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. By Jennifer E. Brooks. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 256. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5578-2; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2911-0.)

In Defining the Peace: World War H Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition, Jennifer E. Brooks explores the impact of World War II on the political behavior of Georgia's male veterans during the first three years following the war. Most generally, Brooks notes that "the war tended to strengthen the historic connection between male identity and political rights" (p. 4). The messages that veterans received from the war, however, differed markedly: black veterans firmly believed they had fought, suffered, and died for greater political opportunities at home; white progressive veterans agreed with their black brethren; white union veterans worked ardently for greater "industrial democracy" (p. 75); white reactionary veterans fought especially against so-called racial democracy; and "good government veterans" (p. 113) worked for economic prosperity, government efficiency, and the end of rule by inactive, politically corrupt local and state officials, within a framework of white supremacy and union decimation.

As the author explores each of these constituencies, she discusses their changed expectations and attitudes that resulted from military service, the problems they faced upon returning home, the organizations they established to effect their goals, their agenda, their degree of success, and the implications of their struggle for postwar politics. The most successful of the groups in both the short term and the long term were the good government veterans. Embarrassed by the contempt with which nonsouthern soldiers viewed the South; impressed by the prosperity of other regions of the country; and determined to achieve a greater level of prosperity in the postwar era than they had achieved prior to it, good government veterans, joined by African Americans and progressive whites, ousted political machines in Augusta and Savannah in 1946. They would have won the governorship had it not been for the county unit system that persisted in Georgia until the 1962 Baker v. Carr U.S. Supreme Court decision on apportionment.

Once in the state legislature in 1947, good government veterans opposed the reestablishment of the white primary, which had ended in 1946, not because it would have continued to exclude African American voters but because it would have relinquished state regulation of the primary and thereby possibly have given corrupt, provincial local and state leaders the opportunity to reassert themselves. Good government veterans had no qualms about enacting stringent antiunion bills, even before Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, because they saw nonunionized workers as the key to attracting industrial developers to the South.

In the 1948 gubernatorial campaign, good government veterans found the perfect blend of their goals in Herman Talmadge. Unlike his recently deceased father, Eugene Talmadge, Herman was willing to support improvement of public schools, roads, and hospitals with a state sales tax while at the same time ardently championing white supremacy. This blend of "fiscal and social conservatism," Brooks argues, would be the hallmark of Georgia and the rest of the South for the remainder of the century as they transformed from cotton belt to Sun Belt.

The larger points regarding the difficulties encountered by African Americans, their white allies, and union advocates, as well as the views and behavior of reactionaries and proponents of industrial recruitment, in the wake of World War II, have been made in monographs dealing with these various constituencies. Brooks reinforces these points and makes clear the role of veterans in the various groups in Georgia with her careful, clear rendition of postwar challenges, defeats, and successes.

GAIL WILLIAMS O'BRIEN

North Carolina State University