All in all, the extractive institutions in the southern United States, based on the power of the landed elite, plantation agriculture, and low-wage, low-education labor, persisted well into the twentieth century. These institutions started to crumble only after the Second World War and then truly after the civil rights movement destroyed the political basis of the system. And it was only after the demise of these institutions in the 1950s and ’60s that the South began its process of rapid convergence to the North.
