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.
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 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 1980s and 1990s, American industry moved en masse to the south, so as to capitalize on low wages, social
conservatism, and anti-union sentiments.[2] With the
industrialization of the south has come economic growth, immigration and population growth. Many now use the term in a
celebratory sense.
Twentieth Century
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.
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.
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.
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; Houston has more
Fortune 500 companies headquartered there than any other city in the nation except
New York, and Atlanta is the third largest city in the United
States to have the most Fortune 500 headquarters. 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.
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.
- ^ Brenner, Robert. "Structure vs. Conjuncture: The
2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift," New Left Review 43, 2006: 33-59. p.
48
See also
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