The New Deal and the South edited by James C. Cobb and Michael V.
Namorato essays by Alan Brinkley, Harvard Sitkoff, Frank Freidel, Pete
Daniel, J. Wayne Flynt, and Numan V. Bartley The New Deal and the South
represents the first comprehensive treatment of the impact of the
Roosevelt recovery program on the South. In essays dealing with the New
Deal's overall effect on the South, its influence on southern
agriculture, labor, blacks, and politics, and its significance as a
turning point in the region's history, the contributors provide readers
with an opportunity to develop a more complete understanding of an era
which a number of historians now mark as the period in which the New
South actually began to become new. Each of the essays in this
collection was presented at the Ninth Annual Chancellor's Symposium on
Southern History, held in October 1983, at the University of
Mississippi. In the introductory essay Frank Freidel identifies the New
Deal period as one of the most important phases in the modernization of
the South, one which linked the wishful thinking of the New South era to
the much-publicized contemporary Sunbelt South. Pete Daniel describes
the New Deal's role in the mechanization, consolidation, and
corporatization of southern agriculture, a phenomenon that swept
thousands of southerners from the land and paved the way for an all-out
crusade to industrialize the region. In his analysis of the New Deal's
impact on southern labor, Wayne Flynt assesses what the New Deal did and
did not mean for southern industrial workers. Alan Brinkley stresses the
tensions induced in southern politics during the New Deal era,
particularly those caused by the Democratic Party's increased
responsiveness to blacks and organized labor. Harvard Sitkoff, in
surveying the New Deal's impact on black southerners, cites the limited
nature of that impact but points to the seeds of future progress sown by
the Roosevelt Administration and its policies. In the concluding essay
Numan V. Bartley emphasizes the collapse of a paternalistic labor system
and the shift of power from small town to urban elites and suggests that
the years 1935-1945 may soon be seen as the "crucial decade" in southern
history. The New Deal and the South provides both the serious student
and the general reader with an up-to-date assessment of one of the most
critical transitional periods in southern history. James C. Cobb is a
professor of history at the University of Georgia. Michael V. Namorato
is a professor of history at the University of Mississippi.
