National press rebranded Atlanta from backward to progressive between 1945 and 1955

Evidence

As late as 1945 the Saturday Evening Post still portrayed Atlanta as the backward setting of Gone with the Wind. “She’s a hot-bread, boiled-greens, fried-chicken-and-cream-gravy town,” a reporter noted with a flourish. In his view, the city’s worst crisis was “an Old Mammy shortage,” which left white women “raising their mammyless children and dreaming for the first time of secondhand washing machines.” With the postwar political changes, however, these Old South stereotypes were replaced by New South themes of economic progress and progressive politics. … The mayor and his business allies, boosters to the core, had long dreamed of press coverage so positive. Now that the image of Atlanta as a moderate, modern city had finally taken hold, Bill Hartsfield was determined to maintain it. In 1955 the mayor mugged for the National Toastmasters’ Club and coined a new nickname for the city. Atlanta, he told the crowd, was “a city too busy to hate.” To his delight, the nickname stuck. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 99

Categorization

• XREF: The crafted ‘city too busy to hate’ brand is the economic-growth counterweight to the racial conservatism this book traces; connects to the boosterism theme in the trees/infrastructure piece.