From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980

Investigating the effects of federal economic policies, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt is an analysis of the South's remarkable odyssey from what President Roosevelt called the 'Nation's No. 1 Economic Problem' in the 1930s to the Sunbelt of the 1970s. Decrying the South's economic backwardness and political conservativism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of aggressive programs to reorder the Southern economy. After 1950, however, Keynesianism replaced New Deal reform as the mainstay of national economic policy, and the national security state supplanted the social welfare state as the South's principal benefactor.