In 1908, the Society of the Pilgrims was founded, buttressed by the slogan, “Land of our Fathers! Ours to Preserve. Ours to Transmit.” The Society was created by Americans who could trace their family ancestry directly back to the British immigrants who landed in New England in the early 1600s. The Society declared that it sought to “perpetuat[e] the memory and [foster] and [promote] the principles and virtues of the Pilgrims.”(1)
And what sort of principles and virtues are we talking about? The Society of the Pilgrims settled on an ambitious agenda: “to promote…civic virtue…political equality, the supremacy of just laws, the value and sacredness of the ballot…and temperate and Godly living.”(1)
The Pilgrims were profoundly religious. In their time, the simple act of reading the Bible, and incorporating its teachings into daily life, was an expected and ingrained aspect of adult life.
The Pilgrims were certainly mindful of the Bible’s unambiguous position on wealth and greed.
1 Timothy 6:10 states, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”(2)
But of course, the Pilgrims were the newcomers to North America, as the continent they had just arrived in was already inhabited by tens of millions of Native Americans. Those original indigenous families had first settled in North America at least 13,000 years before the Pilgrims showed up.(3)
Over the decades, we know that things didn’t end well for the native people of North America. Consider the region we now understand to be the southeastern United States. In the modern states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, a massive and sophisticated civilization of indigenous people had been living for thousands of years prior to European arrival.(4)
By the early 1800s, the Creek tribe was a dominant indigenous community in the southeast. It would be at that point that the existential threat posed by the ever-expanding European-American population on the continent would reach a devastating and violent crescendo.(5) The Creek War of 1813-1814 would definitively turn the tide against the native people of the region.
One of America’s favorite war criminals, Andrew Jackson, led the charge to accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of indigenous people in America. Jackson was so good at the mass slaughter of Native Americans that he rose to great fame among White Americans at the time. In fact, White Americans were so enthusiastic about the mass murder Andrew Jackson helped carry out that they elected him President of the United States. Jackson’s victory over the Creeks in 1814 meant a huge bonus for White America. In the treaty that ended the war, a treaty created by and for the winners, the Creeks were forced to surrender 21 million acres of their territory. That meant control of over half of the entire state of Alabama, and a large part of Georgia as well.(5)
With the mission to exterminate indigenous people from the area nearly complete, White Americans flocked to the southeast. Eager to claim land freshly stolen from the Creeks and other tribes, the White population in the region grew steadily. In 1823, just nine years after the Creek War, a small new town was established in central Georgia. The town would be called Macon, named after an early American Congressman, Nathaniel Macon. Macon was from North Carolina. As a young man, he fought on the front lines of the Revolutionary War against the British. In peacetime, Macon served as a Representative and Senator.(6)
So this small town in Georgia was named after a statesman from North Carolina.(7) Why? Because many of Georgia’s new White residents had quickly migrated to this newly opened land from their original colonial settlements in North Carolina. Georgia and North Carolina, since at least the 1820s, have been connected by this shared piece of history.
A few decades later, with Macon’s primary economic engine being the cotton trade, life in the region became somewhat of a hellscape in the early 1860s. When the moment of moral truth came, the majority of the White people of Macon decided to double-down on their complicity in the most disgusting part of their culture. When pressed on the matter, the White people of Macon chose the death and destruction of their own community over simply abandoning the indefensible practice of slavery. Their personal desire to continue the practice of “owning” Black human beings kidnapped halfway across the world, and forced to work without pay, permanently, and under constant threat of sadistic violence, was apparently just too important to them to give up.
In order to defend their “right” to continue committing unspeakable evil for the love of money, the White people of Macon dug in deep. During the American Civil War, Macon served as the official arsenal of the Confederacy. Macon made the guns and the bullets used to murder Americans from the north who risked and gave their lives to put an end to the debauched culture so deeply entrenched in the hearts of the Confederate Army, that they’d concluded treason was better than morality.(8)
There is very little doubt that the White people of Macon in the 1860s likely told themselves, and told everyone around them, that they were good, upright, Christian people. But talk is cheap. Just because one publicly declares themselves to be a Christian, doesn’t in fact mean that person’s choices, priorities, and actions in real life actually align with the teachings of Christianity.
For what sort of Christian is a man, if his words are not matched by his deeds?
We’ve already reflected on one profound piece of Biblical wisdom, that
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” The sentence preceding that line, in 1 Timothy 6:9, states “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.”(2)
Is there a more appropriate response to the Confederate cause than this? For “love of money,” the American south’s entire economic, political and social order was based on the culturally accepted practice of wealthy White men orchestrating an immense network of human trafficking and the permanent enslavement of entire families who’d been ripped away from their homes and communities in west Africa. This is called “evil.” By the 1860s, the unbridled greed of the slaveholders of the American south, just as the Bible foretells, resulted in “destruction and perdition.”(2)
The practice of slavery is incompatible with Christian morality.
The raw pursuit of expanding one’s own personal wealth is also incompatible with Christian morality.
We now press forward, into the Georgia of the 1900s. In 1914, Augustus Bacon, a giant of the Confederacy passed away.(9) As a young man, Bacon fought in the Civil War in defense of his community’s desire to continue subjugating and brutally oppressing Black men, women and children, in order that people like him could financially profit off the human suffering they felt entitled to preserve.
After the war, many leaders of the racist and treasonous “cause” of the Confederacy were openly welcomed into prominent positions of leadership in the United States federal government. After Bacon volunteered to murder White northerners in defense of his desire to prolong the institution of slavery, he served for decades in the United States Congress. He was a member of the House of Representatives, and later the Senate.(9)
Bacon died in 1914, the year that World War I began in Europe. 1914 was also a half-century after the Confederate’s conclusive defeat in the Civil War. But 50 years after Black people in America had been legally freed from the practice of slavery, the evil inside Senator Augustus Bacon’s heart ran as deep as it ever had. As part of his will, Bacon left a plot of land to the city of Macon. As Bacon desired, a public park would be created for the community of Macon to enjoy. Oh, except if they were Black. Bacon specifically stipulated in his will, that this was to be a Whites Only park. The good, White, Christian people of Macon, Georgia, a half-century after the Civil War, solemnly honored Bacon’s last wish. The Whites Only park was named Baconsfield, in honor of the racist and treasonous man that the White Georgians of the time apparently respected dearly.(10)
Two years after Bacon died, a boy named David was born. As a young man, Bacon risked his life in order to help oppress the most vulnerable people in American society. By the time David was a young man in the early 1940s, he would risk his life in order to help liberate the most vulnerable people in a society far away from his own. When America entered World War II, David and many other young Americans signed up to fight the Nazis in Europe. David would serve with distinction in the United States Air Force. Then, after having been back home in Georgia for several years, David would once again risk his own life on behalf of his country. In the early 1950s, David fought in the Korean War as well.(11)
After returning to Georgia from the second war he’d fought in, David settled into civilian life. His new wife, Gervaise, was a school teacher. The two of them would both commit to long careers in public service. For decades, Gervaise and David served our country in the public-school system. Gervaise had already earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Georgia. She later went on to launch one of the very first gifted and talented programs in the entire state.(12)
Over the years, David rose to different leadership positions. He would become a Principal, and later a Superintendent.(11) As Superintendent of Houston County Schools in Georgia, David would find himself in what very well may have been the greatest challenge of his adult life. David was Superintendent of a school system in the state of Georgia during the 1960s and 1970s. This meant that David was thrust into managing one of the most emotionally-loaded and palpably hostile transitions in modern American society: desegregating the public schools.(12)
By presiding over this enormous and historically upending social change, David was virtually guaranteed to be on the receiving end of waves of hatred and anger coming at him from multiple angles. But of course, this toxicity mostly came from Georgia’s White community.
In the mid 1960s, the school district that David presided over, like many other districts in the region, adopted a “freedom of choice plan… allowing the option of [school] integration but not forcing it.”(12) The idea of such an introductory soft-opening of school integration was surely created to accommodate Georgia’s White community, which reacted to the news of integration with violent hostility. But the NAACP believed such an approach was simply too slow, possibly violating the standard that such changes needed to be executed with “all deliberate speed.” The NAACP sued Houston County Schools, overseen by David as Superintendent. Forced by a court order to expedite the process immediately, David led the charge to ensure the prompt integration of public schools in his part of Georgia.(13)
After their many decades of service to the youth of Georgia, David and Gervaise enjoyed a modest retirement. They’d chosen careers of meaningful public service, instead of careers chasing after the accumulation of personal wealth for its own sake. In her later years, Gervaise became passionate about her own family history. She even wrote a book on what she learned, preserving the family legacy for her children and grandchildren to come. It was amidst this process that Gervaise found like-minded self-historians who had organized themselves around shared aspects of their European ancestry. Among other such groups, Gervaise joined as a “member of the Georgia Pioneer Descendants, Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims, [and the] Colonial Dames XVII Century.”(14)
We opened this essay by learning about one of the groups that Gervaise became a part of in her later years. Through her enrollment in The Society of the Pilgrims, Gervaise sought to be a part of preserving the “principles and virtues of the Pilgrims.” Among the virtues impressed upon Gervaise was the commitment to “promote…civic virtue…political equality, the supremacy of just laws, the value and sacredness of the ballot…and temperate and Godly living.”(1)
One aspect of Gervaise and David’s life we haven’t gotten around to so far was their role as parents of a small family. In 1949, right before David would head off to war for the second time, the couple gave birth to a son. This son would go on to make his own mark on the people of Georgia, and over time, on the people of the United States as a whole.
The couple named their son David, after his father. The boy’s full name would be David Alfred Perdue Jr. We’re now going to examine the life of this man, referred to henceforward simply as Perdue.
Is Perdue a Christian man? Has Perdue lived his life in alignment with the values of his own parents? Of his own ancestral Pilgrim forefathers?
Let’s take an honest look. All throughout Perdue’s childhood and into his teenage years, Georgia remained among the worst states in America to be a Black person. In the 1960s, as Perdue was coming of age, he witnessed and participated in the Jim Crow culture that remained the law of the land at that time. A full 100 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, if Perdue wanted to hang out in Baconsfield park as a high school student, he was more than welcome to. However, at this point in his life, when Perdue was on the borderline of adulthood, Black high school students, and their entire families, remained subject to the credible threat of violence if they dared to endeavor into Baconsfield park, or any other racially segregated space for that matter. Perdue did not create the deep-seated racism that persisted in the culture in which he was raised. But that racism was undeniably a key pillar of the community and culture firmly impressed upon Perdue throughout his entire adolescence.
By 1968, Perdue was a legal adult. How exactly did this man conduct himself in the world? What was important to him? What did he value? Was he a man of integrity? Or was he a man of greed?
For starters, we know that Perdue and his family attend Wesley United Methodist Church in St. Simons, GA.(15)
Let’s consider a third passage from scripture that’s relevant to understanding men like Perdue. Proverbs 28:20 tells us that “A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”(2)
Perdue’s own parents were “faithful” people who dedicated their entire lives in the humble service of others. But as we are now about to see in exhausting detail, Perdue rejected the honorable path his parents modeled for him. Instead, Perdue became exactly the sort of man who “maketh haste to be rich.”
And even after he’d become fabulously rich, for Perdue, no amount of excessive personal wealth was ever enough.
When Perdue Sr became a young man, he volunteered to go fight the Nazis. When Perdue Jr became a young man (in the middle of the Vietnam War), he pursued a different sort of mission: putting himself on a professional track to help enormous corporations become more profitable to their shareholders.
Perdue spent the first twelve years of his adult life as a Management Consultant for a firm called Kurt Salmon Associates. In his own words, the core of what Perdue’s work consisted of over the course of these many years was “Helping footwear companies develop the ability to import shoes from Asia.”(16) Interesting, why exactly might Perdue have become so passionate about cheap sneaker imports from China? Let’s see if we notice any patterns in Perdue’s career choices moving forward.
Perdue Sr’s first job was fighting the Nazis in Europe. His second job was fighting the Communists in Korea. Perdue Jr’s first job was making sneaker sales even more profitable for the very small number of people at the very top of the first corporation he dedicated over a decade of his life to. His second job was similarly emotionally heavy. Next, Perdue joined the company Sara Lee, where he would devote himself to the mission of increasing the global sales of hot dogs, pastries, and condiments.(17)
Perdue served as senior vice president of Sara Lee. In 1994, the corporation announced that it would be "realigning production and distribution facilities throughout the world."(18) This is a fancy way of saying they’re going to start outsourcing. As in, Sara Lee is going to close down its existing factories in America and Europe, and instead will ship those jobs over to poorer countries overseas. This practice is common in many western corporations, because they’ve made an accurate calculation that it will be easier for them to exploit poor working people in China than it is for them to exploit poor working people in, say, Georgia.
Perdue made his personal priorities clear. He chose to work for Sara Lee in a senior management level, he was compensated generously for his work. And at that very time, in 1994, Sara Lee eliminated nearly 10,000 jobs. No less than four separate Sara Lee factories shut down in the state of Georgia alone. The plant in Cartersville, closed. The plant in Milledgeville, closed. The plant in Wrightsville, closed. The plant in Midway, closed. As a result of Sara Lee’s layoffs, well over 500 Georgians and their families became unemployed.(18)
After fighting on behalf of his country in two wars on two different continents, Perdue Sr returned home to Georgia in the 1950s. There, he would commit to his third job, one of the most important, most difficult and least financially lucrative career paths an American can pursue: teaching in our nation’s public schools.
The third job Perdue Jr opted into was helping to increase profits for a yet another corporation, one that sells men’s dress pants. In the mid 1990s, Perdue Jr scored yet another executive position at Haggar Clothing, as senior vice president of operations.(19) The damage that Perdue would do to the American worker in his tenure at the brand was swift and unforgiving.
With Perdue among the company’s top executive leadership, more American factories would be shuttered. The transfer of that labor over to poorer and less regulated countries was justified because it increased profitability for the small number of already wildly rich people like Perdue at the very top. In 1996, Haggar employed 4,300 Americans. In 1997, Perdue helped cut that down to 2,600.(19)
After many years as a classroom teacher, Perdue Sr’s fourth job was serving as the Principal of a public school in his community. Perdue Jr’s fourth job was dedicating himself to the project of persuading ever larger numbers of Black American teenagers to covet overpriced basketball shoes made cheaply in China.
According to the Charlotte Observer, “When [Perdue] joined Reebok in 1998, the sneaker giant had been in decline for years. Perdue earned raves for helping restore its profitability and market share.”(20) Indeed, corporate “profitability and market share” was clearly the guiding moral framework of David Perdue Jr’s life. He dedicated the prime years of his adulthood, decades of his life in fact, to one simple goal: helping the rich get richer.
By 2002, Perdue “was earning $600,000 a year at Reebok, with potential for $600,000 more in bonuses. The company also had committed to give him lucrative stock options, which could have netted him several million dollars in later years.”(20) But like most of the elite corporate jobs he’d pursue, the job at Reebok was just a means to an end for Perdue. Is anyone under the impression that this man, as an adult, was genuinely committed to the mission of hawking sneakers, junk food, or men’s pants? Of course not.
What we’re observing here is a man wholly committed to one thing: the never-ending expansion of his own personal, extravagant wealth.
Let us pause for a moment to remember 1 Timothy 6:9. The passage simply states, “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.”(2)
Perdue is exactly the type of man this passage describes. He is a man self-evidently consumed by his own desire to be rich. And a man driven by his own greed does not think twice about taking advantage of vulnerable people, as long as he can get away with it. In Perdue’s mind, the decision to close down completely functional American factories, where thousands of ordinary Americans worked, was simply the cost of doing business. Meanwhile, everyday Americans who used to work at those factories in Georgia and across the country, and the families they supported with those wages and healthcare benefits, would be completely and unnecessarily left to fend for their own survival.
Perdue Sr had five jobs throughout his long career in public service. His last role would be his biggest yet: Superintendent of Houston County Schools in Georgia. In 2002, Perdue Jr would abruptly ditch Reebok. He jumped at the chance to dedicate himself to yet another cause he had apparently long been passionate about: selling pillows. Oh, and a “headhunter offered a $1 million signing bonus…[Perdue] also got nearly $800,000 in…stock, plus options.”(20)
Perdue’s resume would continue to grow evermore random as the years went by. As long as the money was right, it seems Perdue was willing to sell himself to whomever the highest corporate bidder was at the moment. This time, he got to be CEO at Pillowtex, a textiles company based in North Carolina.
In 2014, Perdue publicly delivered his own revisionist historical account of his time at Pillowtex. To be fair, it is true that the company was already under financial duress at the time he took over. But here’s the real reason why he took the job, according to him, “My parents raised me to be the kind of leader that runs toward the burning building to try to help instead of running away from it and sitting on the curb and criticizing those that are trying to make a difference.”(21)
Interesting. So according to Perdue’s own version of events, the offer to receive a major promotion to CEO, plus the fact he’d be making millions of dollars had nothing to do with his decision to take the new job at Pillowtex. What he really cared about, was “trying to make a difference.” A noble endeavor indeed. Eager to serve as a true leader in his community, Perdue would now dedicate himself not merely to selling hot dogs, men’s pants, or sneakers. Like a real man of action, Perdue would now solemnly commit himself to running “toward the burning building.” And by that he means, helping yet another corporation increase their profit margins. This time for the mission to sell people more pillows.
In 2002, Perdue took over as CEO of Pillowtex. The company declared bankruptcy nine months later.(21)
As a result of Perdue’s visionary leadership at Pillowtex, over 7,650 American workers lost their jobs. Most of Perdue’s shuttered factories were in North Carolina, specifically in Cabarrus and Rowan counties. When this devastating news arrived, it soon became evident that Perdue’s management had caused the “biggest one-day job loss in the history of the state and the textile industry at the time.”(21)
Wow. Perdue’s leadership at Pillowtex sure sounds like it created a lot of hardship and devastation for the thousands of American workers whose factories were closed in North Carolina. Bummer. At the same time, “Perdue left with an almost $2 million buyout while the company could not even pay the pension plan of its workers.”(22) How’s that for the “kind of leader that runs toward the burning building to try to help instead of running away from it?”
After having cost thousands of hardworking Americans their jobs at Pillowtex, Perdue simply glided away from accountability on a generous Golden Parachute. Perdue then deftly steered his Gold Parachute away from mass pillow production. Yes, those heady days were now over for our Man of the People. Instead, Perdue chose to join the fight of another of America’s most pressing social problems: the burning need to sell greater amounts of Cheetos, Finishing Touch Flawless Hair Removers, and Party Plastic Princess Tiaras to poor Americans nationwide.(23)
Perdue decided to become CEO of Dollar General in 2003. By the time he left in 2007, he had certainly succeeded from the perspective of the elite, ultra-wealthy people at the very top of the company, such as himself. In his own telling, we’re sure to hear a lot about the “growth” Dollar General saw during these years. Under Perdue’s tenure, the corporation opened around 1,400 new stores. This also meant the corporation added almost 14,000 new jobs.(24)
Well, new jobs huh? Sounds great! America loves to hear about new jobs popping up. We tend to think that a job is a job is a job, and that if a new job emerges, that must be an inherently good thing. But is it? The overwhelming majority of new jobs that Perdue created at Dollar General were in the role of “Sales Associates.” “Sales Associate” is a euphemistic term for the least important person in a large organization, just like “Private” in the US Army. Both of these clever terms simply mean that, if you find yourself working in a role like this, you will quickly learn that you are at the absolute bottom of the internal Totem Pole. You will be trusted the least, you will be valued the least, you will always be easily replaceable, you will do whatever you are told, you will be compensated less than anyone else, and you will often do the hardest, riskiest, and most unpleasant work while being expected to maintain a smile on your face at all times.
So, what do we know about all these happy campers that Dollar General was hiring under CEO Perdue? We actually have to start by understanding a bit about poverty. The most recent comprehensive data we have on American poverty comes from 2019. According to the United States Census Bureau, the poverty level for a family with two adults and one child was $17,621.(25)
Right now, in 2020, “When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Sales Associate at Dollar General can expect to make an average annual salary of $17,752.”(26) This means that if the father of a small family worked full-time as a Sales Associate at Dollar General, while his wife took care of their baby at home, the family could expect to make approximately $131 over the official poverty-line in America.
When Perdue took over as CEO of Dollar General in 2003, he publicly explained his personal inspiration to join such a progressive institution. He boldly stated, "Dollar General is a great company with clear mission and purpose - making life better for its customers.”(27) This is 100% bullshit. How do we know that? Well, another word for “customers” is “people,” or even “human beings.” And who exactly are these customers that Perdue is so deeply committed to helping?
As it happens, Dollar General has a very specific customer demographic. There are three main things you need to know about people who shop at Dollar General: they are mostly Black, they mostly do not have a college education, and they mostly live in poverty.(28) Please spare us the disingenuous, sanctimonious garbage about having a “mission and purpose” to “making life better” for the most vulnerable people in our country. If Perdue actually gave half a shit about “making life better” for Black Americans living in poverty, he surely could have found a better angle than dedicating himself to selling them more Cheetos, Finishing Touch Flawless Hair Removers, and Party Plastic Princess Tiaras.(23)
Why didn’t Perdue, a man dedicated to “mission and purpose,” help finance and build better public schools in the neighborhoods where he opened new Dollar General stores? Why didn’t he build affordable new housing units? Why didn’t he work to find a way to bring adequate healthcare coverage to his impoverished, Black customers? Why didn’t he build more reliable childcare options in these neighborhoods? Why didn’t he introduce microfinancing, or clean-energy job training?
The answer, of course, is painfully simple. David Perdue Jr is not a man of integrity. If he has to lie to the public to make himself appear to be a better man than he actually is, he’s shown us time and again that he’s not above doing it. As CEO of Dollar General, Perdue’s mission was to increase corporate profit margins for people like himself. In the process of doing so, his business model relied upon the multi-layered exploitation of the poorest and most vulnerable people in America. The Perdue plan was straightforward: sell more cheap plastic stuff to Black people in poverty. As CEO, Perdue ensured that his thousands of new “Sales Associates” were paid as little as Dollar General could legally get away with, thus ensuring that even the largest segment of his own company’s employees would perpetually remain in poverty themselves, even though they worked full-time jobs in America.
One final nail in the coffin here regarding Perdue’s performance as CEO of Dollar General. In 2006, still at the helm of one of America’s Largest Cheap-Plastic-Crap Peddling Operations, Perdue’s leadership managed to get the corporate giant sued. The matter at stake in the lawsuit was over an abundance of evidence of discrimination against female store managers at Dollar General locations all across the country. Although these women had the exact same job title and responsibilities as men in the same role at Dollar General, well over 2,000 women came forward to expose the fact that they were being paid significantly less than their male counterparts when Perdue was CEO of the company.(29)
President Truman famously kept a sign on his Oval Office desk which read, “The Buck Stops Here.” Turns out that Perdue disagrees with President Truman on this point. As a man of integrity, Truman accepted that he alone was ultimately accountable for the tough decisions he was responsible for making as President. The kinds of difficult decisions leaders at the top have to make sometimes bring about unintended and negative consequences for those downstream. The point is, whether any harm was actively intended or not, a real leader accepts responsibility and ownership for their decisions, and the consequences their decisions bring about for the lives of the people they wield enormous power over. A real leader does this not only when it’s easy. A real leader does this even, and especially when it is difficult.
As CEO of Dollar General, Perdue took the opposite approach. When asked about the female store manager lawsuit brought against the company he led in 2006, Perdue said, “There was no wrongdoing there…it was less than 2,000 people. We had upwards of 70,000 employees at that company.”
That’s right, Perdue’s answer was extremely bold. Perdue was the CEO of a major corporation subject to a nationwide lawsuit backed by the accounts of over 2,000 women who were ultimately his own employees. Found to have been overseeing a workplace culture of widely ingrained sexual-discrimination, Perdue simply brushed off the good word and lived experience of the thousands of women whose poverty-level wages he himself helped set, and that he himself financially benefited from. But don’t worry about it, Perdue tells us as he practically rolls his eyes, it was “only” 2,000 women that were discriminated against in his company because of their gender. “Several years after Perdue left Dollar General, the company paid the [female] employees a settlement of almost $19 million.”(29)
After he left yet another American corporate leadership position in disgrace, Perdue decided to try his luck overseas. This time, he’d take on a “senior consulting role at Indian chemical textile conglomerate Gujarat Heavy Chemicals Ltd.” Currently, Perdue refuses to comment on the nature of his role in the Indian chemical textile conglomerate which he dedicated three years of his adult life to.(30) That’s always a good sign.
Gervaise and David Perdue Sr lived their lives guided by a moral framework that made sense to them. They dedicated themselves to careers in unglamorous public service. They never became rich, because they presumably never desired to become rich. This was a couple who truly lived their own values. As grown adults, they were guided to commit themselves to a lifestyle of “temperate and godly living,” just as their family’s Pilgrim forefathers had done three centuries before.
As an adult, David Perdue Jr made the decision to abandon the honorable path that his family and his ancestors had set for him to follow.
His parents and many of his own ancestors committed their lives to self-restraint, and to the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable among them.
David Perdue Jr rejected this Christian path. Instead, he committed himself to his deep lust for money, and to the deep-seated and never-enough culture of corporate greed he found himself addicted to. Perdue, and men like Perdue, become obscenely rich by exploiting poor working Americans and poor working people in developing nations worldwide.
Proverbs 22:22-23 says, “Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted…For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.”(2)
In 2005, while still CEO of Dollar General, Perdue was subject to a legal deposition. He was asked about his lifelong “experience with outsourcing.”
Perdue responded honestly, "Yeah, I spent most of my career doing that."(16)
In 2014, the state of Georgia learned that David Perdue Jr planned to run as a candidate for the United States Senate. This was a confusing career pivot for a man who’d dedicated the prime decades of his entire adult life to selling hot dogs, sneakers, and Party Plastic Princess Tiaras.
When asked about his decades of experience increasing profit margins for corporate shareholders by eliminating good paying jobs for ordinary Americans, Perdue was crystal clear. He flatly stated, “I’m proud of my career.”
Sources Cited
1. Society of the Pilgrims
2. The King James Study Bible (2nd Edition). (2013). Thomas Nelson.
3. Native American settlement in North America
4. Mississippian indigenous people in American southeast
5. Andrew Jackson and the Creek War 1813-1814
6. North Carolina Congressman Nathaniel Macon
7. Origin of town name of Macon, Georgia
8. Macon serves as arsenal for Slavery Enthusiasts in Civil War
9. Augustus Bacon, Confederate soldier and US Congressman
10. Augustus Bacon’s last racist wish comes true thanks to the White people of Macon, Georgia in early 1900s
11. Perdue Sr fights in WWII and Korea
12. Gervaise Perdue’s distinguished career in Georgia public education
13. Integration of public schools in Georgia 1960s-1970s
14. Gervaise Perdue studies her family heritage
15. Perdue Jr’s family church
16. Perdue Jr’s 1st job: 12 years making American footwear corporations more profitable for shareholders
17. Perdue Jr’s 2nd job: selling junk food at Sara Lee
18. Sara Lee ships American jobs overseas while Purdue is one of their top executives
19. Perdue Jr’s 3rd job: eliminating American jobs and shipping them overseas for Haggar Clothing
20. Perdue Jr’s 4th job: Increasing “profitability and market share” for Reebok
21. Perdue Jr’s 5th job: As CEO of Pillowtex, he runs the company into the ground in under one year, resulting in over 7,000 workers being laid off in North Carolina
22. Perdue Jr’s $2 million Golden Parachute as compensation for bankrupting Pillowtex and putting over 7,000 Americans out of work
23. Perdue Jr’s selfless sacrifice to sell Cheetos, Facial Hair Removers and Plastic Princess Tiaras to poor Black Americans
24. New jobs and new stores added by Perdue Jr as CEO of Dollar General
25. US poverty levels according to Census Bureau
26. Dollar General pays poverty-level wages to majority of employees
27. Perdue Jr claims to be drawn to Dollar General because of the company’s “mission and purpose” to “make life better”
https://newscenter.dollargeneral.com/news/dollar-general-corporation-names-david-a-perdue-jr-ceo.htm
28. Perdue Jr enriches himself selling cheap junk to people living in poverty
29. Perdue Jr’s Dollar General sued for sexual-discrimination against thousands of female store managers
30. Perdue Jr conceals his 3-year career at an Indian chemical textile conglomerate
31. 2014 Republican Senate candidate Perdue Jr says, “I’m proud of my career.”
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