Hidden Landscapes and Hidden Labor: Environment and Economy in the American South

This panel explores the labor, technology, and rural economy of the twentieth-century American South through attention to the hidden landscapes and labor networks wrought by the forest industries—one of the region’s most important industrial sectors. Each of these papers moves beyond a singular focus on lumber, pulp, and paper mills to show how wide-ranging changes to the South’s environment and economy created patterns of discrimination that have been obscured by narratives of regional growth. Jessica Elfenbein’s work reconstructs the history of Ferguson, South Carolina, a former lumber mill town abandoned by its primary employer by the 1920s and submerged by a New-Deal era hydroelectric project by the 1940s. As her work shows, the white management class withstood the town’s closing by securing work in other regions while some of the town’s African American workers were left behind in an area that would soon be inundated in the push for rural electrification. Aaron Thomas’s paper argues national portrayals of a “white, middle-class Christmas” obscure the exploitative labor regime behind artificial Christmas trees. Indeed, artificial Christmas tree manufacturers followed a familiar pattern of industrial relocation by abandoning northeastern factories first for the South and then for Mexico in search of ever-cheaper labor. Owen James Hyman’s presentation reveals how the Corps of Engineers used faulty appraisals to deny landowners full replacement value for their property in the creation of NASA’s Mississippi Test Facility. For those dispossessed by NASA and the Corps, the defining feature of the facility was not rocket science but instead dislocation and low-wage, low-tech work in pulpwood forests of the site’s buffer zone. Taken together, these papers highlight the social costs of southern economic development from Reconstruction through the rise of the high-tech Sunbelt economy.