Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 by Cobb James C.;

Author:Cobb, James C.; [Cobb, James C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 “Cotton Mill Colic” by David McCarn, © 1930, by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed.

5. Industrial Development and Reform in the Post-World War II South

Even in the Sunbelt era, most southern industries maintained their labor orientation, but much of the growth of the post-World War II period had resulted from the expansion of better-paying, faster-growing industries whose managers and executives expected more from a plant location than access to cheap labor. In order to attract investments from these more desirable firms, states and communities were expected to support social and political reforms as well as improvements in public facilities and institutions. Moreover, the managers and executives of these firms would presumably insist on continuing efforts to improve the quality of life at the local and state level. Thus more rapid economic progress seemed both dependent on and supportive of efforts to promote reform in the South.

Observers had long insisted that the real solutions to the South’s economic problems were not solely economic but social, political, and institutional as well. Writing in 1960, William H. Nicholls argued that the South’s slow growth rate was closely related to a number of regional deficiencies including the persistence of agrarian values, a rigid social hierarchy, an undemocratic political structure, a generally weak concept of social responsibility, and extreme conformity of thought and behavior.

Nicholls attributed these deficiencies to the persistence of the rigid rural substructure that dominated southern society even in the post-World War II period. He stressed the absence of an independent middle class whose values would have challenged the traditionalism that held the South back. He attributed the absence of a dynamic bourgeoisie to “the glacial slowness of southern urbanization,” the persistence of antiurban political structures, the rural and small-town character of much of southern industry, and the absence of a challenge to the existing middle class from the low-income, working-class population. For Nicholls and others a self-reinforcing principle emerged—a social and political environment more reflective of middle-class values would result in more rapid growth, which in turn would produce a social and political environment more compatible with middle-class values. As used in this assumption, middle-class values were actually “northern” middle-class values, and the presumption was that the effort to bring southern society more in line with them would create pressure for change so intense that even the South’s calcified social and political structure would be unable to withstand it.

Arguing that economic progress went hand-in-hand with social advancement, observers urged state and local development organizations to sponsor the reforms necessary to bring living conditions, educational opportunities, political practices, and public facilities and institutions in the South up to par with those elsewhere in the nation. A major problem for many small towns and their outlying areas was their physical appearance. Ramshackle buildings, unpaved streets, sidewalks, and roads, and the generally neglected appearance of many residential areas, both urban and rural, had long made the South seem to outsiders every bit as backward and savage as Erskine Caldwell, H. L. Mencken, and other critics had described it.

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