The Cultural Thesis

The idea that Southerners have a pathological culture, characterized by racism, fanatic religiosity, male chauvinism, and a general disdain of outsiders, is perhaps as old as the South itself. Northern capitalists — who sometimes made fortunes dealing in the slave trade, underwriting plantation mortgages, and supplying plantations with finished consumables — often characterized Southerners as suffering from a moral defect, a defect from which they were immune.

This defect was most influentially diagnosed in W. J. Cash’s 1941 study The Mind of the South. According to Cash, class conflict and working-class consciousness in the South is systematically muted if not completely absent due to the poor Southern whites’ cultural commitments to individualism, violent racism, and religious fundamentalism — an uncaused germ infecting the mind of Southerners.

Similar narratives remain common in contemporary literature on the South. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which many educated liberals picked up to crack the cultural pathology of Donald Trump’s 2016 win, argues that poor white workers in Louisiana reject environmental protectionism not because heavily polluting chemical companies are essentially the only employers in various regions of the state — a claim many of the book’s interviewees continually insist is actually the reason they do not support environmentalism — but because of an “irrational” aversion to the cultural politics associated with environmentalism.

In this account, the residents of Cancer Alley — the stretch of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge — have nearly a 100 percent higher chance of developing cancer than the average American because the residents themselves are irrational, not the economic system that forces workers to choose between death from cancer and death from a lack of viable employment. Hochschild conveniently ignores the vibrant coalition of chemical workers, unions, and environmentalists that flourished in the 1980s as well as the connection between the decline in union density in the chemical plants and the decrease in environmental activism. Faced with the complexity of Southern political attitudes, observers retreat to cultural explanations.

Taft-Hartley and the Origins of Southern Backwardness

Liberal accounts of Southern backwardness ignore several important details. On the one hand, Southern politics are heterogeneous, ranging from the solidly conservative 14th congressional district in Georgia, home to conspiracy theorist and Trump sycophant Marjorie Taylor Greene, to Jackson, Mississippi, where the self-described socialist and revolutionary Chokwe Antar Lumumba is mayor. On the other hand, the South has been home to some of the most valiant movements for social and economic justice of the past century, from the 1934 strikes that paralyzed the textile industry to the myriad civil rights mobilizations from Alabama to Washington, DC, to the ongoing struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta.

Though erased from the popular imagination, the South was once home to a robust progressive politics, embodied in persons like Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom and the controversial populist Louisiana governor Huey Long, whose Share Our Wealth campaign infamously challenged Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the left. Each of these figures was bolstered by a powerful labor movement whose legacy is nearly forgotten today. In 1945, one in four Alabaman nonagricultural workers was a union member, part of a labor movement bolstered by the state’s powerful interracial coal miners’ union. In Louisiana, New Orleans had, since 1860, been a bastion of interracial unionism thanks to the International Longshoremen’s Association.

The declining fortunes of the South’s labor movement are traceable to the severe repression exacted upon unions in the wake of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and the concomitant failure to organize Southern industries during the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Operation Dixie. Among the many odious developments Taft-Hartley facilitated, the act’s mandate of anti-communist affidavits purged Southern unions of their committed anti-racist organizers.

These organizers struggled to build durable labor and civil rights coalitions that had the capacity to withstand Southern capitalists’ assaults. Without them, efforts to build interracial unionism foundered. What Southern labor leadership remained after the purges were more interested in organizing predominately white industries, and figures like Long and Folsom lost their popular base in the Southern interracial working class. These are the real origins of Southern backwardness.

Class Consciousness Isn’t the Issue

Despite the current political orientation of the South, Southern workers are no less favorably disposed to working-class politics than workers in any other region of the country. We tested this hypothesis in New Orleans in spring 2022 with the Workplace Justice Project at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. In our surveys, we found that New Orleanians generally self-identified as working class, and they regarded the workplace as the most important arena in which to struggle to improve the quality of their lives.

While other studies find that Americans tend to identify as middle class when given the opportunity, New Orleans residents preferred the working-class identification. Respondents also tended to agree overwhelmingly that big corporations held too much power in American society, and that economic fairness was a substantial problem in the city of New Orleans. Moreover, New Orleanians see employers as the primary barrier to improving on these issues, characterize the employer-employee relationship as antagonistic, and generally filter their social problems through the prism of class relations.

Our polling in New Orleans suggests that the weakness of labor in the South isn’t due to a lack of class consciousness; it is more likely due to the relative absence of labor unions and institutions. These results may come as a surprise to those who subscribe to the liberal cultural thesis, but the class consciousness exhibited by New Orleanians follows rather straightforwardly from the economic conditions of the South.

While employment in manufacturing in the US South has increased substantially throughout the latter half of the twentieth century — jobs which, in the North, provided high wages and benefits — wages remained much lower in the South as a result of low union density. The South has in many ways given a “spatial fix” for heavy industry in the United States, providing labor for substantially lower pay — in essence, a domestic Global South. Indeed, since working conditions in the US South often substantively resemble those of the Global South, “outsourcing” has often meant migration to the South, not out of the country.

Southern workers are disproportionately concentrated in the low-wage sector, particularly in cities like New Orleans. As a result, the region has high rates of impoverishment despite relatively low levels of unemployment. For instance, at least half the population of New Orleans is under either the federal poverty line or the Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) threshold (a more wide-ranging measure that establishes location-specific incomes to afford basic necessities), yet only 4.4 percent of the population is unemployed (lower than the state unemployment rates of Nevada, Illinois, Oregon, and Delaware and on par with New York). The poor of the South are often the working poor.

The Labor Upsurge

Despite Louisiana’s low union density, the class resentment evidenced in our surveys has found expression in several recent organizing campaigns in New Orleans, particularly in the city’s service industry. Workers at the city’s Superdome, Smoothie King Center, and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center unionized with UNITE HERE Local 23 in the past few years and recently ratified their first contract. The union also recently organized Sodexo workers employed in the Loyola University of New Orleans cafeteria. Last year, nurses at the New Orleans University Medical Center organized with National Nurses United, the first-time nurses have organized a private hospital in Louisiana’s history.

The South, if these efforts are any indication, is up for the taking. According to UnionElections.org, the number National Labor Relations Board election petitions filed across the region more than doubled between 2021 to 2023. The United Auto Workers (UAW) is on the offensive, identifying organizing the South as essential to protecting autoworkers across the country. This has made the region the site of some of the most electrifying recent developments in labor, including the UAW’s victory at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant earlier this year and their more recent victory at Spring Hill, Tennessee, electric vehicle battery manufacturer in September. We may not be in the midst of the sort of labor upsurge that swept the United States in the 1930s, but the growth of unionism over this period, and particularly its spread to the US South, is an exciting development.

While many liberals will interpret November’s election results as confirmation that they can write-off large swaths of the country, including the South, the actual electoral picture is more complicated. Even in reliably red Louisiana, where Trump won by 22 percentage points, voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum requiring federal money to be diverted to renewable energy and coastal rehabilitation. The city of New Orleans approved two referendums at roughly 80 percent, one requiring the construction of affordable housing, the other adding a “workers bill of rights” to the city charter, guaranteeing workers a fair wage, benefits, and the right to unionize.

From the increase in labor mobilization across the region to the appeal of policies that improve the lives of workers and the poor, these developments indicate that the South has suffered from a lack of labor organizing, not class consciousness. Southerners are no less amenable to class politics than working-class constituencies elsewhere in the country. Any movement on the Left seeking a class realignment ignores the South and Southern workers at their own peril.