Introduction

The system of labor relations in the South that we described in Chapter 1 was a dominant force in the region's economy, but it was fragile in at least one important sense. The relationship between planters and their dependent laborers would have been undermined by government or private sector provision of goods and services that workers viewed as substitutes for paternalistic benefits. With the onset of the Depression, there was little danger of new private sector investment in the South that would have provided workers with an alternative source of jobs and benefits. With the entire U.S. economy flat on its back, there was also little that the individual state governments could do. The only credion threat came from the federal government, particularly the system of social insurance that resulted from the Social Security Act of 1935. The threat posed by the Social Security system and the Southern rural elite's response to it reveal a great deal about the South's system of paternalism and the political strength of the forces arrayed in defense of it.

Before the Social Security system was conceived, the federal government had more immediate needs to address. High levels of unemployment across the nation since 1930 had strained the system of providing poor relief. Before long-term structural change could occur, the government had to find ways of making sure the unemployed would simply survive to see that new system. New systems of relief provision had to be established.