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By Kay Craig
Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment vision of a virtuous agrarian republic was transformed by later Southern thinkers into one of the most sustained critiques of industrial capitalism in American history. From Jefferson through John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh’s “Black Mass” of socialist-slavery, to the Southern Populists, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, and George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, the South waged a 150-year war against its economic colonization by Northern banks, tariffs, and factories. Far from being founded on slavery, American capitalism faced some of its most stubborn domestic opposition from the South. In Rebels, Kay Craig reframes this history and raises uncomfortable questions for class politics from the Left today.
