THE SOUTH: 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.