18

expanding both in value of output and workforce, textile and garment production
was declining as production started the long process of "running away" to the South.
Still, Baltimore had, at the time of the Depression, a remarkably even industrial
profile.

**a

There is an assumption among some urban historians that, by the late 1920s
Baltimore, with its burgeoning industrial-commercial urban economy, was
essentially a Northern city. Others, such as social historian Rod Ryon (whose
inquiries into race, class, and gender in twentieth-century Baltimore are
indispensable to anyone studying the history of this city), disagree.

In a recent article, Ryon writes that "Early twentieth-century southern cities,
including Baltimore, were different from their northeastern and midwestern
counterparts" and that Baltimore "industry's resemblance to that of other southern
cities has gone largely unacknowledged ... the distinctly southern features of its
economy are seldom noticed."  Southern cities, Ryon proposes, were not
dominated by a single industry, transportation was more important to them than
production, and their workforces were dominated by "native" Black and white
workers rather than immigrants. Ryon's argument here raises important questions,
but is mistaken on several grounds. First, factually speaking, the differing profile
he suggests for Southern (including Baltimore) in contrast to Northern and
Midwestern industrial cities does not hold up well. Diverse industrial economies
were not uncommon among Northern cities, especially when cities in question have
access to a wide variety of raw materials due to commercial location. Nor were
diverse economies uniformly typical of the South, as the steel town of Birmingham
in 1930 attests. Also, while it is somewhat unclear what Ryon means by the
importance of transportation over production, it is hard to imagine cities for which
transportation was more important than Boston or New York. And while Ryon is