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The \"Pittsburgh Renaissance,\" an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city's downtown.Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers.

[...]communities outside the sprawling metropolitan region abutting Lake Michigan felt the sting of economic contraction just as keenly if not more so than Chicago and its suburbs.Staley ran a full-page advertisement in the Decatur Herald and Review, headlined \"Why a Lock-out?\" that defended its unprecedented move.Because of the union's provocative actions in the plant, the missive argued, the company had \"no other choice\" but to \"take a defensive action\" to \"save our Decatur business.[...]the newspaper's editorial supported twelve-hour shifts and higher worker contributions for health insurance as necessary changes to safeguard the company's financial bottom line.Local 837 demonstrated at State Farm headquarters in neighboring Bloomington and at branch offices in Champaign, Peoria, and other central Illinois communities.[...]AIW mailed sixty thousand brochures to union supporters throughout the country urging them to cancel their insurance policies unless State Farm persuaded Staley to end the lockout.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president, the South was unmistakably the most disadvantaged part of the nation. The region's economy was the weakest, its educational level the lowest, its politics the most rigid, and its laws and social mores the most racially slanted. Moreover, the region was prostrate from the effects of the Great Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal effected significant changes on the southern landscape, challenging many traditions and laying the foundations for subsequent alterations in the southern way of life. At the same time, firmly entrenched values and institutions militated against change and blunted the impact of federal programs. InThe South and the New Deal, Roger Biles examines the New Deal's impact on the rural and urban South, its black and white citizens, its poor, and its politics. He shows how southern leaders initially welcomed and supported the various New Deal measures but later opposed a continuation or expansion of these programs because they violated regional convictions and traditions. Nevertheless, Biles concludes, the New Deal, coupled with the domestic effects of World War II, set the stage for a remarkable postwar transformation in the affairs of the region. The post-World War II Sunbelt boom has brought Dixie more fully into the national mainstream. To what degree did the New Deal disrupt southern distinctiveness? Biles answers this and other questions and explores the New Deal's enduring legacy in the region.

The imposition of state oversight fell short of addressing the most critical problems afflicting East St. Louis—job loss, dwindling population, crumbling infrastructure, and the declining resources available to local government. 1 The determination to create an independent authority to manage a city's fiscal affairs in Illinois involved a combination of economic, political, and social factors. The city had undergone drastic population loss and a rapid demographic transformation prior to 1990, losing its ethnic and racial diversity and emerging by the late twentieth century as essentially an all-Black community. Workers in East St. Louis shops constructed, assembled, processed, smelted, molded, milled, and refined a wide assortment of goods, elevating the community to the top ranks of the leading manufacturing cities in the state by the time of World War I. 3 In addition, many entrepreneurs operating businesses in East St. Louis carved out new communities on adjacent land to escape high taxes and municipal control, adding to the dense concentration of manufacturing establishments in and around the parent city. The Alcoa works in Alorton enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the production of aluminum alloy for decades, and the Monsanto complex in Sauget yielded a large and increasing variety of chemical products.

Local officials had played no part in formulating Clinton's economic development proposals. Bill Clinton Visits East St. Louis On August 6, 1992, as candidate for president, Clinton and Senator Albert A. Gore, his choice for vice president, spoke and replied to questions in front of an audience gathered at the East St. Louis Senior High School gymnasium. (Hannibal was best known as Mark Twain's boyhood home.) By 1992, however, Hannibal, like East St. Louis, was another Mississippi River city that had expanded decades earlier only to experience a prolonged period of decline as part of the shuttering of manufacturing firms and an accompanying slowdown in railroad and river barge traffic. Sperling characterized the president's trip as “an economic mission in our own backyard,” much like the trade missions that federal and state officials made to non-white, impoverished nations. 2 By anyone's set of calculations, East St. Louis's economic recovery appeared a longshot.