Regional Disadvantage Quotes
The South then had the poorest education in the country and recovery from the Great Depression was made easier by a workforce that was educated enough to handle many of the new jobs and new techniques of doing the old jobs. And that was where the South lagged. The small farms which were the mainstay of the Southern economy were by then far less important as agriculture was undergoing major changes, technological and ecoomic, with many small farmers leaving the farms for the factories if they could.
The problem she described has generally not been solved. The only thing that saved most of rural America is the remarkable increase in agricultural productivity, but that has become so good that farming requires fewer and fewer workers each year and migration to the cities has continued since before WWII. However to avoid higher city wages, unionization, higher taxes, and higher energy costs, many industrial operations deliberately moved to small or medium sized after WWII, and many communities then became one company towns. Then the companies would relocate elsewhere if the mover would save some costs, and the small towns who did get factories were again in the predicament that Mrs. Roosevelt describes. In the 1980s, off shoring eliminated the major job source for thousands of small towns and cities as well. Some cities and suburban areas attracted knowledge industry companies and jobs, but the small town problem is in much of America just as it was when Mrs. Roosevelt wrote this in her column in 1936.
