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^{Atlanta [illegible]}

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For a century now, Americans have heard announcements of a
"New South," only to discover that the new version^s has ^have been very much like the old.^/→ Henry Grady, the great Atlanta editor of the late 1800s, announced a New South where industrialization would replace the old cotton plantation economy. Cotton mills did spring up in across the Southland, but as a great historian of the region (W.J. Cash) noted, the effect was to transplant the plantation system from the cotton field to the cotton mill. The owner of the new mill was the new aristocrat, the white working class was the new labor force, and the blacks stayed behind on the farm as tenants or house servants. Nothing was done to break the tradition of unforfeitable white supremacy.

Another New South was seen by some in the Populist movement of the 1890s, which challenged the railroads, the banks, and the other commercial giants of the period in the name of the poor, impoiv impoverished Southern farmer. But Populism, before many years, was transformed into virulent racism. And in almost every Southern state, the so-called Populist leaders made their peace with the business circles of the time and ended up delivering their gullible constituents empty oratory instead of social reform.

In the 1930s, some believed the spending program of the New Deal would mean a New South, too. The Roosevelt administration did deliver the Tennessee Valley Authority, to the horror of the private utilities, and it ^{the TVA} did begin to provide cheap power and the possibility of industrial development to the northern, hiller regio part of the South. The various New Deal agencies pumped huge amounts of money into the region, which a federal report labeled as "the Nation's Number One economic problem." But nothing was done to disturb the racial caste system of the Southland, and without that change, no really New South was possible.