Lichtenstein traces a history of the Southern antebellum labor economy, focusing on its convict labor penal system. Lichtenstein cites LeRoy's film specifically, arguing that the film (and Burns’s autobiography) position southern chain gangs against modernity. However, chain gangs represented the South’s attempt to participate in northern economic industrialism. Chain gangs developed roads and infrastructures, enriching the south’s economy and expanding its participation in American culture and accelerated networks of communication. Thus, Lichtenstein "joins a growing number of studies that reject the dichotomy between a modern and antimodern South, and instead seek to link the region’s most appalling features to the process of modernization itself” (xvi). Chain gangs facilitated the South's response to economic and cultural pressures posed by the nation's dominant industries. Thus, the financial corruption and penal brutality which the chain gangs made conspicuous to the nation represent the South’s efforts to progress and to modernize. 

If mounting Depression social anxieties also threatened Hollywood's cultural and economic dominance in 1932, then Warner Brothers' total vilification of the chain gangs, which it depicts as embodying a barbaric and regressive South, suggests a financial motivation for the studio's misreading of the Southern penal system. Of course, markets incentives motivated every aspect of Hollywood production, from Warner Brothers’ propagandization of Chain Gang as a uniquely subversive film – to lure audiences who tended to shy away from overtly political films in 1932 – to the studios’ collusion with FDR to circumvent antitrust proceedings. However, Lichtenstein’s situation of the film within a more complex modernity dialogue puts pressure on conservative Jack Warner’s selection of this story as a vehicle for conveying to the nation his studio’s radical politics. By denying technology and modern industry’s implication in a variety of problems associated with Great Depression society, WB propagandized commercial cinema as a revolutionary alternative to sites of purported cultural backwardness which are in reality much more complex than a Hollywood film reveals.