Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1997

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

James C. Cobb

Committee Members

Charles Johnson, Anne Mayhew, Clinton Allison

Abstract

This dissertation examines the postwar activism of both black and white southern World War II veterans in Georgia and the South. As part of the growing effort to understand the complexities and contradictions of the Second World War's impact on the region, this study offers the first in-depth examination of the role of black and white veterans in the South's political transition from war to peace. Military service played a key role in generating the postwar political activities of veterans of both races and all political persuasions. Veterans, however, interpreted the war's meaning in diverse and often conflicting ways. Georgia's first postwar elections in 1946 became the political expression of these differing interpretations as white and black veterans competed to implement their own, often contradictory, visions of "progress." Through voter registration drives, insurgent campaigns for state and local offices, independent political leagues, and crusades for progressive reform, veteran activism turned out more citizens than ever before, black and white, in Georgia to register and vote. The first postwar statewide and local elections stood as a popular referendum, of sorts, on the economic, political, and racial impact of the Second World War. Black veterans returned to Georgia to take leading roles in the burgeoning movement to reform Southern racial tradition. Convinced of the value of their wartime participation, and determined to claim an equal share of the rights and opportunities they had helped to defend, returning veterans galvanized local black leaders and communities to agitate for economic, civil, and legal rights. Their efforts throughout the South, but particularly in Georgia, encouraged more black southerners than ever before to register and vote, and this activism helped put race and the question of black equality at the top of the region's postwar agenda. African-American veterans, however, were not the only Georgians to see in the war a democratic imperative for the homefront. Progressive white veterans such as Harold Fleming, James Mackay, and Joseph Rabun found military service in a Jim Crow army to be an unsettling experience at best. Serving with or in command of black soldiers in a highly destructive war against a racially intolerant enemy encouraged a moderation of racial attitudes that challenged their fealty to Jim Crow. When they returned, Georgia's progressive white veterans joined their black counterparts in attacking the political system that sustained undemocratic regimes and perpetuated racial discrimination. Their efforts to implement the democratic mandate of the war defined its role in bolstering the forces of southern liberalism While some southern veterans questioned the moral rectitude of Jim Crow and targeted Georgia's discriminatory political system, others launched movements for economic development and governmental efficiency. Eager to lead their communities and region into the American economic mainstream, returning white veterans soon grew impatient with the complacent, corrupt, and mossback rings and machines that appeared to stand in their way. As soldiers outside the South and overseas during the war encountered modem road systems, a higher level of education, developed cities, and a hostility to Georgia that surprised them, war mobilization at home exposed serious deficiencies in infrastructure, education, public services and administrative efficiency. To veterans anxious to reclaim and improve their position in the postwar economy, "progress" came to mean establishing efficient administrations and dynamic development as a means to postwar prosperity. The Great Depression had made the South's numerous deficiencies loom large in the political lexicon of the thirties; returning white veterans in Augusta, Savannah, Gainesville and numerous other communities in Georgia and the South made economic development, industrial recruitment, and governmental efficiency paramount political issues in the postwar forties. Together, veteran crusades for racial change, democratic reform, and economic development constituted a significant attack within Georgia and the South on the citadels of southern economic, political, and racial tradition. Even as the mood for regional change grew, however, so too did a reactionary resistance to reform. Conservative white veterans met the demographic and racial intact of the war and the postwar movement for progressive change with a spirited defense of white supremacy. Ex-servicemen in the Ku Klux Klan, the Columbians, Inc. and Eugene Talmadge's re-election campaign symbolized the war's role in fostering racial division and reaction. Their success in re-electing Talmadge, defeating moderate Congresswoman Helen Douglas Mankin, and preserving the county-unit system testified to the resurgent strength of southern conservatism. Even as the democratic momentum of the war boosted movements for progressive change in the South, the racial reaction and anti-communist hysteria that followed subverted the drive for political and industrial democracy. In fact, the most lasting legacy of the Second World War in Georgia, conservative modernization, grew from the interaction of the issues of race and economic development with the racial conservatism that marked the region's political transition from war to peace. The veteran activism that proved to be the most successful in Georgia and the South was white, pro-modernization, and socially conservative, aiming for economic development, honest elections, and clean efficient, government, not for political and industrial democracy or black equality. In politics, white veterans such as Herman Talmadge proved adept at fusing the segregation, anti-unionism, and low taxation conservatives demanded with their own programs for industrial development and administrative reform. Thus, while the war did prove to be an engine of significant economic and demographic change for the South, it was an engine that travelled, by and large, along a quintessentially southern track. A movement for racial, democratic, and economic reform developed out of the war in Georgia and the South, but white veterans helped guide it down a conservative path that rarely strayed from the boundaries of southern racial and economic tradition.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS