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MAN: After the Civil War, a group of influential Southerners promised that a new South would rise, complete with new industries, factories, and railroad lines.

- The New South was a propaganda term developed by boosters who wanted to insist that the South had put the old days of slavery behind it, that racial harmony was reigning. It was mostly a way of appealing to Northerners to invest money in the South.

MAN: Northern entrepreneurs began to pour money into southern industry. Railroad companies laid more than 22,000 miles of new track connecting the region to national markets. Iron production in Birmingham, Alabama rivaled that of Carnegie's Pittsburgh Empire. Southern cotton mills soon outpace their northern neighbors.

- The largest, most important southern industry of the post-Civil War period is textiles. In a sense, there's a shift to the textile industry from New England and the mid-Atlantic into the southern states because it's obviously near closer proximity to cotton.

MAN: Yet for all the investment from the North, the economy of the New South continued to lag far behind that of the North in the years after the Civil War.

ERIC FONER: The South is on this downward spiral economically. It doesn't share in the industrial development, really, that's going on in the North at this time. It doesn't share an economic diversification. It's locked into this one-crop agricultural system which leads to poverty for everybody except a few at the very top.

MAN: While northern industries and investors prospered off Southern products, a New South never really emerged.

- It was a total myth. The New South didn't exist except in propaganda.

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