In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

32 c h a p t e r t w o The 1950s The United States has never seen greater change in day-to-day life than it experienced from 1900 to 1950. By 1950, the automobile provided the chief means of daily transportation. North Carolina, though far removed from the leading centers of economic gravity, boasted of direct air service to New York, Washington, Boston, and Atlanta, even if North Carolina’s airports resembled converted army barracks with porches. Freeways were a California miracle, but North Carolinians took for granted two-lane asphalt and concrete roads connecting major cities and towns. In the preceding year, television sets had moved from a store window curiosity to a common feature of piedmont living rooms, with new stations in Charlotte and Greensboro beaming in national network variety shows and fifteen-minute newscasts featuring announcers who read from prepared scripts. Dial telephones were ubiquitous. Medical advances, including the use of penicillin , reduced the toll of infections. Stupor-inducing ringworms, hookworms, and mosquitoes were less a scourge than in the past. Yet racial segregation remained almost as entrenched as it had been in the early 1900s. Much as King Cotton characterized the antebellum South, King Tobacco was crucial for twentieth-century North Carolina. In 1950, tobacco was near its peak. From August into the autumn, the exotic chant of the tobacco auctioneer rang out from tin warehouses. Those markets produced cash that drove the state’s lively rural and small-town economies. Tobacco paid the bills. Large numbers of young men and women became the first members of their families to go to college, with tobacco providing the needed cash. While tobacco revenue varied from year to year, a New Deal–era price-support program eased the pain in bad seasons. Durham, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem were among the world’s premier cigarette manufacturing cities. Modern factories replaced more The 1950s / 33 antiquated ones. Duke University in Durham developed a national reputation in the arts, sciences, and medical research, partly through fortunes made in tobacco and in electric power. Wake Forest University relocated from the town of Wake Forest, twelve miles north of Raleigh, to WinstonSalem , where its magnificent new campus was funded by the Reynolds family of Camel cigarette fame. Though Duke and Wake Forest are the best-known examples, most of North Carolina’s colleges, both public and private, owed their development at least partly to tobacco. And by 1950, the state was well on its way to distinction in higher education. So tobacco did much to make possible North Carolina’s shining cultural temples of the twentieth century. A curse on the human body was a state’s blessing. Despite its industrial might in tobacco, textiles, and furniture, North Carolina was still mostly rural—69.5 percent of the population in the 1950 census, a figure surpassed only by Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Carolina. The United States as a whole was 59 percent urban, and most of the big northern states were between 65 and 80 percent urban. North Carolina had only one city, Charlotte, with its 134,042 residents, among America’s one hundred largest cities; Charlotte’s 33 percent growth rate in the 1940s and unusually diverse economy by the state’s standards suggested a bright future. Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh rounded out the state’s top five population centers. The concept of suburbia came slowly to North Carolina. The outskirts, as populated areas close to the city were called, ranged from islands of poverty to upscale settlements in the mode of incorporated Biltmore Forest near Asheville or the unincorporated Hope Valley subdivision in Durham County. The transition from urban to rural was abrupt, even near substantial cities like Charlotte and Greensboro. The traveler quickly moved from town into a world of tobacco patches, dairy farms, and pine forests. The public associated the suburban idea more with New York and California. The populace marveled at the wonders of the twentieth century but looked with apprehension toward looming changes overseas and at home. The Korean War broke out in June 1950 and lasted for the next three years. Racial tensions mounted as cases challenging school segregation worked their way through the courts. hints of siege for a segregated society The 1950 publication of Raleigh news commentator W. E. Debnam’s Weep No More, My Lady was a precursor of combat to come. The book was a response to comments that Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the late...

Share