Community, Culture, and Economic Development, Second Edition: Continuity and Change in Two Small Southern Towns

Preface to the Second Edition

xi Preface to the Second Edition The first time i ventured into Somerset County in 1985, i might as well have entered a parallel universe. Nothing had prepared me for the incongruities that i observed there. The very atmosphere of the place felt Kafkaesque —ominous and confusing. (to one observer, the society seemed “almost feudal.”1 ) Why, i wondered, in the poorest county in Maryland, was there deep ambivalence about economic development in Crisfield, the poorest of the county’s two towns. and why, in a county where african americans accounted for 38 percent of the population, had no black ever been elected or appointed to a top countywide position since Somerset was founded in 1666? Somerset County is largely unknown to outsiders. it is the southernmost county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where centuries of geographical isolation have produced self-reliant communities that are distrustful of strangers and resistant to change. indeed, it was astonishing to realize how successfully the old ruling families had inoculated their insular realm against the powerful social forces of the twentieth century. and how remarkably apt that its heraldic shield bears the quaint Latin motto, “Semper Eadem”—meaning “always the Same.”2 Nothing in life is immutable, though, as Somerset’s governing group learned in 2010. Seeds of dissatisfaction sown many years earlier had by then matured and begun to bear fruit. When i learned the full scope of the change that had happened, i had been in retirement for quite some time, never contemplating a second edition. But as ronald Walters said, “we know hardly anything” about black leadership at the grassroots and in small communities.3 So i came to believe that this story was important enough that it had to be told. i have described how these changes occurred in the epilogue, and i have also updated some aspects of the original study. But first a word about this book as a whole. Until 1985, i had never set foot on Mary- xii / Preface to the Second Edition land’s Lower Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, nor did i know anyone there. i was, however, familiar with some of the darkest aspects of Somerset’s history, which might have contributed to my sense of foreboding.4 Needing to understand the strange reality that, like alice in Wonderland, i had stumbled into, i returned the following year to investigate these anomalies for my doctoral research. i am frequently asked whether i have “some kind of personal connection” to Somerset County. The answer is no: quite simply, these places intrigued me. i compared the unique ways of life in Princess anne and Crisfield , Somerset’s only incorporated towns, and attempted to explain why these communities, so similar in many ways, responded so differently to economic decline. a more fundamental question was why, in the late twentieth century, archaic hierarchies of race, class, and gender remained deeply embedded and poverty seemed intractable. at the time of my graduate training, the dominant theories in my discipline were derived from the neoclassical construct of homo economicus, meaning that individuals act always to maximize their economic return, hence their choices can be anticipated without reference to historical or cultural context.5 But “an unpleasant thing often happens in economics: The model does not have realistic assumptions and its results often do not agree with reality.”6 This unpleasant thing also happens in political science , when its models are based on the same flawed assumptions. it was clear from the start that the “economic man” construct could not explain why these two communities—in so many ways comparable—differed in their economic development preferences, or why, in the strongly Democratic state of Maryland, racial disparities in county government and the school system were among the worst in the country.7 So, “let us rethink the concept of homo economicus, whose maximization of utility leads to continuous rational optimization. Let us return to homo sapiens,” as Sedlacek and havel have wisely suggested.8 although urban regime theory was developed by scholars who only studied large cities, its essentially structural mode of research provided a useful framework for this study.9 But community power and economic preferences cannot be wholly explained without reference to cultural values and events in the distant past. according to Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,”10 small groups normally dominate political and cultural systems by controlling institutions and processes over time. as this was the case in Somerset County, i have integrated...