Race, region, and the new deal: reflections on Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. For example, Lassiter and Crispino, Myth of Southern Exceptionalism.

^2.Quadagno, Color of Welfare; Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line.

^3.Alston and Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State.

^4. A majority of “croppers” were black, but the numerical margin was small: 50.5% in 1930, 55.3% in 1940, 60.5% in 1945. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC, 1970), 465.

^5.Wright, Old South New South; see also Rosenbloom, Looking for Work, esp. chapters 2 and 5.

^6. See Carlton and Coclanis, Confronting Southern Poverty, 25, 54, 139–43.

^7.Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 17.

^8. Similar points are raised in Lemann, “New Deal We Didn't Know.” An econometric analysis of southern unions is presented in Friedman, “Political Economy of Early Southern Unionism.”

^9.Wright, Old South New South, 226–35; Whatley, “Labor for the Picking”; Whayne, A New Plantation South, 167, 175, 216.

^10.Fleck, “Democratic Opposition.”

^11.Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box.”

^12.Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 92–93. I argue that the expansion of wartime spending in the South was made possible by the prior impact of the New Deal on the region's infrastructure, environment, and public health and disease conditions.

^13.Wright, Sharing the Prize.

^14.Katznelson, “Great and Grudging Transformation.”

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Notes on contributors

Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1982. Wright has a longstanding interest in the economic history of the American South, including his latest book Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South.