According to sociologist Vaughn Grisham, the first director of the George McLean Institute for Community Development at the University of Mississippi, this stance “rankled industrialists across the state by accusing them of betraying Mississippi’s workers.” The feud caused a marked divide within the community but earned McLean recognition as Nation magazine’s Man of the Year. In 1937 he and his newspaper sided with striking workers at the Tupelo Cotton Mill who were seeking an increase in their ten-dollar weekly salaries and a reduction in working hours from forty-six to forty. The US Department of Agriculture adopted the community development council idea as a nationwide model for rural development in the 1950s.Ĭommunity leaders did not always appreciate McLean’s efforts. With the local economy based almost exclusively on agriculture, McLean saw the need to find new avenues for both income and employment. The councils initiated local community development projects and sought to erase the divide between rural areas and towns and cities. On 6 April 1936, just a day after a tornado leveled most of the town and killed 230, McLean declared in an editorial, “Tupelo will build on this wreckage a better and greater city.”Īnother of his early efforts was the formation of rural community development councils in Lee and surrounding counties. McLean saw Tupelo and the surrounding Lee County area as a grand experiment in social reconstruction and economic diversification. One of the first was the promotion of dairy farming, calling on local businesses to fund the purchase of cattle and start an insemination program that allowed those merchants to recoup their investments many times over while providing farmers with a steady income. McLean funneled the paper’s profits back into the community through a series of economic development projects. On 1 June 1936 it became the Tupelo Daily Journal. With no background in journalism or newspaper management, McLean quickly turned the newspaper around so that it began to show a profit. That same year he used some of his family’s money to buy “a bankrupt biweekly from a bankrupt bank in the middle of a Depression.” At the time, the Tupelo Journal had fewer than five hundred paying subscribers. In 1934 McLean found himself out of work after being fired as a sociology and education instructor at Memphis’s Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) for helping to organize the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in neighboring Arkansas. He also did graduate work in psychology and sociology at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. He then used the newspaper’s profits to fund projects that became a national model for economic development.īorn in Winona on 30 July 1904, McLean graduated from the University of Mississippi and went on to receive his master’s degree in religion from Boston University in 1928. McLean was an educator, sociologist, and journalist who took a bankrupt Tupelo newspaper and turned it into the largest-circulation newspaper in the nation for a city its size.
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