The basic premise is that the misfortunes of the South are more complex than simple assumptions would hold. The racial differences are clearly factor, but there is also significant reference to the fact that the South was delayed in absorbing the positive economic implications of this period in world history. While urban centers throughout the world began a meteoric rise in terms of technological, infrastructural and social development, the isolation which the South had achieved by relying upon slave labor for so long had prevented it from gaining these flourishing urban landscapes. Rural decay would instead become an identifying trait of the South.
Wright's article is prompted by a positive transition in Southern economic momentum however, contending that only as recently as the last two decades (from the perspective of 1987) has the South come to realize the long-term plan of Reconstruction. With the major initiatives of the New Deal, aimed at economic recovery in the time of the Great Depression, the South was forced to absorb many of the labor-based initiatives used to...
President Franklin Roosevelt imposed an array of initiatives which Wright states imposed harsh economic reforms on the labor conditions in the south. Particularly, he reports that the "most far-reaching changes for textiles and many other Southern industries came with the labor controls of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and subsequently the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. All these measures had their major economic effects in the South." (171) Indeed, these would force up labor wages, increase the availability of working opportunities and impose higher costs upon states and municipalities to fund these opportunities. Though this would result in a period of difficult adjustment, Wright suggests that as recently as the 1980s, evidence of technological and infrastructural equalization has come to the surface. To the view this article, the process of Reconstruction has taken a century, but is finally today demonstrating success.
Works Cited:
Wright, G. (1987). The Economic Revolution in the American South. The…
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