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This is another "sociological" WI. It draws on the work of the inimitable Carlos Yu over on soc.history.what-if, though the conclusions are my own.


In 1860, the basic literacy rate of US blacks was about 13%. But it was not an even distribution, at all: free blacks were mostly literate (about 81%) while slaves mostly weren't (about 5%).

Now take a look at how that evolved over the next three generations:

Year White Non-White
1870 88.5 20.1
1880 90.6 30.0
1890 92.3 43.2
1900 93.8 55.5
1910 95.0 69.5
1920 96.0 77.0
1930 97.0 83.6
1940 98.0 88.5


Those numbers are for the US as a whole. (Source: US census data.)

Look at that second column! It goes up in an S-curve. And the rise started as soon as the war ended.

During Reconstruction, the increase was due to the Freedman's Bureau and the short-lived Department of Education. After Reconstruction, the gains were almostentirely due to black public school teachers working in the South. Talk about your thankless jobs... but they raised several million Americans to literacy.

So here's the POD: let's push that curve steeper.

Is this plausible? I think so. OTL the first US Department of Education was created in 1867, but then downgraded to an agency just 18 months later. It didn't become a cabinet-level position again until 1979.

One reason it was downgraded: it was dominated by New Englanders, and it would have led to the whole country -- including the South -- being dominated by New England models of education.

Highly successful New England models.

New England had by far the best educational system in antebellum America. Universal compulsory primary schools -- good ones, run locally but inspected and certified by the state. Almost everybody got at least some secondary schooling, and then of course an excellent university system that was a very effective mix of state-funded, semiprivate and private.

In the early and middle 19th century, the New England model got cut-and-pasted all over "Greater New England" -- Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of Michigan and Ohio, and to some extent Washington and Oregon. The result was that all these states had extremely high rates of literacy and numeracy. (Higher than contemporary Britain and France.) They also produced disproportionate numbers of the nation's scientists, engineers, merchants, industrialists, and entrepreneurs generally.

The lower Midwest had a weaker version, the mid-Atlantic states weaker still. New York City had few and bad public schools at this time, and was a major center of resistance to educational reform. (This would later change, but that's another story.)

The South... well, most Southern states had no system of public universal primary schools until well into the 20th century. A few tried it (South Carolina was one IMS) but the attempts were gutted by corruption and public apathy. White Southern literacy rates were humiliatingly low throughout this period; as late as the 1930 census, several Southern states still had double-digit rates of illiteracy among whites.

So the South, from Reconstruction up to the 1960s, was consistently the most backwards part of the country, with by far the lowest rates of educational development. True even if you index out blacks, and look at white southerners alone. And this was a major drag on economic development.

The South would have done very well to copy the New England model. Unfortunately, it would have involved adjusting some fairly deep-rooted cultural and political attitudes. So it didn't happen.

But there's a window where perhaps it might have, if the North had pushed hard in the early postwar years.

So the specific POD is, instead of getting cold feet and backing off as in OTL, the North pushes forward, and brutally imposes a modern system of education upon the prostrate and helpless South.

That table at the beginning of the post? It was kick-started by a very modest and short-lived investment in black education. So we're not talking huge amounts of money here. The key change is to institutions.

So. The South will still have problems, and will still be its unique and peculiar self. But it won't fall behind as it did OTL. (Or, okay, not as much.)

A couple of specific examples. OTL, the development of the Birmingham iron-and-steel complex was slowed down significantly by a shortage of competent engineers and technicians. TTL, that won't be an issue. So Birmingham will develop faster and earlier, and may be a challenge to Pittsburgh instead of a satellite. All across the South, sawmills, textile mills and oil rigs are going to be more productive.

Cotton: OTL, one reason mechanized cotton pickers were so slow to catch on in the South was that there was a painful shortage of trained mechanics. If one broke down badly, it might end up going back to Illinois or wherever by rail. TTL, less of an issue. Mechanization may arrive soon after the boll weevil instead of 20 or 30 years later.

Which would be a hell of a one-two punch for the Deep South. Which leads to one last point: a more educated work force, both black and white, probably is going to be more radicalized. For whites, this means the Populist-Bourbon split is going to come sooner, and the Populists are going to be in better shape. The Bourbons were drawn disproportionately from the old planter class (though there were exceptions) and they relied on an electorate that was, well, dumb and easily manipulated. So, the internal politics of the South begin to jump the tracks.

For blacks, it might mean earlier civil rights action, or at least a bit more pushback against Jim Crow.

Culturally, we start to see more Southern inventors, businessmen, financiers, scientists, you name it. OTL, from 1865 to about 1930, Southerners were underrepresented in pretty much any field that required a high school education. (For cultural reasons, there were two exceptions to this rule: military officers and lawyers.) TTL, we'll see a wave of Southern ingenuity and productivity with no OTL parallel.

The long-term effects could be huge, because there are positive feedback and founder effects. I suspect this TL would look a lot like ours until the 1890s, then start diverging rapidly, and would be very different by the 1930s. Overall it's a richer, more advanced United States, and probably a net better world... but the Devil, he lives in the details, and those could get gnarly indeed.


Thoughts?


Doug M.
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