Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865-1965.

• Author: Collins, William J.
• Position: Review

By Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferric. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 171. $49.95.

In this book, Lee Alston and Joseph Ferric view postbellum Southern economic and political history through the lens of paternalism, a labor market relationship which in the South took the form of white, rural, elite patrons providing protection and a variety of other services (medical, legal, recreational, credit, and so on) to poor agricultural workers, especially blacks, in return for loyal and reliable labor. The authors argue that this arrangement emerged in the South in response to the high monitoring costs inherent to premechanized cotton agriculture. That is, the technology of Southern agricultural production underpinned this institution of paternalism. A necessary condition for the persistence of this arrangement was an environment in which the economic and personal security of the poor was not already guaranteed by the government. Thus, as long as the Southern rural elite wished to maintain this relationship, they had to ensure that the government did not intrude as a provider of paternalistic goods.

As the technology of cotton agriculture became increasingly mechanized during the 1950s and 1960s, the technological underpinnings of this arrangement came undone, and the Southern rural elite no longer had an incentive to provide paternalistic goods or to resist the expansion of the welfare state. In fact, they might well have had an incentive to encourage the welfare state to relieve them of any implicit obligations to support poor and old workers once mechanization arrived. Thus, the work's central insight is that by tracing the arc of paternalism's ascendance and demise, we can understand not only the mechanics of the Southern agricultural economy but also the connections between Southern economic interests, technological developments, legislative strategies, and the timing of the welfare state's rise.

The logic of the argument is developed well, and the authors make every effort to square the model with the vast existing body of empirical work on postbellum Southern agriculture and labor markets. It is obviously difficult to measure paternalism, however, and therefore it is also difficult to provide strong, direct, econometric evidence to support the ideawork's conclusions. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend the book to everyone interested in Southern political economy, Southern labor markets and agricultural production...