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Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents. Edited with an introduction by David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996. viii, 168 pp. $10.95 paper.
Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression is a volume in Bedford Books' growing series of reprints of accessible primary documents designed for the undergraduate classroom. Like its companions, this edition conjoins a "key text" of American history, in this case Franklin Roosevelt's National Emergency Council's Report on Economic Conditions of the South (1938), with a comprehensive introductory essay and a range of supplementary documents.
The restoration of this government document to print is a valuable service, for as David Carlton and Peter Coclanis make clear in their fine introduction the Report has been widely misunderstood. Roosevelt's infamous phrase associated with its appearance, "the South presents right now the Nation's No. I economic problem" (42), was actually an expression of the organic connection between the political economy of South and North, rather than an attempt to set the region apart. Indeed, the Report, written entirely by southerners, constituted a brief assailing "outside interests" for the region's economic and social woes rather than a Northern complaint about the southern drag on the national economy. The editors wisely caution, however, that the colonial economy...