The Old South Triumphs at Duke

By Tony Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 5-8

Somewhere in the annal’s of Duke University you will find these lofty words:

The aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; to advance learning in all lines of truth: to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the state, the nation and the Church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of this university always be administered.

Not long ago the following comment was made:

My father worked at Duke. His mother worked at Duke, and now three members of my family work there, too. I guess it’s always been one of the best jobs you could find in Durham. But I’ll tell you, they don’t care anything about you here and I don’t think they ever will. I don’t count on it ever changing.

As amazing as it may seem, the “Duke” referred to in the second statement is the same institution referred to earlier in such laudable terms. It is difficult to believe that an institution erected upon such noble principles recently hired one of the most successful and expensive anti-union consulting firms in the country, Modern Management Methods of Chicago (“3M”), at $2,500 a day to block the path of a labor union. But, in addition to being a fountain of learning whose graduates people the walkways of Southern government and commerce and whose endowment would give comfort to many a small nation, it is also the largest employer in Durham, North Carolina. When the union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), set out to organize the 2,100 wage workers at Duke University Medical Center, Duke responded by putting up the best fight that money could buy. What ensued is one of the best examples of “Old South” justice a “New South” institution could provide.

Duke has had serious labor difficulties since the mid 1960s when the university service employees, most of them Black, began to agitate for a union. Their essential grievance then was the manner in which Duke had historically treated its Black workers. Janitors, until they simply refused to do so any longer, had been required to address White undergraduates as Mister and Miss, and the Black custodial staff had to take its meals in the kitchen rather than in the dining hall. Under the leadership of Oliver Harvey, a custodian who had participated in the Greensboro sit-ins, a Duke Employees Benevolent Association was formed which tried unsuccessfully for two years to win benefits from the university.

Then the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a Memphis sanitation workers strike turned the small question of Duke employees’ welfare into a major campus issue. Fifteen hundred students made a vigil at the home of Duke President Douglas Knight (which finally sent him to the hospital for a “rest”) demanding that wages for non-academic employees be raised to $1.60 an hour and that Knight speak out for open housing, denounce racism, and resign his membership in a segregated country club.

Dining hail and custodial workers called a strike, and Duke students boycotted classes and the campus eating spots for two weeks. The strike ended when the university Trustees promised to formulate a plan to resolve employee grievances. Once the workers were back on the job, however, the Trustees dragged their heels until most of the students had gone home for the summer and then agreed to recognize an Employees Council as an informal bargaining agent for its custodial and clerical personnel. Thereafter the university declined to make any significant concessions to its employees or to raise pay beyond the increases already planned.

In frustration the university service employees linked up with a national labor organization, AFSCME, chosen for its reputation as a democratic union keenly interested in organizing Black workers. An election was held in January 1972; the union won it by a vote of 491 to 10, and AFSCME Local 77 was established on campus.

During this same time there was also considerable dissatisfaction among the much larger workforce at Duke’s sprawling 900 bed medical complex. Dieticians, microbiology lab technicians, and computer terminal operators had all staged brief, unauthorized walkouts at various times, and with other hospital workers they tried to form an AFSCME local of their own in 1974.

The university succeeded in delaying an election on union recognition until November 1976 and in expanding the definition of those eligible to vote to include not just the cooks, clerks, orderlies, and secretaries, whom the union was counting on to vote “Yes,” but also a large number of highly skilled employees, such as Senior Laboratory Assistants, who often hold Masters’ Degrees and were thought to be less conscious of themselves as “workers.”

The university was aided by the disarray of the local union organizing committee torn by internal political disputes and the fact that the international union lent only minimal support to the campaign. As a result AFSCME lost the election by a scant 42 ballots out of 1616 cast.

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Even given the diversity of the employees in the hospital “bargaining unit” the union organizing committee felt confident that with a more concerted effort they could win an election the next time around. Most of the wage workers at the hospital, as even the administration admitted, shared the feeling that they were inadequately rewarded and respected by their superiors. In common s ith most hospitals, it was the Duke physicians, professors, fund raisers, research directors, and specialized technicians who won the awards, gave imperious commands, were amply compensated, and got quick attention sshenever they had a problem.

The cooks, operating room attendants, X-ray technicians, and lab assistants, on the other hand, were, and are, the hospital’s second class citizens, even though many of them share the professional’s pride in contributing to patient care and are often called upon to perform extra hours of drudgery in emergencies. In a major teaching hospital like Duke, which occupies 30 buildings, sees more than 390,000 patients a year, and is aswarm with more than 2,000 doctors and students in one or another field of health care, everyone’s work is vital. Differences between the treatment given professional and service personnel are, therefore, a constant source of friction.

As a second AFSCME campaign commenced at the hospital in the summer of 1978, the union hoped to capitalize on the fact that most of the wage workers felt unfairly harassed by their supervisors, and that Blacks, who made up about 60 percent of ths hospital work force, continued to feel that the administration discriminated against them. Many employees, too, worked at the minimum wage, and there was a maximum pay level for every job classification regardless of years of service. For example, Dorothy Harris, a lab assistant and head of the union organizing committee, could only take home S6,000 in 1978 though she had worked at Duke for 17 )ears. The grievance procedure was also said to be stacked in the administration’s favor, and all of this, the union argued, lowered employee morale and diminished the quality of patient care.

Assisted by Wil Duncan, a Black organizer sent in from AFSCME’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Duke Medical Center campaign got underway in June 1978 with a demonstration in front of the hospital of 75 employees demanding higher wages. All was cordial, and, in fact, pleasantness characterized the relations between the administration and the employees during the first six months of the campaign. The union mustered student support, created a Duke Friends of Labor, got professors and doctors to sign AFSCME petitions, and in November 1978 was able to present the National Labor Relations Board with “green cards” signed by more than 1,000 hospital employees requesting a new union election. The date selected was February 16, 1979.

It seemed certain that no matter which side won, the campaign would arouse none of the bitterness of the 1968 student and worker protests. The university was now in the hands of President Terry Sanford who, as the moderate governor of the state in the 1960s and campus peacemaker in the 1970s, had achieved a reputation for tolerance. His administration had done nothing out of the ordinary to resist previous union efforts on campus, and it stated that relations with Duke’s two existing unions, AFSCME Local 77 and a smaller local of Operating Engineers, had been “very good.”

But the university, it turned out, regarded the union drive at the hospital with greater trepidation than anyone imagined. An additional hospital wing, costing $92 million, was under construction, and many new employees would be required to staff it; it was no time to permit a union, which was bound to demand substantial wage increases, to become established at the Medical Center. At least two months before the union election, Duke quietly hired the Chicagobased anti-union consulting firm, Modern Management Methods, or “3M.” Each “3M” consultant is paid from $500 to $700 per day, and as many as five of these agents were believed to be on campus at one time during the climax of the campaign. It is impossible, however, to report exactly what the Chicago firm cost the university because Duke repeatedly refused to disclose this information during the campaign. (And after the campaign was over, no responsible official at Duke was willing to discuss the matter in any depth.)

Modern Management Methods exemplifies the new wave of American union-busting. Gone are the axehandles, the goons, and the blacklists – the agents of “3M” and kindred consulting firms wear three-piece suits, boast college degrees, and avoid ever being seen outside the personnel offices of whatever company, or university, has paid for their services.

They operate very much behind the scenes in the labor conflict, so it is impossible to render a detailed account of their performance at Duke. Their known activities, however, all seem to be impeccably legal and highly effective. Duke was attracted to the firm because “3M” specializes in fighting hospital unions, their methods are quite sophisticated, and because they shun the press like a farmer avoids fire ants. Almost every non-union corporation in the South employs some type of labor consultant, but few can afford “3M.”

The principal tactic of Modern Management Methods, the Duke union said, was to turn all department supervisors into full-blooded organizers against AFSCME by

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interviewing each supervisor, gauging his or her feelings about the union, and making it clear that management expected their full support for its anti-union program. These meetings were not threatening (a supervisor at Duke described her “3M” interviewer as “one of the tallest, most gorgeous Black men who ever walked the streets,” and a supervisor at a Boston hospital where “3M” was active said she felt as though she were “being seduced” throughout her interview) and were designed to ally the supervisors in a common cause with the upper echelons of management. Then came seminars where the supervisors learned what they might or might not do, under existing labor law, to influence their employees. In the latter stages of the campaign the supervisors became the eyes, ears and voice of management as far as the workers were concerned. The union claimed that the supervisors kept track of the wavering sentiments of each worker in their unit, vigorously espoused management’s line, and were made to feel personally responsible for how each of the workers in his or her department voted on election day.

Duke’s executives described the “3M” program differently. They were “communications experts,” said Richard Jackson, head of personnel at the Medical Center. “Their function was to educate our supervisors in the best ways to communicate to the employees the many good things that Duke was doing and to counter, by legal means, the arguments of the union.” Duke had hired these “outside experts,” he told me, in response to the fact that AFSCME had assigned outside organizers to the campaign.

The impact of the “3M” strategy was immediate. Before their arrival debates for and against AFSCME had been conducted fairly freely in the Medical Center corridors, but the hospital’s friendly climate quickly turned sour when the neutrality of the supervisors evaporated. Employees became fearful of discussing the union on the job and began to worry about how secure their jobs would be if they were identified as AFSCME supporters. Friends of years standing became distrustful of one another. A secretary who had worked 19 years at Duke and was known to favor AFSCME said, “During this union campaign people would not walk down the hall with me. We’d be walking and they would say, “I’d better go down this way so people won’t see us together. We’d be standing in the bathroom talking – not even union talk – and one of the girls would say, “Would you mind waiting just a few minutes, I don’t want to be seen walking out with you.” You know, there’s a strange kind of fear here. I can’t understand it, because I don’t have it, but I think it’s a fear that Duke has put there.”

AFSCME tried vainly to make a winning issue out of Duke’s employment of “3M.” “Is your pay raise being used to hire these Chicago union-busters?” the union asked. But it could never get any hard facts about what the consultants were up to or how much they were being paid. The “3M” agents stayed in the background as far as possible. When one of them inadvertently stumbled upon a TV news crew doing a story on the AFSCME campaign, he was filmed rushing down the hall trying to avoid the camera. The aura of secrecy surrounding “3M’s” mission on campus actually seems to have worked in the administration’s favor because it added to the anxiety of some employees that they were being watched.

So that everyone would know exactly where the administration stood, a daily barrage of letters and “3M”-designed leaflets poured out to the employees insisting that AFSCME was an alien force that would disrupt the previously congenial relations between the workers and Duke’s management. The personnel department repeatedly stressed the possibility that employees might even lose existing benefits and pay if they voted in the union. Much of this literature reached the employees through their hospital mailboxes, a channel of communication denied to AFSCME. Duke went so far as to assert, inaccurately, that if the hospital workers voted for AFSCME they would be forced to join the Blackdominated Local 77. It is unclear why the university pressed this point, but union sympathizers felt it was a play on the racial fears of White hospital workers.

Even President Sanford underwent a curious transformation. He had previously been considered a friend of labor for stands he had taken as governor, but now he wrote a lengthy letter to the faculty urging it to oppose AFSCME on the grounds that wage increases for the hospital workers might compete with faculty salaries and that a hospital union would inevitably result in a strike to the detriment of patient care.

The second charge went to the real heart of the matter because the union was contending that only the hospital workers, and not management, truly cared about the welfare of the patients, and that a better paid and happier work force, not the ever more expensive medical hardware in which the hospital preferred to invest, was the key to improved health care. AFSCME backers also maintained that strikes were unlikely, and that even if one did occur the hospital workers would not desert sick patients. Sanford’s letter had the effect, however, of chilling faculty debate about the union and serving notice that his administration was from top to bottom unalterably opposed to the notion that the hospital workers should organize.

Toward the end of the campaign the pressure began to build. “In the beginning the momentum was on our side,”

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one of the hospital employees said, “then people started getting nervous when 3M came in using a lot of scare tactics. They starting having meetings every single day with the supervisors, and, Oh Lord!, the rumors they were spreading around were unreal. Supervisors told the people that if they went with the union they might lose their job whenever someone with more seniority wanted it. They were told that the first thing the union will do is go on strike, and you’ll never get another job, and you won’t get unemployment, and you won’t get food stamps. A lot of employees bought that. I mean, who would want the kind of a union 3M was describing. We were trying to present the union as a progressive force in the workplace, but we simply couldn’t get out the word as effectively as 3M. People were scared to death, just scared to death. People would come up to me and say, l think this is a good thing, but I can’t talk to you.’ Or Don’t call me, don’t come by me.’ They inspired incredible amounts of tear.”

Duke’s tactics worked. On February 16 the hospital workers voted 995 to 761 to reject representation by AFSCME. Not even the administration claimed that the outcome could be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the university. Rather it may fairly be concluded that Duke’s employees, who dwell in a state where the major history of unionism is one of defeat, were easily persuaded that they risked losing their livelihood if they defied the university. Duke insists that it won the contest by appealing to the intellect of its employees, but a great portion of the university’s anti-union literature played on the natural insecurities of the loly and on the pessimism common to Southern workers which teaches that they shall never have the power to win a bigger share of the pie.

The Medical Center’s constant warning to its employees was that “in the give and take process of collective bargaining, no one can predict the outcome. It is a gamble; you could gain or you can lose wages and benefits you now have.” Such tactics and worse are, of course, the standard fare of many North Carolina corporations devoted to making profits, but they seem somehow less tolerable when put forth by a wealthy, charitable institution devoted to “the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps the time is past when this distinction meant anything. One month after AFSCME’s defeat Terry Sanford re-emphasized the mercantile aspect of Duke’s institutional character when he told the press that “working as a citizen of Durham personally and as president of its major corporate citizen,” he would take an active role in seeking new industry for the city. One might speculate that he will seek hardest that industry which shares Duke’s labor philosophy. In light of the fact that Duke University is one of the shrines of the New South (some think the New South was actually invented there) it is only natural to wonder how much hope for laboring people is contained in the dawning of this new age.

Tony Dunbar is a free-lance writer living in Western North Carolina.

A Hero, Moth Holes and All

Reviewed by Tony Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 24-26

W. J. Cash, A Life, by Bruce Clayton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991, $24.95.)

To those who have “a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation,” W. J. Cash, who wrote those words and went on to explain them in his bestselling classic The Mind of the South, first published in 1941, is one of the region’s special heroes. Cash, who captured Southern history, moth holes and all, was himself a peculiarity. Neither a rigorous historian nor a participant in major events, but instead a sporadic journalist little-known outside North Carolina, he nevertheless penned one monumental book which has remained in print for fifty years. Having achieved this success, he then committed suicide.

In Bruce Clayton’s biography we have as authentic an account of the man as we are ever likely to find. Cash is a hard man to write about So much of his time was spent in a very private world. He was not for example, a man of many accomplishments. Born in 1900 in Gaffney, then the industrial frontier of South Carolina, Joseph Wilbur Cash was the son of a man trying to rise in that world by operating a small textile mill for his father-in-law. “The Cashes were of the middling sort.” is Clayton’s description. “They worked hard, occasionally succeeded, yet seemed perpetually to be starting over again in life.”

Young Cash was bookish, and was nicknamed “Sleepy” by his schoolmates for his customary squint and his eyeglasses. He transposed his first names to distinguish himself from his father. He grew up in the days when the great clash in the Baptist Church was over evolution, when the famous orators were William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, when evangelists like Billy Sunday roamed the countryside, and when his most famous neighbor was Thomas Dixon, Jr., author of The Clansman (made into the early film, “Birth of a Nation” and a series of other tremendously popular books (which were racist in the extreme) about the same subject. After false starts at Wofford College and Valparaiso, Cash attended Wake Forest College. His writing career began there as an editorialist for the student paper in defense of the Baptist school’s liberal president William Louis Poteat For intellectual nourishment he looked, for want of other sources, northward and found the caustic critic of the South, H. L Mencken and his American Mercury. The Mencken style left an indelible impression on Cash, as in this senior year epistle on the South: “It is a desert–a barren waste, so far as the development of culture and the nature of the beaux arts are concerned, and North Carolina comes very near being the dreariest spot in the whole blank stretch.”

Dismay intact, Cash graduated and entered a long period of what might best be described as “drifting.” He taught high school in Henderson, tried college teaching at the Baptist Georgetown in Kentucky, and wrote some pieces for the Charlotte Observer, but generally he stayed close to his parents in Boiling Springs, North Carolina “Nervous disorders” and depression frequently laid him low, and he was never able to support himself. Clayton writes that the “imposing religious fundamentalism” of the era, the “culture of racism,” and the way the world turned slowly” in places like Boiling Springs. and even Charlotte, were “enough to make someone like W. J. Cash sick. In any event, something did.”

He displayed some vigor in 1928 when he accepted the job of managing editor of a new county newspaper, and he wrote some ringing editorials for the Catholic “wet” New Yorker Al Smith against the Quaker “dry” Midwesterner, Herbert Hoover. But Clayton gives us no evidence that this fiery propaganda was widely read. Once again, frail health and “neurasthenia” caused Cash to retire.

Then in 1929, while the rest of the country crashed, a dream of sorts came true. Cash had an article accepted for publication in the American Mercury. It was an attack on North Carolina’s Senator Furnifold M. Simmons (a pompous Old Democrat who had supported Hoover), and it was soon followed by two other articles in the Mercury. One was called “The Mind of the South,” and it parroted the Mencken style with references to white trash, coons, the yokel mind, and sweeping derogatory

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premises like, “The growing of cotton involves only two or three months of labor a year, so even the slaves spent most of their lives on their backsides, as their progeny do to this day.” To modem ears,” notes Clayton, “unaware of the journalistic context or the fact that Mencken (and Cash) used slangy epithets for even’ group–even their own–Cash’s words sound like malicious slurs.”

But here too was much that would flesh out the themes of the book it would take him twelve more years to write. Despite the birth of the New South, the Southern mind was basically the same as in the Old, Cash wrote, with “a passion for the lush and baroque,” charged with irrationality and fantasy, and unadjusted to the modem world. Cash described his neighbors as “lint-heads” and “romantic loons,” but Clayton writes, he had an important statement to make, that “the hill-billy was mired in history and, as a result, lacked any class consciousness or ability to understand his own deprivation–a controversial point that Cash would place at the center of his great book.”

All of this was big stuff, and its publication by a national magazine made Cash a local celebrity. He began a correspondence with Blanche and Alfred A Knopf, owners of the Knopf publishing house and also publishers of the American Mercury, about expanding “The Mind of the South” into a book. But as recognition threatened, Cash fell ill. He was hospitalized in Charlotte and, Clayton speculates, treated to electric shock therapy. He returned to his parent’s home, now in Shelby, and for six years basically loafed. He hiked the dirt roads, rode his bicycle, talked politics at the courthouse, provided an entertaining target of jests for little boys, yet still got off an occasional piece for the Mercury or the Baltimore Sun. Frustrating stuff for the historian. Cash began novels then burned the pages. Worse, he revealed this to his waiting publishers. For years he continued his correspondence with the Knopfs, enticing them with the prospect that they would soon receive the manuscript they were encouraging him to write. Clayton is letting his own irritation show when he writes that “It is tempting, given Cash’s tendency to procrastinate, to second-guess him and feel anger or impatience with the man for throwing away pages and then avoiding working on a book that would become a classic.”

Finally, in early 1936, Cash mailed three hundred manuscript pages (which became the first half of The Mind of the South), and the Knopfs responded with a contract, which Cash quickly signed. He collected a $250 advance and promised a first draft by summertime. It was not to be. Cash instead moved to Charlotte to write editorials and book reviews for the News. He became known as, “that man writing a book.” The public read and liked his repeated slashing denunciations of Naziism. At Knopf, pages continued to arrive in the mail, but at intervals of months, and often Cash was trying to retrieve old segments to rewrite them. The process consumed five years.

At age thirty-eight Cash met and, on a high-alcohol Christmas Eve, eloped to South Carolina with and married divorcee Mary Bagley Ross. The event ended one thread of the Cash story, his fears of impotence, to which Clayton gives importance. All of a sudden, The Mind of the South was finished and in the mail. The Knopfs rushed it into print before Cash could think twice, and, as they had predicted, it was critically acclaimed almost everywhere. The book arrived at a time when there was great interest in the South, when Wolfe, Faulkner, W. A Percy, the ‘Twelve Southerners” who wrote I’ll Take My Stand, and even F. D. R., it, who called the South the Nation’s Number One Economic Problem, were all bombarding the public with their views about the region. Though Cash basically advanced the idea that the South is a land of violent Irishmen, romantics, unrealistic and prideful, resistant to any modern secular or religious ideas, and though he talked freely of rednecks and the exploitation of blacks, his book was reviewed well in the South, and even more widely praised in the North. Time magazine wrote that “Anything written about the South henceforth must start where he leaves off.”

All those things pleasing to an author followed. The Cashes were invited to lunch with Margaret Mitchell and to the mountain home of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling. He was invited to lecture at the University of North Carolina and to give the commencement address at the University of Texas. Best, Cash was awarded a Guggenheim (and $2,000), and he and Mary decided to spend the next year living and writing in Mexico City.

The journey began with an arduous train ride south, followed by two weeks of digestive disorders that made it difficult even to drink beer. Then, in his hotel roam, Cash began to hear Nazis in the corridors plotting to kill him. Mary dragged him to a psychiatrist who gave Cash an injection of Vitamin B, then back to their room to rest He escaped, and was found hours later in a rented room, hanging on the bathroom door from his necktie. His family back home would always believe that Nazis had done him in. Clayton thinks it was a suicide.

It was a disappointing and inglorious end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. and Clayton does not try to glamorize it He does attempt to explain it by digressions on Freud and on physiology. Clayton’s book compares favorably with another biography. W. J. Cash, Southern Prophet, by Joseph L Morrison (published by Knopf in 1907). As the title of Morrison’s book suggests. it was an affectionate account, less scholarly than

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Clayton’s. Clayton’s book, barely 225 pages long, moves crisply and swiftly and leaves the reader feeling that there is not much more we are going to find out for sure about this troubled soul.

Cash was not a common man. He was a small-town eccentric, the butt of jokes, and a gifted writer blessed with enormous powers of observation, planted deep in Southern soil, who escaped greatness each time it was offered to him. He gave us one great book which, probably more than any other, has shaped how Southerners (even those who have neither read it nor heard of it) think of themselves.

Tony Dunbar is a New Orleans lawyer. His latest book is Delta Time. An earlier version of this review appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Old Truths

Reviewed by Tony Dunbar

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 32-33

The Measure of Our Success, A Letter to My Children and Yours, Marian Wright Edelman (Beacon Press, 97 Pages)

You need to know a little bit about Marian Weight Edelman before you pick up this book, or else you might not fully savor its ninety-seven pages of ethical, political, and parenting instruction. “South Carolina is my home state and I am the aunt, granddaughter, daughter, and sister of Baptist ministers,” is how it begins. A little daunting.

Fortunately, a great many people will recognize her as the president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, as a human rights fighter, and perhaps also as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. Others who don’t will come to know her in the months ahead, when she sure is to be featured in national magazines and on talk shows in the promotion of this book. It is her integrity and record that add power to her words, most of which are venerable.

The Measure of Our Success is organized around a personal letter to Edelman’s three sons and then her 25 “Lessons for Life.” Other small chapters deal with her own upbringing in Bennettsville, South Carolina, at the hands of upright, industrious parents (he, a minister who taught her to stay busy and account for herself; she, a fundraiser for the church and care-giver to the elderly who always “earned her own dime”) and an extended family of relatives and church members. Her letter and the 25 Lessons for Life are a “spiritual and family dowry” for her children.

The treasures in this dowry are simple and familiar. “Treat others as you’d like to be treated,” she tells her sons. “It is the only ethical standard in life you need.” From the first Lesson (“There is no free lunch. Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for”) to the last (“Always remember that you are never alone”) there is nothing here—and I am confident Ms. Edelman would agree that would not—fit well into one of the Reverend Wright’s sermons. But there are some very special things about this book.

One is that, in her choice of moral thinkers to quote in support of her precepts, she is mindful of the great Southern black teachers of her parents’ generation and before, those who led the rising out of slavery and Reconstruction. Howard Thurman, Mordecai Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Benjamin Mays, Dr. J.J. Starks, and Vernon Johns share her pages with, more popularly known figures such as Gandhi, Einstein, and Shel Silverstein, and they mingle compatibly.

Another special thing is that Edelman does not let us forget that there is a social and political dimension to personal responsibility. She skillfully illustrates simple advice, like “Be a can-do, will-try person” (Lesson 18) by asking, “If the Soviet people and their extraordinary leader Gorbachev could dismantle Communism, can’t we in America envision and wage an end to child neglect, poverty, and family disintegration, which are graver threats to our national future than nuclear weapons?”

And throughout the book is the emphasis on good parenting and taking responsibility for the nurturing of children.

She lectures young men on sexual responsibility and urges parents to love their children unconditionally and to teach them by example. In the final chapter she asks the good questions. How can we afford the Persian Gulf War and the thrift and bank bailout while we say we cannot fund more child care for working families or mobilize doctors, teachers, and social workers to fight the tyranny of poverty and child neglect and abuse?

This is one of the most condensed books of wisdom since The Prophet. It could probably be read most usefully

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by teens and new parents.

Everyone, however, can take gentle inspiration from Edelman’s simple message. We must care for our young. For spiritual and community well being we must engage in individual service and private charity. And, “Collective mobilization and political action are also necessary to move our nation forward in the quest for fairness and opportunity for every American.”

An hour or so spent with The Measure of Our Success may recall past mornings in Sunday School (which may have a pleasant feel) and may also remind us of the significance and the challenge contained in old truths.

Tony Dunbar practices law in New Orleans and writes about the South. His latest book was Delta Time, about the Mississippi Delta’s present look. (An earlier version of this review appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.)

Leasing Life

Reviewed by Tony Dunbar

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000 pp. 35-36

Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, New York City: Verso Press, 1997.

The convict leasing system, widely used in the South after the Civil War, is not one of the dark corners of the region’s history but is instead on the cutting edge, in its time, of southern political and economic development. “Far from representing a lag in southern modernity, convict labor was a central component in the region’s modernization.” This is the thesis of Twice the Work of Free Labor, and the author deliberately avoids turning the book into an exposé of the brutality and tortures of chain gang existence. It was not sadism, but the post-war economy’s appetite for cheap, reliable labor to power the “New South” that created convict leasing. Lichtenstein focuses on how the South’s emerging capitalists, primarily in the railroad and coal industries of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, used convict labor to launch their empires.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” Emancipation generated, in the view of the propertied class, a vast vagrant and criminal population, and incarceration mushroomed. In most Southern states, Reconstruction governments reacted to the cost of securing and feeding this overload of convicts by making their systems profitable. The Georgia State Penitentiary at Milledgeville was initially leased in its entirety to Grant, Alexander & Company, the firm that oversaw the majority of Georgia’s Reconstruction railroad development. In time, it made sense simply to lease the convicts to politically connected entrepreneurs for employ in remote coal mines or railway construction projects.

The advantage in cost savings to cash-strapped governments was obvious. Renting a convict for $36 or $50 per year to the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company was obviously more desirable than running a penal system with tax dollars. The enthusiasm for the system, however, came from the business leadership.

The dramatic industrial development of the South in the last half of the nineteenth century, the rebuilding of railroads destroyed by war and the laying of thousands of miles of new track, the related exploitation of coal resources and the sudden appearance of pig iron furnaces and coke ovens, the birth of Birmingham as the Pittsburgh of the South, could not have happened as it did, Lichtenstein argues, without convict labor. He details the history of company after company, the Chattahoochee Brick Company, Selma Rome and Dalton Railroad, the Atlanta and Charlotte Air-Line, the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, whose core operations in those first years were the convict workforce.

The sordid face of convict leasing is apparent in the book. Lichtenstein notes that over four-hundred convicts perished during the first twelve years of leasing in Georgia. It was also readily apparent to the people who participated in it. Observing that deaths on the railroads had steadily mounted from 1870 until 1875, the chief “keeper” of the Georgia system admitted that, “casualties would have been fewer if the colored convicts were “property, having a value to preserve.” But the utility of convict leasing overwhelmed these reservations. They were a cheap, reliable, and productive labor force. They acted as a check on free labor, in keeping down strikes. Where leased convicts were employed as coal miners, the wages of free laborers were reduced by 10 to 20 percent When prices for coal or other commodities produced by prisoners and free workers fell, the prisoners could cheaply keep the core operations running and the free” workers could be laid off. The fact that the majority of leased convicts was African American reinforced the notion that blacks would only work productively in peonage.

Convict leasing met its greatest resistance in East Tennessee from the United Mine Workers and other coal miner organizations. During a thirteen-month period in 1891 and 1892, miners attacked five convict camps, burned one to the ground, and set the prisoners free. As the turn of the century approached, the impact of church and Progressive reformers also began to have an impact. In the mid-1890s Canadian customs barred the importation of pig-iron from twenty-three furnaces in Alabama and Tennessee because it was produced “under the taint of prison labor.”A Georgia legislator argued to the Southern Sociological Congress in 1913, that while southerners through slavery had fulfilled their burden to care for the blacks,

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relegating convicts to a leasing system was “the shirking of governmental duty.” Ultimately, most progressive thinkers settled upon public road construction by chain gangs as the superior alternative to convict leasing. The leasing system was abolished in Tennessee and Mississippi in the 1890s, and was replaced by state-owned coal mines and the state-run Parchman penal farm, respectively. Georgia went to the chain gang in 1908. Florida and Alabama finally removed convicts from the turpentine and coal industries in the 1920s, sending the prisoners out to build roads.

While Lichtenstein’s book is certainly a valuable tool for historians of the “New South,” and traces and contests various viewpoints of those historians, the writing is fluid enough to engage a broader readership. It makes the convincing, if un-flattering, case that convict leasing was not one of the bleak horrors of the region’s past, but a foundation block of the South’s current prosperity.

Tony Dunbar is a lawyer in New Orleans. He is also treasurer of the Southern Regional Council.