who in turn have been highly successful in transmitting these qualities to ordinary employees.⁽²⁷⁾

As his business began to expand in the 1950s and 1960s, Walton and his managers saw the men and women for the rural, upcountry South as an ideal source of labor. With low-wage expectations and few other employment opportunities, rural and small-town women were particularly important to Walton's success. Not only did they provide the bulk of the sales force, they brought with them notions of Christian service and a commitment to a particular version of "family values" that Wal-Mart's executives recognized as valuable in the advancement of its corporate agenda.⁽²⁸⁾

Walton recruited his managers, most of them men, from nearby state colleges and religious institutions, men (and a few women) eager to join an enterprise that promoted the notion of the firm-as-family and identified closely with the regional version of Christian values. Basing his competitive advantage on obsessive attention to cost-cutting and on minimizing the wage bill, Walton tied incentives for managers to their success in extracting maximum effort from underlings. Store and department managers typically work long hours off the clock to enable them to meet corporate-imposed labor-cost goals. Hourly workers-termed "associates"--in many cases illegally put in unpaid overtime hours as a way of helping their managerial team leaders reach the company's exacting standards. All the while, Walton and his corporate associates have used pep sessions, focus groups, one-on-one meetings, and other forms of in-store social control to inculcate disdain for "outside" parties such as union organizers and government inspectors while promoting loyalty to the company and affection for Mr. Sam and his epigones.

When faced with evidences of employee dissent and dissatisfaction, Wal Mart's managers have not been slow to resort to traditional methods of intimidation. Employing the tactics-and eventually the person-of pioneer union busting attorney North Carolina native John Tate, Sam Walton took full advantage of the expanding scope that an increasingly conservative National Labor Relations Board has permitted to so-called "employer free speech." With NLRB approval, Wal-Mart has perfected the practice of relentless exposure of employees (or "associates") to anti-union presentations, in group meetings, in one-on-one settings with supervisors, and in propagandistic videos. Managers endlessly remind associates that in the event of dissatisfaction, their doors were "always open," that alien, outside parties (read: unions) were little more than dues collection agencies, and that independent organizing would undermine the wholesome family spirit of the Wal-Mart Way.

In important respects, Wal-Mart has reversed the Fordist paradigm of labor use and reward that characterized the US industrial relations system through much of the past century.⁽²⁹⁾

Wal-Mart has accepted that its often arbitrary scheduling and disciplinary practices lead to a high degree of turnover. Indeed, Wal-Mart managers rely on a quasi-casual approach to labor recruitment and retention as a means of weeding out potential trouble makers and of limiting access to the company's modest profit sharing and benefits packages. The classic Fordist regime sought to reduce the instability of large-scale turnover by offering relatively high wages. It encouraged consumerism among workers and used corporate welfare and benefit programs to undergird a stable labor force committed to long-range career identification with the company and the industry.⁽³⁰⁾

In time, the industrial union movement challenged the private Fordist paradigm but eventually the new unions both reformed and adapted to it, adding through collective bargaining and public social security measures a high degree of security and continuity to blue collar workers. Walton's way, however, has been the reverse of the high-wage, stable industrial labor regime, "targeting the bottom half of the population for both employees and customers," in Nelson Lichtenstein's apt formulation.⁽³¹⁾

The Wal-Mart paradigm is not limited to labor and employment relations in the new big box stores. As the Bentonville behemoth has moved aggressively into vending groceries, it has challenged the bland, get-along industrial relations regime that has characterized the supermarket sector, where at its peak in the early 1990s over half of the workers were represented by unions. Wal-Mart's aggressive cost- and-price cutting has undermined the stable collective bargaining arrangements that have characterized such chains as Safeway, Kroger's, and Albertsons in non-southern states. Along with non-union southern employers such as Publix markets and Fed Ex, Wal-Mart has developed a new paradigm, relying on temporary, part-time, short-tenure workers whose lack of skills, education, and alternative sources of employment undergird the anti-Fordist workplace order.

This is not to say that Wal-Mart and other southern employers have acted alone. Convergence is evident in workplace regimes even as it is in employment mix and demographic profile. Employers everywhere have targeted the New Deal-era's security- and continuity-based system of collective bargaining and labor relations, citing global competitive imperatives. "The most important development in recent southern history," declares historian Michael Dennis, " is the ascent of the marketplace as the regulating institution of public life," and "the unprecedented cultural authority of business. . . ." Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in a South that has for generation boasted of its workers' limited expectations and willingness to accept low wages. For generations, a combination of "minimal government and a docile working class" lay at the heart of the efforts of southern states to attract industry. Grafting onto the South's low-wage heritage the heightened work norms and job insecurity that has characterized the "quality management movement" that took root toward the end of the 20^th century, employers have cited a newly globalizing labor market as requiring the abandonment of the stable, high-wage Fordist system. Remarks Dennis, by the 1990s, "the Virginia creed had become the national creed . . .; the South was now becoming a frontier for the quality management movement."⁽³²⁾

Notes

1. . James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1991); Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Numan V. Bartley, The New South: 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1993).

2. . C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951; 1970 printing); Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133-34, 330-31, 362-63; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).

3. . See Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

4. . Robert Newman, Growth in the American South: Changing Regional Employment and Wage Patterns in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 5-6, 143-160, quote on 152; Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 180-209.

5. . Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 173.

6. . Polk quoted in Bartley, New South, 105; Woodward in Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, "Introduction: The End of Southern History,"The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Lassiter and Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13.

7. . Newman, Growth in the American South, 15.

8. . Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 137-41.

9. . MCD, The State of the South, 2004: Fifty Years after Brown v. Board of Education (Chapel Hill: MDC, Inc., 2004), 8-9, at http://www.mdcinc.org/docs/sos_04.pdf ( accessed September 2, 2009); Todd Lewan, "Has Economic Twilight Come to the Sun Belt?," May 31, 2009, at msnbc.msn.com/id/31016073 (accessed May 31, 2009).

10. . MDC, The State of the South 2007: Philanthropy as the South's "Passing Gear" (Chapel Hill: MDC, Inc., 2007), 16-18, at http://www.mdcinc.org/contact/form.aspx (accessed September 2, 2009).

11. . Lassiter and Crespino, "Introduction: The End of Southern History, 3-22.

12. . Gavin Wright, "Persisting Dixie: The South as an Economic Region," The American South in the Twentieth Century, ed. Craig S. Pascoe, Karen Trahan Leathem, and Andy Ambrose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 88-90.

13. . MCD, The State of the South, 2004, 13-14; MDC, The State of the South 2007, 14; John D. Studstill and Laura Nieto-Studstill, "Hospitality and Hostility: Latin Immigrants in Southern Georgia," 68-81, in Latino Workers in the Contemporary South, ed. Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 10.

14. . See Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 164-72, 223-28; Paul D. Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 220-88.

15. . Anthony S. Chen. The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). See also Matthew D. Lassiter, "De Jure/ De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth," The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, 3-48.

16. . Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

17. . Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

18. Important recent studies include Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 2002); Richard K. Scher, Politics in the New South: Republicanism, Race and Leadership in the Twentieth Century (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997; second edition); Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987; and Jeffrey M. Stonecash, Class and Party in American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968 (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1994) is a cogent account of organized labor's efforts to bridge the racial divide in the 1960s and 1970s. See especially 109-21.

19. Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (NY: Knopf, 2006), 275.

20. Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Russell Sage Foundation], 2008), 76-78.

21. Exit poll data found in http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#ALP00p1 (accessed August 30, 2010).

22. . See Shafer and Johnston, End of Southern Exceptionalism, 128-33, for a discussion of what the authors term the "peripheral" and the "deep" South.

23. . MDC, The State of the South, 2004; The State of the South 2007; Timothy J. Minchin, "'Just Like a Death': The Closing of the International Paper Company Mill in Mobile, Alabama, and the Deindustrialization of the South, 2000-2005," Alabama Review 59: 1 (January 2006): 46-48, 75. See also Peter Coclanis, "Down Highway 52: Globalization, Higher Education, and the Economic Future of the American South," Journal of the Historical Society 5 (Fall 2005): 333-34, 336-39, and Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

24. . MDC, State of the South 2007, 11, 15-16.

25. . National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc., "Employees in Right to Work States," n.d., at http://www.nrtw.org/d/rtwempl.htm (accessed January 17, 2010); "Union Members by State," at http://www.aflcio/joinaunon/why/uniondifference/uniondiff16.cfm (From U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members in 2008, January 28, 2009; accessed January 17, 2010). The informative reports of MDC, Inc., a North Carolina economic research consortium, which express enlightened concern about the widening disparities in income and the troubled plight of black, Latino, and female workers in the service sector, for example, completely ignore union membership as a possible force for narrowing wage differentials (see the bi-annual reports at http://www.mdcinc.org/knowledge/ (accessed January 17, 2010). See Dorothy Sue Cobble and Michael Merrill, "The Promise of Service Worker Unionism," Service Work: Critical Perspectives, ed. Marek Korczynski and Cameron Lynne Macdonald (London: Routledge, 2008), 153-74, for an overview of the challenges and successes in recent service worker organizing efforts.

26. . Robert H. Zieger and Gilbert Gall, American Workers, American Unions (3d ed.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 257-58; Marc Linder, Wars of Attrition: Vietnam, the Business Roundtable, and the Decline of Construction Unions (Iowa City, IA: Fanpihua Press, 1999), 182-230; Robert H. Zieger, "Textile Workers and Historians," Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South, 35, 52-53.

27. . This and the next four paragraphs are based on Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2009), especially 53-148. See also Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), and Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). The quote is from Moreton, God and Wal-Mart, 8.

28. . Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, is a brilliant account of this phenomenon. See especially 100-24.

29. . For a succinct discussion of Fordism as a concept and as a historical phenomenon, see Fred Thompson, "Fordism, Post-Fordism[,] and the Flexible System of Production, http://www.willamette.edu/~fthompso/MgmtCon/Fordism_&_Postfordism.html (accessed February 10, 2010).

30. . On the five-dollar day and the quest for labor stability, see Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 67-94; and Richard J. Jensen, The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19:4 (Spring 1989): 553-83.

31. . Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution, 62.

32. . Michael Dennis, The New Economy and the Modern South (Gainesville, etc.: University Press of Florida, 2009), 19-47.