In the aftermath of World War II, Georgia's veterans--black, white,
liberal, reactionary, pro-union, and anti-union--all found that
service in the war enhanced their sense of male, political, and
racial identity, but often in contradictory ways. In
Defining
the Peace, Jennifer E. Brooks shows how veterans competed in a
protracted and sometimes violent struggle to determine the complex
character of Georgia's postwar future.
Brooks finds that veterans shaped the key events of the era,
including the gubernatorial campaigns of both Eugene Talmadge and
Herman Talmadge, the defeat of entrenched political machines in
Augusta and Savannah, the terrorism perpetrated against black
citizens, the CIO's drive to organize the textile South, and the
controversies that dominated the 1947 Georgia General Assembly.
Progressive black and white veterans forged new grassroots networks
to mobilize voters against racial and economic conservatives who
opposed their vision of a democratic South. Most white veterans,
however, opted to support candidates who favored a conservative
program of modernization that aimed to alter the state's economic
landscape while sustaining its anti-union and racial
traditions.
As Brooks demonstrates, World War II veterans played a pivotal role
in shaping the war's political impact on the South, generating a
politics of race, anti-unionism, and modernization that stood as
the war's most lasting political legacy.