In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
as large as Europe, invented the crop-lien system—essentially, a barter economy that perpetuated poverty and such pastoral flowers as Erskine Caldwell’s famous Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road.
Of course, there were exceptions such as the entrepreneurial McGowin clan of Chapman, Alabama. Their unique story is a metaphor for how the South could have grown if national policy had been development instead of regional advantage. James Greeley McGowin was one of those rare people who, set down on the surface of the moon, would invent some way to develop an interplanetary market for dead rocks and a personal life of high culture. From a class of farmers, small-town merchants, and sawmill operators in the pine wilderness of south Alabama, James Greeley McGowin—in a single generation—created a land barony, jobs for impoverished backwoods people of both races, and an aristocracy.
The handsome Greeley and his talented, desirable wife Essie Stallworth McGowin crafted a family heritage of refinement from the materials of culture, education, hard work and travel, set upon a bedrock of indomitable will. The boys’ education included graduate study at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the daughter at Vassar. Essie’s insistence that they all master a musical instrument filled the thick, moist night air of their mill town and the surrounding pine forest with sounds to compete with the symphony of cicadas and bull frogs—a family string quartet. If Chapman’s baronial seat, Edgefield, was a center of civility, grace and learning, life in the “benign dictatorship” of the company town was a far sight better than the rutted, hopeless, treadmill existence of sharecropping. The company provided a steady job, a place to live with a garden, schools, and churches for blacks and whites, as well as a clinic staffed by a doctor and a nurse.
The McGowins could make money from their lumber mills and live baronial lives because they were in a free zone untouched by the punitive economic policies laid down by the Radical Republicans after the Civil War, and perpetuated into the middle of the twentieth century by the interests they protected. Essentially, the South was to be a producer of raw materials in a revival of the mercantile system abandoned by the British in the 18th century. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad provided the company access for its lumber to markets in the northeast and abroad through the port of Mobile, and later to markets in the middle west. When Greeley died in 1934, his sons Floyd, Earl, and Julian, continued to operate the company and used imagination, salesmanship and inventive reforestation to govern Chapman as a highly profitable enterprise, owning some 222,000 acres. As in most enterprises owned by large families, the pull of distant family members who own stock worth millions but wonder if they can afford a new car eventually dismantled the family business, and the company was sold to Union Camp in 1966. By then, a New South was in economic ascendancy and the Old South was about to become a fictionalized memory. The “boys” are long since dead, the mill town has vanished, Edgefield was put up for sale and family cellos and violins no longer competed with crickets and frogs. The entrepreneurial spirit, however, still courses in the veins of the third generation. A grandson, Earl’s son, Mason, has installed a $30-million computer-driven machine to process smaller pine trees (overlooked by previous generations) into lumber. Mason, a big, friendly, emphatic man, likens himself more to his all-business grandfather, Greeley, than his charming father, Earl, but good-naturedly takes his pretty wife Suzie’s ribbing, “The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy.” Sawmills can do what Mason’s magical machine can do, he says, “but not as fast, as much, as cheaply.” Edgefield still stands, as a museum that recalls the charms of a life that was but will be no more.
Railroads provided the McGowins a way to create a good life, because they fit the colonial mercantile system erected by Eastern politicians and interests: Ship us the raw materials and we’ll send them back as finished goods. Henry Grady lamented the South’s peonage in the story of a Georgia funeral in which the casket came from Cincinnati, marble and nails came from New England, and all Georgia supplied “was the body and the hole in the ground.” As if to ensure that the South would not rise from its humid cage, the dominant East imposed a system of discriminatory freight rates that inhibited the growth of industry, cities and capital in the region. Complicated rule making by the Interstate Commerce Commission had this effect: a refrigerator manufactured in Birmingham would cost more to ship to Pittsburgh than the same appliance shipped from Pittsburgh to Birmingham. Why build manufacturing plants in the South if you had to pay an extra tariff to ship the product?
Southern governors, frustrated by the added barrier to development posed by these discriminatory freight rates, formed what became the Southern Governors Conference. In 1937, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves filed a complaint with the ICC on behalf of the Conference. The issue won the sympathy of President and Mrs. Roosevelt. FDR and his chief of staff, Harry Hopkins, cited unfair freight rates as central to the South being “the Nation’s number one economic problem.” The cause of reform was pushed along to the U.S. Supreme Court by Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, but was not finally resolved until the spring of 1952. I was a seventeen-year-old fifth-former at the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut. That year in Mr. Grover’s class I wrote an enthusiastic essay about the South’s growth rates exceeding that of the nation, and got an “F” on the paper. Exuberant Dixie chauvinism met precise Yankee superiority, and Yankee superiority won.
Still, that year, the economic shackles had been struck from the limbs of the South. The economic stimulus of World War II, elimination of the freight rate differential, and the delightful invention of New Yorker Willis Carrier—air conditioning, which became widely affordable in the 1950s—combined to give the South its economic takeoff speed. Irony of ironies, the South’s final recovery from its war came at the same time as the recovery of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Because of that bitter irony, perhaps we can be forgiven sullen reflections about how rapidly the South would have recovered socially and economically—thus coaxing the national economy to a faster gallop—if the nineteenth century Radical Republicans had been men of vision such as twentieth-century Republican statesmen Henry Stimson, John J. McCloy, Robert Lovett, Arthur Vandenberg, and Dwight Eisenhower. The bipartisanship that remade the world by the enlightened self-interest of helping our fallen foes to their feet could have made America a much better place, much sooner. Perhaps it might even have accelerated civil rights reforms.
However, we’re not in a mood to dwell on that old mistake, because—irony of ironies, again—the economy of Anniston and a large slice of Alabama across the I-20 corridor is being occupied by the former Axis Powers. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz is on the western side of I-20 and Japan’s Honda has built a plant thirteen minutes from our major shopping mall on the eastern end of I-20. To make the ironic triangle complete, Italy’s Fiat has a plant just forty miles to the south. Of course, the boys and girls with whom I grew up so happily in our third-world cocoon had never heard such exotic names as Honda or Toyota, and if they had, they would have belonged to the enemy. It was beyond our powers of imagination to think that one day the Axis Powers would be our welcomed neighbors.
2
Growing Up—Cracks in the Cocoon
We were innocents, focused on the pleasures of the present. It was pleasant on Glenwood Terrace, a street divided by a grassy median, which supported a line of antique streetlights marching six blocks up to Tenth Street Mountain. Our house was the fourth on the south side of the median, number 818, the only one sitting on two corner lots. Glenwood Terrace was and is a premiere address in Anniston, but I didn’t know it at the time. Even if I had, we were taught that it is pretentious (a cardinal sin) to say so. My family was part of what passed for aristocracy in a small town, though we didn’t put on any airs. That “wasn’t done.” Besides, you couldn’t get away with such affectations in a small town.
Had there been a social register in Anniston, though, Mother and Dad would have been listed. Mother was an athletic, beautiful, and talented woman, star of the Little Theater and a state doubles tennis champion. From childhood, she had pulled a whole caravan of Norwegian maiden names—Edel Olga Leonora Ytterboe—that embarrassed her when she had to recite them before a first-grade class in the Minnesota college town of Northfield. Her father, Halvor Tykerssen Ytterboe, whom I knew only as a lithe, athletic-looking man in the portrait hanging in our dining room, played football for the University of Iowa and was a founder