Southern businessmen last week looked straight at a big question mark: did the defense program mean the industrialization of the South? Under the mild Southern winter, the defense boom was shooting up faster than anywhere else in the U. S. From Georgia's Tobacco Roads through the Mississippi Delta out to the oil and cattle country in West Texas, there was many a town which had doubled in population since last spring's census, many a village which had multiplied so many times over that no one could keep track. New towns had sprung up where none had been before. Farmers left their land to work on construction at wages up to $90 a week; some of them made more money in a single month than they were used to making in a whole year.
The South was a-clatter with new building. Its 1940 construction was $1,534,350,000, an all-time high; 1941 would be even bigger. Chosen because of its climate and cheap land for 60% of the nation's 100-odd big new military camps, the South was making money fast out of building them, out of feeding and entertaining the soldiers who arrived daily.
Pay rolls bounced from one merchant's cash register to another; although retail trade was up all over the U. S., the in crease was greater in the South (12-20%) than anywhere else. In some places, the South had almost more prosperity than it could stand. But was it building up a permanent industry? Or was it a retail trade jag, with only a hangover to look forward to?
To a section which President Roosevelt had called "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem," the answer was critical. Southern chambers of commerce have preferred to call their country "the Nation's No. 1 industrial frontier," but behind either phrase were simple facts which everyone knew. The National Emergency Council's famous 1938 report on Southern economic conditions had made them as plain as the side of a barn; while the South had immense natural wealth, its people were the poorest in the Nation; until it had industries of its own, it would remain a backwoods colonial economy.
Camp Towns. Alexandria nestles behind a levee on the Red River in the middle of Louisiana. On hills bordering the river valley near by, five Army camps were going up last week. In last spring's census, Alexandria had a population of 27,066. By last week this figure had jumped to somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000. Construction of the camps had employed 25,000 men regularly since last September; in one peak week 30,000 were at work. Rooming houses and small hotels had waiting lists twice as big as their capacities. Some of them were turning over their rooms three times a day, renting them for eight hours of sleep.
Everywhere that there was a big camp going up, there was an Alexandria in the South. In Florida, 15,000 men were throwing up a tent-city at Camp Blanding (for 75,000 soldiers) on a flat stretch of white sand 48 miles by automobile from Jacksonville. Some 3,500 of the workmen poured into Starke (normal population: 1,480), eight miles from the camp. Starke's rents jumped from $19-25 to $50-$60. A waitress paid her boss $5 a week to sleep in a restaurant kitchen. Land around the camp which once sold for $15 an acre began selling for $15 a front foot.