Georgia was already struggling economically when the stock market crash of 1929 helped bring about the Great Depression. Earlier in the decade, the infestation of the boll weevil devastated Georgia’s cotton industry, which was made worse by a three-year drought beginning in 1925. The newspapers published in the highest cotton-producing counties of south Georgia, including the Dawson News and the Vienna News, provide an agrarian journalistic perspective not available in the news coverage of larger cities like Atlanta and Savannah. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs brought some relief to Georgians, and he resided part-time in the small town of Warms Springs, Georgia, during his presidency. The Warm Springs Advertiser/Mirror began circulating the year before winning the presidency and had unique local insight into his presence in the state. The Southern Ruralist, an agricultural paper published in Atlanta, provided a farmer’s perspective of the Depression. The Gainesville Eagle covered the tornado that hit north Georgia in 1936 and reported on the effects of the state’s deadliest disaster long after the national press forgot it.
Georgia played an important role in the United States’ participation in World War II. Over 300,000 Georgians served in the Armed Forces during the war, and newspapers written by and for the soldiers, including the Fort Benning Bayonet, covered soldier life in Georgia during the war, as did large city papers located near military training centers, like the Athens Banner-Herald. The state was also home to a thriving wartime industrial economy, including the Brunswick shipyards, munitions factories in Milledgeville, and the Bell Aircraft plant in Marietta. Papers like the Brunswick News, Milledgeville Union Recorder, and Marietta Journal circulated detailed coverage of Georgia’s war effort and the changes it brought to southern society in the post-war years.
Southwest Georgia was considered a particularly hostile area to African Americans in the Jim Crow Era. Many of the state’s counties from that region earned nicknames exemplifying the harsh conditions for African Americans, including “Bad Baker,” “Terrible Terrell,” and “Lynching Lee.” Newspapers from these and other southwest counties covered the everyday injustices faced by African Americans and did so from the perspective of an unsympathetic white establishment. Despite this skewed perspective, papers like the Lee County Journal, Cordele Dispatch, and Camilla Enterprise unapologetically covered the repression and bigotry of southwest Georgia in the post-war period and the civil rights activities of the Albany and Americus movements that activists organized in response to these injustices.
Atlanta was a city torn between the past and the future in the early 20th century. It aimed to meet the developmental ideals of the “New South” espoused by famed Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady but remained a segregated city that openly discriminated against African Americans. The Atlanta Georgian, a William Randolph Hearst-owned paper, documented the city’s daily history during this period through the sensationalist lens of yellow journalism. The paper used multiple daily editions, dramatic headlines, and the liberal use of photography to report on a wide swath of stories, including the dramatic growth of Atlanta, the Leo Frank Trial, the arrival of the boll weevil in Georgia, and the continued efforts of the white population to disenfranchise and segregate African Americans in the South.