North America’s Divide - The Political Geography of Inequality - page 113

Klan was spreading into the plantation areas and many black families found it
rational to migrate to urban areas either in the North or in the West (Steckel
1983 ). According to historical census data, the proportion of blacks born in
their state of residence fell from 83%in1910 to 75%in1930. In the context of
the Great Migration, concerns about an adequate supply of labor grew among
planters. According to Alston and Ferrie ( 1999 : 17), “some planters chose a
new course - turning to honesty, fair dealing and a host of nonwage aspects of
their relationship with their workers as additional margins for competition.”
Over time a system of mutual obligations emerged and consolidated. “By the
early twentieth century planters had come to act as intermediaries between
their workers and much of the outside world. Planters exercised control over
the credit extended to their workers, but they were also willing to stand good for
their workers' debts with local merchants. [ ...]Plantersreported significant
outlays for the payment of doctor's bills, the establishment and maintenance
of schools and churches, and various unspecified forms of entertainment. And
planters commonly paid legal fines incurred by workers and served as parole
sponsors for their workers.” (Alston and Ferrie 1999 : 20). In return, workers,
especially tenants and croppers, “were expected not only to work hard in
the fields but to display deference toward their landlords” (ibid: 25). Such
basic exchange underlies what economic historians conventionally refer to as
Southern Paternalism .
Its logic was compelling. Tenants and croppers gained protection and side
benefits for their families. From the planters' point of view an adequate supply
of low-cost labor was guaranteed. The longer the duration of the exchange the
bigger the levels of mutual dependency and hence the larger the opportunity
cost of moving away for croppers and tenants. Put differently, paternalism
reduced mobility and hence maintained the specificity of the planters' system of
production and social dominance. In fact, the proportion of blacks born in their
state of residence did remain constant between the 1930 and 1940 censuses, as
reflected in Table 5.3 . Planters, in turn, had incentives to keep “looking after”
their tenants as well as to prevent any external input potentially disruptive of
this particular relationship.
This brief historical overview shows how, afterWWI, Canada and the United
States took opposite paths on the issue of immigration. While the United States
increasingly made a more selective policy, Canadian borders were open to
large amounts of unskilled labor, let in to work primarily in farming and
extractive industries. From the beginning these immigrants were a very mobile
sector of the Canadian labor force in that their familial and cultural ties did
not belong to any particular province. When the Depression affected both
countries, transients were a Canadian peculiarity, a mass of seasonal workers
moving between jobs and the quest for welfare, operating as a multiplier of
the social consequences of the Depression across territories. In contrast, by the
late 1920s the Great Migration was over in the United States, and Southern
Paternalism had emerged as a politico-economic model tying down workers
to secure steady levels of labor supply. Accordingly, cross-regional mobility