The Enlightened Revolution

The Old South, the land of cotton, sharecropping and mortgages, is the fastest changing region of the U.S. From the southern Atlantic seaboard west to Arkansas and Louisiana,* trim, modern factories have sprung up in the cities, the small towns and the open fields. Since the beginning of World War II, industry has invested billions in new Southern plants, put 2,000,000 Southerners on new, steady payrolls, and started the dynamics of history's first enlightened industrial revolution.

A Georgia Corpse. The big change came with express-train momentum, but it was a long time getting started. The plight of the old Cotton South was well illustrated by Henry Grady, managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution. To a Boston audience in 1889, he described the funeral of a "one-gallus" man in Pickens County, Ga. Said Grady:

"They cut through solid marble to make his grave, and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburgh. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. They buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati. The South didn't furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground."

By 1920, the South's industrial revolution had begun--but in the ugly classical pattern that was set a century before in the textile mills of England. Cotton mills moved south to take advantage of hand-to-mouth labor conditions. The "lint-heads," as cotton-mill workers were called, huddled together in drab mill villages, chronically in debt to the company store. They worked a 55-to 60-hour week for around $15 (as compared with a 48-to 54-hour week in New England for about $19).

In the '30s, this classical agony of industrial birth came to a halt. The New Deal put a floor under wages, a ceiling on hours and gave organized labor enough encouragement to worry Southern mill owners. At the same time, U.S. capitalism itself was undergoing basic changes of attitude and method. More & more industries discovered that well-paid employees did better work and bought a lot more of everybody's products. It is the South's good fortune that the second phase of its industrial expansion comes in a period of enlightened industrial relations unprecedented in history.

Fiery Crossroads. What happened in Camden, S.C. is an example of the new kind of industrialization. In 1946, Camden's townspeople grew curious when small groups of tight-lipped engineers, labor specialists, tax experts, lawyers and power analysts began dropping in from "the North." The visitors would take samplings through the length and breadth of Kershaw County, then fly mysteriously back whence they came.

It wasn't until two years later that Camden discovered that E. I. du Pont de Nemours had picked the town as the site for a $17 million plant for processing Orion, a new synthetic fiber.

There was only one leading citizen of Camden who objected. He warned that the coming of Du Pont would ruin the town's winter-resort business. He wrote a letter asking Du Pont to stay away. When his fellow townsmen found out, three carloads of young bloods roared over to the man's house and--in a unique variation of a waning Southern custom--burned an oil-soaked cross on his front lawn.

By the spring of 1950, a handsome, air-conditioned Du Pont plant was ready to operate. Of the 950 employees, about half came from the town, half from the surrounding cotton land. One of the transplanted farmers was Cleatus Threatt, then 25, a World War II veteran whose 65 acres of sandy cotton land were mired in mortgages. One day in May 1950, he was astride his tractor, plowing under a hail-ruined cotton crop, when a friend ran from the neighborhood telephone to tell him that Du Pont had accepted his application for a job. Cleatus had never worked in a factory in his life.

Out of the Mire. Like most of the South's farmers, he turned out to be good at it. Du Pont put him through a two-month training course, then set him to work as a laboratory technician testing batches of raw materials. In 18 months, he missed only twelve hours of work. His pay climbed from $1 an hour to $1.62 ("I make more now in a week at the plant than I used to make in a month on the farm"). Fortified by this certain income, he kept the farm and bought another 145 acres of better land, built a new seven-room frame house, and bought enough fertilizer to push his cotton and tobacco to record yields. He began to plan a cattle-raising venture on the side.

The revolution brought political as well as economic changes to Camden. The town's voters went to the polls and turned out their old-line politicians, voted in an efficient city-manager government. They chose for their mayor Henry Savage Jr., a 48-year-old lawyer who had worked hard to bring new industry to Camden. Old forms of negligence vanished under new forms of efficiency (sample: investigators found that a cottonseed plant had been drawing off unmetered city water for 20 years). Camden's municipal bonds, which had been discounting at 4% and 5%, gained a Class i rating: the latest batch discounted at 2%.

Out of the new city and county tax revenue and new efficiency came a new junior high school, enlargement of Camden's six other school buildings, three new school cafeterias, and plans for a new Negro high school. Camden added Pontiac, Nash, Oldsmobile and Cadillac agencies, two new drive-in theaters, three new furniture stores, a radio station, supermarkets, a fourth farm-implement agency, and its first pawnshop. The town's white churches noted a 37% increase in membership (the Episcopal Church was highest: 52%) and paid off most of their debts. Contractors put up nearly 1,000 new houses and apartment units. New sewer lines prompted the removal of 675 outdoor privies. Even Camden's Confederate Monument, a 12-ft. marble reminder of the last Northern invasion, was transplanted from its old stand in the middle of Broad Street to a new, less trafficked site in the park.

New Whirl. Camden's changes have only begun. By mid-1952, Du Pont will complete an additional $25 million expansion of its Orion plant (one of 20 Du Pont plants in nine Southern states), will hire about 1,900 more workers, and start Camden's spiral whirling again by paying out an additional $7,300,000 a year in wages.

Among the factors in the South's industrial growth are cheap electric power from TVA and private utilities, natural gas piped from Louisiana and Mississippi, and a lowering of Southern freight rates, which used to be much higher than in the Northeast and Midwest.

Industry draws industry. Each new payroll gave the South more money to spend. Northern manufacturers had to decide whether it was cheaper to feed this market by freight or by a new branch plant. Ford moved an assembly plant into Atlanta, General Motors began building Chevrolets, then Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and Buicks in Atlanta too. Purchasing power brought refrigerator plants, refrigerator plants brought enameling plants. Dairy processors and meat packers came along as Southern workers began eating higher & higher on the hog. An estimated 14% of all U.S. industry now lies in the Southeastern U.S.

Contrary to legend, most of the big corporations which have recently built Southern plants were not primarily searching for cheap labor. Some Southern wages are still lower than Northern, but the gap is sure to narrow. Southern labor offers employers some other, solider advantages. The Southern labor pool is deep. (Mechanical cotton pickers, for instance, and other labor-saving farm machinery are expected to displace 2,000,000 field hands by 1965; many of them will be available for factory work.) The South's labor population is young and quick to learn. Employers who complain that they have to scrape the bottom of the labor barrel in the North find they can pick, choose and train the brightest of young Southerners.

Glad Hand. The Southern glad hand has been quick to welcome industrial prospects. In 1936, Mississippi embarked on the "Balance Agriculture with Industry" plan which gave state assistance to local communities so they could build plant facilities. In return, the companies that moved in were supposed to maintain a minimum level of employment for about ten-years. Nearly all Southern states borrowed some variation of this technique, or offered special tax reductions to help new factories get going. Favorite targets are industries which employ lots of people, e.g., the shoe factories (Arkansas got eleven in three years), and garment plants (heaviest in Tennessee).

Port Wentworth, Ga. built a new industrial water plant to attract the Southern Paperboard company. Natchez, Miss, "clarified" the state stream pollution law to get the Johns-Manville insulation board plant. In Greenville, Tenn., some schools joined in educating the populace in the art of dairy farming to help the Pet Milk Co. build up a milk supply for its new processing factory.

Thus far in the revolution, the Negro is still the stepchild, although he is often an indirect beneficiary. Northern corporations, shunning discrimination in their home plants, usually yield to local pressure and restrict Negroes to menial labor. There are notable exceptions. In Memphis, the International Harvester Co. flatly announced that it would hire Negroes without discrimination as to type of job and with equal pay. Out of 2.425 production and maintenance employees, 641 are Negroes.

Industrialization and relative prosperity is stemming the tide of Southerners moving North. Southern college graduates are staying home. Scientific research and executive management will inevitably fall into the hands of young Southerners.

The South's new industry is there to stay. If the U.S. economy continues to expand, the South will stay in the forefront of the parade. If the national economy deflates, the South's new factories will be among the last to sag, because they are among the newest and most efficient in the nation.

* The industrial development of Texas is another and better-known story.

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