THE SOUTH: The Enlightened Revolution

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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.