The Plundered South

 

Address by Sam H. Jones, Governor of Louisiana to the Southern Farm Bureau Training School, Monroe, La., August 18, 1943

The history of mankind relates many stories where superior military force has conquered nations of superior civilization. In the wake of overwhelming brute force the great citadels of culture and economic and social progress have fallen never to rise again. Egypt, Byzantium, Greece and Rome are but comparatively modern examples of these uncommendable sporadic outbreaks that unfortunately have characterized the course of mankind—and littered the rugged pathway of civilization’s struggle upward.

But here in America, for more than a hundred years, we have witnessed and lived through a more refined version of the same process—a process that has for its purpose the reduction of the fairest portion of our country to the permanent status of a conquered province—and the thwarting even of the laws of nature to perpetuate this unthinkable injustice. For more than a hundred years the Southern part of the United States has been the victim of a studied plan to overcome its superior economic advantages and reduce it to a state of economic vassalage.

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