Defense Boom in Dixie

Southern businessmen last week looked straight at a big question mark: did the defense program mean the industrialization of the South? Under the mild Southern winter, the defense boom was shooting up faster than anywhere else in the U. S. From Georgia's Tobacco Roads through the Mississippi Delta out to the oil and cattle country in West Texas, there was many a town which had doubled in population since last spring's census, many a village which had multiplied so many times over that no one could keep track. New towns had sprung up where none had been before. Farmers left their land to work on construction at wages up to $90 a week; some of them made more money in a single month than they were used to making in a whole year.

The South was a-clatter with new building. Its 1940 construction was $1,534,350,000, an all-time high; 1941 would be even bigger. Chosen because of its climate and cheap land for 60% of the nation's 100-odd big new military camps, the South was making money fast out of building them, out of feeding and entertaining the soldiers who arrived daily.

Pay rolls bounced from one merchant's cash register to another; although retail trade was up all over the U. S., the in crease was greater in the South (12-20%) than anywhere else. In some places, the South had almost more prosperity than it could stand. But was it building up a permanent industry? Or was it a retail trade jag, with only a hangover to look forward to?

To a section which President Roosevelt had called "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem," the answer was critical. Southern chambers of commerce have preferred to call their country "the Nation's No. 1 industrial frontier," but behind either phrase were simple facts which everyone knew. The National Emergency Council's famous 1938 report on Southern economic conditions had made them as plain as the side of a barn; while the South had immense natural wealth, its people were the poorest in the Nation; until it had industries of its own, it would remain a backwoods colonial economy.

Camp Towns. Alexandria nestles behind a levee on the Red River in the middle of Louisiana. On hills bordering the river valley near by, five Army camps were going up last week. In last spring's census, Alexandria had a population of 27,066. By last week this figure had jumped to somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000. Construction of the camps had employed 25,000 men regularly since last September; in one peak week 30,000 were at work. Rooming houses and small hotels had waiting lists twice as big as their capacities. Some of them were turning over their rooms three times a day, renting them for eight hours of sleep.

Everywhere that there was a big camp going up, there was an Alexandria in the South. In Florida, 15,000 men were throwing up a tent-city at Camp Blanding (for 75,000 soldiers) on a flat stretch of white sand 48 miles by automobile from Jacksonville. Some 3,500 of the workmen poured into Starke (normal population: 1,480), eight miles from the camp. Starke's rents jumped from $19-25 to $50-$60. A waitress paid her boss $5 a week to sleep in a restaurant kitchen. Land around the camp which once sold for $15 an acre began selling for $15 a front foot.

Jacksonville's merchants cashed in on pay rolls both at Camp Blanding and at their own new $25,000.000 Naval Air Base (for 8,000-10,000 men). The city's bank clearings topped $1.000,000,000 last year for the first time since the Florida boom of the '20s. Old residents complained that Negro cooks and maids, whom they had paid $4-$7; a week, were quitting to work for families of Army and Navy officers at $10-$12 a week. The sporting houses on Jacksonville's drab Houston Street expanded their personnel by 200.

Into such spectacular activity, sober-minded Southerners could read little long-term meaning. The money poured out for construction of the camps made a mighty splash in boarding houses, restaurants, saloons, movie houses, dance halls, filling stations and ice-cream stands. But once the camps are built the jobs will be gone. Soldiers' pay rolls will keep retail trade bouncing along, but if & when the emergency ends the soldiers will leave too. For a South which needs the tools and factories of modern industry, abandoned dance halls will solve no problems.

The Case of Birmingham. There was more hope for the South in booms like that at Birmingham, Ala., whose steel mills were still operating at 100% capacity last week and expanding too (TIME, Nov. 25). Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. will soon make 140-inch plate (for shipbuilding) for the first time. To crack a coke bottleneck, T. C. I. has built 73 new ovens. The Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co. planned to reopen 87 old beehive ovens unused for over 20 years.

In Alabama's Muscle Shoals area, northwest of Birmingham, the Reynolds Metals Co. is building a $23,500,000 aluminum plant and a $17,500,000 rolling mill. Planned for the Republic Steel Corp. plant at Gadsden is a $6,000,000 addition to forge 105-mm. anti-aircraft shells. Also in the blueprint stage are a $12,800,000 underground ammunition storage area at Anniston, a $47,997,000 powder plant and $15,000.000 powder-bag loading plant at tiny Childersburg (population: 515).

Childersburg's Mayor H. D. Wilson, alarmed by prosperity's prospective effect-on his village's housing, water, sewage and traffic problems, appealed to Governor Frank Dixon for help. Said he: "Our resources are totally inadequate. ... If we aren't prepared for it, this thing can ruin us instead of helping us."

The Birmingham area's boom was advertised last week by a thousand plumes of smoke hanging over its valley. Its boom was definitely beyond the beer, ice cream and rooming-house class. But Birmingham has been the South's No. 1 industrial promise for nearly 70 years, and expansion of its steel capacity is nothing new. Aluminum plants are more exciting: not only do they look permanent, but the Reynolds plant will give Alcoa (which is also expanding its Tennessee Valley capacity) its first real competition in ingot production. But to many Birmingham businessmen, anti-aircraft shells, powder and shell loading looked like stimulants that would soon wear off. Asking themselves what a powder plant could be used for in peacetime, they found no answer.

Ships and Textiles. Promising industrially was the South's share of the nation's shipbuilding bulge. Southern yards extending from Virginia's Newport News all the way around the Gulf Coast to Orange, Tex. had received some $1,250,000,000 in orders: almost $1,000,000,000 for the Navy, the rest for the Maritime Commission and private interests. Just the list of new yards made heady reading. The one at Orange was a brand-new $5,000,000 Navy project preparing to go on three 48-hour shifts a week to turn out twelve destroyers (costing $97,200,000). To build 75 of the standardized 7,500-ton freighters, under President Roosevelt's new 200 emergency ship program, yards were under construction at Houston, New Orleans and Wilmington, N. C. At Mobile, Ala., new Gulf Shipbuilding Co. yards were working on their first contract (four cargo ships worth about $12,000,000). Norfolk, Va. had a newcomer in Welding Shipyards, Inc. (starting off with a $4,000,000 tanker).

On the basis of post-World War I performance, the South could expect to see many of its now bustling yards shut down to rot after the emergency passed. But in 1941. past performances were a poor guide. The U. S. was committed to a two-ocean Navy, for the first time in its history. Quite possibly the nation would not soon again let its merchant marine decline to the decrepit state it was in at the outbreak of World War II--80% of its vessels obsolete or on the verge. With both Navy and Maritime Commission committed to a three-coast building policy, the South looked to substantial shipyard payrolls for years to come.

The South's big textile industry (with 77% of the nation's capacity) also feels the defense spur. Up to last September (when contracts were last broken down by factory areas) Southern mills had received $19,127,000 worth of orders from the Army and Navy, 40% of the total. With civilian consumption up as well, these mills will produce more goods and employ more workers this year than ever before in their history.

Some new industries cropped up too. Texas got a $7,000,000 airplane factory at Grand Prairie, a $10,000,000 airplane assembly plant at Garland, a plant to assemble four-motored Army bombers at Fort Worth. Dow Chemical Co. is spending $15,000,000 on a plant at Freeport, Tex. for extracting magnesium from Gulf water. Manufacture of toluol (for TNT) from petroleum was begun by Shell Oil Co. at its Houston refinery; a new $10,760,000 toluol plant was also under construction at Baytown, Tex. by Humble Oil. Another defense-born baby of the oil industry was synthetic rubber: Standard Oil Co. of Louisiana had a $1,000,000 buna plant under construction at Baton Rouge, and Hydrocarbon Chemical & Rubber Co. will complete a butadiene plant at Borger, Tex. next month.

The balance sheet on the defense program's long-term significance to the South was still ambiguous this week. Some Southerners were frankly pessimistic. As they viewed the figures, the South was on the short end, getting the cantonments and the powder plants, while the solid, lasting business went to the industrial North. Some were even resentful; they thought the South had been passed over shabbily when defense contracts were handed out. The South had $1,530,898,441 in defense contracts by the middle of last month; the rest of the nation had $9,784,958,092. Such contracts were undoubtedly going first to those best prepared to fill them; and whatever else the South had, it was short on skilled labor and machine tools.

For years the South, in attempting to in dustrialize, pulled itself up by its own boot straps. Absentee land ownership and tenant farming perpetuated the ruinous one-crop system and discouraged the diversification of agriculture which the South needs to save its soil and feed its own people. Lack of industrialization denied its people a chance to learn industrial skills, and lack of trained workmen hampered industrialization.

Now Southerners like Donald Comer, head of Birmingham's big Avondale Mills (TIME, Feb. 10), see one way the South may permanently benefit even from a mere ice-cream-and-powder-mill boom. Most of the camp construction work is done by farmers, for big wages. Comer hopes they will use the money to buy the farms on which they have been tenants heretofore, and to improve buildings and equipment. This would give the South a new standard of farm income, a shift from cotton and tobacco to food crops, a permanently increased purchasing power. The South also is getting a chance now to train workers; even when the shell plants fold up, the new supply of trained men will be an invitation to new industries.

Furthermore, the South had already be gun to industrialize before defense came along. From 1935 to 1937, while the number of manufacturing establishments in other States was declining, the South's total increased slightly. (Among the newcomers: kraft pulp & paper, soap, building materials, chemicals). The South already obtains 260% more wealth from its factories than from its farms. Even if defense does not complete the industrialization of the South overnight, no one could doubt that it would give a push in the right direction--the direction in which the South was already going.

*Radford, Va. (pre-Boom pop. 6,898), where some 10,000 men are building a powder plant.

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