Proponents of the New South envisioned a post-Reconstruction southern economy modeled on the North’s embrace of the Industrial Revolution.Henry W. Grady, a newspaper editor in Atlanta, Georgia, coined the phrase the "New South” in 1874. He urged the South to abandon its longstanding agrarian economy for a modern economy grounded in factories, mines, and mills.But Grady’s vision was not to be. By 1900, per-capita income in the South was forty percent less than the national average, and rural poverty persisted across much of the South well into the twentieth century.
