Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
In the aftermath of World War II, Georgia's veterans--black, white, liberal, reactionary, pro-union, and anti-union--all found that service in the war enhanced their sense of male, political, and racial identity, but often in contradictory ways. In Defining the Peace, Jennifer E. Brooks shows how veterans competed in a protracted and sometimes violent struggle to determine the complex character of Georgia's postwar future.
Brooks finds that veterans shaped the key events of the era, including the gubernatorial campaigns of both Eugene Talmadge and Herman Talmadge, the defeat of entrenched political machines in Augusta and Savannah, the terrorism perpetrated against black citizens, the CIO's drive to organize the textile South, and the controversies that dominated the 1947 Georgia General Assembly. Progressive black and white veterans forged new grassroots networks to mobilize voters against racial and economic conservatives who opposed their vision of a democratic South. Most white veterans, however, opted to support candidates who favored a conservative program of modernization that aimed to alter the state's economic landscape while sustaining its anti-union and racial traditions.
As Brooks demonstrates, World War II veterans played a pivotal role in shaping the war's political impact on the South, generating a politics of race, anti-unionism, and modernization that stood as the war's most lasting political legacy.
From the Inside Flap
Brooks studies the competing efforts of black and white WW II veterans in Georgia, as they worked to shape postwar politics. Black veterans forged new grassroots networks to mobilize against candidates who opposed their vision of racial equality; reactionary white veterans, in turn, organized to support candidates who curbed openings toward greater equality in favor of a conservative, economically driven vision of modernization in the South.
Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition
Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition,Jennifer Brooks,The University of North Carolina Press,0807855782,Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General,Georgia,History,History & Theory - General,History - U.S.,Military,Military - World War II,Political History,Political activity,Politics and government,United States - 20th Century (1945 to 2000),United States - State & Local - South,Veterans,World War, 1939-1945,American history: postwar, from c 1945 -,Economics,History / Military / World War II,POLITICS & GOVERNMENT,Racism & racial discrimination,World War Two; Georgia; the South; Eugene and Herman Talmadge; James V. Carmichael; Helen Douglas Mankin; defeat of the Bouhan machine; Cracker Party; terrorism against black citizens; Georgia Veterans League; American Veterans Committee; Ku Klux Klan and Columbians; Operation Dixie; Political Action Committee of the CIO; good government campaigns; white primary; right-to-work; 1947 General Assembly
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