The National Emergency Countil's 1938 Report on Economic Conditions of the South caused Franklin Roosevelt to view the south as "the Nation's #1 economic problem" and quickly became a standard part of modern Southern history. This important and out-of-print document is reprinted here, along with primary accounts of the Depression-era South, statistical data, and contemporary reactions to the Report.
David L. Carlton is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where he has taught since 1983. He is the author of Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (1982) and a number of publications dealing chiefly with the urban, industrial, and labor history of the American South. He is currently working on a study of the industrialization of North Carolina.
Peter A. Coclanis is a member of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of many works in economic history, including The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (1989), which won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians.