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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (360835)	1/21/2018 8:07:09 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541743

"had to get along".... There was not very much interaction between them until the 20th century. Prior to the Civil War, the vast majority of northerners had not been the South nor had most southerners been north. They read about each other in travel books, magazines and newspapers and really had fairly superficial understanding of the other region. They knew what the loudest voices wanted and extrapolated that to the entire region (actually not unlike many Ds and Rs do today to each other, lol). The South wanted to expand slavery to the West, to Cuba and the Caribbean, and then to Mexico and beyond. The North wanted to abolish slavery everywhere. That was what the loudest voices wanted and eventually led to the Civil War. After that, the South licked its wounds, killed a lot of black people and intimidated the rest of them, instituting share cropping, convict labor (and arresting many people on bogus grounds like "vagrancy" and then of course resisting arrest), debt servitude and laws that restricted voting. And of course segregation. "Separate but equal" became the farcical law of the land until the mid 50s, and remained the de facto condition of the land for decades afterward, remaining so in many places today. The North went along with it; I guess in that sense you could say that the states "got along". But he cement that held things together was the rapid growth due to advances in communications, transportation and overall technology, which made extracting and exploiting the many natural resources of the land more possible. If you didn't like the way employers treated labor, tough. People like Debs tried to form unions, but the military strength of the govt was used against them. During the Gilded Age, employers definitely had the upper hand and the result was enormous growth combined with severe overheating and recessions every few years. People made and lost fortunes all the time. TR tried to brake it somewhat, but after him, that same ethos returned until FDR sided with the unions. The states "got along" because the pro-employer ethos was pretty widespread and both Congress and state legislatures were dominated by business. Coolidge was just speaking the plain truth when he said "The business of America is business". And unless we find another FDR, we will return to that ethos again.