GEORGIA: Crossroad Town

There are 13 Atlantas in the U. S., but only one mattered last week.* Atlanta, Ga. was the place where Gone With the Wind opened (see p. 30); where Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh passed by and the Negroes said: "I seen 'em!"; where Banker Robert Strickland wept for Melanie and said: "By God, I'm not ashamed"; where young ladies in their grandmas' crinolines and young bucks in fawn vests and pantaloons skittered through Peachtree Street and Henry Grady Square at dawn; where old, old people remembered the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman and the flames ("Well, suh, Grandmaw Harper said: 'General Sherman, I'll never leave Atlanta as long as there is one spot of it as big as my apron.'

. . . General Sherman said: 'Madam, you got spunk'"). Last week Atlanta was more self-conscious of its present and its past than any other U. S. town.

In the beginning, in 1836, Atlanta was the spot of red clay where one Hardy Ivy had his cabin, and where an engineer named A. H. Brisbane chose to drive a stake. Because the stake marked the end of the new Western & Atlantic Railroad, the town-to-be was called Terminus. By 1843 Terminus had ten families and one more railroad, and Governor Wilson Lumpkin had a daughter named Martha. So Terminus became Marthasville, and Statesman John C. Calhoun in 1845 saw what was to come: "Such is the formation of the country between the Mississippi Valley and the Southern Atlantic coast . . . that all the railroads which have been projected or commenced . . . must necessarily unite at a point . . . in the State of Georgia, not far from the village of Decatur. . . ." The point: Atlanta, ex-Marthasville.

For booming, trading, railroading Atlanta, the War Between the States was a cosmic incident but not the end of the world. Savannah and Decatur (doomed to be a mere suburb), Macon and Augusta might mourn the life that was gone; Atlanta had business to do: rebuilding, shipping to and from the whole southeastern U. S., as John Calhoun had foretold, growing to 22,000 by 1870, 89,872 by 1900. Georgians who were not Atlantans had a saying: "If the folks in Atlanta could suck as hard as they can blow, they would suck the ocean up to their city limits and have a harbor!" At its vital crossroad, inland Atlanta actually has:

¶ Eight railroads (five use the new Terminal station, only three the Union station rebuilt in 1871); seven airline routes (33 planes daily); 75 trucking lines; 845 factories (textiles, chemicals, fertilizer, furniture, paper, candy); 3,833 retail stores, 809 wholesale stores (annual net sales: $465,316,000); 81 public schools, 33 universities and colleges (total enrollment: 77,282); the South's busiest telephone exchange (636,000 long distance calls per month); 2,500 branches of national firms doing business in the South; a 221-square-mile "metropolitan" area, whose heart and centre is famed Five Points (where Peachtree intersects four other streets).

¶ 196,200 whites, 97,800 Negroes, only 5.000 foreigners; 156,300 females, 137,700 males; a birth rate robustly above the high death rate (13.2 per 1,000 in 1938).