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

6. Conclusion

93 6 Conclusion It was clear from the outset of this study that Somerset County did not conform to the market model that dominated the field of public policy analysis in the 1980s. What was not clear was how to explain this deviation from widely accepted economic theories. Following the “social embeddedness argument,” I assumed that the policy preferences of individuals were powerfully shaped by local history, culture, and social structures. Hence the present research required an analysis of how these way-of-life variables shaped both individual preferences and public policy decisions in Princess Anne and Crisfield. The need to investigate how policy decisions were made becomes clear when we consider the fact that, even within the same community, individual preferences regarding economic development varied. There is an advantage to using urban regime theory as a framework for this kind of research, which is that it directs our attention to the informal governing arrangements that are key to understanding policy making. There was a disadvantage, however, that I encountered in using it for this study, which relates to its focus on large cities and the fact that it has little to say about traditional social structures and cultural values. It became necessary, then, to extend this theoretical framework in order to incorporate the structural and cultural variables that intellectual convention has relegated to rural communities only. I have thus attempted to transcend the urban-rural duality by positing a new theoretical synthesis that will be useful to scholars investigating the political economy of human settlements of all sizes. If we apply this model comparatively, we can begin to apprehend the full range of factors that impinge upon economic development. We can also begin to sort out the conditions under which different sociocultural and political variables are likely to have different effects. Princess Anne and Crisfield are only the first leg of the 94 / Community, Culture, and Economic Development journey. Still, they afford important insights and a number of implications for economic development policy. Summary of the Findings The present research reveals that the social structure of Somerset County was complex enough to contain opposing tendencies in its two sectors. The growth machine that was constructed in Princess Anne and the subsistence regime that was maintained in Crisfield could not have resulted from the operation of inexorable economic laws. History shows that the difference between the two towns resulted from the cultural bifurcation that occurred in the early seventeenth century, when two different economies became established in the Chesapeake region, one land-based and hierarchical, the other water-based and cooperative. The remarkably different ways of life in Princess Anne and Crisfield stem from their unique histories and different economies: hence their different development policies. Possibly this study’s most significant finding is that because specific types of economies can sustain certain ways of life and not others, individuals correctly viewed economic change as a potentially restructuring event. Many citizens had the foresight to realize that growth threatens to disrupt long established power relations, degrade cultural values, and upset delicately balanced subsistence arrangements. Their reactions to proposed development projects were therefore predicated upon their informal assessments of the likely sociocultural impacts of those projects and how their own values, preferences, and political and economic interests would be affected. This largely depended upon the place of the individual in the social order. Let us re-examine some of the social and political ramifications of economic development policy in the two towns. Princess Anne Princess Anne, because it was the county seat and the commercial center for Somerset’s agricultural industry, was the headquarters for what is referred to here as the “planters’ regime.” Historians refer to the planters’ oligarchies that dominated Maryland’s Eastern Shore counties as “courthouse elites” or “courthouse gangs.”1 But in the mid-1980s, when the townspeople of Princess Anne spoke of the collection of exclusively white male insiders who met in the back of the Washington Hotel dining room Conclusion / 95 every Saturday morning for breakfast and decided the fate of the town and county, they called it the “good-ole-boy machine.” This element controlled most of the county throughout most of its history. The social order that it perpetuated was hierarchical, and social relations were characterized by pronounced political, economic, and race inequalities. But the black community, which constituted the majority of the population in Princess Anne in 1990, had long desired...