AHC: Change the American South's Reputation

Why would this happen when OTL shows the exact opposite would occur, poor whites would unite with their elites to keep down black people. Land distribution alone isn't powerful enough to overcome deeply embedded racial resentment.

Its not that simple. Several reform movements in the South, including the Populists, Socialists and some labor organizations, allowed black members on an 'equal' basis with white members (this isn't to say there wasn't unofficial discrimination. But the official policies called for equality between members.), as well as religious movements. There is more than enough material to work with. The problem is that, at least in the case of race relations, we seem to live in the Darkest Timeline; the elites always seemed to sneak out of the coming stock by the skin on their back, turn around, and crush the problem. The optimist in me says that having one or two of these movements becoming more prominent and you might start the slow process to undermine the racial hierarchy in the South.
 
So there are a few things mentioned here, and I recommend looking into a mixture of them. Have say the air conditioner invented earlier combine this with a greater focus on industrialization in the South post civil war along with giving freed slaves and the poor 40 acres and a mule. During Reconstruction focus on making sure that the lost cause is not created in the rebuilding of the south.

Add into this mix the rise of Socialists and Populists, Labor Organizations and religious groups that promote equality among the people be far more successful uniting the races together to become a stable block. Say have christian socialism emerge from the south that works with the populists, socialists, and labor movements that emerge stronger here. In regards to labor, have operation dixie not just succeed but be overwhelming successful. Operation Dixie btw was the plan by the CIO to unionize the southern workers. This would go hand in hand in keeping organized labor strong so no Taft-Hartly for example.

Now you have a south that mixes Christian Socialism and progressivism with a populist/socialist party/faction within one of the big two. An industrialized south where the majority of the workers belong to a union.

Does this work? :)
 
Why would this happen when OTL shows the exact opposite would occur, poor whites would unite with their elites to keep down black people. Land distribution alone isn't powerful enough to overcome deeply embedded racial resentment.

Not when the poor whites have benefitted from the disposition of land the rich whites want to overturn.
 
The answer here is obvious: avoid the Great Migration and the South will forcefully need to pass through social changes to accomodate the large population surplus. It's a Post-1900 phenomenon but it would require a 19th century POD.
 
Religious fundamentalism is a product of the Second Great Awakening which displaced the Anglican church in much of the South, but unlike other once highly religious parts of the United States (i.e. New England), the influence of Protestant Christianity has never gone down since. A racial division is pretty much inevitable when you let slavery exist and allow slave owners to "breed" their slaves. Poverty and agrarianism is a product of slavery as well, where plantation owners (what every white man aspires to be) can monopolise all the wealth and the lands their system can't thrive on end up in the hands of poor yeoman farmers. This causes backwardness as a result, although it should be noted that at the time of the American Revolution, the South had about 2/3 of the economic value of the 13 Colonies.

In large part, many of the worst parts of the South were built into it thanks to the existence of slavery which even marginal areas of the South like Appalachia were economically linked to. And slavery economically makes sense in the South thanks to the climate and geography.
You could argue the Second Great Awakening also helped the abolitionist movement in some ways, as well as several other social movements.
 
I am hardly a Southern apologist, especially as the Civil War period begins, but the Southern states could have had a better reputation if a few things had happened differently.

1) The history of the Revolution was taught differently - Charleston was lauded as "The American Paris" and the rice barons there kept the rebellion alive. If they had wanted to remain loyal subjects of the British crown the Revolution would have died in its crib. Further, the really important campaigns and victories of the Revolution were in the southern colonies... yet all most people ever hear of is Washington's oh-so-brave boys at Valley Forge. Daniel Morgan is the real hero of the Revolution.

2) The small group of rebel legislators in NC who declared succession were stopped somehow. The voters had rejected succession but succession was declared anyway. It would have been a terrible hardship (as they would have been cut off from the Union and beset on all sides from invading rebels) the CSA campaigns to invade NC and seize the much-needed resources would have occupied a great deal of time and manpower, both of which were in short supply. NC also provided a valuable source of men to the Confederate armies, which would not have been the case if NC had been invaded by the CSA.

3) The CSA officer corps would have been quite different if a number of the soon-to-be famous generals had remained loyal to the Union. They would have not had vital leaders like Stonewall Jackson or Lee. The rebels then would then had to rely on state militia leaders and likely the war would have gone quite differently. After a short victorious war the Union might not have imposed a harsh Reconstruction.

4) Labor unions take hold strongly in the South even among rural labor pools like mining and agricultural workers, their successes in raising wages and improving workplaces might have then begun to slowly break down old prejudices and make the white workers see the black populations more as brothers than a class of competing workers.

5) The Lost Cause mythology had not taken root and romanticized the rebel South as a doomed, heroic Sparta fighting against a wicked empire. A short decisive war might have convinced generations of Southern writers that the rebellion was a mistake... and for what... to keep fellow human beings in chains? If the war had been seen immediately as a shameful mistake made by wealthy landowners and taught that way in Southern classrooms then the Apocalyptic evangelical "Christianity" (though my opinion is that it's not Christian at all but rather a group of Old Testament sects) might not have taken hold. Noone eould be waiting for the "South to rise again" because most Southerners would think of the first uprising as a huge mistake.

There are a number of other alt-history possibilites (radical Socialist workers' parties being successful, successful black nationalism, etc.) but the points I made above are probably the tippimg points that could gave happened the easiest in our history.
When compared to the rest of the United States, the South is usually seen as socially conservative, religious/fundamentalist, racially divided, poor/agrarian, and overall "backwards." As I understand, many of these features have been around for centuries - by the time of Independence, it was the most agarian part of the Colonies and the heartland of slavery, and Evangelical Protestantism has been extant since the Second Great Awakening (though, IIRC, the intersection of fundamental Christianity and politics wasn't mainstream until the 60s/70s, and many other regions, such as New England, have been equally associated with religiosity and social conservatism until the last century or so).

However, with a POD after 1789, how many Southern cultural/political stereotypes can you change or reverse?
 
Avoid the Great Migration. This would mean multiple southern states would be majority-black, and if/when the civil rights movement gets rolling, this will deeply alter Southern politics.
 
5) The Lost Cause mythology had not taken root and romanticized the rebel South as a doomed, heroic Sparta fighting against a wicked empire. A short decisive war might have convinced generations of Southern writers that the rebellion was a mistake... and for what... to keep fellow human beings in chains? If the war had been seen immediately as a shameful mistake made by wealthy landowners and taught that way in Southern classrooms then the Apocalyptic evangelical "Christianity" (though my opinion is that it's not Christian at all but rather a group of Old Testament sects) might not have taken hold. Noone eould be waiting for the "South to rise again" because most Southerners would think of the first uprising as a huge mistake.

There are a number of other alt-history possibilites (radical Socialist workers' parties being successful, successful black nationalism, etc.) but the points I made above are probably the tippimg points that could gave happened the easiest in our history.

A quick and decisive Union victory likely means the continuation of slavery.

I'll go with a more creative POD and have a libertarian-leaning Southerner as the founder for CNN. The challenge here is changing reputation, which is only partially correlated with reality. The press has a lot of control over the narrative.

In that case, the Boston drug lab scandal, the Chicago Police Department's use of abandoned warehouses to torture suspects, and the NYPD's practice of planting misdemeanor amounts of drugs to meet arrest quotas would all be major national headlines. The aforementioned founder might want to highlight these abuses to make Northern progressives look bad, and greater awareness of those abuses would shift the racist label away from the South.
 
What if Plessy v Ferguson never established separate but equal and the Supreme Court struck down laws and policies that racially discriminated?
 

samcster94

Banned
A quick and decisive Union victory likely means the continuation of slavery.

I'll go with a more creative POD and have a libertarian-leaning Southerner as the founder for CNN. The challenge here is changing reputation, which is only partially correlated with reality. The press has a lot of control over the narrative.

In that case, the Boston drug lab scandal, the Chicago Police Department's use of abandoned warehouses to torture suspects, and the NYPD's practice of planting misdemeanor amounts of drugs to meet arrest quotas would all be major national headlines. The aforementioned founder might want to highlight these abuses to make Northern progressives look bad, and greater awareness of those abuses would shift the racist label away from the South.
What if the Lost Cause developed, but only barely and ONLY glorified the pre-Confederate South(the Confederacy is seen as an aberration, but for legal reasons)?
 
What if the Lost Cause developed, but only barely and ONLY glorified the pre-Confederate South(the Confederacy is seen as an aberration, but for legal reasons)?

What do you mean? Since glorifying a brutal slave society by calling it a Golden Age of the South and basically saying that the only bad parts of it were because some bad people owned slaves is OTL and isn't going to change the reputation of the South much.
 

samcster94

Banned
What do you mean? Since glorifying a brutal slave society by calling it a Golden Age of the South and basically saying that the only bad parts of it were because some bad people owned slaves is OTL and isn't going to change the reputation of the South much.
What i mean is they do not consider secession valid, but still have the same ugly views. It is a subtle change, but not a huge one.
A bigger change would be where the LC does not develop, and the era is glossed over(not out of racial progressiveness or anything, some Jim Crow Lite develops or something).
 
Have the Boll weevil crop up halfway through the Civil War. Desperate aristocrats fight harder with less, and thus the south is subjected to a far more radical reconstruction.
If the boll weevil did crop up halfway through the Civil War and it ruined the cotton industry, there is no reason why the South would be subject to a more radical Reconstruction. If the best Northern minds could not solve the boll weevil in 1870 – and I do not think they could – they would likely have encouraged the South to switch to other crops and would not have favoured a harsher Reconstruction than observed.
Alternatively what if the Bill Weevil came up in the 1850s and made slavery useless for cotton prior to a civil war?
Likely, then, slaveowners would have tried to move their slaves into the desert territories of the Southwest, and use them to crop irrigated fruit crops that are as labour-intensive as cotton. Or, if it were possible, they would have sold their slaves as nominally free but extremely low-prices labor in California, where at the time irrigation was just beginning.

My imagination of American history in the event of a boll weevil infestation at the height of slavery is that – whether this be as free or slave labour – there is an “alternate Great Migration” of African Americans to the Southwest and California rather than to northern cities. Unlike the actual Great Migration, these migrating blacks remain as farm laborers without political rights, and likely would have remained so for a very long time. However, the growth of western agriculture does allow blakcs to form both a dependable labor force and stable communities in the region, and has the effect of reducing immigration from Mexico and potentially from the Philippines, which becomes independent after World War I rather than World War II. This might mean Japan gains more power in the Pacific, unless (as I imagine would happen) an independent Philippines does turn to the US when attacked.

The problem is that, with blacks unable to move to areas where they can gain even a glimmer ofi political influence as they did in northern cities during the actual Great Migration, what the US would do when and/or if its racism tarnishes its foreign image?? I imagine that under my scenario of a hypothetcal Great Migration to the Southwest, that Northeastern and Midwestern elites are hostile or indifferent to black civil rights there and in the actual slave states. Moreover, with a large proportion of blacks possibly living in less accessible locations, civil rights would be less of an issue to Washington politicians (unless Latin American leaders try to exploit the question). With much greater Federal hostility, civil rights movements would have had much less chance of succeeding.
 
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The boll weevil or something like it hits the cotton crop much earlier than OTL. The cotton crops are hit around 1820 or so, the price of slaves absolutely crash and the sexes are segregated as to prevent slave children from being born for a while as it is expensive to feed all those mouths with so little cotton.
 
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