obliged to clean themselves—at least the neighborhoods of the well-off. The
last southern epidemic occurred in .
tCleanliness approaches godliness, it is said, and beauty as well. The
very civic exertions that built water and sewer systems, that provided gar-
bage collection, that forbade free-ranging swine, and that began (at least)
to complain about air pollution produced some version of the City Beau-
tiful movement early in the twentieth century. The movement’s beginning
is usually associated with the gigantic Columbian Exposition in Chicago
in . The exposition presented a brand-new, dazzling array of faux Re-
naissance structures arranged in a park ‘‘like frosted pastries on a tray’’ (as
Jane Jacobs put it). This wasdesign, the magisterial signature of a new breed
of planners. A beautiful city, indeed,mustbe planned, by men wise and
brave—from boulevard to architectural and landscaping detail—in order
to achieve the monumental. Civic pride and ambition—virtually always
the possession and initiative of local business and professional elites—
had been grandly demonstrated already, in expositions associated with
southern cities’ centennials and with farm products and manufacturing.
Nashville and Atlanta, newer railroad centers with excellent transportation
and sanitary infrastructure, shone brightly. The model was Atlanta’s Inter-
national Cotton Exposition in , which featured a giant, cross-shaped
structure built for the occasion in Oglethorpe Park. Then came the same
city’s Piedmont Exposition in and the memorable Cotton States and
International Exposition of , at which Booker T. Washington delivered
a momentous address that seemed to sanction segregation. Nashville’s tri-
umphant show came two years later, with the Tennessee Centennial Expo-
sition, where attendance and the monumental scale of the new buildings,
such as the wooden ‘‘Parthenon’’ that remains today, outdid Atlanta.^17
By these glorious times, the South had finally begun its takeoff toward
urbanization. Such a historical turning point is defined as when the urban
portion of a population surpasses percent of the total. The Northeast’s
takeoff had occurred during the s; the Midwest’s, in the s. By
, percent of southerners lived in cities—a point the Northeast had
achieved about . The domestic demographic chaos of World War II,
however, propelled southerners out of farming and lumbering and other
rural callings and into cities. By the time the census of was completed
and published, the South had become, at long last, urban, converging with
other American regions.^18
But by this date, too,suburbanization was already under way in the