Country Capitalism w/ Bartow Elmore
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
RTN is coming to Washington DC on May 29! Join us for a night of stories of murder and mayhem with guests Major Garrett, Margaret Talev, and Doug Heye at the Hamilton Live! You can get tickets and details at RTNpod.me/liveindc – hope to see you there!
The "Amazon economy" seems like something new, but it rests on the physical and intellectual infrastructure built by those who came long before the age of the internet and leaves many of the same marks on the environment. Prominent in this story are five companies- Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, Bank of America, and FexEx- all of which have global reach and southern roots. In this episode, Bart Elmore joins us to talk about his new book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade our Economy and the Planet (UNC Press, 2023), and how understanding the history of American business can help us address the environmental challenges that are undeniably facing humanity today.
Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History and a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. In addition to Country Capitalism, he is also the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021). You can hear his discuss these books in RTN episode 140 and episode 208 respectively. Bart is also a 2022 winner of the Dan David Prize.
This episode originally aired as episode #272 on May 15, 2023. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the Road to Now. |
| 0:09.0 | Before we get into the show, just a reminder that our live show in D.C. is taking place on May 29th. |
| 0:15.8 | It's a Thursday night at the Hamilton Live. The theme of the show is murder and mayhem in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:23.0 | We're going to be telling stories out of D.C.'s history that we hope are both informative and |
| 0:28.4 | entertaining. |
| 0:29.2 | And we have a great lineup of guests to make sure that happens. |
| 0:32.6 | The lineup is Major Garrett of CBS News, Margaret Taleb, who is director of Syracuse University's |
| 0:39.3 | Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship, and Doug High, former RNC. Coms |
| 0:44.5 | director, longtime D.C. Insider, and longtime friend to Road to Now as well. That is May 29th. |
| 0:50.8 | You can get those tickets right now at RTMPpod.m.m.m.-Live-N-D-C. That's RTNPod.m-E-L-I-V-E-I-N-D-C. No spaces, all lowercase. |
| 1:05.5 | Hope to see you there. Now, let's turn to today's show. Friends, around here at our house, we still get the newspaper, the print newspaper, and my wife |
| 1:17.0 | reads it almost every day. |
| 1:19.4 | And one thing that stood out in a recent issue of the Tennessean was a full-page ad, |
| 1:25.9 | headlined USA, USA, USA. I don't know if you all saw this. We checked, |
| 1:32.2 | and it turns out this I guess was in the New York Times as well. Below that it reads, |
| 1:36.7 | We are a people of principle and honor. We honor our commitments and stand by our allies. |
| 1:41.7 | We defend against aggression by dictators. We uphold and defend the |
| 1:45.0 | Constitution. We care for veterans and children. We respect our neighbors and trading partners. |
| 1:49.5 | It goes on and concludes, show up, attend your town halls, be civil. In other words, this is an |
| 1:57.4 | assertion of values that are, well, have been taken by many people as an anti-Trump sign, |
| 2:03.4 | which is in itself fascinating. I think it's overall a positive thing. I think there's way |
| 2:08.8 | too much I'm against Trump and not enough I'm for these principles. But that's not the reason |
... |
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