AHC and WI:No New South....

An challenge and what if: avoid the U.S Southern economic boom after WWII and describe the political, social, economical and cultural effects of a poorer and less developed South...
 
Avoid air conditioning. If home air conditioning were not wide-spread, far fewer yankees would move south. Also the environment would be better off. First air conditioning was a major factor in the ozone hole. While fewer people would live in the south in the summer, more people would be hitting the beaches, which are usually cooler than the inner south. Second, there would be less global warming. Unlike heating, which would have a negative feedback with global cooling, air conditioning has a positive feedback. While air conditioning cools a house, it heats the surrounding air by more. Not only does it use alot of fossil fuel it makes the surrounding air evenhoter. If we could butterfly air conditioning and continue the use of railroads, we might not be talking about global warming.
 
Global Warming would still be around....

The US uses coal for electricity, so global warming would be around. And other countries also use fossil fuels, so although I blame the South for the Civil War, I cannot pin global warming on them. Yet :p

However, in regards to a poorer South, perhaps Southern leaders dismantle the education system rather than integrate? More private, "exclusive" (ie white only), so the South has a poorly trained workforce? Might help if the Justice Dept decides before the 1970's (seems the New South rose by then) that racism is inplicit in wages, so the fed govt. sets regional wage rates based on Midwest prices?
It seems to me that anything that can help keep the Midwest viable will lessen the South; but I am out of ideas now....
 

mowque

Banned
Maybe we deal with race even more poorly get violent black/white stuff? More then OTL, to the point beyond mere civil disturbance and real damage. Well, how back can we go with the POD? I;d like to stop the Great Migration. That would really stall things.
 
(snip)However, in regards to a poorer South, perhaps Southern leaders dismantle the education system rather than integrate? More private, "exclusive" (ie white only), so the South has a poorly trained workforce? (snip)

That actually happened for a few years in the late 1950s & early 60s when authorities in Virginia had several school districts that were ordered to integrate by Federal courts to shut down rather than integrate as part of the 'Massive Resistance' strategy to fight desegregation efforts.

That act was challenged in court, & that move was ruled both by state courts as an act violating the requirements of the state constitution that the state provide for the education of children, and by the Federal courts as a violation of the Equal Protection clause, with threats of imprisonment for contempt thrown in against recalcitrant local officials thrown in after initial defiance of both a Federal District Court when the case made it to the Supreme Court.
 
The coal that generates electricity for trains would replace a much larger amount of oil on which the cars planes and trucks run. Even if we use more coal, we use far less oil.
And the main household use of electricity on the summer is for air conditioning. When summers get longer and hotter in global warming, we use even more of the coal for air conditioning.
So in my scenario we use much less fossil fuel for tramsportation and much less electricity in househokds. It would take a lot if incandescent lamps to equal the electricity that would be saved by reducing airconditioning.
 
I think air conditioning was pretty much inevitable.

A better POD revolves around union relations. The CIO had a failed attempt to organize unions in the South, "Operation Dixie" in the late 1940s. Soon afterwards Taft-Hartley was passed, which meant that Southern states all became "right-to-work" and ensured unionization rates would be low. As a result a lot of industry began flowing from the North to the South, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, although the South is losing its manufacturing just as quickly now.

The question is which POD would make the most sense? The CIO's problem in the South is it didn't address the race issue. It neither confronted Southern white racism (as it wanted southern whites to join) not embraced it (as it wanted to organize black workers as well). I tend to think a more strident pro-civil rights tact that early would be liable to blow up even worse in the face of organized labor than their organizing did historically. This suggests they'd have to tacitly make a deal with racist southerners, which would have very...unseemly...conclusions for U.S. politics as a whole.
 
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