The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s (review)

Industrialization is one of the key themes in the standard narrative of the modern South. In most accounts, this narrative first locks onto textiles—between roughly 1880 and the collapse of the 1934 General Strike—makes quick nods to Mississippi's "balance agriculture with industry" program and to Operation Dixie, and maybe executes a quick drive-by on the integration of textiles in the 1960s before fixing on the rapid expansion of the region's manufacturing sector during the Sunbelt Boom. One of the real virtues of this exciting new volume edited by Philip Scranton grows out of its largely successful attempt to complicate the standard narrative by focusing not on the origins of modern industrialization in the South nor on its maturation, but on its less-well-known midcentury expansion.

The Second Wave grew out of a 1998 conference sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for the Study of Southern Industrialization. Unlike many conference volumes, this one has a coherent theme, and, while some essays are better executed than others, students interested in the general subject of southern industrialization can learn from all of them. The book comprises nine case studies, mainly by younger scholars, bracketed by a good, punchy introduction by Scranton and a provocative, contextualizing afterword by Gavin Wright. Three of the cases deal with the Bell (later Lockheed) aircraft plant outside Atlanta, while others deal with north Georgia's carpet industry, the Texas petrochemical industry, and the southern automobile industry and paper and pulp complex. In addition, the volume includes an essay on the protracted decline and ultimate demise of the mill-village system in cotton textiles and a revisionist assessment of the contribution of federal spending to southern manufacturing between 1940 and 1990.

Different readers will have their own favorites, but to my mind three of the contributions stand out: Randall Patton's on the rise of the tufted carpet industry in and around Dalton, Georgia; William Boyd's on the rise of industrial forestry in the South; and Karen Hülsemann's on the history of the region's automobile industry. Each of these, particularly Boyd's, combines empirical depth and analytical rigor in such a way as to enrich greatly the state of our knowledge about the industry in question.

As both Scranton and Wright note, The Second Wave should be viewed as the beginning rather than the end of the discussion about southern industrialization during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Clearly, nine cases do not a comprehensive history make. The failure to address developments in several important industries—agribusiness, furniture, and second-wave textiles and apparel are not treated, for example—limits to some extent our ability to generalize from conclusions drawn in this volume. The focus of so many of the essays around Georgia, while not surprising given the conference venue, poses other problems. Just how representative of southern industrialization were the Bell Aircraft Corporation's operations in Marietta? Were such operations worth three essays, however good? Maybe, maybe not. As Hülsemann suggests in her essay on autos and Wright points out explicitly in the afterword, there are many Souths, including some that were bypassed by industry in the mid-twentieth century and are still bypassed by industry today. There are others that got industry, as it were, but industry of a much more rudimentary nature than automobiles or airplanes or even tufted carpets. It would have been nice to have seen another essay or two on such areas and such industries. But this is quibbling at the margin: The Second Wave represents an important contribution to southern economic and business history. The individual authors and the editor both deserve high praise.