Their contradictory aspirations suggest why the lush rhetoric of the New South was so radically divorced from its impoverished reality. The greatest obstacle to an economic boom turned out to be what has been described as a continuation of slavery by other means: the policies of racism, segregation, repression, and discrimination that continued well into the twentieth century. These policies were as integral a part of the New South program as the ideas of modernization and industrialization. Moreover, in contrast to such rhetorical chimeras, racist policies were a reality that scuttled all
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