As dead as Dixie: The Southern States Industrial Council and the end of the New South, 1933-1954

"As Dead as Dixie: The Southern States Industrial Council and the End of the New South, 1933--1954" demonstrates how a set of conservative southern industrialists pursued a political campaign to preserve southern economic arrangements. Organized in 1933, the SSIC's adherence to the South as a political and economic fact limited its members' ability to forge political coalitions to provide countervailing policies to the New Deal. The SSIC's insistence on maintaining regional preferences, however, influenced conservative thought in the postwar era, ultimately shaping the contours of the new American Right that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. The dissertation concludes at 1954, as the civil rights movement began and attention on the South's race relations rose to prominence, obscuring the nationalization of the SSIC's mission.;For these manufacturers, the New Deal threatened southern exceptionalism as it pertained to economic development. Conservative southern industrialists, in response to New Dealers' attempts to remake the southern economy, fought to preserve an "exceptional" South---for their own economic, political, social, and cultural reasons. In the postwar era, the SSIC weakened its reliance on sectional solidarity and helped usher in new ideas regarding free market capitalism, conservative fiscal policy, spending, and limited bureaucracy. Once they began to pursue policies not in the interest of the South, but rather for small and medium sized industries located outside of northeastern urban centers, SSIC leaders converged with the emergent New Right. SSIC leaders merged traditionalist conservative positions, particularly regarding the responsibilities of economic elites, with libertarian free market ideas and anti-government critiques of liberal welfare programs and deficit spending.;By merging a business history approach with American political history, this study demonstrates that southern manufacturers succeeded in perpetuating regional economic and business prerogatives into the postwar era, and doing so helped shape the nation's partisan landscape as well as conservative political ideology.