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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

What drove American exceptionalism in the 20th century was still largely what drove its exceptionalism in the 19th and earlier centuries: chattel slavery and black exploitation. Slavery wasn't phased out immediately after the emancipation proclamation. 1) Slavery was still legal in the north after that signing and 2) states and counties did not enforce the law consistently (e.g. Juneteenth), and 3) criminal justice system was used to enslave black people for free prison labor not too unlike today. Of course later in the 20th century there was Jim Crow and Redlining to come which suppressed and continued the extraction of Blacks for whites to enrich themselves and their nation.

https://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168957092/what-the-emancipati...

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=890511...

https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-stat...

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I see. US was the only country that had slaves and this gave them an unfair advantage ergo they had the best universities.

My brain hurts stringing this logic together. Is that was you're implying?

Nope, I never said that. I am saying that the US was able to have the largest economy in the world by the turn of 20th century (before major international conflict) even despite an incredibly bloody civil war because of chattel slavery. Basically, in addition to how they stayed out of international conflict in WW1 and WW2, they had a big tail wind.

The slave economy of the Confederacy was literally burned to the ground by 1865. The legacy of that was poverty in the south.

The slave economy was only partially dismantled, not burned to the ground.

Southern poverty stems from post-war wealth extraction by the same land-owning elites who dominated the pre-war economy.

Sherman's "March to the Sea" was a deliberate and successful strategy to burn the heard of the South to the ground.

Germany and Japan were also burnt to the ground in WW2, and rose from the ashes to quickly become economic superpowers, due to adopting free markets.

> Southern poverty stems from

That implies you agree that the superpower economy of the US is not the result of the pre-war slave economy.

Repetitive flooding of the Mississippi didn’t help much either. Some natural disasters are hard to come back from.

I didn't realize the Missisouppi only started flooding after 1865.

Hey, if this was an ironic statement then I don’t think it was called for.

I wasn’t disagreeing with you or making a counterpoint, merely adding to your “history of the decline of the south” by adding some interesting facts about how devastating Mississippi floods were the nails in a coffin that, as you pointed out, had already been glued-up, waxed and lined with silk.

Have a great day!

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