and many whites worked to re-establish white supremacy, Grady popularized an antithesis between the "old South" which "rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth," and a "new south" – "thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity:" The new South presents a perfect democracy...; a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace; and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age as he said in an 1886 speech in New York. His audience included J. P. Morgan and H. M. Flagler at Delmonico's Restaurant, at a meeting of the New England Society of New York. From 1882 to 1886, along with Nathaniel E. Harris, Grady promoted the founding in Atlanta of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a state vocational education school intended to train workers for new industries. Orator and spokesman for the "New South" Grady was also praised for his great passion for political oratory (he supported Prohibition and a Georgia veterans' home for disabled or elderly Confederate soldiers), commitment to the new peace, and well-known sense of humor. To a large crowd in Boston, Grady said "I am a talker by inheritance: my father was an Irishman and my mother was a woman." That sense of humor got Grady through more than one difficult situation. Once at a banquet of northern elites, he was waxing eloquent about the brilliant prospects for northern investments in a New South determined to rise from the ashes of defeat. Grady spotted General William T. Sherman in the audience, the celebrated Yankee soldier who was credited with defeating and burning much of Georgia, and particularly Atlanta, on his infamous march to the sea. Without missing a beat, Grady acknowledged the general by noting that the people of Georgia thought Sherman an able military man, "but a mite careless about fire." In another speech, Grady wanted to gently chastise his Southern audience for what he believed to be Georgia's economic shortcomings. Rather than pounding them with statistics, he entertained them with stories that made the points. He said: I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor "one gallus" fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits