Development Arrested Quotes

“In 1848, Alexis de Toqueville attempted to describe the origins of this regional imperialism: Those Americans who go out far away from the Atlantic Ocean, plunging into the West, are adventurers impatient of any sort of yoke, greedy for wealth, and often outcasts from the states in which they were born. They arrive in the depths of the wilderness without knowing one another. There is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them, laws have little sway over them, and mores still less. Therefore, the men who are continually pouring in to increase the population of the Mississippi Valley are in every respect inferior to the Americans living within the former limits of the Union. Nevertheless, they already have great influence over its counsels, and they are taking their place in the government of public affairs before they have learned to rule themselves … [When a state has a population of 2 million and is one quarter the size of France] it feels itself strong, and if it continues to want union as something useful to its well-being, it no longer regards it as necessary to its existence, it can do without it, and although consenting to remain united, it soon wants to be preponderant.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“One of the most important lessons to be learned from Delta history is the relationship between representation, social control, and taxation. Democrat organizations such as the White Men’s Clubs and the Taxpayer League grew rapidly. The latter was composed of planters who accused the Reconstruction governments of mismanagement when they were not complaining about the cost of governmental services, high taxes, and the state debt. They wanted social service monies redirected to levee construction and the retirement of their own back taxes. One traveler found that at every town and village, at every station on the railroads and rural neighborhood in the country, he heard Governor Ames and the Republican Party denounced for oppressions, robberies and dishonesty as proved by the fearful rate of taxation. White Leaguers knew … that they must appeal to the world as wretched downtrodden and impoverished people.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“General Hawkins, administrator of the Northeast Louisiana Delta, objected to the preservation of land monopolies and believed that the failure to break up plantations into small farms would have a devastating impact on the future Southern society. Additionally, he viewed the lessees as men who cared nothing how much flesh they worked off the Negro provided it was converted into good cotton at seventy five cents per pound … Cotton closed their eyes to justice just as it did in the case of the former slave master.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“In December 1863, Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction guaranteed the re-establishment of regional planter hegemony. It allowed repentant planters and their newfound Northern partners, typically investors and army officers, to reclaim confiscated land. In the Lower Mississippi Valley this new alliance would later come to defeat every attempt by African Americans to occupy or lease land, to regulate and raise wages, or to improve living and working conditions.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“To rectify this situation, planters organized the General Levee Board in 1858. This body was dedicated to constructing 262 miles of levees from Memphis to Vicksburg at a cost of $6.25 million. Although only 142 miles were completed prior to the Civil War, the projected increase in property values by the year 1868 was put at $150 million. One of the world’s largest public works projects, the levee system was, and is, one of the defining features of Delta capitalism.57”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Therefore, for social, political, and production reasons, the leadership of this capitalist complex fought to expand. The plantation system was not dying a slow death due to land exhaustion, rather it was struggling to expand and conquer. By the 1850s, cotton demand, production, and profitability had reached unprecedented heights. So much wealth was generated that key elements within the colonization-minded Mississippi wing of the Southern plantation bloc felt they would be better served by organizing their own nation.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“The socially totalizing aspects of plantation production enabled the planter bloc in Mississippi to build a modern police state on top of slavery using all-encompassing laws and a minutely detailed pass system that renders the concept “Orwellian” completely feeble.53”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“The blues emerge immediately after the overthrow of Reconstruction. During this period, unmediated African American voices were routinely silenced through the imposition of a new regime of censorship based on exile, assassination and massacre. The blues became an alternative form of communication, analysis, moral intervention, observation, celebration for a new generation that had witnessed slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in rapid succession between 1860 and 1875. Perhaps no other generation of a single ethnic group in the United States, except for Native Americans, witnessed such a tremendous tragedy in such a short period of time. Performer Cash McCall described the blues as the almost magical uncorking of the censored histories of countless people, places and events: Well, in the old days, you see, you weren’t allowed to express your feelings all that much. A lot of stuff was bottled up inside. Coming up from the old days until now … You can’t explain it in a conversation so the best way to do it is to sing.33 On the other hand, guitarist Willie Foster described them as the irrepressible voice of daily anguish: The black folks got the blues from working … You work all day long, you come home sometimes you didn’t have”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“many of the human and material extremes that were the keys to the Delta’s identity either as the “South’s south,” or “America’s Ethiopia” were shaped not by its isolation but by pervasive global and national influences and consistent with interaction with a federal government whose policies often confirmed the Delta’s inequities and reinforced its anachronistic social and political order as well … the social polarization that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta may be observed wherever and whenever the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power overwhelms the ideals of equality, justice and compassion and reduces the American dream to a self-indulgent fantasy. As socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life, it seems reasonable to inquire whether the same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta’s image as the South writ small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta writ large.16”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“First, the Delta regime of inequality is not the result of too little capitalism, too little development. Second, in many ways the entire United States is rapidly becoming the “Delta writ large”:”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“These groups learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it.”
― Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta