Chain Gangs and the Good Roads Movement

Primary Title Chain Gangs and the Good Roads Movement

Grant Holt

Kenyon College - Class of 2022

In June 1912, penal reformer E. Stagg Whitin published “Convicts and Road Building” in an issue of the periodical Southern Good Roads. In this article, Whitin wrote of the “good roads movement,” and how it had become identified as “the movement to take the prisoner out of the cell, the prison factory and the mine to work him in the fresh air and sunshine.” This so-called good roads movement advocated “that bad men on bad roads make good roads,” and consequently that “good roads make good men.”1 Within a few sentences, Whitin captured the fundamental idea that drove much of the South to use convict labor on public roads. Around the turn of the twentieth century, this use of convict labor produced sprawling state highways. The driving force behind this application of convict labor was the Good Roads Movement, which marketed convict roadwork not only as an efficient means of public development, but also as a humanitarian penal reform. The impact of the Good Roads Movement, however, was not penal rehabilitation, but rather the successful rallying of enough social and political capital to stimulate public development. As a so-called progressive movement, it did not overcome the cruelty and abuse of the southern penal system, focusing more on development rather than reform. The movement’s penal reforms perpetuated a state of subservience among African Americans in a post-bellum nation, becoming a functional replacement for slavery in the modern age. Before the Good Roads Movement, however, prisoners worked under the convict leasing system.

Under this system, state governments leased out prisoners to private employers as workers, who labored under the supervision of armed prison guards. In exchange, state governments received hundreds of thousands of dollars from private contractors leasing convicts. Convict leasing appealed to southern states most impacted by the Civil War. The war decimated many southern prisons, and with no money to erect new penitentiaries, leasing was an attractive option.2 Furthermore, to the state and society, convict leasing was convenient. It transferred responsibility for thousands of prisoners from the state to private entities. Leasing generated millions in revenue for state and local coffers, funded public infrastructure like roads and bridges, and lowered taxes for the average citizen.3

Leasing also worked as a system of racial domination and control in a post-slavery society. A number of trends developed during the age of convict leasing: longer sentences translated into a larger convict population, the number of people sentenced rose drastically, and prisoners became almost entirely black. Convict leasing even incorporated elements of slavery. Convicts leased in Alabama and Texas, for example, were classified by their level of labor, such as “full,” medium,” and “dead” laborers. Slaves were classified under a similar system. However, unlike slavery, convict leasing offered no proprietary protection.4 Reports of poor food, abysmal sanitation, brutal labor, and inhumane punishment defined life on the chain gang. In 1920, black convicts working on a North Carolina chain gang wrote to the governor that they were “beat up like dogs” and that their overseers “work us hard and half feed us [and] beat us with shovel and stick.” In North Carolina’s Johnston County, Wiley Woodard, a black convict, wrote to the state’s commissioner of public welfare. Woodward said that although he had “made a mistake” on the job, it did “not call for the management of this camp to treat me and my race as dogs,” and that his camp kept convicts “at the point of a gun and threats of [the] lash.” A critic of North Carolina’s chain gangs wrote to the governor stating that although

2 Christopher Adamson, “Punishment after Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890,” in Social Systems 30, no. 5 (June 1983): 556. 3 David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 57. 4 Matthew J. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” The Journal of Negro History 63, no. 4 (October 1978): 343-345.

“the State may be getting some good roads out of this system,” the chain gang must be abolished as it “savors too much of slavery times.”5 Like slaves, convicts labored under inhumane conditions and received brutal punishment. Unlike slaves, however, convicts were cheap and plentiful.

They were also lucrative. In his 1880 book The State of Prisons and of Child-Saving Institutions in the Civilized World, prison reform advocate Enoch Cobb Wines reported that — for states without convict leasing — roughly half of penal administration costs were paid by prison-generated income. Taxpayers paid the rest.6 In comparison, states with convict leasing generated more than three-times worth of income over costs. Convict leasing also provided businessmen with the labor to build railroads, chop timber, and amass profits. Convict leasing allowed states to maintain control over emancipated African Americans and was a significant source of wealth to businessmen and politicians. For half a century, these two mutually reinforcing factors fended off multiple attempts to abolish the system.7

Convict leasing in the South faded towards the end of the nineteenth century. The railroad boom transitioned into a period of consolidation in the North, and not expansion in the South. This eliminated the need for a large convict labor source to work the railroads. The depression of 1893 further hampered the viability of convict labor in major business ventures. The price of leased convicts also rose drastically. In 1907, for example, a lessee in Georgia paid roughly $100 per year in upkeep, in addition to the price as stated in the leasing contract. The total cost came out to be roughly $670 every year, or two dollars every day. This was similar to the price of free labor.8 The rising costs of leased convict labor was caused by the rising prices of key commodities. Between 1890 and 1910, the Wholesale Price Index for goods produced by convict leasing like farm products and building materials rose from 50.4 to 74.8, and 46.8 to 55.3, respectively.9 The value of convict-leased labor would have increased in accordance with the rising costs of its produced commodities. Furthermore, the legalization of subleasing after 1899 likely exposed the system to forces of the free market. This increased the pressure to pay costs close to the going rate for free labor.10

As convict leasing struggled to turn a profit, there was a growing appreciation for the cost-effectiveness of “chain gangs.” A brutal form of forced labor, chain gangs — composed of mostly African American convicts — were constantly chained together while working, eating, and sleeping.11 Southerners valued chain gangs more at the same time that convict leasing fell out of favor with businessmen. The abolition of leasing left a vacuum to fill, and chain gangs offered an attractive replacement. The South again filled a vacuum originally left by the abolition of slavery — first with convict leasing, then with chain gangs.12 A key difference, however, was the ideological force driving chain gangs. Coming from the abolition of convict leasing — and during the Progressive Movement — chain gangs were conceived as a reform that demonstrated penal humanitarianism, but also economic modernization. The American Progressive Movement was multifaceted. Activists ranging from suffragettes fighting for the right to vote to trustbusters wanting to regulate monopoly and competition all fell under the banner of American progressivism. The movement was tied together by a belief in using state power to enact social, political, and economic change. This opposed conservatives, who tended to discredit using state power, for example, on behalf of workers, small business, and the poor. Conservatives instead preached a philosophy of Social Darwinism, asserting that people were subject to the same laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Therefore, they believed in survival of the fittest for society. In short, social darwinism. Progressives, comparatively, committed themselves to generalized political action untethered to any single cause, driven by a robust sense of morality, and the belief that human effort could make positive change.13 “Anyone who has a serious appreciation of the immensely complex problems of our present-day life,” wrote noted progressive Theodore Roosevelt in a 1901 edition of McClure’s magazine, “and of those kinds of benevolent effort which...we group under the name of philanthropy, must realize the infinite diversity there is in the field of social work.”14 Roosevelt further elaborated that “no hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to

5 Convicts to Governor, March 7, 1920; Wiley Woodard to Kate Burr Johnson, August 10, 1925; Urban A Woodbury to Governor Bickett, February 8, 1920, in “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave,’ by Alex Lichtenstein. Journal of Southern History 59, no. 1 (February 1993): 92. 6 Enoch C. Wines, The State of Prisons and of Child-Saving Institutions in the Civilized World (Cambridge: University PressL: John Wilson & Son, 1880), 94. 7 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 339. 8 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 348. 9 U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (September 1975), 200. 10 In regard to convict leasing, subleasing was when a leaseholder gave their lease to another party with the permission of the original holder. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 352. 11 Jaron Browne, “Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 17, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 79-80. 12 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 349. 13 Glen Gendzel, “What the Progressives Had in Common,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 3 (July 2011): 331-334. 14 Theodore Roosevelt, “Reform Through Social Work,” in McClure’s Magazine, March 1901, 448.

the way in which such work must be done.”15 To create change and reform society, Progressives wanted to wield state power in the name of the public good, and not just what was good for big, private business.16

In the South, progressivism behaved differently. Southern progressivism exalted business. The coming of Southern progressivism was heralded by a few changes in the social landscape that took place by the end of the nineteenth century. This included the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of a new middle class made up of business organizations and other professional groups. This diversified the South’s economy, and induced a new spirit of commercialism that exalted business like never before. The people and institutions with influence and authority shifted from the countryside to towns and cities. This urban environment produced a new middle class of merchants, bankers, lawyers, technicians, and others.17 These professionals came together in trade associations, bankers’ groups, and chambers of commerce. Apart from elevating standards within their professions, these groups also turned towards collective action in the name of reform, and — in the case of race relations — control. These ideas of reform and control were firmly rooted in regional progress. Accordingly, Southern progressivism expressed itself in the desire for economic development and rehabilitation of the region. These desires were encapsulated in the “New South” creed, a vision for regional development that deemed economic progress capable of resolving the South’s socio-economic distress.18 This vision for a New South, however, would lead Southern progressives to provide African Americans with a modernized version of paternalism — referring to the infringement on the rights and personal autonomy of an individual under the guise of benevolence — and racial control in a post-emancipation society.19

Progress in the South largely meant improved schools and churches, real estate, and booming industry.20 Southern psychologist Lyle H. Lanier commented that this idea of business progressivism was reinforced by a barrage of “newspapers, magazines, radios, billboards, and other agencies for controlling public opinion,” and that it did not take much to learn “that progress

15 Ibid., 454. 16 Gendzel, “What the Progressives Had in Common,” 333. 17 Grantham, “The Contours of Southern Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86, no. 5 (December 1981): 1036. 18 Ibid., 1037-1038. 19 Ibid., 1048. 20 George B. Tindall, A History of the South, vol. 10, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 223. usually turns out to mean business.”21 This ideology of business progressivism asserted that prosperity could be achieved through spending and development. This desire for growth led to popular crusades in education, public health, the treatment of criminals, and good roads.22 In the South, North Carolina led this movement for business progressivism. During this period, North Carolina developed the leading southern state university, expanded its education and public health services, and embarked on the most ambitious highway expansion program in the region. By 1928, the North Carolina State Highway Commission had spent more than $150 million dollars on a state road system of over seven thousand miles. The state ended the decade eleventh in the nation in terms of total mileage of surfaced roads.23

This expansion of state roads originated with the “Good Roads Movement,” a wave of southern business progressivism that, in the words of Georgia governor Joseph Brown, meant “the closer binding of the common interests of the farmer and the merchant” towards the common goal of an expanded highway system.24 Around the twentieth-century, there was much to gain with good roads. The creation of the first American gas-powered automobile in 1893 promised significant revenue to those with roads. Gasoline and automobile taxes became a source of income to states.25 By 1928, for example, revenue from gasoline and automobile taxes had covered the costs of North Carolina’s $150 million dollar highway expenditures.26 Before southern states like North Carolina could achieve such a lucrative highway system, they needed a robust source of labor. Conscripted labor would not suffice.

Until the 1890s, every U.S. state used an American ad aptation of the corvée — a French word referring to a system of temporary unpaid labor — to supply workers for public infrastructure, and especially roads. Appearing as “road duty” in law books, the corvée system functioned as a tax of labor, not money.27 In 1883, North Carolina legislated that overseers supervising roadwork “shall have power to call out all the hands” they required, and that these conscripted free laborers would “be liable to all the penalties and punishments

21 Lyle H. Lanier, “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, ed. Louis Decimus Rubin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 123. 22 Tindall, A History of the South, 225. 23 Ibid., 226-227. 24 Henry B. Varner, “Good Roads Notes Gathered Here and There,” Southern Good Roads, March 1910, 17, https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/ p249901coll37/id/13802. 25 Peter Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 16. 26 Tindall, A History of the South, 226-227. 27 Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes, 22.

now imposed by law for failure to perform road duty.”28 State judiciaries rejected claims that “road duty” was involuntary servitude. They asserted that statute labor was simply another public duty, like serving on a jury.29 But this conscription service, while cheap, often resulted in poorly built roads. Speaking to the North Carolina Good Roads Convention in 1902, William R. Cox, a former Confederate general, decried this “antebellum style of working the public highways” for being as ineffective as “were the old militia ‘musters’ to the development of actual soldiers.”30 A massive expansion of state highways required a more reliable labor force. In 1887, North Carolina law books listed an act “to provide for the working of certain convicts upon the public roads of the State.” Under this act, convicts whose sentences were imprisonment in county jails or the state penitentiary could be sentenced to “hard labor upon the public roads” by county judges.31 Cox declared that there was legislation “in our State which already enables us to use convict labor,” and that he believed “it should be more widely used than it is at the present time.”32

The 1887 law came as a result of growing calls to replace the South’s old system of conscripting free men to work the roads. In 1901, geologist Joseph A. Holmes published “Road Building with Convict Labor in the Southern States,” a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Holmes reported on chain gang practices throughout the South and suggested that they exerted a positive influence on convicts. Holmes wrote that a prisoner who “has injured a community through the commision of crime” should be made to “benefit the community which he has injured.” He said that “the belief prevails that perhaps the best way in which a criminal can benefit the community he has injured is in helping to improve its public highways.”33 But Homes’ report stood out for its suggestion that “this out-of-door work not only improves the physical health of the convicts” but that also their work on the roads “improved their general character and prepared them for better citizenship.”34

Holmes declared that chain gangs would improve not just society, but also convicts as well. Rather

28 North Carolina General Assembly, Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1883 (Raleigh, 1883), 190. 29 Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes, 22. 30 William R. Cox, “Good Roads and their Relation to Country Life,” in Proceedings of the North Carolina Good Roads Convention, ed. J.A. Holmes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903), 36. 31 North Carolina General Assembly, Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1883 (Raleigh, 1887), 354-355. 32 William R. Cox, “Good Roads,” 36. 33 J.A. Holmes, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Road Building with Convict Labor in the Southern States, (1901), 319. 34 Ibid., 326. than continue this campaign for chain gangs, however, Holmes accepted a position at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis to direct its mines and metallurgy department. This humanitarian conception of chain gangs would be further pitched as progressive reform by Holmes’ colleague, mineralogist and northern progressive Joseph Hyde Pratt.35 As an automobile owner and real estate investor, Pratt saw value in a grand state highway system. To construct such a system, Pratt needed capital, civil engineers, and more labor than could be provided by the counties’ supply of convicts. Pratt’s plan required state support and control of all major road construction. To garner such support, Pratt drew on Holmes’ assertion that roadwork helped convicts rehabilitate themselves, and he began the campaign for “good roads and good men.”36

Pratt did not invent the concept of using convict labor on roads. He rather emphasized that convict road crews could be a method of penal reform. This idea grew in popularity. In 1907, penal reformer Charles R. Henderson published a report describing outdoor penal reforms in England, Australia, and Switzerland. Henderson stated that outdoor work — like farming and canal building — was “excellent for the health of the prisoners” because nature itself kept “the atmosphere free from all contagion” and germs.37 In 1908, periodical editor Samuel Barrows published an article entitled “Convict Road Building,” which described the experiences of eighty convicts working on Colorado highway. Barrows stated that the number of escapes had dropped, indicating that “as soon as this outdoor life, living in tents, had improved their physical and mental condition, the desire to escape almost entirely disappeared.”38

To take advantage of the popularity of outdoor penal labor, Pratt embarked on a campaign to market the chain gang as a vehicle of penal rehabilitation. He went on the speaking circuit, presenting papers and delivering presentations throughout the South. He presented a paper on convict labor for roadwork before the national Good Roads Association conference in St. Louis, Missouri, and at the Southern Commercial Congress in Atlanta, Georgia in 1910 and 1911, respectively. Pratt then spoke about the benefits of state control over public roads at the National Good Roads Congress two months later in Birmingham, Alabama. Then, at the sixty-third annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., Pratt delivered a

35 Robert E. Ireland, “Prison Reform, Road Building, and Southern Progressivism: Joseph Hyde Pratt and the Campaign for “Good Roads and Good Men,” North Carolina Historical Review 68, no. 2 (April 1991): 132. 36 Ibid.,133. 37 Charles R. Henderson, Outdoor Labor for Convicts: A Report to the Governor of Illinois (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1907), 64. 38 Samuel Barrows, “The Delinquent,” in Charities and the Commons, ed. Edward T. Devine (New York: The Charity Organization Society, 1909), 454.

presentation titled “Convict Labor in Highway Construction.” In this address, Pratt gave the moral and economic rationale for “good roads and good men.”39 Pratt stated two principles, that a convict should “compensate society for his crime,” and that a convict should “be in better condition physically and morally at the end of his sentence” before returning to society. He advocated for rehabilitation through labor that benefited communities, and questioned what labor “will be for the best interest of the state and the convict himself” in order for all to benefit. Pratt refuted the idea that any convict labor “that is in direct competition with free labor,” citing the potential for conflict. He rejected methods like convict leasing on the grounds that “the work is largely in the interest of individuals and private corporations.”40 He asserted that a convict can best be employed “in the construction of public roads,” which are “a public necessity” and belong “to all the people of the state.” According to Pratt, the roads produced by convict labor “ [do] not have to be disposed of in competition with products made by free labor.”41 He compared road work to other industries, like manufacturing, where convict labor works in competition with free labor. Pratt declared that “friction has been caused, and still exists, between the private operators of coal mines and the state,” a reference to the mine worker protests of the early 1890s. Pratt asserted that public roads were an alternative that benefited the state, communities, and — through a “healthful occupation” — the convict.42

Pratt praised outdoor work “where the air is pure” and there is “plenty of good drinking water.” He stated that in such conditions “the health of the convict who is employed in road construction and living in the convict camps is better than that of those in any other form of work.”43 Pratt also introduced the idea of an “honor system when the convicts are employed in working public roads.” He believed that very few convicts “are entirely devoid of a sense of honor,” and that the state should “try to bring out and develop this spark of honor” to achieve greater success on the roads. Pratt concluded his presentation with calls to give “a certain per diem” to convicts for their work, and to “commute so many days per month” that convicts worked as a reward for good behavior.44 He reiterated his points in an editorial published in the October 1910 edition of Southern Good Roads, writing that it “is necessary to consider the moral and physical health of the prisoner while he is paying

39 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 140. 40 Joseph Hyde Pratt, “Convict Labor in Highway Construction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 46 (1913): 79. 41 Pratt, “Convict Labor in Highway Construction,” 80. 42 Ibid., 81. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 87. his debt to society.” Pratt further wrote that by using convict labor to build public roads, “the greatest good of the greatest number is being accomplished and without causing any feeling of competition with free labor.”45 In the chain gang, Pratt found an efficient method of road construction that could be marketed as a progressive and healthy alternative to previous penal systems. However, reality never matched Pratt’s marketing material. Reports of inhumane treatment and abuse smeared his shiny pitch for penal labor. In 1915, W.O. Saunders — editor of North Carolina’s The Independent newspaper — published an exposé detailing the abuse of convicts working on North Carolina’s chain gangs. Saunders reported on a judge who visited a convict camp in Pasquotank County. At night, convicts were “chained to their bunks and chained together by a master chain,” prohibited from rising at night for any reason at all. Those who complained “were chained with an iron collar at night, the collar being fastened to their necks and padlocked.” The judge discovered that “barbarous devices were employed to shackle [convicts] so they could not run.” This included iron bands that “cut into their flesh, making running sores that never healed because the iron bands were never removed.” The guards received “two or more shipments of liquor every week,” and drunkenly abused prisoners. The judge condemned the Pasquotank chain gang as “a little man-made hell,” and pledged to “send no prisoner to the Pasquotank chain gang” until it rehabilitated itself. Saunders commented that such chain gangs “all over North Carolina are quite as bad as the chain gang in Pasquotank.” He further stated that similar abuses “have been reported in the newspapers month after month.”46

As the public grew aware of abuse, Pratt’s “good roads and good men” movement faded around 1915. The expansion of roads continued, but Pratt abandoned his argument that chain gangs were a reform. He could not, however, abandon chain gangs as a labor source. Abolishing chain gangs would cripple road expansion. Pratt instead focused his attention on improving the chain gang system through legislation. In 1917, Pratt framed a law for “the treatment, handling, and work of prisoners.”47 This law directed prisoner labor “not to exceed ten (10) hours of each day” and put all convicts into three classes. These classes utilized Pratt’s aforementioned honor system and sentence commutation. Convicts in the first class would “be known as honor men,” grouped together in “honor camps.” These “honor men”

45 Joseph Hyde Pratt, “Convict Labor in Road Building,” Southern Good Roads, October, 1910, 18, https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/ p249901coll37/id/13795. 46 W.O. Saunders, “Cleaning Out North Carolina’s Convict Camps,” in The Survey, vol. 34, 152, ed. Paul U. Kellogg (New York: Survey Associates, Inc., 1915), 152. 47 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 152.

would work without guard supervision, not be chained at night, and would not wear a striped jumpsuit. Convicts assigned to the second class would work under guards, but they would not wear chains while at work. Convicts of the third class would wear stripes, work under armed guards, chained during the day and at night. Both first and second class convicts could commute their sentences “eight days out of every four weeks” and “six days out of every four weeks,” respectively. Third class convicts, however, “shall not be allowed any commutation of their time.” Furthermore, all camps were to meet sanitation standards set by the state board of health, and nobody “addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors shall be employed” within the penal system.48

Despite applying these regulations to all county and municipal chain gangs, this law specified no means of enforcement.49 As Frank Tannenbaum wrote in his 1924 exposé Darker Phases of the South, each county penal department had “its own system and [provided] its own management.”50 County officials had control over county convict camps, with no real pressure to follow the rules. By the Great Depression, the North Carolina state prison system fell under the jurisdiction of the state highway department. Despite achieving Pratt’s original goal of state control over convict labor, brutality and racism continued to define the southern penal system.51 Southern good roads advocates directed convict labor onto roads by appealing to the tenets of Southern progressivism. By offering chain gangs as a replacement for convict leasing, good roads advocates provided an alternative that was efficient. Furthermore, the financial incentives of an improved highway system presented itself as a major method of regional development. But the good roads movement also satisfied the modernization of racial control inherent to Southern progressivism. Southern progressives supported the abolition of convict leasing because it correlated with their racial agenda for African Americans. Progressives considered the overt brutality and oppression of convict leasing to undermine its validity as punishment.52 They believed that progress depended on establishing the protection — and more specifically, control — of African Americans. As a result, Southern progressives used the replacement of convict leasing with chain gangs to take further control of African Americans. The chain gang therefore manifested as a southern progressive reform of state-sponsored pater-

48 North Carolina General Assembly, Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1917 (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1917), 593-598. 49 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 153. 50 Frank Tannenbaum, “Chapter III: Southern Prisons,” in Darker Phases of the South (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 82. 51 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 155. 52 Alex Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South,” Journal of Southern History (February 1993): 90. nalism and racial control comparable to that of antebellum slavery.53 This relationship between Southern progressivism and racial paternalism was expressed by Georgia legislator Hooper Alexander in a speech to the Southern Sociological Congress in 1913. Hooper declared that domestic slavery was a required reform. He asserted that the “slave trade had imposed evils on the [American] colonies,” and that the government was left with the duty of managing it. The establishment of domestic slavery, Hooper argued, “was an expedient for discharching that duty by contract.”54 In short, Hooper stated that slavery was simply the privatization of the state’s duty of racial control, and that slaveowners taking on this duty were compensated with slave labor. After emancipation, convict leasing took on this duty before giving it to chain gangs. Southern progressives and good roads advocates accordingly used the chain gang to modernize the state’s control of African Americans.55

The Good Roads Movement pitched chain gangs as a humanitarian and economical replacement for convict leasing. To many white southerners, however, the movement’s real value was its ability to mobilize the social and political capital required for public development. Between 1920 and 1929, the amount of funding allocated to southern roads rose by 157 percent. The South’s roughly 69,000 miles of surfaced roads in 1914 skyrocketed to over 120,000 miles in 1921. By 1930, the South had over 200,000 miles of surfaced roads.56 Despite these successes, the Good Roads Movement did not resolve the cruelty of the South’s penal systems. Pratt’s advocacy of a penal system that improved the lives of black convicts likely clashed with Southerners who upheld the racial control of the chain gang.57 This suggests that the replacement of the private convict lease for the public chain gang merely adapted slavery for another time. In his article “The Spirit of Convict Road Building,” E. Stagg Whitin declared that “the convict on the road is the slave of the State.”58 Pratt’s movement did not achieve a rehabilitating penal system, but rather gathered the resources necessary to deploy convicts in roadwork. For many southerners, the expansion of quality roads was all that mattered. Put into practice, the Good Roads Movement served the interests of a society more interested in good roads than good men.

53 Ibid., 91. 54 Alexander Hooper, “The Convict Lease and the System of Contract Labor—Their Place In History,” in The South Mobilizing for Social Service, ed. James E. McCulloch (Nashville: Southern Sociological Congress, 1913), 165. 55 Lichtenstein, “Good Roads,” 92. 56 Tindall, A History of the South, 257. 57 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 156. 58 E. Stagg Whitin, “The Spirit of Convict Road Building,” Southern Good Roads, December, 1912, 13,https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/ p249901coll37/id/13769.