The Countryside Encircling the City

"Because of agricultural modernization, there were numerous farmers' daughters and seasonal agricultural workers happy to earn a regular paycheck by working in retail. Organized labor had been notably unsuccessful in organizing the South, so Walton did not have to worry about unions. And both his workforce and clientele came from the same relatively homogeneous population. Most of the local black population had fled after a wave of brutal race riots in the 1910s and '20s, so the Southern Plains were almost exclusively white when Walton began his business. Ironically, this troubled past meant that Wal-Mart was the rare major chain store to survive the 1960s without having been embroiled in protests over integration. The region was also overwhelmingly Protestant, and the store came to reflect the socially conservative, Christian culture of its home base. To this day, the company still recruits future executives from a network of small evangelical colleges in the South and nurtures them through the company hierarchy. It has banned from its magazine racks not only Playboy but also Rolling Stone because it was deemed inappropriate for children. And the store's prominent displays were credited by the publishers of Left Behind, a series of apocalyptic Christian thrillers set in the immediate aftermath of the Rapture, with making the books bestsellers."

In The Nation, Jefferson Decker reviews Nelson Lichtenstein's The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.