Henry Grady & the New South Creed
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Henry Grady was a proponent of what came to be called the New South Creed, and this movement was strong in the three decades after the Civil War. Its very title shows that it was intended as a contrast to the Old South that had existed before the war, the Old South of myth as well as reality. Henry Grady was the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and along with other young Southern moderates, he developed a philosophy that was designed to improve the fortunes of the South, to restore its power and prestige, and to expiate some of its guilt over slavery. The creed was also intended to solve the race question so it would never again be the controlling factor in Southern life. The idea of the New South was grandiose and doomed to failure, and it would itself become part of the myth of the South. While the New South movement had as one element the desire to end the race question, in fact many of the men who professed a belief in the development of the black population of the South were actually white supremacists. The failure of the New South movement would result in the institutionalization of the Jim Crow laws that would rule the South until the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the 1950s. Henry W. Grady did not coin the term New South, but he popularized it in his speeches and his writings for his newspaper. He appeared before the New England Society of New York in 1886 and made a speech that would become something Southern schoolboys for generations would have to c
. . .
pect. Southern pride caused many mills to be built as civic enterprises. Most of the capital down to 1880 had come from the people of the South, but there was a limit to what a region so impoverished by war could achieve on its own. It was because of his perception that there was a need for additional capital that Grady turned to the North.
An aspect of the New South movement was an attempt to develop an answer to the Negro question, to the many freed slaves now on the job market in the South. Grady saw a new opportunity in the removal of slavery from the South. He knew that this had been a shock to the region but considered that a shock that was needed to bring the region to its senses. He felt that emancipation had not only freed the blacks but had freed the whites as well. The Old South had rested everything on slavery and agriculture without realizing that neither of these could give or maintain healthy growth. Emancipation was the first requisite to healthy growth, he said, and would be the white man's passport to prosperity.
Grady would write on this subject in a letter to The Century in 1885. He was answering an earlier article by George W. Cable concerning his belief that the South had been evading its respons
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Grady South, Jim Crow, North Grady, Adam Badeau, South Grady, South Grady's, Magazine Grady, Grady Cable's, Holland Thompson, Society York, jim crow, henry grady, south movement, south myth, race question, south creed, grady south, jim crow system, south grady, crow laws, idea south, jim crow laws, editor atlanta constitution, york alfred knopf,
Approximate Word count = 2987
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
