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The balance sheet on the defense program's long-term significance to the South was still ambiguous this week. Some Southerners were frankly pessimistic. As they viewed the figures, the South was on the short end, getting the cantonments and the powder plants, while the solid, lasting business went to the industrial North. Some were even resentful; they thought the South had been passed over shabbily when defense contracts were handed out. The South had $1,530,898,441 in defense contracts by the middle of last month; the rest of the nation had $9,784,958,092. Such contracts were undoubtedly going first to those best prepared to fill them; and whatever else the South had, it was short on skilled labor and machine tools.
For years the South, in attempting to in dustrialize, pulled itself up by its own boot straps. Absentee land ownership and tenant farming perpetuated the ruinous one-crop system and discouraged the diversification of agriculture which the South needs to save its soil and feed its own people. Lack of industrialization denied its people a chance to learn industrial skills, and lack of trained workmen hampered industrialization.
Now Southerners like Donald Comer, head of Birmingham's big Avondale Mills (TIME, Feb. 10), see one way the South may permanently benefit even from a mere ice-cream-and-powder-mill boom. Most of the camp construction work is done by farmers, for big wages. Comer hopes they will use the money to buy the farms on which they have been tenants heretofore, and to improve buildings and equipment. This would give the South a new standard of farm income, a shift from cotton and tobacco to food crops, a permanently increased purchasing power. The South also is getting a chance now to train workers; even when the shell plants fold up, the new supply of trained men will be an invitation to new industries.
Furthermore, the South had already be gun to industrialize before defense came along. From 1935 to 1937, while the number of manufacturing establishments in other States was declining, the South's total increased slightly. (Among the newcomers: kraft pulp & paper, soap, building materials, chemicals). The South already obtains 260% more wealth from its factories than from its farms. Even if defense does not complete the industrialization of the South overnight, no one could doubt that it would give a push in the right direction—the direction in which the South was already going.
*Radford, Va. (pre-Boom pop. 6,898), where some 10,000 men are building a powder plant.