Arkansas in Modern America since 1930 by Ben F. Johnson III

Author:Ben F. Johnson III [Johnson, Ben F. III]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781610756723
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2019-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

I. Uneven Progress: Corporate Growth on the Edge of the Sun Belt

“We’re the Sun Belt now.”

In the 1970s scholars and commentators contrasted the growing prosperity of a region sweeping from the Carolinas to Southern California with the woes of the slumping industrial Midwest. The Sunbelt locales attracted not only retirees escaping Northern winters but also migrants streaming into cities swelled by defense industry dollars, surging energy production, and manufacturers turning to technology rather than workers. This recognition of an unmistakable socioeconomic Southern rim stretching to the West underscored that neither the traditional American South endured as an enclosed region nor was prosperity universal throughout the old Confederacy. Overviews of the Sunbelt slotted Arkansas on the margins of the region, both in terms of geography and economic dynamics. The state was better off but still had considerable ground to make up to match national benchmarks.

Arkansas’s population growth failed to match the overall Sunbelt climb through the last half of the twentieth century. Arkansans continued to benefit from the favorable balance of payments between outgoing federal taxes and incoming federal spending, but the slice of the state’s economy tied to Cold War operations and bases was not on par with agriculture or food and clothing production. If the ascent of the metropolis in the Sunbelt was indisputable to commuters in sprawling Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, or San Diego, Arkansas remained a majority rural state until the 1970s (the 1970 state census actually recorded a 50/50 split between town and country; nationally, 73.6 percent of the population was listed as urban). The increase in urban Arkansans slowed in the subsequent decades leading up to 2000, and by that year only 13 of the 102 incorporated municipalities with a population of 2,500 (the boundary between rural and urban for the census bureau) reached or exceeded 25,000 residents.

On the other hand, economic reports that measured Arkansas with 1970s powerhouses such as Texas, Florida, and California obscured the extent and rate of change in the state since World War II. While the United States had become urban by 1920 because of the flood of immigrants seeking factory jobs, Arkansas towns and cities grew in population by two-thirds between 1950 and 1970 despite the continued out-migration of its citizens. The countryside, of course, was emptier. During the 1960s, the state exceeded the national growth rates in personal income, increased employment, value added by manufacturing, residential construction, retail sales, and, not surprisingly, agricultural cash receipts. Arkansas farmers prospered even more dramatically during the following decade as they embraced mechanization and relished a shift in federal farm policy that rewarded planting more acres. Between 1970 and 1978 statewide total net farm income increased 279 percent.

The chronic inflation that fueled soaring crop prices in the 1970s combined with festering unemployment to curdle the American economy. While a number of Sunbelt states relied upon new technologically oriented industries to weather the storm, agriculture buoyed Arkansas and advanced the state’s century-long quest to “catch up” with the rest of the nation. Arkansas’s marked

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.