Economic Growth Experienced By North Carolina in the early 20 th Century

1. Economic Growth Experienced By North Carolina in the early 20th Century

2. EQ: How did North Carolina experience economic growth in the early 20th century? • North Carolina in the 20th century was a part of the national experience of changing economic cycles. A decade of significant economic and social developments followed World War I, but the Great Depression of the 1930s brought widespread hardship and severe curtailment of education and other public services. In the view of some historians, the federal New Deal programs were responsible for more lasting changes in the state than any other force in its history. • In the 1940s the national defense program and World War II affected North Carolina. Some of the country's largest military installations were located in the state, notably Fort Bragg. North Carolina was a major supplier of manufactured war materials and delivered more textile goods to the army than did any other state. • After World War II the state began a time of rapid change. New highways were built, and cities grew as new industry and new people moved to the state. Interest in politics revived, and by the 1970s the state again had a viable two-party system. The painful struggle to eliminate racial segregation, beginning in the public schools in the 1950s and at the lunch counters in Greensboro in 1961, absorbed the state's energies for several decades. While most racial segregation had ended by the late 1980s, the state continued to be burdened by the remnants of earlier discriminatory practices and prejudiced attitudes. • North Carolina faces the enormous challenges of extending the benefits of education and economic prosperity to all its citizens, of preserving its environment from the pressures of growth, and of eliminating remaining racial discrimination. The state's economic prosperity, its widely respected system of higher education, and a growing confidence in its role as a leader of the New South give it the resources to face those challenges with optimism.

3. Words to Know! • Mass Production – the manufacture of great quantities of an item through the assembly of interchangeable parts. • Hydroelectric – power that is generated through the flow of water. • Strike – a work stoppage in protest over some grievance. • Export – to send goods to another country to sell. • Boll Weevil – an insect that attacts the boll of the cotton plant. • Farmer’s Union – a farmer’s organization formed in the early 1900s that worked for better schools, banking reform, and the break up of trusts. • Fundamentalist – a member of a religious group who believes that the Bible is the source of all religious authority and who believes the Genesis creation story as written. • Evolution – the theory that man developed from earlier, simpler life forms. • Workers Compensation – a form of government insurance for accidental death or injury in the workplace.

4. 20th Century Graphic Organizer Highways Industry 20th Century Economic Growth First Flight Electric Power Agriculture