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On the economic front, a century of ^{literal and grinding} depression in the South has ended with the rapid shift from the agrarianism once so distinctive to the region to a new economy based on industry and ^{marked by} urbanization.

For those of you from [illegible] outside the region, who may not be familiar with its economic history, I think a quick flashback ^/to^/the^/way^/things^/were^/ may be in order. During the^its "Civil War century," as Tennessee Senator Howard Baker once described it to me, the region remained overwhelmingly rural and bound to the land. There were a few spots of major industry, but essentially the South remained [illegible] ^agricultural in the very era that the rest of [illegible] America was industrializing and urbanizing. In 1930 the vast majority of the South's people lived a in the rural, backward areas, and the regional per capita income was only half the national level. SDuring the 1920s the boll weevil ravaged Southern cotton crops and then the Great Depression struck the region like a sledgehammer. One Southern historian, Thomas D. Clark, has written:

In 1935 vast areas of the South were reduced to shabbiness. Farmsteads were cluttered and run-down, reflecting the deepest state of poverty. Rusting implements and vehicles were scattered about in disarray of abandonment. Barns, outhouses, fences, and grounds sagged under the weight of sun and time...Agricultural backwardness, iuf if not complete failure, was stamped upon homesteads with as indelibly as the thrust of the hills and the slash of the streams. ...Between Charleston and Natchez.... "nigger house h shabbiness" was more descriptive than Tara, Rosehill, or Afton Villa splendor.

^/_ Consider another fact: it was not until the 1940s that the the value of property tax assessments in Georgia reached the level they had had [illegible] before the Civil War. The date of the 1940s, of course, is significant, because it was World War II that provided the great catalyst for economic growth in the South. Then countless military camps were set up in the region and Washington sent billions