This is C-SPAN's Lectures and History podcast.

This week, a look at the American South in the 1920s.

Professor Alan Crout talks about the region's economic progress 50 years after the Civil War.

Welcome to our special guest, C-SPAN this afternoon.

I'm Alan Kraut from the Department of History at American University,

and this is a class in the South since Reconstruction.

Today we're going to be talking about the South during the 1920s.

But first I want to sort of remind us of what we've been talking about.

You know, there was a very, very special generation of politicians that began to affect

Southern life and Southern politics in the early part of the 20th century.

These progressive politicians were primarily concerned with the needs of the middle

class, with scientific management, with harnessing competition within the marketplace, and with

taking care of society's producers, the workers, the farmers, the people, some of the same

people that the populists had been concerned with in the 1890s. It gave rise to a new generation

of southern politicians, people with colorful names like Hoax Smith and Ben Tillman, pitchfork

Ben Tillman, Big Jim Hogg from Texas, James Vardeman

and Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, and of course from Louisiana, U.E. Long. These politicians

were at one and the same time corrupt. Many of them were racists. They were colorful, they were dramatic speakers,

dynamic speakers, and yet at the same time, whatever negative things they were, they were also

some of the most reformist-minded, innovating politicians that the South had ever seen.

It was these politicians who eventually ousted child labor or reduced the amount of child labor in the South.

Three quarters of the textile mills of North Carolina employed children,

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