ABSTRACT
The Southern Growth Policies Board, an interstate compact that at the time comprised twelve southern states and Puerto Rico, was among the first to take notice and publicize the decline in rural employment growth. Industrial Invasion of Nonmetropolitan America, published in 1976, in documenting industrialization and its impacts, called attention to the fortunes being amassed in rural communities, many of them in the rural South. The new data found a receptive audience in a number of rural areas, many of which were already experiencing the effects of job loss, and rural industrialization policy was resurrected as a topic of debate. Shortly after the Factories was released, the Chapel Hill-based policy research firm of MDC assembled a committee of distinguished southerners who supplemented the data in the report with case studies and additional analyses to piece together a rather grim picture of the rural South.
