New South
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New South or New South Creed is a phrase that has been used intermittently since the American Civil War to describe the American South, in whole or in part. The term "New South" is often used in contrast to the Old South of the antebellum period.
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[edit] Origins
The term has been used with different applications in mind. The original use of the term "New South" was an attempt to describe the rise of a South after the Civil War which would no longer be dependent on now-outlawed slave labor or predominantly upon the raising of cotton, but rather a South which was also industrialized and part of a modern national economy. Henry W. Grady made this term popular in his articles and speeches as editor of the Atlanta Constitution. One way of envisioning the New South were the socialist Ruskin Colonies.[1] The historian Paul Gaston[2] coined the specific term "New South Creed" to describe the hollow promises of white elites like Grady that industrialization would bring prosperity to the region.
The New South campaign was championed by southern elites often outside of the old planter class, in hopes of forming a partnership with northern capitalists in order to strengthen the social, political and economic status quo of the south. They in turn expected to situate themselves as equals to northern investors. From Henry Grady, to Booker T. Washington, New South advocates wanted southern economic regeneration, sectional reconciliation, racial harmony and their idea of the gospel of work.
For many years, this "New South" was more of a slogan of Chambers of Commerce and similar civic-booster organizations than a reality in many areas. Racial conflict during Civil Rights Movement gave the south a backward image in popular culture. But in the 1880s and 1890s, American industry moved en masse to the south, so as to capitalize on low wages, social conservatism, and anti-union sentiments.[3] With the industrialization of the south has come economic growth, immigration and population growth. Many now use the term in a celebratory sense.
[edit] Twentieth Century
[edit] Civil rights
The beginnings of the Civil Rights era in the 1950s led to a revival of the term to describe a South which would no longer be held back by Jim Crow laws and other aspects of compulsory legal segregation. Again, the initially slow pace of the Civil Rights era reforms, notably in the areas of school desegregation and voting rights, at first made the "New South" more of a slogan than a descriptions of the South as it was; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an era of far more rapid change.
[edit] Politics
For over 100 years, from before the Civil War until the mid-1960s, the Democratic Party exercised a virtual monopoly on Southern politics (see also Solid South). Thus elections were actually decided between Democratic factions in primary elections (often all-white); the Democratic nomination was considered to be tantamount to election.
The "New South" period in this context began in 1964 when several Southern politicians, and states, supported Republican Barry Goldwater for President over the Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson. Some, in what later became a trend, switched party affiliations, notably Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in the 1968 campaign is thought by many to have vastly accelerated this process. Since 1980 the South has voted Republican at the Presidential level except when the Democratic nominee is from the South, in which case several states may be competitive.
The term "New South" has also been used to refer to political leaders in the South who embraced progressive ideas on education and economic growth and also minimized racial rhetoric if not promoting integrationalist stances. This term was most commonly associated with the wave of Southern governors elected in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Terry Sanford in North Carolina and Albert Brewer in Alabama.[4][5]
[edit] Geography
The term "New South" is also sometimes used geographically, to denote the South Atlantic states, in contrast to the East South Central and West South Central states. The former have grown considerably more cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and many observers maintain that they now comprise a distinct geocultural subregion. One prominent example of the use of "New South" in this context was in the 1991 book The Day America Told The Truth, which divides the South as a whole into the "moral regions" of the New South and Old Dixie.
[edit] Economy
The "New South" is also meant to describe the economic boom in the southern part of the U.S., compared to the loss of jobs in the Midwest. Economic centers of the US have shifted away from cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and St. Louis to southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Nashville, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Birmingham, Dallas, and Houston. For example, two of the largest banks in the USA -- Bank of America and Wachovia -- are headquartered in Charlotte; automobile manufacturers BMW, Toyota, Mercedes, Honda, Hyundai, and Nissan have opened plants in states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi; Behind New York, Houston has the second-most Fortune 500 companies in the nation, and Atlanta is third. Only five metro areas in the country have more Fortune 500 companies than the Richmond area. The Raleigh and Huntsville, Alabama areas are home to two of the largest research parks in the world.
[edit] References
- ^ Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901. University of Illinois Press, 1996.
- ^ Paul M. Gaston. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.
- ^ Brenner, Robert. "Structure vs. Conjuncture: The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift," New Left Review 43, 2006: 33-59. p. 48
- ^ A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968–1976. By Gordon E. Harvey. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. x, 229 pp.)
- ^ Terry Sanford and the New South. Duke University News (2007-04-03). Retrieved on 2008-06-11.
