New South: the Vanishing Sunbelt
During these years one heard more and more about “the New South”. The initial announcement was delivered in the 1976 Saturday Review which hinted the South was “the New America”[i]. In 2005 an AP-Ipsos Survey reported that more than one-third of those living in the South did not identify themselves as “southerners”. This might be because the South grew by 20% between 1980 and 1990, and another 17% the following decade. By 2000 the South held 35.6% of the nation’s population; by 2015 it was 37.7—more Americans lived in the South than any other region. Not surprisingly, A literature has developed concerning southern identity (i.e. political culture)[ii].
A part of the reason for the rise of the New South was a “reverse Great Migration” which supposedly started. “Between 1965 and 1970, the South lost about 280,000 African-American residents. Just a decade later, between 1975 and 1980, it [the South] gained more than 100,000, a trend that has only picked up steam since”. Between 2005 and 2010 a net average of 66,000 African-Americans resettled in the South each year. (Cobb, Away Down South) College grads and retirees constitute a major portion of the reverse migration. New South migration was very uneven; Atlanta, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, plus Florida captured the lion’s share—leaving the “Old South” largely untouched.
The new South, the Research Triangle, auto alley, the Florida-North Carolina retirement magnet, Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, Atlanta its capital, Charlotte the financial center—and Texas its cutting edge had finally penetrated Northern and Midwestern consciousness. Economic vibrancy was one thing, internal identity another—and whether the latter would allow a sustained resurgence was the question.
The Sunbelt ballyhoo of the late 1970’s suggested that the realization of Henry Grady’s dreams might at last be close at hand. Like Grady’s New South, however, the Sunbelt South retained its ties to a past characterized not only by bright hopes but by recurrent disappointments. Thus, it remained to be seen whether the region could actually reach the nation’s economic mainstream in the 1980’s and in so doing, make prosperity a permanent feature of a new ‘southern’ way of life (Cobb, the Selling of the South 208).
Cobb makes the argument the New South’s rise was based on a particular ED strategy: state business climate. State/municipal strengths had long been associated with recruitment, marketing, promotion and attraction programs. But the business climate strategy rests ultimately on one added ingredient: a perceived reality independent of marketing and advertising. Businesses didn’t need to be told or marketed; they could figure out for themselves the business climate and make their own judgments. In the New South, businesses no longer needed to be recruited. As the years rolled on, the South won more and more of these normal business decisions.
Cobb makes the case, and we agree, that Florida, was the South in microcosm—and its leading edge. Florida captured many of the New South’s characteristics and led the region in capturing jobs and people. Florida had natural advantages of beaches and weather (?); it survived the civil rights era with a reputation as being “only moderately racist” with “respectable conservative politics”, access to an abundant low-cost workforce, and an easy place to attract workers and firms. As to establish its bona fides in business climate, Florida was literally the first state to enact right to work laws in 1943 (and again legally in 1947).
Florida and Cape Canaveral launched the first space flight, Mercury Project in 1961. What is less known is the Cape launched its first rocket in 1950 and, in 1959 the first successful launching of an ICBM. Since the 1960s Florida lured Northern residents seeking a warm retirement carrying with them their social security and pensions. Ever more tourism followed, so did Disney World which opened in 1971. As Florida gathered steam, residents, jobs pensions and tourist dollars, Florida almost single-handedly created the favorable growth statistics in the early 1970’s for the entire southern region. Florida personified the non-manufacturing, service and government sector character of the New South. Also worth comment is its tourism strategy, which became Florida’s top industry sector after World War II.
Other southern states did not enjoy such obvious natural advantages plus they suffered from a more difficult civil rights and historical stereotypes. But the Seventies success changed the perception of the South by many outsiders. Watergate was a plus for the South’s image. The “good old boy” Sam Ervin and also Howard Baker performed well and responsibly; George Wallace and Lester Maddox had given way to Jimmy Carter, Fred Thompson (of Law and Order fame) and Reuben Askew. Country music was in so were “the Walton’s”, “Dukes of Hazard”–and Larry Hagman’s Dallas began in 1978. Equally important the North (shall we say the Union) was at its lowest ebb. Big Cities were “hitting bottom”, fiscal basket cases wracked by busing riots and Northern white backlash.
South Carolina’s resurgence in this period is especially interesting. The South’s, now almost two-decade old, promotional and attraction campaigns bore unexpected fruit; the South overall was garnering 50% of all foreign direct investment (FDI). By 1972’s end, foreign firms had invested more than $5 billion in the South and within two years that number had risen to $8 billion. By 1978 several southern states were attracting as much as $1 billion annually, with South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia leading the way in numbers of plants, and petroleum-rich Louisiana ahead in terms of aggregate value of foreign investments. Cobb reports the English, West Germans and Japanese were particularly aggressive, the former building fifty-seven plants ($1.25 billion) half of which were in the Carolinas. South Carolina captured way more than its fair share of all this foreign investment–in fact by the end of the seventies, 40% of South Carolina’s annual business investment came from foreign firms. There was more West German investment in South Carolina than any other location in the world (Cobb, the Selling of the South 188-93).
In South Carolina’s case the active public-private partnership of the State, its EDO and local communities combined with “the same red carpet, kid glove treatment afforded all industrial prospects by southern states” seemed particularly effective. Spartanburg South Carolina (population at the time about 50,000) the beneficiary of a local developer’s campaign to recruit foreign industry, lured one $200 million West German textile plant which in a few years became the fourth largest polyester plant in the nation. By the mid 1970’s Spartanburg had landed twenty-four foreign firms (4,000 employees). Population and tax base increases resulting from these investments were dramatic (Cobb, the Selling of the South 192).
As to why the South benefited so much from FDI a number of reasons can be cited. Rather than fight quotas and import restrictions, developing on-site capacity seemed reasonable–especially when low cost, right to work, southern labor could be employed. The business climate strategy mentioned earlier also was impactful in foreign decision-making. While states across the nation were regulating the effects of pollution, the South conducted a widespread deregulation of pollution (Cobb, the Selling of the South 229-53). The impact of FDI did not go unnoticed in the North. In February 1976 the New York Times issued a six article series on the South and its glowing economic success, population gains, and life-style advantages[iii]. The reason, however, the NYT cited for all this southern prosperity was not FDI or Florida or southern business climate, but federal government spending.
The seventies witnessed a dramatic reversal in the perception and, to some degree the reality, of the southern economy and way of life. The New South lay alongside some redefined and reshaped version of the “Old South”. But by the end of the century an earlier observation by Goldfield and Rabinowitz (Goldfield and Rabinowitz) seemed valid—the Sunbelt was no longer a useful term to describe the variated regions. Not only was the West in a different “space” than the South, but the Southwest did very nicely on its own.
[i] Horace Sutton, “the South a New America”, Saturday Review, Vol 3, (September 4, 1976), p. 8.
[ii] The region with the fewest people throughout this period was the Northeast/ Mid-Atlantic, which in 2000 held 19% of the population, and 17.5% in 2015.
[iii] New York Times, February 8-13, 1976, p. 1
Ron W. Coan 