Since the 1940s, the southern US has been transformed from a region of backward agriculture, low-wage industries located in small towns and rural areas, and unrelenting racial segregation into a modern society and economy. In 1950, there were no metropolitan areas in the South with a population of one million or more, but 18 had populations in excess of one million in 2000. The populations of the Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Miami metropolitan areas grew to over 4 millions. Population growth in the 18 largest metropolitan areas accounts for 63% of the total population growth in the South from 1950 to 2000. The transformation of the South is, to a sizable extent, a transformation to an urbanized society. This paper documents this urbanization by examining population and employment growth in those 18 metropolitan areas. 1. Introduction Beginning in the 1930s, the southern states of the US were transformed, according to the title of the book by Schulman [1], From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt. Wright’s [2] title is Old South, New South, and he states [2, page 241] that By the 1980s (and indeed much earlier in many places), a new Southern economy prevailed, located in the same geographic space as the old one, but encompassing a very different package of labor, capital, natural resources, and entrepreneurship: not an advanced version of the old economy, but a new economy. The transformation of the South was a goal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Tennessee Valley Authority created in 1933 did not pursue aggressive economic transformation for its first five years but, as recounted by Schulman [ 1], did so beginning from 1938. The 1938 federal Report on Economic Conditions of the South stated that “The low income belt of the South is a belt of sickness, misery, and unnecessary death.” In that same year, FDR declared that the South was the nation’s number one economic problem. At that time the economy of the South was based on backward agriculture, low-wage industries located in smaller towns and rural areas, and unrelenting racial segregation and discrimination and denial of voting and other legal rights. This southern system was created in the decades after the Civil War in the interest of a ruling coalition—a result that Olson [ 3] argued is an application of his “logic of collective action.” All of this also was documented in Myrdal’s monumental work [ 4] An American Dilemma, a book that was featured prominently in Myrdal’s Nobel Prize citation. The year 1938 is also the date of passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which instituted a
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