Abstract

The New United States

This article focuses on economic conditions in Memphis, Tennessee during 1919. It is one of the world's great cotton centres, and it is also the world's largest hardwood lumber market; but it is not irrevocably tied to either. The steady development of farming interests in addition to cotton growing, in the surrounding region, joined to the absence of large competing cities nearby, makes it an important jobbing centre and opens up possibilities of wealth through general trade. A systematic effort is being made to reduce the cotton acreage. The immediate development of the hardwood lumber industry looks in a different direction. The local consumption of hardwood is negligible, and the Memphis producers have found their chief market in the furniture, tool, agricultural implement, and wagon industries of the North and Central West.