The Significance of Veterans in the Postwar South

Jennifer Brooks. Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

World War II veterans have come to occupy a special position among historians of modern America, as they figure prominently in the new scholarship relating to civil rights, state formation, gender relations, citizenship, and notions of entitlement. In her exploration of Georgia's postwar political landscape, Jennifer Brooks operates within this tradition. Brooks goes further than most historians, however, by placing former servicemen at the very forefront in the struggle for racial justice, and at the epicenter of the campaigns for "good government" and workers' rights. In Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition, veterans do not play merely a critical role; instead, they play the critical role, in the effort to create a more inclusive and progressive political order in Georgia. Although Brooks has written a thought-provoking monograph that sheds new light on several important issues, she overstates the role of World War II veterans and, in so doing, obscures some important historical processes that were at play in the postwar South.

In its general outlines, Brooks's account will have a familiar ring to most historians of modern America. The World War II experience, she argues, transformed not only the political attitudes of American GIs, but also provided returning servicemen with the motivation and the social standing to push for sweeping domestic reforms. On the civil rights front, returning black GIs took the lead in persuading fellow African Americans to register to vote. As Brooks explains, "The war tended to create highly motivated black men cognizant of their own rights, conscious of the barriers that impeded their full citizenship, and determined to establish for themselves the freedom, opportunity, and political participation they felt they had earned" (p. 19). Coming on the heels of Smith v. Allwright and King v. Chapman—two federal cases that voided the all-white primary—the voter registration drives of black veterans resonated strongly within Georgia's African American communities. Accordingly, the number of blacks on the voting rolls soared in the years immediately following the war. By the fall of 1948, approximately 140,000 had registered to vote in Georgia— which amounted to more than 10 percent of the state's voting rolls. The black vote proved critical to the election of liberal Congresswoman Helen Douglas Mankin of the fifth Congressional District and to the defeat of entrenched elites in Savannah, Macon, and Augusta. For those committed to the cause of civil rights, the most satisfying electoral result came with the stunning loss, in 1946, of Georgia House Speaker Roy V. Harris, an arch segregationist and head of the political machine in Augusta.

Although the struggle for racial justice was the principal objective of black veterans, Brooks shows that among white veterans, their focus centered on the issues of "good government" and labor organizing. In this section, Brooks succeeds in breaking new ground. Through her incorporation of oral interviews, legislative records, and newspaper accounts, as well as her skillful application of the secondary literature, Brooks shows that returning servicemen were at the forefront of postwar efforts to clean up and modernize Georgia's political system. In the minds of most white activist veterans, modernization meant "good government," which meant changing the way the state conducted its business. More specifically, it meant challenging corruption and cronyism and allocating more resources to basic government services. As part of their efforts to forge an electoral majority, many white veterans formed a loose alliance with African Americans, organized labor, and other progressive forces. Although this coalition failed to elect James V. Carmichael in a close race against Eugene Talmadge, white veterans succeeded in capturing at least one-fifth of Georgia's legislative seats in the 1946 elections.

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