Turning Point: World War II and the Economic Development of Arkansas

THE SLOW AGRICULTURAL RHYTHM OF ARKANSAS, progressing from wet spring to summer drought, from summer drought to smoky fall, from smoky fall to frost and back again via snow to wet spring, seemed definitely to change between 1942-1945, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould Fletcher in an interpretative history of his home state first published in 1947. That same year, from a different place on the literary spectrum, the trade journal Manufacturers' Record announced that Industrial Revolution is underway in Arkansas, a phenomenon it ascribed to War II and the investment by the Federal government of than half a billion dollars in Arkansas war plants.1 While both of these statements exaggerated the traditional nature of the prewar Arkansas economy, they nevertheless expressed a fundamental truth. World War II set in motion the most important economic change in Arkansas since the introduction of cotton production a century before. Beginning with the mobilization that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor, per capita income increased through the next thirty-five years, propelled by a long-term shift from agriculture into commerce and industry and an even rapid decrease in population. The wartime change was particularly impressive. Between 1940 and 1945, per capita income in Arkansas rose from 44 percent of the national average to 60 percent. One cause was economic activity connected to mobilization, production of goods, and the training of troops, and another was a migration from the state that dropped its population from 1.48 percent of the national total to 1.32 percent. During the same period, income produced by agriculture fell from 29 to 21 percent of the state total, and the farm population dropped from 57 to 42 percent. Postwar changes followed the same pattern. By 1960, less than one percent of Americans lived in Arkansas and the farm population was down to 28 percent. In 1970, per capita income had increased to 70 percent of the national population's, and manufacturing was in the midst of long-term growth that raised it from 0.28 percent of the national total in 1940 to 0.85 percent in 1990. In 1990, agriculture accounted for less than 3 percent of Arkansas income (see Table 1 and Chart 1).2 This economic modernization was part of a larger phenomenon that transformed the South from its status as the economically wounded offspring of the Confederacy to its modern position in the prosperous Sun Belt. Per capita income in the region rose from 58 percent of the national average in 1940 to 81 percent in 1970, precipitating a host of other changes that brought southerners into the mainstream of national culture. Economic historian Gavin Wright summed up the transformation in 1986: Long the most backward and impoverished section of the United States, the South since 1940 has persistently outpaced the rest of the nation in the growth of incomes, industry, jobs, commerce, construction, and education.3 The economic impact of the war on the South has been widely recognized. In The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, a volume in the prestigious A History of the South series that was published in 1967, George Tindall argued that it brought prosperity, forced workers and managers to improve their skills, generated capital, and created a new growthoriented mind-set-all of which were essential ingredients of economic `takeoff.' Tindall believed that the effects would have been greater still had the South not been more campground than arsenal, that is, had it not received 36 percent of the federal funds spent on training facilities but only 17.6 percent of those used to construct defense plants. But he also recognized that the allocation was not grossly unfair given the fact that in 1939 southerners were 28 percent of the American population but produced only 15 percent of the nation's manufactured goods. In The New South, 19451980, the next volume in the same series, which appeared in 1995, Numan V. …

Topic: Cuban History and Society
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences