Book Review: Ivy on Frederickson, Cold War Dixie
Kari A. Frederickson. Cold War Dixie:
Militarization and Modernization in the American South. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2013. xii + 226 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-4519-2; $24.95
(paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-4520-8.
Reviewed by James Ivy
Published on H-SAWH (November, 2014)
Commissioned by Lisa A. Francavilla
Published on H-SAWH (November, 2014)
Commissioned by Lisa A. Francavilla
Atoms for Change
Kari A. Frederickson’s Cold War Dixie is a good
book on an important topic: the social, cultural, geographic, and political
impact of the Savannah River Plant (SRP), which produced primarily tritium
and plutonium-239 for the American nuclear arsenal. Built and managed by
Du Pont Corporation beginning in 1951, the SRP was situated on over
three hundred square miles of mostly rural South Carolina at the
Georgia border. Frederickson chronicles the transformation of the area in and
adjacent to the site, arguing that the military necessities of arms production
and the corporate culture of Du Pont elided a traditional southern culture
and facilitated the rise of one corner of the modern, suburban Sunbelt.
Significantly, she asserts that despite the racism of conservatives who
abandoned the Democratic Party in the years following the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, the ascendency of Republicans in southern states can also be traced, to a
large degree, to the modernization that projects like the SRP brought to
the region.