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From 1941 to 1948, Aiken County was represented in the South Carolina state senate by Fred Brinkley, a physician from the tiny town of Ellenton. In addition to being one of the town’s two doctors, Brinkley was also a part-time farmer and owner of the one of the town’s gristmills. A longtime resident of Ellenton, Brinkley was closely tied to the region’s agricultural rhythms and was active in community affairs. And like every other state senator, Brinkley was a Democrat in a state that reviled Republicans. In the early 1950s, after Ellenton was condemned to make room for the Savannah River Plant (srp), Brinkley moved to the city of Barnwell. He died relatively soon after the evacuation, in June 1952, with his passing serving as poignant symbol of the larger transformations under way in the area. The influx of thousands of new residents from communities across the nation altered not only the region’s demographics, built environment, economic profile, and cultural identity but also its politics. In 1968, fifteen years after operations commenced at the srp, Aiken County voters elected George McMillan to represent them in the State Senate. A Republican and former Du Pont supervisor at the srp, McMillan was just one of a growing number of Republicans elected to public office in Aiken County and in the expanding suburban regions across South Carolina and other southern states in the 1960s and 1970s. The origins of the Republican Party lay in the communities housing the plant employees; the party drew strength from their conservative, middleclass values, forged not only by opposition to certain New Deal–era programs and staunch anticommunism but also from notions of efficiency and modernization as they applied to the political process. Such values were also deeply engrained in Du Pont’s corporate culture. The growth of the Republican Party in Aiken County coincided with and C H A P T E R S E V E N Shifting Landscapes Politics and Race in a Cold War Community 148 · C H A P T E R S E V E N at times appeared synonymous with the acceleration of school integration. Although the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 motivated thousands of white southerners to vote Republican, the party’s roots in South Carolina went further back and were tied to the changes brought on by the Cold War. Integration in this region was in part shaped by Du Pont’s corporate culture. Although the company encouraged employees to participate in local and state politics, there was an understanding that employees were not to engage overtly in the desegregation debate and were to let the issue run its course. As with its employment strategy, Du Pont preferred to follow local custom rather than challenge it directly. School integration proceeded as slowly in Aiken County as it did in other towns across the South, but without the extreme public acrimony and outright violence present in some communities. Although whites in Aiken County— both longtime residents and newcomers—were content to drag their feet on the issue, the impending threat of a loss of federal funds as well as the judicial dismantling of freedom-of-choice school-assignment plans in the late 1960s finally brought desegregation to the region. When meaningful integration finally came to the county in 1970, white resistance died with a whimper. The relatively uneventful process of integration partly resulted from factors related to Aiken’s particular historical development as well as the more recent changes brought about by the Cold War. White resistance in this corner of South Carolina was muted by a variety of factors, including changing demographics , the influence of Du Pont’s particular corporate culture, the central role given to large corporations for securing prosperity and security, the reputation of black schools, and the presence of Winter Colony residents. The intense backlash and white flight to private academies found in other communities simply was not present in Aiken. While not exactly welcoming of the prospect of integration, white parents also were unwilling to take extreme measures to stop it.  Following company president Crawford H. Greenewalt’s advice, Du Pont employees became involved in the city’s political institutions, initiating innovations that were based on their desire for modern, efficient, representative government, something that seemed lacking in this one-party region. The majority of Du Pont’s permanent operations staff took up residence in Aiken’s burgeoning suburbs and...

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