1956
1956 G OING into the last half of the 1950s, Atlanta had accomplished much it could be proud of in the decade following the war. Men and women from all over the nation who had served in or around Atlanta in the 1940s remembered the city and its people and its promise. And they came back to share in that promise, to make their names here, and to go into business, the professions, and the arts. In an article reprinted in theJournal-Constitution onJanuary 29, 1956, U.S. News and World Report told the story."ATLANTA: Hub of Prosperity . . . A growing market" was the headline; and the story summed up why this was so: Main port of entry to the "new" South is Atlanta, now reaching for the million mark in population and spilling into the surrounding counties on every side. Atlanta has recaptured the atmosphere of a boom town. You can sense it as soon as you set foot on the busy airport. Here the North and South collide, but gently and politely. Clipped New England accents mix with Southern drawls. A visitor to Atlanta calls five hotels before finding a room. Southeastern shoe retailers are in town, followed by the furniture men or the garment manufacturers . Convention badges sprinkle hotel lobbies. There is waiting for tables at some restaurants. Cabs are hard to find. In public places, men talk over plans for new factories, draw crude diagrams of plants on restaurant menus. "Two million . . . four million . . . six million," the dollar talk goes. Fifteen main railway lines, sixty truck lines, ten major air routes pour passengers and goods in and out of Atlanta. They put the city at the crossroads of the awakening South. The five states reached most readily from Atlanta—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina—are doing 56 billion dollars' worth of business a year. A fat slice of this passes through Atlanta. Georgia itself did 14.2 billion in business in 1954 and of that, 6.3 billion was done in Atlanta. One big industry in the Atlanta area—the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation —paid out 72.2 million dollars to 15,500 people in 1954. That was twothirds as much money as Georgia got from its whole cotton crop. The Lockheed payroll is running even higher now. It goes to 17,000 people and is putting 1.5 million dollars a week into the Atlanta market area. In Georgia and the other states that fit into the Atlanta trade orbit, business volume is now six times what it was in 1939. Since then, deposits of Georgia's biggest banking system, the Citizens & Southern National, have increased almost fourfold. 236 ATLANTA AND ENVIRONS, 1956 As in a good many prospering sections of the United States, war plants have given the South its first real shot in the arm. The shift from cotton and tobacco has helped the process. In Georgia alone income from cattle, hogs, poultry and dairy products now is much bigger than from sales of cotton and tobacco. And the armed services continue to lavish contracts on the South; Georgia, for instance, got 120.6 million dollars in defense construction in the last four years. With new money in long-empty pockets, Southerners are spending it fast for pent-up needs. In wide reaches of the Deep South, poverty has been normal for ninety years. This backlog of need, with the new prosperity, makes the South perhaps the greatest potential consumer market in the country. Of the 1.4 billion dollars of Atlanta incomes in 1954, 1.2 billion went for consumer products. The Southern appetite for new cars especially is sharp. Once a dumping ground for the North's second-hand discards, the Deep South itself now trades in plenty of used cars for its lots. And in the first eleven months of 1955, dealers in the five states sold 22% more new cars than in all of 1954. The new folding money, rustling in Southern jeans, is the reason why eighty percent of the new factories in the South have been built to fulfill the needs of Southerners exclusively. Such plants make everything from pots and pans to the air-conditioning assemblies that are doing so much to change sleepy Tobacco Road or Magnolia Row into places where men work harder in year-round comfort. Southerners with cash to spend are bringing the Yankees back again, this time to stay; in Atlanta alone, two-fifths of the newcomers between 1946 and...
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