- Dr. Tisdall, you said at the start of the LBJ reforms, out of wedlock births of African Americans shot from 10% to 60% almost instantly. Do you have any on hand links for this data? I haven't found much.
- Can you type up a quick rundown of the effects of slavery on black culture? I'm a little fuzzy on the details of industrial slavery, the worst part of the whole ordeal.
- Evan, you mentioned a book that covered a lot of the woes of Great Society programs, what was the name of this?
- slavery in the US is a very big subject and I don't know of a single comprehensive reference (not that there isn't one, just none that I know of). Here is a quote from Wikipedia on Eli Whitney's cotton gin:
ReplyDelete"And the cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy.[9] Southern cotton found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton exports from the U.S. boomed after the cotton gin's appearance - from less than 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810. [10] Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural products. It became the U.S.'s chief export, representing over half the value of U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.
Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve slavery in the U.S. Before the 1790s, slave labor was primarily employed in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were especially profitable any more. Neither was cotton, due to the difficulty of seed removal. But with the gin, growing cotton with slave labor became highly profitable - the chief source of wealth in the American South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern society."
I don't think the true depravity of slavery in the Deep South has ever really been part of modern American culture. I'll look for more references, but here is a small taste:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plantation.htm
- Great Society and the break-up of the black family (black illegitimacy rates about 20-25% in 1960). There are lots of articles. Here are a couple:
- http://fumento.com/economy/greatsociety.html
- http://www.mmisi.org/pr/20_01/nieli.pdf
"In the area of welfare policy, Murray singles out no less than eightimportant changes that occurred between1965and1970,all of which, hecontends, tended to undermine the lower-class male provider role and makeit rational for poor women to have children out of wedlock and rely on thewelfare system for their support. These changes included the following: a)more generous public assistance payments to single mothers with dependentchildren under the Federal Aid to Families with Dependent Childrenprogram (AFDC); b)avast expansion in the federal Food Stamp program;c)the introduction of the Medicaid program that provided free medical benefitsfor the poor; d) increases in public-housing assistance; e) changes in HEWguidelines that eliminated intrusive at-home welfare eligibility checks; f) the1968Supreme Court decision inKing v.Smith,which struck down the man-in-the-house restriction that tried to limit AFDC payments to single womennot living with a male companion; g) the1969Supreme Court rulingoverturning local residency requirements for welfare eligibility; and h) theCongressional thirty-and-a-third rule, which allowed welfare recipients tosupplement their welfare-benefit package with their own part-time earnings(the first $30 could be kept in its entirety, after which $1 could be kept out ofevery $3 earned). These changes, Murray contends, together with amuchmore tolerant and supportive attitude on the part of the white cultural elitetowards welfare recipiency itself even among the young and able-bodied,radically transformed the benefit and incentive structures in which the lower-class poor operated. These changes, Murray argues, had the effect of makingthe welfare system a more attractive option for many poor women thanreliance on the low wages of a young unskilled male worker who had littleimmediate chance of securing a job that paid a middle-class wage."