Southern Industrialism

IN Charlotte, North Carolina, faces and scenes pass in reminiscent and historical review before one's eyes, telling in vivid epitome the epic story of southern recovery. One recalls the boyhood scenes of a small town long set in the midst of cotton farms, reaching back with great traditions into the life of the old South, and more recently set in the midst of cotton mills, reaching forward with high promise into the life of the new. This country town within a generation became a merchandising, distributing, banking, and communicating center for the two states, the financial capital of a textile dominion, and the administrative metropolis of an electrical empire. The story of this transition becomes increasingly significant as we watch the rise of the figures of industrial production in North Carolina: in tobacco manufacturing, from $700,000 in 1870 to $13,000,000 in 1900 and $413,000,000 in 1927; in cotton manufacturing, from $1,000,000 in 1870 to $30,000,000 in 1900 and $425,000,000 in 1927; and in furniture manufacturing, from $67,000 in 1870 to $1,500,000 in 1900 and $53,000,000 in 1927. These figures are the deposits of the work of hundreds of thousands of people on farms and in factories; they express the momentum of the energies of a risen people, and are concretions of the fact that in the Piedmont South we are in the midst of the swift course of the rise of industrialism. The industrial revolution has come south. No citizen in the Piedmont South is outside the range of its consequence. Its responsibilities are a part of our citizenship. We cannot with irresponsibility shut our eyes to the lessons of the written records of industrial history and blindly repeat the economic wastes and human tragedies of a hundred years. The tides of time and the currents of American history have joined in depositing four working principles, available to us in the South for our guidance now, in making the necessary adjustments to the changes involved in the resistless sweep of the industrialization of a rural state. These working principles are implicit in the ideas and the practices tested by the experiences of the western democracies in the hundred and fifty years since the power engine let loose the forces which have rearranged the structure of the modern world. On the preservation and the adaptation of these tested working principles turns today the search, in an industrial society, for that freedom of personality and equality of opportunity which this commonwealth was founded to win for all our people

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