page_791 < previous page page_791 next page > Page 791 See also Chicago Seven; Hoffman, Abbie; Kent State Incident; Students for a Democratic Society. New Nationalism Frustrated by the conservatism of Republican president William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft's predecessor, decided to seek a third term as president in 1912. Because he was a Republican and Taft was running again, Roosevelt ran as an independent candidate on the Progressive party ticket. Drawing much of his inspiration from Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909), Roosevelt formulated a platform called the "New Nationalism," which argued that the federal government had a positive interventionist role to play in the advancement of progressive democracy. The Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, insisted that government should be used only for the negative purposes of sweeping away privilege and restoring unfettered competition. He called for the dismantling of trusts and monopolies. Roosevelt denounced this as anachronistic, arguing that large corporations had become indispensable in the modern age. They should not be dismantled but should be controlled and regulated in the public interest. Roosevelt also proposed a comprehensive program of labor and social legislation. Wilson (who won the election) denounced the New Nationalism as elitist and detected in it the seeds of despotism. Despite elements of chauvinism and elitism, the New Nationalism was in essence a hard-headed attempt to come to terms with the modern corporate age. It was also by far the most progressive platform proposed by the three presidents of the Progressive Era. See also Elections: 1912; Roosevelt, Theodore. New South Although often used by historians simply to designate the post-1877 period, the term New South is most prominently identified with a program of regional industrialization and agricultural diversification promoted by southern publicists, businesspeople, and politicians in the late nineteenth century. The Civil War and Reconstruction had given certain antebellum southerners' dreams of a business-oriented, manufacturing South a new significance. The vision of a New South described by Edwin De Leon in magazine articles in the early 1870s was taken up by skillful propagandists like Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Richard Edmonds of the Manufacturers' Record and became a favored prescription for a rejuvenated Dixie. Instead of cultivating a few staple crops, the South, with the aid of northern investment, could become a land of industry, entrepreneurship, and scientific farming. In addition, although insisting upon white supremacy, the New South should devote itself to sectional reconciliation. Southern industry, notably textile milling, did boom after the end of Reconstruction. Grady and his peers proclaimed their vision to have been realized. But, in fact, the region remained disproportionately poor, characterized by staplecrop monoculture, low-wage industry, and external ownership of much of its resources. The catchphrase "New South" has not been the exclusive property of the Grady movement, however. Groups ranging from Union occupying forces in Confederate South Carolina to the twentieth-century Communist party issued publications entitled New South. Newspapers See Magazines and Newspapers. Niagara Movement This was a major step on the road to black militancy. Its beginnings may be traced to the publication in 1903 of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. That book included an essay, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," which attacked Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech and accused him of abandoning the fight for black political rights  < previous page page_791 next page >