Three days after the 1938 Report on the Economic Conditions of the South was released to the public, The New York Times reprinted a political cartoon from The Cleveland News. Striking in its simplicity, the cartoon depicted a white man and woman struggling in a field and joined together by a yoke labeled "economic inequality." The caption simply read "Dixie."[1] In many ways this cartoon encapsulates the liberal attitudes following the Report's release. Although the southern authors of the Report went to great lengths to explain the external and internal sources of southern poverty, many Americans simply continued to view the South not as a distinct and potentially wealthy agricultural region and system, but as an area of the nation that was woefully behind the economic and industrial times. The source of economic inequality in the South, this popular opinion went, was a lack of technological and economic modernization coupled with an incomprehensible refusal to shed old anti-progressive traditions and attitudes. And, for most Americans, that was a problem devoid of racial concerns. Much like our Cleveland …show more content…
For not only were race and poverty inextricably linked in the southern United States, but, according to Patricia Sullivan's Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, the politics designed to remedy these economic problems created a unique period of opportunity for those involved in reversing the second class status of southern African Americans. Sullivan's thesis that the national crisis of southern poverty created opportunities for southern liberals to attempt to change the deep-rooted economic, political, and racial traditions of the South is promising, well-researched, and in-line with recent evaluations of the New Deal as a crucial moment in post-Civil War southern