On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

The first European settlers set foot in North Carolina at Roanoke Island in 1585. You may remember Roanoke as the “lost colony,” the one whose governor returned from a supply run to find that all hundred of its settlers had disappeared, leaving the word Croatoan scratched into a fence post as the only clue to what happened. Even today, the only historical consensus is that whatever it was probably wasn’t good. Since those auspicious beginnings, North Carolina’s been almost comically unlucky and poor, crippled by several factors—no large ports, a coastline nicknamed “graveyard of the Atlantic,” pirates, hurricanes, unproductive soil, incompetent leadership, and active economic kneecapping from other colonies. So as wealthier neighbors like Virginia and South Carolina developed Southern aristocracies based around huge slave plantations, North Carolina—especially this western area—remained mostly populated with subsistence-farming immigrants as likely to be from Germany or Scotland as from England. Supposedly, this is when North Carolina picked up the nickname “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” After the American Revolution, North Carolina made so little economic and social progress that it acquired more nicknames poking fun at how backward it was, including “the Rip Van Winkle of the States” and “the Ireland of America.” It was already the poorest and most desperate state in the South by the time it joined the Civil War, in which it lost more soldiers tha...