The Economics of Nostalgia

In mid-August of 1974 I walked into Joanna Elementary School and introduced myself as the new reading teacher. The principal, Frazier Sanders, was a short, balding man in a crumpled short-sleeved white shirt and dark, thin tie. “I been expecting you, Mr. Hemphill.” He smiled and extended a friendly hand. “Here, I brought you a little something from my garden.” He handed me a brown paper bag full of green beans and tomatoes.

We toured the brick schoolhouse built in 1927. The wooden floors creaked as our steps echoed down the hallway. My classroom was large and mostly bare except for tall windows and iron radiators along the outside wall. On winter mornings for the next four years, the first thing I did was turn off radiators and open windows to let the heat escape.

Back in the office, Mr. Sanders introduced me to his secretary. “If you need anything, just ask Cheryl. She’s the one who runs this place.” I soon learned that Sanders spoke the truth and was never embarrassed by it.

I spent a good four years teaching in that school in a small South Carolina cotton mill village. Though I was a young man with a beard from the foothills of North Carolina, I was always welcomed. I was naïve, but had learned from two previous years of teaching that respecting the community was necessary to success. Sometime in the first month of the school year a father came into my classroom

Typical cotton mill village street *

after school and handed me a paddle, about a foot and a half long, made of sturdy wood with holes bored in the blade. On one side was printed “The Board of Education”. “I made this for you,” he said. “Don’t call my wife again about Wesley ‘til you’ve used this.” A month later, I reluctantly pulled the paddle out of my desk drawer and used it on Wesley. I never paddled him again and never had to call his parents – a dent in my educational philosophy, but a small battle won.

Joanna Elementary was an old school in an old school place. Modern times had changed the community, but old culture held fast. The school stood among artifacts of the past. Windows in the library revealed the remains of a swimming pool, its cracked and decaying concrete filled with debris. The playground was an old ball field where a semi-pro baseball team once played. Towers of broken lights no longer illuminated the field. Honeysuckle vines obscured the fading advertisements on the outfield fence.

On the backside of a low brick wall separating the teacher’s parking lot from a pine forest, rusted metal vats lay half buried in the sandy ground. I asked Mr. Sanders about those vats. He chuckled. “Oh, you are looking at the hog parlor.”

“The hog parlor?”

“It’s where folks in the mill village brought their hogs for slaughter. Those pipes through the brick wall carried hot water from the school’s boiler to the vats.”

Joanna was planned and built by the cotton mill owner – a rich man from up North. The school stood on the western end of a long quadrangle.  Small, wood framed homes lined streets along two sides of the quad. On the eastern end was the schoolrry – a two-story brick building that once provided apartments for the young female teachers. In addition to the factory, school and homes, the owner also built a small hospital and movie theater.

I was no stranger to cotton mill villages. In the early 1900s, Minnie Justice, my mother’s mother came to the Clinchfield cotton mill from her home across the mountains in Haywood County. She got a room in a boarding house and a job in the mill where she met Taylor Messer who had also come across the mountains looking for work. They got married and eventually bought a small frame house on the end of a dirt road at the top of the mill hill.  I was their first grandson and Grandma Minnie was my first baby sitter.

My grandparents were typical of the people of the mill village.  They had come there from desperately poor circumstances. Their frame house, with no running water and heated by a coal grate in a shallow fireplace, was a major improvement in life’s circumstances. Neither had an education past grade school, though Grandma won the spelling bee when she was in the 4^th grade. They never owned a car. Grandpa Messer died when I was eight years old. On Saturday afternoons, I rode my bike across town, cut the grass around Grandma’s house and watched Gun Smoke with her.  On Sunday mornings, Mom and Dad picked us up and took us to church.

I share this bit of personal history because I believe there is an economic lesson in it. There was a time when corporations lifted masses of people out of poverty. I know that it was not a totally benign and altruistic process. I know the abuses of the company stores. I know the violent resistance to labor unions. I know the first generation of workers was uneducated and marginally literate. But most of the second generation graduated from high school and the third generation, my generation, had access to colleges and trade schools. Those wealthy people who built the cotton mill villages created, at least in part, the circumstances that helped build an educated and versatile middle class.

In the 21^st century, there is little evidence that corporate America is willing to sustain the middle class. Commerce and industry have always existed to generate profits for owners and shareholders. But now, they seem only about profit; the welfare of workers be damned. Good jobs with benefits are hard to find. Wal-Mart is the standard for both shopping and employment. A globalized economy may work for some skilled and mobile people; but for the masses, it is a brutal and inhumane thing. It is hard to imagine how anything other than local industry and business, with a commitment to a good wages and benefits, can restore the middle class.

 * By Bill Fitzpatrick (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons