Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 by Matthew L. Downs (review)

In Transforming the South, Matthew Downs has produced a well-researched and well-written monograph that is simultaneously insightful in its presentation of the transformation of North Alabama and unconvincing in its conclusion that the region and the city of Huntsville, in particular, “foreshadowed the later Sunbelt economy” (p. 9). By focusing on the North Alabama counties of the Tennessee River Valley, Downs selects an area that benefited and suffered from the vagaries of federal investment in the Muscle Shoals Dam during World War I, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) of the New Deal and beyond, the Redstone Arsenal in World War II, and the Marshall Space Flight Center.

In an introductory chapter that covers the history of the region, seven well-organized chapters that cover the chronological changes from 1915 to 1960, and a summarizing final chapter, the author connects the social, political, and economic histories of North Alabama to the larger national transformation of the first six decades of the twentieth century. As his subtitle indicates, the region’s progress was intimately bound to federal planning and federal money. This is the history of an area that, prior to 1915, existed almost entirely on cotton. Although the North Alabama cities of Florence, Decatur, Sheffield, and Huntsville embraced the ideology of New South industrialization in the 1880s, they remained small towns in an area whose economy depended on cotton—the growing, ginning, transportation, and spinning of cotton. For most people, it was an existence that included low wages, poor education, and limited opportunities. The construction in 1917 of a dam at Muscle Shoals—a historic transportation barrier on the Tennessee River—and the production of nitrates for World War I began a transformation of the region that has continued into the present.

Between the time of the construction of the Muscle Shoals Dam and the advent of the TVA in 1933, the region’s political and economic leaders desperately worked to maximize the advantages produced by the military’s use of the dam. Aligning themselves first with Henry Ford and his bid to take control of the dam, and then with opposing forces when it became apparent that his efforts would fail, city chambers of commerce and other booster organizations solicited new industrial investment. Like other southern entrepreneurs, they sought firms that would not challenge the social and racial hierarchies that characterized the region. When the TVA arrived with the New Deal, the agency brought with it some of the transforming legislation of the first 100 Days, including unions and regional economic planning, but it did little to alter the racial hierarchy. Like with the construction of the Redstone Arsenal in the 1940s, the TVA displaced farms and people—some who could not find economic opportunity within the transforming process. The lack of specialized skills and education placed many Alabamans at such a disadvantage in the competition for higher-paying federal jobs that the University of Alabama established a branch campus, first to teach the necessary skills and later as the University of Alabama Huntsville to support the scientific and technological demands of government installations. Throughout the book, Downs demonstrates the fragility of federal funding as he documents the ups and downs of the North Alabama economy, and that of Huntsville in particular. He is insightful in his exploration of the ongoing efforts of local organizations to attract private investment, even as they lobbied for continued funding of federal projects. North Alabama leaders were not oblivious to the precariousness of the booms they periodically experienced as a result of federal investment. They engaged in city planning and beautification, promoted education, and solicited new businesses for their towns. The last chapter of the book is a booster’s dream of investment triumphs for Huntsville as the city became an attractive site for locating some of the largest national firms in support...