Highway Building and the Making of a Rural Industrial Economy in Post-World War II North Carolina

Tyler Greene, .

In the post-World War II years, North Carolina embarked on an ambitious effort to expand and improve its system of rural highways. By 1956, 97 percent of rural North Carolinians lived within one mile of a paved highway, lending credibility to the state’s nickname, “The Good Roads State.” For state leaders like governors Kerr Scott and Luther Hodges, good rural roads were essential to making rural North Carolina a desirable site for new manufacturing enterprises. This paper argues that state leaders sought to bring factory jobs to the countryside because they feared the development of large industrial cities, associating them with a host of ill-effects, including congestion, labor unions, and New Deal liberalism. Although rural factories proliferated in postwar North Carolina, industrialization took place within a political economy defined by low wages, limited regulations and antiunionism, which failed to provide long-term economic security to rural North Carolinians.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 41. Technology, Politics, and Rural Labor in the 19th and 20th Century South