Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South by Casey P. Cater (review)

Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South is a timely and important study of electrification in the American South, which highlights race and ownership politics as fundamental to the writing of energy history. Casey P. Cater starts by defining the South as a cultural region, which sets the book apart from many recent electricity histories that are largely bounded by geological or political borders. By contrast, Cater is interested in the relationship between electricity and the “New South”—an “unofficial and contested” post-Reconstruction agenda that prioritized urbanization and industrialization as a way for a “thoroughly defeated and desperately impoverished region” to regain its standing in a modernizing America (p. 6). New South ideology is, for Cater, the social backdrop that fundamentally influenced and constrained southern electrical development—“not only in the final analysis,” he writes, but also “as front-end inputs that in many ways guided both producers’ and consumers’ thoughts as to electricity’s possibilities” (p. 189). Atlanta played a dominant role as the epicenter of southern modernization, though the book expands regionally in later chapters.

The book subsequently shines in its centering of southern race relations in the evolution of electrical systems. For example, Cater’s historical treatment of the streetcar business and its regulation in Atlanta is intimately tied to Black activism and racial violence. Likewise, the politics of municipal power versus corporate ownership is bound up in postbellum anxieties about “white democracy” for working-class white southerners confronting the rapid industrialization of the New South (p. 47). While slave metaphors for electric power and the resources used to produce it transcended the American South, Cater argues they had “special meaning” there (p. 104). As power companies, politicians, and others played up the potential for electricity to make “all white southerners—from plantation owner to factory drudge—slave masters,” Cater observes, “[a]ntebellum-tinged visions of a white democratic future based on a highly electrified life were part of private utilities’ attempts to control the masses of whites who openly rebelled against corporate monopoly and the New South order” (p. 104). Of particular note for historians of capitalism and the Black radical tradition is Cater’s casual allusion to an early-twentieth-century usage of the term “racialized capitalism” (p. 116).

Regenerating Dixie is also an environmental history. For Cater, the confluence of environmental change and southern development politics is most evident in tracing “the primacy of corporations in rearranging flows of natural resources,” particularly rivers and coal (p. 188). This, too, was entangled in southern race relations. As class allegiances began to shift and consolidate across racial lines in the later decades, Cater argues, the relationship between public and private power began to change and became less politically charged. He traces experimentations in public-private partnerships with a critical eye for how private power companies gained access to public lands and public funds and gradually “unplugged the New Deal” as an electrical political economy (p. 155).

Regenerating Dixie thus joins work such as Andrew Needham’s Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, 2014) and Conor Harrison’s 2016 Annals of the American Association of Geographers article, “Race, Space, and Electric Power: Jim Crow and the 1934 North Carolina Rural Electrification Survey,” in making clear how much energy systems are designed within and for unequal social contexts and in turn reify those inequalities in ways that are path dependent but not predetermined. Cater’s work also historically situates the vibrant race-based organizing around utility justice and energy democracy throughout the South since the late 1970s.

In short, Regenerating Dixie exemplifies the sociotechnical and socioenvironmental linkages of American energy history at its best. It not only illuminates the past but also offers a parable for a present South facing another energy transition in an unequal society captured by corporate interests. Electricity, Cater shows...