Alabama

views updated

ALABAMA

Alabama, traditionally one of the nation's poorest states, has survived the demise of a one-crop economy, the upheaval of a civil war, a revolution in race relations, and the challenges of a modern industrial economy. While the state still has many difficulties to overcome, it continues to be an important contributor to the nation's economy.

The first Europeans to arrive in Alabama found the land inhabited by Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw Indians. The Spanish first entered Mobile Bay during the sixteenth century. Hernando de Soto (c.1496–1542) entered the Mobile Delta via Tennessee in 1540. In the early 1700s French explorers established the first permanent settlement at Mobile. The British took over the territory by terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 but lost it again to Spain in 1780. The United States did not gain title to the land until after the War of 1812 (1812–1814). In 1814 a force led by Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) drove off most of the remaining Indian tribes, opening up the territory to white settlement. After this time many immigrants from southern states poured into Alabama in hopes of acquiring good land on which to grow cotton, a newly profitable crop in the South. Though still sparsely populated, Alabama became a state in 1819.

Alabama remained an almost entirely agricultural state for some decades to come. Cotton was the major crop though sorghum, corn, oats, vegetables, and livestock also were important. The farm economy, particularly on large plantations, was based on slave labor. By 1860 the number of slaves in the state constituted 45 percent of the population. Large planters, only about one percent of the total, owned 28 percent of all of the state's wealth and wielded the most power in the state legislature both before and after the American Civil War (1860–1865). They lived in columned mansions, which according to historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, "betray[ed] their owners as among America's conspicuous consumers, free from Puritan scruples about showiness and lavish expenditure even when heavily in debt."

Small farmers, by contrast, led a hardscrabble life in Alabama at this time. In his Journey in the Back Country, Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York journalist who toured the South in 1853, noted that these farmers were hardworking yet reaped only minimal crops for their efforts. "They are very ignorant," he said. "The agriculture is wretched and the work hard."

The large planters led the movement to secede from the Union, and Alabama joined the Confederate States of America in 1861. Montgomery served as the Confederate capital until it was moved to Richmond in May of 1861, and Alabama native Jefferson Davis was elected president. After the South's defeat in 1865, a Reconstruction (1865–1877) government ruled the state for six years. It aroused the hatred of most Alabama whites, who resented both the radical Republicans and the blacks they placed in positions of power.

Although cotton was still "king" after the Civil War, many readjustments were necessary in Alabama. Without the free labor provided by slavery, landowners had to rely on landless farmers called sharecroppers who paid rent in cotton for the land they worked. This system tended to perpetuate a culture of dependency and deep divisions between wealthy landowners and poor sharecroppers.

The state attempted to diversify the economy in the 1880s and 1890s by encouraging industry, particularly the iron industry, in cities like Birmingham. The presence of coal fields and veins of iron in the state made this industry possible. In the early days in the iron mills, according to Hamilton, "Hammers rose and fell eighty strokes a minute, their steady throb audible for four to five miles on still days." Labor unrest, along with controversy over the leasing of convicts to work in the factories, plagued the iron business. The 1894 strike at Birmingham's Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI) ended with capitulation by the workers. Thereafter labor made few strides in the state until the mid-1930s. In 1907 U.S. Steel, the country's largest steel maker, bought-out TCI. Birmingham, like its sister city in England, had become an important manufacturing city by this time.

Cotton milling also became a vital industry, employing mostly poor farm people who had lost their land after the war and were forced to work long hours for low wages. By 1900 nearly 9,000 workers, including children, were employed in Alabama mills. Episcopal rector Edgar Gardner Murphy led a reform movement to prevent the exploitation of child workers, who often worked 12 hours a day for as little as 15 cents a day. In 1907 the Alabama legislature set the minimum age for workers at 12, limited the work week for children to 60 hours, and forbade those under 16 from working all night.

The increasing number of tenant farms in the state led to unrest among farmers in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s many farmers joined the Grange, a cooperative organization for farmers, and, along with factory workers, supported the Populist Party in a vain attempt to overthrow longtime Democratic rule. Both African Americans and poor whites were becoming more and more disenfranchised by state Democratic administrations.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s Alabama was harder hit than most other states. One-third of the population was out of work, and private charities were overburdened. The New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) helped Alabama, one of the most destitute states, even though the federal government was viewed with suspicion by the people of Alabama. This period saw the shortening of the workweek, reform of child labor practices, and guarantees of the right to join a union. The Tennessee Valley Authority made many new industries possible, and the Rural Electrification Act brought people in remote areas from subsistence living into the twentieth century.

World War II (1939–1945) revived Alabama's industry, but the postwar period saw another relapse. War plants stood empty, and many blamed the labor and marketing practices of U.S. Steel for Birmingham's failure to compete successfully with plants in the East. In the late 1940s the Interstate Commerce Commission equalized freight rates, making it again profitable to produce steel in Birmingham.

The civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century brought white Alabama citizens into direct conflict with the national government. The first in a series of protests by African Americans—the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955—took the form of an economic boycott. The young African American preacher Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to prominence during this time of social change. Since the 1960s African Americans in Alabama have gained some of the political and civil rights they sought. Their economic status, while improved, remains much behind that of whites.

Alabama has resisted progressive changes such as education, health care, and the taxation that would pay for these social programs and bring the state to the level of most other states. The tax system is regressive and even exempts from taxation the property of giant lumber companies at their market value. No property taxes go toward education, putting Alabama near the bottom of all the states in funding schools. Infant mortality is also high in the state, and in 1990 more than 20 percent of the people in Alabama lived below the federal poverty level. Citizens of the state also had difficulty recovering from the serious recessions of the 1970s and 1980–1982, which caused the loss of 39,000 jobs in manufacturing.

Alabama, however, made some important economic strides during the last few decades of the twentieth century. The economy diversified from its heavy dependence on steel. Alabama employment opened up for thousands of workers in the food, textile, metal, electronic equipment, and transportation equipment industries in the 1990s. Birmingham's U.S. Steel spent well over one billion dollars in 1984 to improve the Fairfield steel plant, and in 1997 Mercedes Benz began producing a sport utility vehicle in the town of Vance. The state provides a number of tax incentives for new businesses, and the Alabama Development Office provides assistance in financing.

See also: Civil Rights, Civil War (Economic Causes of), Civil War (Economic Impact of), King Cotton, Reconstruction, Sharecropping