As you know US citizens and corporations own 70% of the banks in the CSA along with 80% of its railroad mileage, 70% of its steel mills, 70% of its airports, 75% of its textile mills, 75% of its tobacco manufacturing, 65% of its timber industry and refines 70% of the oil the CSA produces. In the average year an estimated 5% of GDP is sent north in the form of dividends and interest. Is there any way of preventing the CSA from being so dominated by it northern neighbor?
DBWI: AHC The CSA not economically dominated by the US
- Thread starter Johnrankins
- Start date
I think that if WWI could somehow be avoided the US wouldn't gobble up all the CSA property the French and Brits were forced to sell when they went after each other.
OOC:In this alt WWI GB, Germany and Italy fought France, A-H, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The US stayed neutral selling arms to all.
OOC:In this alt WWI GB, Germany and Italy fought France, A-H, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The US stayed neutral selling arms to all.
Probably not, TBH.....But is it really such a bad thing, though?
At least with the Roosevelt Laws originally in the late '40s and '50s finally being adopted by the C.S.A. in the late '70s under Terry Sanford, Confederate workers are doing much better now than they were in the years immediately after WWII.
And, speaking of agriculture, you can thank the North American Small Farmers' and Growers' Association for keeping cannabis legal in the C.S.A. since 1959.....the reason I point this out do you realize just how many small Confederate farmers were saved by hemp growing after the great "Tobacco Blight" wiped out much of the Southern(and did some damage in the Union states of Virginia and Kentucky, too) crop in the '60s? BTW, Before '69, only about a third of tobacco companies in the C.S.A. were even partly owned by Americans; it was thanks to the "Blight" and U.S. botanical research saving the remaining plants, that 75% of production is now in Yankee hands.
But it took the Southern tobacco industry up until the early 1980s to fully recover, and, mainly because of this, hemp & cannabis became the plant of choice for many small farmers(particularly more egalitarian folks who didn't mind cannabis's near universal association with Mexicans, Blacks, and Natives) who had lost their tobacco crops(it also helps explain why 95% of tobacco is now manufactured by big conglomerates), and many of them never looked back.
As for the 70% bank ownership, two major recessions down there, one in 1949 and the other in 1971, are primarily to blame for that. Up until the mid-1970s, Confederate banking regulations were simply atrociously inadequate in many ways, and corruption eventually became so rampant that people who knew what was what couldn't trust ANY big banks anymore. After the Wilson Brothers company had to shut down in December 1970, the C.S. stock market began to crash and thousands of investors, in a panic, withdrew all of their money in a huge rush, exacerbating the effects. Several more big banks followed during the first quarter of 1971 and by April 2nd, the economy was in full-blown recession. The Dixiecrats, whose candidate, Robert Eastland from Tennessee had won the '68 elections, took a major hit from this happening on their watch.....and lost spectacularly to Terry Sanford and his Confederalist Party in 1974. Sanford, thankfully, had the good sense to reverse many of the so-called "Total Free Market"(more like totally free-for-all market, if you ask this Minnesotan) laws signed by Strom Thurmond in '52, which effectively destroyed many of the already somewhat weak protections for workers and consumers in C.S. law; as stated earlier, Sanford signed into law was effectively a rough copy of the "New Deal" legislation suggested by Progressive legislator Frank Roosevelt in 1928, just before the Great Depression(and enacted in various stages by Presidents Taylor(1936-48), Wheeler(1948-52), Wallace(1952-56), and Eisenhower(1956-60).)....despite significant opposition from virtually the entire Conservative Party, and many of the more hardcore right-wing Dixiecrats(like Lester Maddox). The C.S. economy has been slowly rising up to our standards since those bad old days.
Also, I believe you forgot to mention the auto industry; out of the 4 remaining automakers, 3 of them are U.S. owned; Hendrick, Jones-Martin, and Marmon. Only the Barrett survives independently.
OOC: Hendrick is a reference to Chipperback's "Winter of Discontent" TL and is a subsidiary of TTL's General Motors, selling badge engineered Chevys, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles to Confederate consumers; only difference is here, is that Chevy, Buick and Olds had some pretty good performance offerings in the '80s(especially Chevy with the Corvette). Hendrick's best model was the 280-hp Intimidator Turbo from 1983-88, and it had to be discontinued because it didn't meet the new regulations from Atlanta. So basically, it's switched a little.
Marmon was an Indiana-based automaker IOTL, but here, *Howard (named William ITTL) Marmon married a Confederate citizen and moved to Nashville, Tennessee were the company's been based since 1904. ITTL, it's primarily a Bentley analogue.
Jones-Martin is a newer company and a subsidiary of Chrysler; primarily manufactures joint Japanese-North American designs.
Barrett is an independent company that could basically be an amalgam of several smaller OTL American companies; it mainly puts out specialized models.
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You have a point. In any case I think without WWI the CSA would have been less an appendage to the US then it is OTL. The French and the Brits would still have their share.
As far as banking is concerned it ALWAYS was the case. Even during the ACW Southern planters preferred to keep their contacts with Northern factors for loans since they felt that they were the best and cheapest source for money, illegal or not. Most historians think that even in the immediate ante-bellum South CSA banks got a lot of "secret loans" from less than patriotic Northern bankers.
NothingNow
Banned
Yeah. Scuttlebut is that it'd usually be through Bermudan and Bahamian subsidiaries (surprising how many of them popped up during the war, no?) and after the normalization of The Keys' status as a Union territory in the Halifax Accords, through there.
But Key West has always been notorious for that sort of sketchy business.
Same with New Orleans now that I think about it. It's got to be some law of Financial centers or something. But Louisiana banks were pretty much the only ones to have a decent regulatory framework before the 70's, which is why they're still the majority of Large Confederate-Owned banks.
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Very true. And not to mention what happened after the Germans were forced to pull out of the C.S.A. after we kicked their asses in WWII(The C.S. was neutral in WWII but many people there sympathized with the Germans, including many industry heads); btw, a similar situation occurred with many North African countries after we and the Soviets curbstomped the Turks as well, only in the latter case, much worse things happened than just a recession(i.e. the revolts in British-occupied Syria, anti-Sultanist violence in Armenia and what was Causacian Georgia, Islamist terror attacks against secular politicians, Jews, and more liberal clerics in Libya, etc.; compared to that, the riots in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Miami, and the lynchings of perceived "pro-Yankee traitors" as well as a few hapless Mexicans, Blacks, and Italians who just happened to be in the way, at the hands of the Klan and other terror groups, while quite tragic, weren't quite on the same scale as the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in '46).
Yep.
Definitely true, although some of Louisiana's more recent, more structured frameworks were based on those done in California, Minnesota and Illinois right around the same time(the late '40s).
OOC: Concerning the Soviets, btw, what do you think is a better scenario: the *U.S.S.R. falling apart, and somewhat bloodily at that, just after WWII, or the peaceful breakup of the country circa 1988-92, similar to OTL?
In any case without WWI do you think the CSA would be less of a US puppet?
OOC: I would have preferred them not mentioned at all as the USSR was probably butterflied away. If nothing else there is an alt WWI I mentioned that had different sides although Russia still probably lost. However, since you did do that have it fall bloodily apart so there are at least some butterflies here.
OOC: Well, alright. Early death it is. 1948 or so sound good to you?
IC: Probably not much less of one, no. It took until 1905 for traditional slavery to be (very reluctantly!) phased out, and it wasn't until 1947 that the Wilson system fell apart; Confederate big business relied heavily on both of these, the latter in particular, and the repeal of the latter, while it did end up helping some smaller companies, still ended up contributing some short-term pain to the C.S. economy, including to the '49 recession, thanks to the lack of adaptability on the part of many larger companies.
OOC: The Wilson system is named after an ITTL cousin of Woodrow Wilson who moved to N.C. in the 1880s. It's not quite slavery, but it's extremely restrictive on black people, telling them where to live, where they can work, to do as a white person asks them or risk jail time, etc....basically, Jim Crow and Apartheid turned up to 11.
OOC:1948 sounds fine, just don't make it Stalin or Molotov or someone else we heard of. Make up a name.
IC: With the completion on de-jure slavery not ending until 1920. After the breakdown of the Wilson system they started the Johnston system which wasn't quite as bad but bad enough
OOC: The Johnston system is bascially Jim Crow from OTL with a few changes here and there.
OOC: That's fine. I got an idea:
"Yes.....Everyone remembers the name of Alberto Ivanovich Varanoff, don't we? The son of Italian Sephardi Jewish Communist Giovanni Tagliano and his Serbian wife, who lost his parents at the age of seven and adopted by the Varanoffs, a liberal Franco-Russian couple in Moscow, who later died at the hands of the Whites during the Civil War?
He was the last of the U.S.S.R.'s leaders; and a somewhat brutal one as well. He avenged the deaths of his foster parents by personally torturing and executing the commander who gave the order, and then shot everyone else that he could find that had been a part of the Stolypin Street Massacre.
His predecessor, Kalinsky, didn't approve of his tactics either as a revolutionary, or as head of the State Security Bureau, but upon his resignation, and Varanoff's ascension in August 1928, he kept silent as hundreds of thousands of supporters of the former White regime either disappeared or were assassinated, on Varanoff's orders. WWII was terribly hard on Russia and the German and Imperial Chinese invasions, though both were beaten back, had inflicted grave wounds on this already troubled nation. And when Varanoff died in July 1947, all hell broke loose.....and just 15 months later, the U.S.S.R. was no more."
Honestly, I know things are terrible for non-whites in the CSA; but I can't imagine how much the Confederacy would drag us to the right if they lost. I tell people all the time, the only reason the US is a modern social-democratic state is losing the Civil War.
There may be some truth to that, TBH.
For example, what may seem ironic to many, the South, at one point, wasn't all that much more religious, than say, New England or the eastern Midwest, during much of the old Antebellum period, and some places, may, in fact, have been a tad more secular than old New England. That all changed by the 1870s, though. If you don't remember, I'll give you a hint: The Third. Great. Awakening. It was largely stillborn in the North after the War, outside of the U.S. Territories and amongst the tens of thousands of blacks who escaped slavery, but religious fervor thrived in the South nearly two decades after they won.....and not of the social justice kind, either; the Southern brand was almost exclusively pro-slavery and anti-anybody who wasn't white. And then the Fourth Great Awakening that followed really got hardcore Southron nationalism going; needless to say, it turned many people here in the North off to radical religion(especially in New England), including, and perhaps especially, many early progressives, even those who considered themselves devout Christians.
And without that, no absolute prohibition of hard liquor and beer(unlike what happened up in Canada from 1912-28) a very moderate, and quite diverse temperance movement was the order of the day here in the U.S.(albeit one that didn't get a lot of love from the establishment, but that wasn't a bad thing, TBH.); compare this to the more radical, and almost entirely male-dominated, mind you, anti-cannabis efforts down South, and you'll see the difference right away.
You exaggerate more than a bit here. Even during its worst period CSA churches did more than just preach racial superiority (And racism was not exactly unknown in the US during this period!). It paid about as much attention to charity, mercy and faith as Northern churches did and its parishioners paid about as much attention to it as the Northern brethren. Namely, pay mostly lip service to it on Sunday and forget about it the rest of the week. Christianity is far from unknown in the US today as a considerable majority of the people in the country are Christian. There are also a good many left wing churches in the CSA today, particularly in poor communities. A good many are full fledged Socialistic. The CSA is hardly the monolithic block you make it out to be.
Huh? All of us are posting like the CSA won and has been economically dominated by the US. That is what a DBWI is.
OOC: A proper DBWI would be to ask What If The CSA lost....although I seem to have just realized you have an AHC within a DBWI. Barely noticed through my fever, my mistake.
Anyone else think it is ironic that the CSA was more economically dominated by the US within 40 years than the ante-bellum South was dominated by the North as overwhelming as it already was?
Not really. Way back in the early 19th century, a country could have agriculture as its primary industry and still be rich in comparison to other countries. The industrial revolution changed all that. King Cotton couldn't be king forever. With the Northern United States moving to manufacturing and the CSA remaining agricultural, it was only a matter of time before the former dominated the latter, War or no War. Really, I think the CSA would be much richer if it never split from the US. It probably would still be behind the North, but without those tariffs it may not have sunk into the level of poverty it reached in the early 20th century, and as a result might not be so dependent on the US in present day.
A big part of it was the crippling debt and inflation after the war. The CSA probably could have industrialized much quicker if its debt after the war wasn't 175% of GDP and didn't have an inflation rate of around 35% a month! It didn't get its debt and inflation rate down to reasonable levels until around 1900 or so. One effect is that the CSA has one of the lowest inflation rates and government debt in the world today. The Confederates are terrified of inflation and do almost anything to avoid it.
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I think if New Orleans and Lousiana in general was quicker to adopt the Railroad it could definitely help the CSA in competing with the North. If you look at the New Orleans in 1830 it was as rich as any northern city and definitely richer than Charleston (an early adopter of railroad in the south). There were proposals for some time for a Orleans to Nashville railroad as early as 1835. If New Orleans did this than I think rail investment would spur other industrial development.
New Orleans has always been a center of progressivism in the CSA and seeing that city prosper would hopefully the religous populism of Texas and Conservatism of Virginia could be mitigated.
New Orleans has always been a center of progressivism in the CSA and seeing that city prosper would hopefully the religous populism of Texas and Conservatism of Virginia could be mitigated.