well into the twentieth century. These institutions started to
crumble only after the Second World War and then truly
after the civil rights movement destroyed the political basis
of the system. And it was only after the demise of these
institutions in the 1950s and ’60s that the South began its
process of rapid convergence to the North.
The U.S. South shows another, more resilient side of the
vicious circle: as in Guatemala, the southern planter elite
remained in power and structured economic and political
institutions in order to ensure the continuity of its power. But
differently from Guatemala, it was faced with significant
challenges after its defeat in the Civil War, which abolished
slavery and reversed the total, constitutional exclusion of
blacks from political participation. But there is more than
one way of skinning a cat: as long as the planter elite was
in control of its huge landholdings and remained organized,
it could structure a new set of institutions, Jim Crow instead
of slavery, to achieve the same obj