According to a new economic history of the South, our go-go, everything-on-demand consumerist economy has its roots in the decades-old strategies of five Southern companies: Atlanta-based Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, as well as FedEx (Memphis), Walmart (Bentonville, Arkansas) and Bank of America (Charlotte, North Carolina).
When they decided to serve small rural communities scattered widely throughout the South, these companies were forced to invent new logistical systems to do so.
But these companies are also at the root of some of our problems with global climate change because their large carbon footprints are tied up in the way they do business.
Those are the interlocking premises of “Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet” (University of North Carolina Press, $28) by Atlanta native Bart Elmore, an associate professor of environmental history at The Ohio State University.
Author of “Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism” published in 2014, Elmore, 41, grew up in Atlanta and graduated from Woodward Academy in College Park, where he walked past the statue of Coca-Cola benefactor Robert W. Woodruff every day. He went on to earn his B.A. in history from Dartmouth and a Ph.D from the University of Virginia.
Elmore discussed his new book with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: This is a book that really goes back to Atlanta. Going to school in College Park and East Point, I was surrounded by Delta Air Lines landing every minute or so. As I’m driving through town, I passed CNN headquarters, the Olympic flame, Coca-Cola headquarters on North Avenue. It was a South that was very much booming but that — to my mind — still had a lot of problems dating back to Jim Crow. And the smog alerts were a daily reminder of an economy out of whack.
College gave me a different perspective. I felt to do Southern history right, we needed to put Southern businesses back into the story of economic history.
Q: Did you create the term “Country Capitalism?”
A: As far as I can tell. Any good historian, when you start looking, you’re open to what you’re going to find. I recognized there was a commonality across these firms that was rooted in geography and the rural nature of the South. They all saw that trying to get things into the countryside and small rural towns was an asset and could make them a lot of money. And they revolutionized their logistics system, thereby changing our economy in so many ways.
Q: You write that these five companies “figured out how to conquer the world.” Out of context that sounds like you are singing the praises of these companies, but you’re not really, are you?
A: Not at all. I’m trying to simultaneously show the power of the South but also point out that power comes with problems. Whether we’re talking about environmental issues or labor issues or the fact that these companies could grow alongside Jim Crow.
Our environmental laws don’t do a very good job of regulating these types of companies. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act aren’t designed to look at Walmart’s greenhouse gas effects. How do we take a company that’s shipping so many goods across the globe like Walmart and regulate that in terms of the environment? That’s a challenge.
Q: The book states that Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler’s father was one of the largest owners of enslaved people in Carroll County, and some early investors in Delta made their money from sharecropping. To what extent did slavery and Jim Crow contribute to the rise of these companies?
A: I think it’s a significant role. In the ‘20s and ‘30s, the Great Migration (of millions of Black people from the rural South to the Midwest and North) was because Jim Crow tightened. And that migration changed the face of Southern agriculture; fewer workers meant more mechanized agriculture, including crop-dusting from airplanes. Delta is part of that story.
And Jim Crow shaped the products themselves. Coca-Cola is a good example. Most people think that when cocaine was removed from the drink around 1903, this was done because of a national ban. But it had nothing to do with national laws. It had to do with Southern concerns that cocaine contributed to Black crime in the South. It was a racist trope. The efforts by Candler to ensure there was no trace of cocaine left in the drink were driven by those Jim Crow fears.
It’s convenient not to think about the largest corporations in the world coming out of the Jim Crow South. If you tell the story of the rise of these firms, you can see some of the biggest corporations in the world are growing at the same time this retrograde social institution is taking hold. And I think that’s a message for our time.
Q: And you write there were other factors in the South that encouraged these corporations to grow, such as so-called right-to-work laws, tax policies and lax environmental regulation.
A: The traditional economic histories of the South have been about extractive companies like timber companies or manufacturers like auto manufacturers taking advantage of right-to-work laws and lax environment regulation. That’s all true, but you also have these companies that are different. None of these companies were making money off the extraction or assembly of goods in the South. They’re not really in that traditional industrial vein.
All of them are like brokers in the economy, like conduits of capitalism, these channels of goods in the case of Walmart or capital in the case of Bank of America. I saw that as something different.
Going back to the idea of “Country Capitalism,” the reason they were doing it and making such advances was they were trying to do so operating in smaller towns. They were creating these logistics systems that were defined by rurality. And that was the key ingredient.
That’s something we miss in the economic histories of the United States. We hear about Pittsburgh as a steel town, the Carnegies and Rockefellers being the drivers of economic history. When in fact it was the countryside and rural communities in the South, and how to service them, that led to the most powerful companies of our time.
This interview was edited for length and clarity
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