From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (review)

126Southern Cultures group and the role of knowledge-producers in political life. Is this a band of public intellectuals defending the values of liberal democracy against the new "beast" alarmingly about to be born? David Duke was a racist. Doubtless he remains a racist. Thanks to this book we now know the story of his political career, but the story not told well enough here is the story of his voters. Are they symbolic racists, willfully ignorant common folks, or leaderless protesters? The book opens with a focus group of Duke's supporters. They feel squeezed from above and below, Rose tells us. The rich get tax breaks. Affirmative action and welfare help the blacks. Strong feelings are voiced, but the stories of these folks are not followed. Politics is animated by strong feelings, but in the book these feelings become background noise. We are not told if these grievances are legitimate, only that their expression through support for David Duke is not. Where do these feelings go? That is the specter. This is a significant book. The authors tell an important story well, and for a collaborative book that is high praise. They use the story of David Duke to cany the reader to new knowledge even as they use statistical analysis about public opinion and electoral behavior. They give proper emphasis to the rise of a new populism and signal its potential force, not just in Louisiana, but everywhere. The book is significant, too, because its authors deploy knowledge as part of the contest, not just the context, of political life. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980. By BruceJ. Schulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xii, 333 pp. Cloth, $38.00. Reviewed by Carl Abbott, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. His publications include Urban America in the Modern Age, 1920 to Present, and The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities. This thoroughly documented and clearly argued book is true to its subtitle. Bruce Schulman 's explicit purpose is to trace the variety of deliberate and inadvertent ways in which the federal government helped to transform the economy of the South in the middle decades of this century. His implicit goal is to judge those changes against an ideal model of economic development that might have offered more of its benefits directly to southern farmers and workers and fewer to industrialists, utility companies, and holders of suburban real estate. The result is a solid and valuable contribution to our understanding of recent southern history. By focusing attention on the role of the federal government, the book complements James Cobb's work on state economic development policies and the wide range of studies of city-level growth politics. It provides a national context for interpreting trends and patterns in southern politics. It also presents substantial data on the restructuring of the southern economy. In organizing his rich information, Schulman finds two major discontinuities in the policy environment for southern economic development. Through the mid-1930s, he argues, the southern elite of planters and mill owners, with their dependence on cheap and abundant labor, vigorously resisted any federal intrusion into regional economic development. In the late 1930s, however, a group of southern New Dealers convinced Reviews127 Franklin Roosevelt that an aggressive economic policy could transform the South and undermine political opposition to the new Democratic party. Key figures included Frank Porter Graham, Lister Hill, and Claude Pepper. The key document was the 1938 Report on Economic Conditions of the South. A key action was an effort to raise southern wage levels with the Fair Labor Standards Act. The second turning point came in the 1950s. World War II had brought large but unequally distributed economic gains to the South. It also reinvigorated the urban advocates of a New South. Schulman calls these city-oriented and business-based leaders "Whigs" (other writers have talked about "neoprogressives" or members of metropolitan "growth machines"). Standing between the old planter/mill owner elite and the southern liberals, they pursued economic growth and diversification as an overriding goal. Race relations were judged by the reactions of...