{"id":74,"date":"2023-03-10T23:54:48","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T23:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-13\/"},"modified":"2023-04-27T19:31:28","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T19:31:28","slug":"module-1-13","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-13\/","title":{"raw":"1.13 The New South","rendered":"1.13 The New South"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\n\u201cThere was a South of slavery and secession,\u201d Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. \u201cThat South is dead.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> Grady captured the sentiment of many white southern business and political leaders who imagined a New South that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture. He promoted the region\u2019s economic possibilities and mutual future prosperity through an alliance of northern capital and southern labor. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region\u2019s economy in the North\u2019s image. They wanted industry and they wanted infrastructure. But the past could not be escaped. Economically and socially, the \u201cNew South\u201d would still be much like the old.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Photograph The ambitions of Atlanta, seen in the construction of such grand buildings as the Kimball House Hotel, reflected the larger regional aspirations of the so-called New South. 1890. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA \u201cNew South\u201d seemed an obvious need. The Confederacy\u2019s failed insurrection wreaked havoc on the southern economy and crippled southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four million enslaved Americans\u2014representing the wealth and power of the antebellum white South\u2014threw off their chains and walked proudly forward into freedom.\r\n\r\nEmancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass \u201cJim Crow\u201d laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The reestablishment of white supremacy after the \u201credemption\u201d of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a \u201cNew\u201d South. Perhaps nothing harked so forcefully back to the barbaric southern past than the wave of lynchings\u2014the extralegal murder of individuals by vigilantes\u2014that washed across the South after Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or fabricated crimes or for no crimes at all, white mobs murdered roughly five thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.\r\n\r\nLynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly common. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the man\u2019s wife, Sam Hose was captured by a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching quickly spread, and specially chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a can of kerosene over his body and burned him alive.2<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nAt the barbaric height of southern lynching, in the last years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were most frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where southern blacks were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of white landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over five hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred.\r\n\r\nThroughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women\u2019s rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton\u2014who would later become the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate\u2014endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, \u201cIf it takes lynching to protect women\u2019s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> When opponents argued that lynching violated victims\u2019 constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, \u201cWhenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1600\"]\"Photograph This photograph captures the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, a mother and son, on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. In response to national attention, the local white newspaper in Okemah simply wrote, \u201cWhile the general sentiment is adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law.\u201d Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching advocate, lost three friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South\u2019s lynching culture and exposed the myth of the black rapist.5<\/sup><\/a> The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United States. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed bill was never enacted.\r\n

Lynching was only the violent worst of the southern racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples, and white men, ever anxious of relationships between black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police the racial divide.<\/p>\r\nIn politics, de facto limitations of black voting had suppressed black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated black voters with physical and economic threats. And then, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented de jure, or legal, disfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor whites and poor blacks alike), effectively denying black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.\r\n\r\nWith white supremacy secured, prominent white southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South\u2019s economy and convincing the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the recent past. A kind of civic religion known as the \u201cLost Cause\u201d glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to an imagined past inhabited by contented and loyal slaves, benevolent and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had little to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for home and honor, not the continued ownership of human beings. The New South, then, would be built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded by political and social custom.\r\n\r\nHenry Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women\u2019s groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and celebrated Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Across the South, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but across the country. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the South against the corruption of African American and northern \u201ccarpetbag\u201d misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed film director David W. Griffith adapted Dixon\u2019s novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The film almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination.6<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nWhile Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the South into the modern world. The railroads became their focus. The region had lagged behind the North in the railroad building boom of the mid-nineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region\u2019s rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. The rising popularity of the automobile after the turn of the century only increased pressure for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.\r\n\r\nAlong with new transportation networks, New South boosters continued to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. While agriculture\u2014cotton in particular\u2014remained the mainstay of the region\u2019s economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region, and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally flee the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunity for rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen.\r\n\r\nIn most cases, as in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. African American women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for white families. As poor as white southern mill workers were, southern blacks were poorer. Some white mill workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew up alongside factories were whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.\r\n\r\nThat a \u201cNew South\u201d emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and World War I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality but if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, however, the New South looked much like the Old. Boosters such as Henry Grady said the South was done with racial questions but lynching and segregation and the institutionalization of Jim Crow exposed the South\u2019s lingering racial obsessions. Meanwhile, most southerners still toiled in agriculture and still lived in poverty. Industrial development and expanding infrastructure, rather than re-creating the South, coexisted easily with white supremacy and an impoverished agricultural economy. The trains came, factories were built, and capital was invested, but the region remained mired in poverty and racial apartheid. Much of the \u201cNew South,\u201d then, was anything but new.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"1893 Designers of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago built the White City in a neoclassical architectural style. The integrated design of buildings, walkways, and landscapes propelled the burgeoning City Beautiful movement. The Fair itself was a huge success, bringing more than twenty-seven million people to Chicago and helping to establish the ideology of American exceptionalism. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States abandoned itself to industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and scope. The nature of labor shifted. A middle-class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The Jim Crow South stripped away the vestiges of Reconstruction, and New South boosters papered over the scars. Industrialists hunted profits. Evangelists appealed to people\u2019s morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. In all of its many facets, by the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had been radically transformed. And the transformations continued to ripple outward into the West and overseas, and inward into radical protest and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.\r\n

Notes<\/h4>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Henry Grady, The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry Grady<\/em>, ed. Edwin DuBois Shurter (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldredge, 1910), 7. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  2. William Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880\u20131930<\/em> (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 82\u201384.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890\u20131940<\/em> (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 201. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women\u2019s Campaign Against Lynching <\/em>(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 195. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865\u20131920<\/em> (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
    \n

    \u201cThere was a South of slavery and secession,\u201d Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. \u201cThat South is dead.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> Grady captured the sentiment of many white southern business and political leaders who imagined a New South that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture. He promoted the region\u2019s economic possibilities and mutual future prosperity through an alliance of northern capital and southern labor. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region\u2019s economy in the North\u2019s image. They wanted industry and they wanted infrastructure. But the past could not be escaped. Economically and socially, the \u201cNew South\u201d would still be much like the old.<\/p>\n

    \"Photograph
    The ambitions of Atlanta, seen in the construction of such grand buildings as the Kimball House Hotel, reflected the larger regional aspirations of the so-called New South. 1890. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    A \u201cNew South\u201d seemed an obvious need. The Confederacy\u2019s failed insurrection wreaked havoc on the southern economy and crippled southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four million enslaved Americans\u2014representing the wealth and power of the antebellum white South\u2014threw off their chains and walked proudly forward into freedom.<\/p>\n

    Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass \u201cJim Crow\u201d laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The reestablishment of white supremacy after the \u201credemption\u201d of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a \u201cNew\u201d South. Perhaps nothing harked so forcefully back to the barbaric southern past than the wave of lynchings\u2014the extralegal murder of individuals by vigilantes\u2014that washed across the South after Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or fabricated crimes or for no crimes at all, white mobs murdered roughly five thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.<\/p>\n

    Lynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly common. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the man\u2019s wife, Sam Hose was captured by a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching quickly spread, and specially chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a can of kerosene over his body and burned him alive.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    At the barbaric height of southern lynching, in the last years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were most frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where southern blacks were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of white landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over five hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred.<\/p>\n

    Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women\u2019s rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton\u2014who would later become the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate\u2014endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, \u201cIf it takes lynching to protect women\u2019s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> When opponents argued that lynching violated victims\u2019 constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, \u201cWhenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    \"Photograph
    This photograph captures the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, a mother and son, on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. In response to national attention, the local white newspaper in Okemah simply wrote, \u201cWhile the general sentiment is adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law.\u201d Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching advocate, lost three friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South\u2019s lynching culture and exposed the myth of the black rapist.5<\/sup><\/a> The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United States. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed bill was never enacted.<\/p>\n

    Lynching was only the violent worst of the southern racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples, and white men, ever anxious of relationships between black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police the racial divide.<\/p>\n

    In politics, de facto limitations of black voting had suppressed black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated black voters with physical and economic threats. And then, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented de jure, or legal, disfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor whites and poor blacks alike), effectively denying black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.<\/p>\n

    With white supremacy secured, prominent white southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South\u2019s economy and convincing the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the recent past. A kind of civic religion known as the \u201cLost Cause\u201d glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to an imagined past inhabited by contented and loyal slaves, benevolent and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had little to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for home and honor, not the continued ownership of human beings. The New South, then, would be built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded by political and social custom.<\/p>\n

    Henry Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women\u2019s groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and celebrated Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Across the South, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but across the country. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the South against the corruption of African American and northern \u201ccarpetbag\u201d misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed film director David W. Griffith adapted Dixon\u2019s novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The film almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination.6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    While Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the South into the modern world. The railroads became their focus. The region had lagged behind the North in the railroad building boom of the mid-nineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region\u2019s rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. The rising popularity of the automobile after the turn of the century only increased pressure for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.<\/p>\n

    Along with new transportation networks, New South boosters continued to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. While agriculture\u2014cotton in particular\u2014remained the mainstay of the region\u2019s economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region, and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally flee the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunity for rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen.<\/p>\n

    In most cases, as in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. African American women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for white families. As poor as white southern mill workers were, southern blacks were poorer. Some white mill workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew up alongside factories were whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.<\/p>\n

    That a \u201cNew South\u201d emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and World War I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality but if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, however, the New South looked much like the Old. Boosters such as Henry Grady said the South was done with racial questions but lynching and segregation and the institutionalization of Jim Crow exposed the South\u2019s lingering racial obsessions. Meanwhile, most southerners still toiled in agriculture and still lived in poverty. Industrial development and expanding infrastructure, rather than re-creating the South, coexisted easily with white supremacy and an impoverished agricultural economy. The trains came, factories were built, and capital was invested, but the region remained mired in poverty and racial apartheid. Much of the \u201cNew South,\u201d then, was anything but new.<\/p>\n

    \"1893
    Designers of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago built the White City in a neoclassical architectural style. The integrated design of buildings, walkways, and landscapes propelled the burgeoning City Beautiful movement. The Fair itself was a huge success, bringing more than twenty-seven million people to Chicago and helping to establish the ideology of American exceptionalism. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    After enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States abandoned itself to industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and scope. The nature of labor shifted. A middle-class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The Jim Crow South stripped away the vestiges of Reconstruction, and New South boosters papered over the scars. Industrialists hunted profits. Evangelists appealed to people\u2019s morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. In all of its many facets, by the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had been radically transformed. And the transformations continued to ripple outward into the West and overseas, and inward into radical protest and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.<\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h4>\n
      \n
    1. Henry Grady, The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry Grady<\/em>, ed. Edwin DuBois Shurter (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldredge, 1910), 7. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. William Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880\u20131930<\/em> (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 82\u201384.\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890\u20131940<\/em> (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 201. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women\u2019s Campaign Against Lynching <\/em>(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 195. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865\u20131920<\/em> (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"menu_order":13,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-74","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":25,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/revisions\/644"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/25"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}