Victory at Home: Manpower and Race in the American South during World War II (Economy and Society in the Modern South)

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South. During The Past Half Century, The American South Has Undergone Dramatic Economic And Social Transformations. Gone Is The South Of Cotton Fields And Cotton Mills, Of Monocrop Agriculture And Rudimentary Industries, Of Desperate Poverty And Stultifying Racial Segregation, The South That Franklin Roosevelt Saw As The Nation's Number One Economic Problem. But If That South Is Gone, How Can We Explain The Rise Of The Sunbelt, And What Has Economic Change Meant To Southerners - Their Daily Lives, Their Attitudes, Their Culture? This Series Aims To Answer These Critical Questions Through A Multidisciplinary Analysis Of The Region's Economic And Social Development Since World War Ii. It Seeks To Present The Best New Research By Historians, Economists, Sociologists, And Geographers - Fresh Scholarship That Investigates Unexplored Topics And Reinterprets Familiar Trends.--jacket. Tents, Trailers, And Shack Towns: Mobilizing The Southern Home Front, 1939-1942 -- Empty Sermons: Race And Economic Mobility On The Southern Home Front, 1940-1942 -- On The Train And Gone: Worker Mobility In The Cotton Belt, 1941-1945 -- The Segregation Frontier: African American Migrant War Workers In The Pacific West, 1941-1945 -- We're Not Here To Start A Social Revolution: Southern Black Workers Define Equality, 1943-1945 -- The South Needs The Negro: Demobilization And Economic Equality In The South, 1945-1948 -- A Virtual Revolution In Negro Leadership. Charles D. Chamberlain. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 259-269) And Index. This work is an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labour force within the commission's province. It discusses conflicts between racial groups within labour unions, for example.