The impracticality of extreme wealth

Two of the books that I read for my 2018 Black History Month reading were pretty annoying. The Strange Career of Jim Crow had the advantage of being relatively short, but Been in the Storm So Long felt like it went on forever, an interminable wave of white people whining.

Some of my annoyance with the book was feeling like the author, Leon F. Litwack, devoted so much attention to the whining because he felt a sympathy for them, which I could only think was undeserved. However, as ridiculous as the complaints sounded, maybe he knew that too and the sheer excess was only to drive home the point.

I am going to put in one quote here. There are some misspellings from the original source:

“Nearly a week after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate dream lay shattered. When the news reached Mary Darby, daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, she staggered to the table, sat down, and wept aloud. “Now.” she shrieked, “we belong to the Negroes and Yankees.” If the freed slaves had reason to be confused about the future, their former masters and mistresses were in many instances absolutely distraught, incapable of perceiving a future without slaves. “Nobody that hasn't experienced it knows anything about our suffering,” a young South Carolina planter declared. “We are discouraged and have nothing left to begin new with. I never did a day's work in my life, and don't know how to begin.” Often with little sense of intended irony, whites viewed the downfall of the Confederacy and slavery as fastening upon them the ignominy of bondage. Either they must submit to the insolence of their servants or appeal to their northern “masters” for protection, one woman wrote, “as if we were slaves ourselves – and that is just what they are trying to make of us. Oh it is abominable!” (p.178)

This is a representative example. There were many more complaints about no longer having slaves being equivalent to slavery (which is interesting in light of how some people react to criticism and threats of equality) and many lamentations of suddenly having to work and not knowing how.

Beyond that, there was great frustration with having to pay wages ("I still believe we can hold our own but the negroes will have to enjoy more of the fruits than before." p. 552), but also not being able to set the schedules. Many of the former slaves were agreeable to working on their old plantations, but were no longer willing to work from before sunrise to sundown, wanting something more like an eight-hour day with a lunch break.

Both sets of frustrations had a common cause that I was able to recognize, in that the old way of life had been built on lots of people literally slaving away to create a life of splendor and ease for a few. One woman can maintain a single-family house dwelling enough, even if there is a learning curve for knowing how. Maintaining a mansion is considerably harder. There is more to clean and more to heat and more to cool. 

When your workers don't get a wage, and you are in charge of how much they get to eat and what clothes they get, and they don't have to get breaks or time to think and spend with their families, you can be much more profitable. 

Actually, neither Crazy Rich Asians nor Generation Wealth spent a lot of time on that, but if you look below the surface it is always there. Fabulous wealth can't be maintained without exploitation, and the closer you look, the more likely it was acquired in ways that were ethically wrong if not specifically criminal.

Oddly, there were not a lot of records of Southerners forced to do an honest day's work who found themselves starting to appreciate their former slaves for their abilities and stamina. There was a lot of resentment, sometimes thoughts that white people would end up doing the work better once they got the hang of it, and I remember one person wanting to replace the slaves with apes, then bitterly predicting that someone would want to free the apes.  

Yes, clearly we are past all of that now.