Southern History Month 2019: Southern Parks

I’ve grown nostalgic for the 20th century.

Yes, it is hard to believe, but there were good things that were accomplished in the 20th century as well as bad things. In the 19th century, we lost the most devastating war in our history and roughly 1 out of every 4 Southern White men of military age died in the War Between the States, but strangely enough that awful period of our history has become overly romanticized.

Occidental Dissent has grown bored with the obsession with Confederate nostalgia. The Confederacy was a mere 4 years of our history. Let’s talk about something else for a change:

Southern History Month 2019: Robert Barnwell Rhett on the “Age Of Reason” – Fire eater Robert Barnwell Rhett in the antebellum era fumes about the fanatics and enthusiasts and the political dreamers who were ascendant in his day.

Southern History Month 2019: James Henry Hammond On Wage Slavery – South Carolina governor and US senator James Henry Hammond slams free-market capitalism and the system of wage slavery for being un-Christian.

Southern History Month 2019: George Fitzhugh on The False Philosophy Of Our Age – Southern political theorist George Fitzhugh articulates a razor sharp critique of the Northern ideal of Free Society.

Southern History Month 2019: The South as a Garden – Just as the settlers of New England saw the colonization of their region as “an errand in the wilderness” to build a “City on a Hill,” the Southerner saw his mission in the New World as populating the Garden of Eden.

Southern History Month 2019: The TVA – The creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority revolutionized the economy of the Upper South and literally turned the lights on for millions of destitute sharecroppers and farm tenants while curing them of malaria.

Southern History Month 2019: Rural Electrification Administration – The Rural Electrification Administration built critical infrastructure in the rural South and brought electricity to millions of poor Southerners who were unserved by free-market capitalism.

Southern History Month 2019: Prohibition – The “dry” Protestant South was a strong supporter of Prohibition. In many ways, political correctness is the new Prohibition, a failed and unsustainable experiment maintained by urban progressives that reasonable people ought to end.

Southern History Month 2019: The Southern Progressive Era – President Woodrow Wilson’s administration saw the beginning of a Southern based populist-progressive electoral coalition.

Southern History Month 2019: The Time John Rankin Gave E. Michael Edelstein a Heart Attack – The New Deal coalition included anti-Semitic populists like John Rankin who nevertheless were strong supporters of the TVA and REA.

Southern History Month 2019: Wigfall vs. De Bow: Two Views of Southern Economic Independence – In the antebellum era, James D.B. DeBow of New Orleans pioneered a development strategy for the American South that integrated and harmonized industrial and commercial classes with the existing agricultural interest. DeBow is the true intellectual father of the New South.

Southern History Month 2019: Huey “The Kingfish” Long – In the Great Depression, Louisiana governor and US senator Huey Long launched the “Share Our Wealth” campaign and called for investment in education and infrastructure. He also endorsed Universal Basic Income.

Southern History Month 2019: Southern and Alabama Agriculture, 1860-1870 – The current debate about “reparations for slavery” is silly because abolition destroyed the Southern economy and we didn’t recover from it until the New Deal era.

Southern History Month 2019: NASA – In the mid-20th century, ex-Nazis led by Wernher von Braun were brought to the United States to beat the Soviets in the Space Race. The Apollo 11 moonshot was conceived in Huntsville, AL, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, FL and was coordinated from Houston, TX. It was the absence of political correctness and setting aside free-market capitalism which made the greatest scientific and technological accomplishment in the history of mankind possible.

Southern History Month 2019: Mechanization – The mechanization of Southern agriculture under President Franklin Roosevelt was caused by simply giving poor farmers the money to invest in better equipment. Millions of White and black sharecroppers were displaced from the land.

Southern History Month 2019: Sharecropping – In the mid-20th century, the blight of sharecropping was abolished in a generation. It was a happy story of White and black Southerners being lifted out of mass poverty, but “Democratic strategists” for some reason have forgotten that the vast majority of Southerners picked cotton into the 1930s and 1940s.

Southern History Month 2019: The Dust Bowl, Soil Erosion, Okies – The Dust Bowl and the exodus of the Okies to California from the Great Plains was the greatest environmental disaster in American history. And yet, the massive soil erosion that devastated the environment all over the South is rarely mentioned in the context of promoting a “Green New Deal.” The original “Green New Deal” in the 1930s not only worked, but the agricultural interest still benefits from it.

Southern History Month 2019: Georgia’s Providence Canyon – Georgia’s Providence Canyon is a vivid illustration of the environmental devastation caused by soil erosion and poor stewardship of the environment. In the 20th century, we began to correct the problem.

Southern History Month 2019: Top 15 Species Lolbertarians Hate – The biodiversity of North America was utterly devastated under free-market capitalism until men like President Theodore Roosevelt began to criticize it and oppose it. As a society, we’ve since come to accept the need for the government to restrain the Invisible Hand of market hunting. In fact, Southerners have forgotten that even the wild turkey and white tail deer were eradicated here and were only brought back by careful wildlife management.

Such is our current point in a story that I am starting to tell on this blog which I might one day self publish as Up From Wage Slavery: The Failure of Free Society in the American South, 1865-2019. I’ve borrowed that one from Booker T. Washington (call me a “race traitor” for reading a book) who was once the president of nearby Tuskegee University. I’ve read the book and have been there many times to observe and think about race and capitalism and now I have the answer.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON WAS A PRACTICAL MINDED REALIST WHO ADVOCATED JOB TRAINING AND RACIAL RECONCILIATION

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHERS KNOW THE GREAT PLANTATION STILL EXISTS TODAY

SOUTHERN CULTURE IS ORGANIC, NOT ABSTRACT

joking/not joking they really became the masters and we really became the slaves, which is to say, wage slaves to the US dollar that is printed out of thin air by the Fed

I’m getting ahead of myself.

It is going to be very difficult to explain the concept of cognitive stratification in the context of a free-market capitalist economy that has been preserved from totally destroying itself by a variety of tools and programs that were passed by Congress in the 20th century. There is a reason why, say, blacks like P.Diddy are wealthy, but people in Tuskegee, AL are desperately poor. It is because they have a skill – making music that sells to poor people – which the free-market allocates value to. The free-market is blind and doesn’t care whether it is selling Mozart or Vivaldi to the masses or pure cultural poison.

How many low-IQ, impulsive people in Tuskegee, AL buy P.Diddy and 8ball and all the rest?

joking/not joking what kind of culture is free-market capitalism creating in black America? It’s not the culture we had a few generations ago in the rural South. I know it is due to more than just race because I have seen the way black culture has changed here

joking/not joking our culture has progressed so far in the 21st century! I could drive home the point by showing you how free-market capitalism has created the pornography industry in the late 20th century, but I will spare your eyes from seeing what I see now.

Anyway, the whole point of this article is to observe how Southerners began to move away from the paradigm of free-market capitalism in the 20th century. In fact, one of the things we did was to start creating our current system of public national and state parks.

This is a nice story:

“The South has always had a number of flowering trees that have captivated the southern imagination. In particular the dogwood (Cornus florida) is identified with the imagery of the region. In Atlanta a million dogwoods were once planted in a campaign to beautify the city. Red and white flowering dogwoods grow wild through most of the region and can reach 30 feet tall. They are slow growers, and their leaves are glossy, pointed, grayish-green in color, turning to a deep red in autumn. Dogwood festivals throughout the South attest to its popularity among southerners. Other flowering trees include the Texas ash and tulip trees.”

Charles Reagan Wilson in Martin Melosi (ed.) The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Environment (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp.160-162

Fascinating.

We planted a million dogwoods in Atlanta back when it was still Southern and livable.

WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE IN SUCH A HORRIBLE, CONGESTED PLACE TODAY? OBVIOUSLY, NOT ALL THE WHITE ATLANTANS WHO PRACTICALLY NOW COMMUTE FROM THE ALABAMA LINE!

Let’s continue … we really built it all from Wilson through FDR and his successors:

“Preservationists did not arrive in the South until most of the parks and recreation areas were already designated. At the turn of the 20th century, when men like John Muir first decried the loss of natural places, the South still longed for more development. The National Park Service (NPS), established in 1916,. immediately became responsible for 14 new parks, and only Hot Springs, Ark, was available for designation in the Southeast. …

In 1926 Congress actually authorized three parks – Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave (Ky.) – but provided none of the funding. For the next ten years, Southern states scrambled to raise money and to deal with the complex issues of land title and ownership …

During the 1930s a New Deal relief program for young people, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), also stimulated interest in southern parks. Charged with conservation work, the CCC employed young men to plant trees, stock fish, conduct fire prevention work, and build recreation facilities in the nation’s over-harvested forests. Because they had new national parks that sorely needed this kind of development, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia at first picked up the majority of CCC camps. Federal funding, however, inspired other southern states to start their own park departments, usually under a fledgling forestry or conservation division. South Carolina alone initiated 15 parks in the decade, buying land at Depression-era prices and promptly requesting CCC workers to build the needed trails and amenities. Alabama built 14 state parks on 21,769 acres of land with the help of the CCC and first began management of these lands when the CCC left. After World War II, southern states began to claim a stronger urban middle class whose members wanted to travel by automobile to parks for family camping. No one had to explain parks to their congressman any more. Virtually all the southern states extended their state park systems in response to 1950s travel. Governor Marvin Griffith of Georgia actually ran on a platform of granting “every county a state park.”

Charles Reagan Wilson in Martin Melosi (ed.) The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Environment (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp.160-162

Uhh … have you even read Ayn Rand?

Sounds like socialism to me. Public ownership of the wilderness? For the common good and enjoyment of everyone and not for the super wealthy who clearcut the Appalachian Mountains?

Chicago Sun Times:

“A Depression-era mural depicting white children playing outside in the winter was removed from Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park because school officials said it failed to represent the school’s diversity.

While some said the mural was upsetting to students of color who felt it excluded them from the school, a local historian likened the removal to a “modern-day book burning.”

Julian Principal Todd Fitzgerald announced the weekend removal in an email sent to school staff Monday.

“I have had students approach me pointing out that this picture does not represent our student body or the diversity of Oak Park,” Fitzgerald wrote. “We will be working with the Social Justice Club and our parent Diversity Committee to create a mural/canvas that better represents Julian Middle School.” …”

HATE!

This historical memory … has been rated EC-10. White people must not remember their past! They might get ideas like our how stupid the political correctness has become!

joking/not joking WATCH the video and THINK

Note: Actually, I would argue that we need people who are wise to govern our country, and one of the main sources of wisdom in traditional societies is memory of the past. Tradition is nothing but the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.