By John C. Delvin The New York Times (Wednesday, May 9, 1956)

Cleveland, Miss., May 8--Southern business men were urged here today by David Rockefeller to encourage investment locally by outside capital to speed a 'quiet revolution' from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

Mr. Rockefeller, executive vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, said the growth of the so-called Middle South--Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana -- might even outstrip the rest of the country.

He also urged cotton producers to expand research pioneering to meet the competition of synthetic fibers.

Mr. Rockefeller spoke to 5,000 persons at the twenty-first annual conference of the delta Council. This organization of cotton growers and other business men is interested in the economic development of the eighteen counties lying wholly or partly in a lush delta area of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The meeting was held at delta State College.

Mr. Rockefeller said there were roadblocks to expansion of industry in the Middle South. He explained:

"First, you lack adequate capital to develop fully the resources of the area; and secondly, it seems probably that you have a shortage of skilled managerial personnel--particularly men who have had the training and experience t0 start up new industrial enterprises."

There is "still some debate here in the South about this inflow of capital from other areas," Mr. Rockefeller continued.

"It is sometimes objected," he said, "that because interest and dividends go to the investors in the North, the south is paying a form of tribute to that area. In my judgment, this type of thinking does not rest on solid grounds."

Describing the shifting trend from an agricultural economy in this heart of the old South, he said:

"There are many, no doubt, who regret this change, there is something appealing about the simpler, less complex life of a rural economy."

Where coal and iron ore once forced the chief basis for industrialization, he continued, the trend in recent years has been increasingly toward chemicals and lighter metals. The Middle South has an "abundance of many of the basic raw materials for chemicals, he said, oil gas, potash and sulphur among them."

The Delta Council, in a resolution citing the decline of cotton exports from 50 percent of the world total in 1951 to less than 20 per cent for the current year, said the country's cotton industry had become a victim of the "cold war. The resolution listed a ten-point program for its rehabilitation to maintain "a fair share of the world market for United States cotton."

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update 24 July 2008