Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

CHAPTER 6: The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

THE SUNBELT SOUTH AND ITS SHADOWS The “Sunbelt South” is only the latest reincarnation of a region that has been proclaiming itself renewed, redeemed, and reconstructed since the Civil War. Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution introduced the first “New South” in 1886. Political analyst Kevin Phillips became his spiritual descendant when he announced the arrival of the “Sun Belt” in 1969. Meanwhile, with each new emanation, a long lineage of writers, scholars, and musicians lamented the disappearance of the South they once knew and loved. Yet the South somehow has always remained as resilient, stubborn, frustrating, hated, and beloved as it was when Sherman marched through Georgia. The fact that the region has indeed changed is evident in the absence of the “For Colored Only” signs at rest stops and service stations. The oligarchies that have ruled its politics and economy have changed, too, yet oligarchical rule remains even in the new New South. The racehaunted Old South was class haunted as well as race haunted, and even as it works today to reconcile its racial divisions, the class divisions remain strong. The old economic staples of low wages, a plentiful and compliant workforce, and a strong government-business-media alliance against unions remain as true in the modern-day Dixie as they were in the South that Henry Grady knew. “The one incentive (to industry) that most clearly separates the South from the North is state right-to-work laws,” sociologist Thomas A. Lyson has written.1 The historian James Cobb put it much more bluntly. “By the end of the 1970s antiunionism had supplanted racism as the South’s most respectable prejudice.”2 This chapter explores the “Sunbelt South” from a variety of angles. The first is from the viewpoint of one of the top business editors in the region, ironically an erstwhile “insurgent” labor organizer whose days as a young man were spent fighting against much of what the Sunbelt would Chapter 6 98 99 The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows come to represent. From the vista of this single individual the chapter then shifts to his city, Atlanta, the self-anointed capital of the Sunbelt South. From “the city too busy to hate” the chapter goes on to look at the region as a whole—the post–World War II changes brought about by the federal infusion of billions of dollars for military bases and contracts as well as the construction of super highways, the emerging identification of the region as arbiter of the nation’s economy and politics, and finally the Southernization of the nation itself. Less than two decades after the Sunbelt South’s christening, deep shadows could be seen across the horizon—the lingering backwardness and poverty of its rural regions, the legacies of its failure to invest in itself and in the social welfare of its people, the cash-starved budgets of its local and state governments whose overseers were too often willing to trade in their community’s future for short-term gain, the veritable sea of Old South problems surrounding the Sunbelt’s few islands of prosperity. Henry Unger is uncertain about the interview. He asks me more than once what my purpose is. He wants to know how I got his name. I explain as best I can that I want to talk about the Sunbelt South but also about labor unions. We settle into a nondescript office in a corner of the expansive newsroom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Outside along Marietta Street, among downtown’s gleaming skyscrapers, the morning commuters are arriving in legions and busily making their way to their offices. Unger is the newspaper’s deputy business editor, a native New Yorker who has worked there for the past sixteen years. He oversees a staff of thirty reporters and editors, the business and economics team of the JournalConstitution ’s five-hundred-member news operation. He carries at lot of compressed energy in his short, somewhat stocky, fifty-five-year-old frame. The years in the South have softened the clipped accent from the old days in Queens, and they’ve cooled the embers of his youthful passion , too. That long-ago passion was the American labor movement. He marched and boycotted with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, organized for the Teamsters in Long Island, campaigned with the left-wing United Electrical Workers (UEW) in the Carolinas and Florida. He cut his teeth in journalism with the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a...