South Carolina and the New Deal.

By Jack Irby Hayes Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xvi], 290. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-399-4.)

State histories help explain national movements. Though their significance reaches beyond the borders of the state they study, their focus on variety and exception prevents generalizations from becoming too sweeping. Jack Irby Hayes Jr. has written an excellent study of South Carolina in the New Deal in this vein. Hayes largely confirms what we thought we knew about the South and the New Deal--that the region benefited enormously from it, beginning a transformation from a Third World-like insularity to the Sunbelt of forty years later, but that questions of race and federal power constantly shadowed New Deal initiatives. None of this is new, but Hayes provides rich detail to explain and support it.

Hayes finds that early relief efforts in South Carolina got caught up in state political rivalries. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), however, was immensely popular. The Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) were engines of economic change, though the hydroelectric installations known as Santee-Cooper and Buzzard Roost barely survived court challenges. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was eagerly embraced by the state's textile industry, but it helped unleash the General Textile Strike of 1934 that culminated in six dead in Honea Path on September 6, 1934, and largely broke the back of union organizing in the South. The Agricultural Adjustment Acts (AAA) drove the often painful transformation of agriculture away from small, labor-intensive, sharecropped plots. Strangely, what this reviewer always thought were among the New Deal's most important accomplishments in South Carolina--measures to improve clean-water supply, sanitation, and public health--are barely mentioned by Hayes.

Hayes begins with chapters about the state's situation and regional nuances. He emphasizes the ways that South Carolina's chief political figures interfaced with the New Deal, notably Senators James F. Byrnes, who embraced and helped shape it, and Ellison Durant ("Cotton Ed") Smith, who obstructed it. Hayes argues that African Americans, who were included in New Deal benefits over considerable white grumbling, lost more than they gained under the AAA and NRA, but that they came out of the New Deal more empowered than before. Hayes concludes that federal reforms paved the way for Briggs v. Elliott, the South Carolina school integration case that was one of several subsumed under the Supreme Court's 1954 consideration of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka.

Hayes uses the state's newspapers and personal papers from many of the principal participants to thoroughly document his work. The book includes an excellent bibliography, but its index lists mainly proper names. This reviewer questioned some of the author's organizational choices; notably, the discussion of the banking crisis of March 1933 in the concluding chapter seemed chronologically out of place. Still, Hayes's book is packed with illuminating detail and written in a crystal-clear style. It is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the New Deal played out below the national level.

RICHARD SAUNDERS JR.
Clemson University