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  • Guten Tag, Y'All: Globalization and the South Carolina Piedmont, 1950-2000
  • Michael Dennis
Marko Maunula . Guten Tag, Y'All: Globalization and the South Carolina Piedmont, 1950-2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. viii + 162 pp. ISBN 978-0820329017 (cloth), $44.95.

Economic modernization came to South Carolina in a "revolution from above," argues Marko Maunula in this stimulating analysis of globalization in the American South. Integrating regional and international contexts and incorporating national trade policy as well as global finance, Guten Tag, Y'all liberates the study of southern history from its often parochial boundaries.

Maunula's analysis unfolds in five tightly knit chapters that trace the efforts of Spartanburg's elite to modernize, southern style. The key, according to Maunula, was the ability of town leaders to achieve the delicate balance between cultural continuity and economic development. As the agricultural economy collapsed in the Great Depression, town elites faced both a challenge and an opportunity. The latter eclipsed the former as a large pool of relatively unskilled, eager workers provided a magnet for New England textile mills seeking to escape the ravages of the Depression. Low taxes and low wages, the central pillars of southern economic development since journalist Henry Grady championed the New South Creed, rescued Spartanburg from postwar stagnation.

Yet modernizing the southern piedmont presented unique challenges. The often inscrutable mill village culture, with its curious mix of resilient individualism and clannish folkways, presented a considerable obstacle to industrial discipline. Then there was the problem of how to prevent unionization from taking hold among these feisty mill workers who had demonstrated their willingness to resist in the general strike of 1934. Industrial moguls continued to deploy the traditionally aggressive tools of southern anti-unionism in the postwar era. Yet Maunula explains that mill managers won the battle against unions by adopting more sophisticated tactics of accommodation. Improved wages, better working conditions, and a deliberate campaign to absorb workers into a pro-business consensus minimized the traditional antagonism between mill and town. So too did the liquidation of mill housing and the acquisition of homes by mill workers who, according to Maunula, now saw themselves as "small-scale individual capitalists with a growing commitment to the place" (p. 24). Workers ultimately embraced the company "devil they knew" rather than the union organizers since "the devil was finally beginning to pay them a true living wage" (p. 22). [End Page 239]

The same commitment to "moderate inclusion and closely managed growth" (p. 32) defined Spartanburg's response to the challenges of industrial decline in the postwar era. In short, confronted by the inexorable deterioration of the textile industry, Spartanburg's elite chose to automate its existing plant, invest in training, and diversify its industrial base. Despite its ambivalence toward protectionism, Spartanburg's leadership chose investment and modernization over defensiveness. According to the author, this was the key to its success in the sweepstakes of corporate-led globalization. Spearheaded by latter-day carpetbaggers such as New York transplant Richard Tukey and business fronts like the Spartanburg Development Association, town elites launched a campaign to recruit manufacturing firms to Spartanburg. Although Maunula highlights the luck and pluck of local boosters, he stresses the links forged between local and state-level industrial recruiters. Governors such as Fritz Hollings and the state's Research, Planning, and Development Board established alliances with Tukey and Spartanburg's Chamber of Commerce to sell the state on its traditional virtues of anti-union, low tax, and business friendliness. Hollings and his early 1960s contemporaries pioneered the globe-trotting sales pitches that would continue to land Spartanburg a coterie of European companies—most notably BMW—over the next thirty years. While Maunula is necessarily critical of the outrageously generous incentives that became de rigueur in the economic development handbook of the South in the 1980s, he is most impressed by the evolving and effective coordination between government, state, and private agencies. That coordination defined the Spartanburg way, and it made it the envy of both its northern and southern competitors.

It was not just slick salesmanship that made Spartanburg's stretch of the I-85 highway into the "autobahn" of the South. Maunula suggests...

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