ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the routes by which three Southern regions—the plantation South, the Upcountry, and the Appalachian South—entered the modern era. Paternalism—the social relations of the plantation extended to the mill village, labor repression including the use of state police and national guard forces to block unionization efforts, right to work laws, and racial segregation each have contributed to employers' strategies to defend low wage rates in the rural South. Plantation culture profoundly shaped the South's rural life in other ways as well. The shift from plantation supervision to sharecropping and tenancy arrangements represented a significant reorganization of agriculture, but in many other respects, rural life remained the same. Planters opposed economic developments which would threaten their supply of lowwage rural labor. Anthony Tang's study of economic development in the Piedmont demonstrates that industrial-urban development has helped to absorb underemployed farm labor.
