Publication Date
January 1990
Abstract
On 21 December 1886, Southern editor Henry W. Grady gave a speech at New York's Delmonico's Restaurant in which he called for the South to lift itself out of its slump of poverty, backwardness, and defeatism, and make itself over into a New South. In this speech, soon to be known as the New South speech, Grady stated: "The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement-a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core-a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace-and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age." The two main goals of the New South agenda, industrialization and agricultural diversification, were thus set forth in this ringing manner.