<P> The rapidly growing middle class of professionals, businessmen and educated worked to bring the Progressive Era to Georgia in the early 20th century . The goal was to modernize the state, increase efficiency, apply scientific methods, promote education and eliminate waste and corruption . Key leaders were governors Joseph M. Terrell (1902--07) and Hoke Smith . Terrell pushed through important legislation covering judicial affairs, schools, food and drug regulation, taxation and labor measures . He failed to obtain necessary penal and railroad reforms . </P> <P> A representative local leader was newspaper editor Thomas Lee Bailey (1865--1945), who used his Cochran Journal to reach out to Bleckley County, from 1910 to 1925 . The paper mirrored Bailey's personality and philosophy for it was folksy, outspoken, and upbeat and covered a variety of local topics . Bailey was a strong advocate for diversified farming, quality education, civic and political reform, and controls on alcohol and gambling . </P> <P> In the early 1900s, Georgia experienced economic expansion in both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors . The cotton industry benefited from the depredations of the boll weevil further west . In 1911, Georgia produced a record 2.8 million bales of cotton . However, the boll weevil arrived in Georgia four years later . By 1921, infestation had reached such epidemic proportions that 45% of the states' cotton crop was destroyed . Demand during World War I drove cotton prices to a high of $1 a pound . After 1919, however, cotton quickly fell to 10 cents per pound . Landowners ruined by the boll weevil and declining prices expelled their sharecroppers . </P> <P> Although blacks also participated in the Progressive movement, the state remained in the grip of Jim Crow . In 1934, Georgia's poll tax, which also had excluded poor whites from voter rolls to reduce the Populist threat, was upheld in the Supreme Court case of Breedlove v. Suttles (1937). That challenge was brought by a poor white man seeking the ability to vote without paying a fee . By 1940 only 20,000 blacks in Georgia managed to register . In 1944 the Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Allwright banned white primaries, and in 1945 Georgia repealed its poll tax . NAACP and other activists rapidly registered African Americans in cities such as Atlanta, but in rural areas they remained outside politics . </P>

Why georgia was important to united states during world war i
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