In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the poverty-stricken American South the biggest threat to the nation’s economy.
“It is my conviction that the South presents right now the nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” FDR wrote in a message to a Conference on Economic Conditions of the South. “The nation’s problem,” he added, “not merely the South’s.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, would probably recoil at the notion of borrowing a thought from the original New Deal Democrat, but he could absolutely say the same thing about the southern half of the state he now leads.
To be clear, Georgia’s challenges with poverty, poor education and ill health are not confined to the areas south of Macon. You can find all those problems and more in every corner of the state. But they are overwhelmingly concentrated below the state’s fabled gnat line—and they hang like an albatross around the neck of the state and Metro Atlanta. South Georgia is, indeed, Metro Atlanta’s problem. It’s footing the lion’s share of the cost for South Georgia’s economic, education and health problems.
To give Kemp his due, the governor and his industry hunters have done an admirable job of landing major new businesses and locating them outside Atlanta and around the state. The new $5 billion Hyundai plant now being built in Bryan County will almost certainly have a transformative impact on that end of the state, and make Georgia a major player in the electric vehicle industry.
But that kind of industrial development is only part of the solution, and arguably not even the most important part. Since the dawn of the current century, much of rural Georgia—especially south of the gnat line—has fallen into the bottom national ranks for economic prosperity, education and health.
Mapping and watching the data unfold across a period of years and decades is not unlike studying a series of medical images that show the clear metastasizing of multiple socioeconomic cancers. Would the next Hyundai agree to set up shop in a part of Georgia with lousy schools, limited health care and little if anything in the way of quality-of-life attributes? The gravity of these problems is arguably long past a point where conventional political treatment might be effective.
But the state’s leaders can’t even muster the political courage to take on the most obvious problem: Georgia has about 50 or 60 more counties than it needs and can support—or rather, that can support themselves. Even a cursory review of economic data makes clear that small, sparsely populated counties can’t make it on their own. Thirty-four of Georgia’s 159 counties have populations of less than 10,000 people, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, and another 33 come in under 20,000. Most of those are losing population.
None of this is news. Nearly a half-century ago, a Buckhead Republican House member named Kiliaen Townsend sponsored legislation that would have cut the number of counties in Georgia nearly in half, and insisted on campaigning for his proposal into rural Georgia. The state’s Democratic governor at the time, Joe Frank Harris, was apparently wary of having a maimed or dead Republican on his hands, and sent state troopers with Townsend. By multiple accounts, they had to hustle him out of more than one town hall meeting.
I haven’t been able to find any kind of record or newspaper article on Townsend’s forays into rural Georgia, let alone an account of how he presented his proposal. But he was blunt years later in a video interview with a historian at the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library at the University of Georgia.
“They have no reason to exist,” Townsend told an interviewer from the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library in 2006. “They have two or three thousand people, no business, no jobs, no health, no education, no law enforcement, really.” Georgia ranked close to the bottom nationally in education, he added, “because who’s going to teach in Podunk County with a bunch of illiterate parents [who are] uninterested in education?”
Townsend’s proposal was of course dead on arrival at the Georgia House of Representatives, and no doubt still would be today.
What then to do? FDR responded to the economic crisis of his day with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Work Projects Administration, among other measures—all initiatives that were anathema to conservatives then and still are.
With two years left on his gubernatorial term, Kemp seems likely to follow the lead of his predecessors and kick this can down the road again. The problems of rural Georgia will continue to deteriorate, and Metro Atlanta will continue to be stuck with the bill. Kemp most likely need not fear being compared with Roosevelt.
Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the center or the university.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
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Kemp’s New Deal? The Governor Could Learn From FDR
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the poverty-stricken American South the biggest threat to the nation’s economy.
“It is my conviction that the South presents right now the nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” FDR wrote in a message to a Conference on Economic Conditions of the South. “The nation’s problem,” he added, “not merely the South’s.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, would probably recoil at the notion of borrowing a thought from the original New Deal Democrat, but he could absolutely say the same thing about the southern half of the state he now leads.
To be clear, Georgia’s challenges with poverty, poor education and ill health are not confined to the areas south of Macon. You can find all those problems and more in every corner of the state. But they are overwhelmingly concentrated below the state’s fabled gnat line—and they hang like an albatross around the neck of the state and Metro Atlanta. South Georgia is, indeed, Metro Atlanta’s problem. It’s footing the lion’s share of the cost for South Georgia’s economic, education and health problems.
To give Kemp his due, the governor and his industry hunters have done an admirable job of landing major new businesses and locating them outside Atlanta and around the state. The new $5 billion Hyundai plant now being built in Bryan County will almost certainly have a transformative impact on that end of the state, and make Georgia a major player in the electric vehicle industry.
But that kind of industrial development is only part of the solution, and arguably not even the most important part. Since the dawn of the current century, much of rural Georgia—especially south of the gnat line—has fallen into the bottom national ranks for economic prosperity, education and health.
Mapping and watching the data unfold across a period of years and decades is not unlike studying a series of medical images that show the clear metastasizing of multiple socioeconomic cancers. Would the next Hyundai agree to set up shop in a part of Georgia with lousy schools, limited health care and little if anything in the way of quality-of-life attributes? The gravity of these problems is arguably long past a point where conventional political treatment might be effective.
But the state’s leaders can’t even muster the political courage to take on the most obvious problem: Georgia has about 50 or 60 more counties than it needs and can support—or rather, that can support themselves. Even a cursory review of economic data makes clear that small, sparsely populated counties can’t make it on their own. Thirty-four of Georgia’s 159 counties have populations of less than 10,000 people, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, and another 33 come in under 20,000. Most of those are losing population.
None of this is news. Nearly a half-century ago, a Buckhead Republican House member named Kiliaen Townsend sponsored legislation that would have cut the number of counties in Georgia nearly in half, and insisted on campaigning for his proposal into rural Georgia. The state’s Democratic governor at the time, Joe Frank Harris, was apparently wary of having a maimed or dead Republican on his hands, and sent state troopers with Townsend. By multiple accounts, they had to hustle him out of more than one town hall meeting.
I haven’t been able to find any kind of record or newspaper article on Townsend’s forays into rural Georgia, let alone an account of how he presented his proposal. But he was blunt years later in a video interview with a historian at the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library at the University of Georgia.
“They have no reason to exist,” Townsend told an interviewer from the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library in 2006. “They have two or three thousand people, no business, no jobs, no health, no education, no law enforcement, really.” Georgia ranked close to the bottom nationally in education, he added, “because who’s going to teach in Podunk County with a bunch of illiterate parents [who are] uninterested in education?”
Townsend’s proposal was of course dead on arrival at the Georgia House of Representatives, and no doubt still would be today.
What then to do? FDR responded to the economic crisis of his day with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Work Projects Administration, among other measures—all initiatives that were anathema to conservatives then and still are.
With two years left on his gubernatorial term, Kemp seems likely to follow the lead of his predecessors and kick this can down the road again. The problems of rural Georgia will continue to deteriorate, and Metro Atlanta will continue to be stuck with the bill. Kemp most likely need not fear being compared with Roosevelt.
Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the center or the university.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
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