Volume 33, Number 8 · May 8, 1986
The Stagnant South
By Michael P. Johnson
Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War
by Gavin Wright
Basic Books, 321 pp., $19.95
In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville pronounced the South a society 'gone to sleep.' As he steamed down the Ohio River, Tocqueville heard from the free, right, bank the 'confused hum' of men at work, while from the left shore came the silence of loitering slaves and idle white men. Slavery cursed southern whites by degrading work and glorifying idleness, Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America. Whites shunned work because it suggested the double debasement of slavery and blackness. In the North men hungered for wealth and worked passionately to get it; in the South people were drawn to the pleasures of the hunt, bottle, and bed. Inevitably, Tocqueville predicted, the North would accumulate the nation's wealth, leaving the South burdened with problems of slavery and race for which no happy solutions existed.
Review, 3926 words
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