The South at Work: Observations from 1904

The Present and the Future of Birmingham

The Present and the Future of Birmingham Its Pressing Problems Are Labor and Steel Employers Are More Bitter Against the Unions Than in the North— The Blacks, Though Not Admitted to the Unions, Follow Their Leadership—The Permanency of Steel-Making There Is Not Yet Settled—Other Industries Coming to the Fore Birmingham, Ala., April 1. The precise date of my first visit to Birmingham I cannot recall. Neither can I be sure whether the railroad crossing in Jones’s Valley was then called Birmingham or not. What I do remember rather distinctly is that the inn where we stayed was uncomfortable and miserably dirty, and that the locomotives which passed during the night had a peculiarly wild, shrill whistle, and longdrawn , protesting scream, which to the end of my days will doubtless continue to remind me, whenever I hear it, of that particular night. There are certain sounds which have a mnemonic power comparable even to that of perfumes. Thirty-two years is a long time to remember anything, but one’s earliest memories are the longest and lasting. Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, April 13, 1904. 62 The Present and the Future of Birmingham Few people, I suppose, ever tried to sleep in that particular inn, if they could avoid it, and the majority of those who did were quite probably bound for some summer resort in the mountains, as we were. If I am right in guessing that our visit was thirty-two years ago, then it was very close indeed to the beginnings of Birmingham.I have been there many times since,at various stages of its growth.Noise and the discomfort of uncleanliness are still among the lasting memories which the place leaves in the minds of its visitors. Both, however, are unavoidable. A city of furnaces and mills and railroads, all using bituminous coal, is bound to have a lot of whistles and a lot of smoke. Let the worst come first. In Birmingham no one has clean hands, no one wears clean linen. If you are going to live there, buy shirts with detachable cuffs and collars.You will wish to change them many times a day. I wondered for a long time why the well-to-do did not build their houses on Red Mountain, a long ridge south of the town, so as to live above the smoke. The reason is that the mountain is for the most part iron ore. Parts of it are already being hauled away to the furnaces.1 From Marion and Greensboro and Selma as they were to Birmingham as it is—this little journey has meant to many Alabamians a very profound change. Some few, I understand, have never once made it, even for a visit. There is a family in Selma, so I am told, made up of people who sternly refuse to go and see what Birmingham is like. Selma, by the way, is the town which both the United States senators from Alabama call home. These two venerable men, fine representatives of the vigor and will of the old South, are two of the most remarkable figures in Washington. Both were men of strength and reputation here in Alabama long before the Civil War. Both have powerful frames and massive heads. Both are lawyers. Both were Confederate brigadiers.2 There is a group of alert politicians patiently waiting for one or the other to leave the scene. But it seems to be the general opinion here and in Washington that neither ever will. If either should, then it is not likely that Selma will furnish a successor. The disfranchisement of the Negroes has deprived that black belt metropolis of the disproportionate power it formerly had in the Legislature and in Democratic conventions. Besides, the stronger men of the generation now in its prime are in the new cities of the mineral belt. On the streets of Birmingham one is constantly encountering one’s acquaintances of twenty years ago in the black belt. One finds here, in fact, people from all parts of the State, and indeed from all parts of the South east of the Mississippi. Northern people are here, too, but on the whole surprisingly few. In the boom period of the late seventies and the early eighties more Eastern investors lost money in the Alabama mineral region, probably, than anywhere else. My judgment is that for this their own unwise haste was [52.14.224.197] Project MUSE (2024...