how did mississippi economy change after world war 2
History of Mississippi The war years brought prosperity as cotton prices soared and new war installations paid high wages. Many blacks headed to northern and western cities, particularly in California, as part of the second and larger wave of the Great Migration. White farmers often headed to southern factory towns. Young men, white and black, were equally subject to the draft, but farmers were often exempt on occupational grounds. The World War II era marked a transition from labor-intensive agriculture to mechanized farming in the Delta region of Mississippi. Federal farm payments and improvements in mechanical cotton pickers made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted their workers from sharecropping to wage labor. As workers left the farm for military service or defense jobs, farm wages rose. By 1944, wages had tripled. In 1945 the newly established Delta War Wage Board provided planters temporary relief by setting a maximum wage for farm workers, but President Harry S. Truman lifted wartime economic controls in 1946.
Industrial Revolution in the United States Famed Merchant Francis Cabot Lowell memorized the designs of British textile machines in 1810 and realized that, during the War of 1812, demand for domestic finished cloth increased as imports were drastically cut through embargoes. When he returned to the United States, he set up the Boston Manufacturing Company, which employed the famed Lowell system as a response to poor working conditions in England, initially employing many women. His company was massively successful and extremely productive, especially because his competitors continued to use labor-intensive methods while he employed the mechanized spinning jenny and the water frame. The systems developed by the Boston Manufacturing Company and Lowell himself, such as vertical integration and mass production, found replicas across the country as the United States began to recognize the need for economic independence and industrial development in the wake of the Embargo Act of 1807, which highlighted the country's long-term reliance on the British Empire for trade in important refined resources.[2] Since it became clear the U.S. had relied too heavily on foreign refinement of resources,[3] entrepreneurs such as Oliver Evans, Robert Fulton, and Matthias W. Baldwin capitalized on this mostly new industry and mechanized refinement and transportation, thereby drastically increasing the economic independence of the United States for resource refinement and fueling the war effort against Britain.