The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-10-16
MASSENGALE TELLS
 OF THE WONDERFUL SOUTHERN COUNTRY
Atlanta Man Is Among the Principal Speakers at Big Commercial Congress
 in New York

New York;. October 15.-At the session of the Southern Commercial congress beginning here today St. Elmo Massen- gale, head of an advertising agency in Atlanta, described the souths prosperity, saying money was never before so plenti- full there as today and emphasized the necessity for advertising because she has the goods and knows it, but all the world doesn't know it.' The south, he declared, no longer was at the mercy of King Cotton.
 MT. Massengale spoke in part as fol- lows:
 The south should advertise for the same reason that any business firm should dvertise-because she has the goods and knows it, but all the world doesn't know it. She has her products to sell, she has land to offer farmers, she has an out-of-door winter to attract tourists. she has cheap water power and ample transportation to offer investors and above all, she has money to spend and plenty of it. She was the poor re- lation of Uncle Sam's family few years ago. but now, praise providence, she has grown up and learned eto make living for herself with a little left over for the rest of the country.
 We people of the southern states are AhO~.' all these good things to ourselves. There are vast tracts of field and woodland still untenanted and unproductive and we have these to offer the farmer from the rock ribbed hills of New England or the bound plains of the middle west at prices which seem insignificant beside the cost of fancy farm land in the prairie belt For we want more people, more sturdy Americans who will come 1;xra rxy;tI, md a,11f fa Io r,dc and add to the crops that feed and clothe the world; new citizens who will benefit themselves ill this sunny land and bene- fit the south by their presence. For more people means more money to spend, more business to be done, more manu- factureed articles to be bought, more taxes in the treasury to pave the high ways that stretch like a spider web from Virginia to the gulf. We have room for all who Will come, and there is d living and more for all who will work.
 Therefore, the field is ripe for a great national advertising campaign that will let the whole country know what Dixie has to offer It should be a campaign to arouse the interest of capital, which will establish fac tories of every kind; to attract the farmer in other sections who grows up, looks about him, and finds the lands exempted by an older generation and held at a price beyond his means, to attract the increasing thousands of business men who have left their investments in safe hands and are in search of a climate where they can play golf $50 days in the year and porker on the remaining 15.
 It has been my good fortune 70 have had a small part in a step to- ward this national advertising of the south, through the medium of long series of full page advertisements ia the Literary Digest. and advertising g journals covering two years past set ting forth some of the prosperity oi the southern states. This advertising, | take pleasure in explaining, was paid for (some $50,000) by the leading daily newspapers of the south. They have been loyal to their section-and our southern papers will rank in power and prestige and enterprise with any of the east--but the great campaign which alone could do justice to the south and her advantages scould not be borne by the newspapers Or any other one class of business.
 You must. remember that in the southern states we have 35,000.000 in- habitants--practical one third the population of the United States. There is a large proportion of negroes, the best adapted of all farm labor to 1ne r land in which they work. But besidss the negro, there is an infintesimal pro- portion of foreign born inhabitants. Nowhere else in all this country can you find such population of purely -snglo-Saxon citizens, descendants of the pioneers who came to America be- fore the revolution, whose blood has been unmixed with the Slav or the { Teuton or the Latin. We have no Scandinavan vote in Dixie; no Italian question, no great foreign element ta consider in politics or patriotism There are mo hyphenates here, and the Industrial Workers of the World is merely name we read in the papers
 We are not all southern-born. In my home city of Atlanta we have thousands of splendid men and women from New York and Boston and Chi cago and the Pacific coast and they are among our best and most public spirited citizens. The same holds true of all the south. But those who come to make profits remain to live among us, and within a few years we absorb them into the family and they become true southerners like the rest of us There is no more enthusiastic booster