Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Convergence, Metropolitanization, and Anticommunism
- 2 Race, Rights, and the Liberal Consensus
- 3 Wars against Liberalism
- 4 Southern, Suburban, and Sunbelt Strategies
- 5 Mobilizing the Religious Right in the Politicized “Bible Belt”
- 6 Reagan’s Sunbelt, Reagan’s America
- 7 Shades of Red, Shades of Blue
- Epilogue
- Index
- References
1 - Convergence, Metropolitanization, and Anticommunism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Convergence, Metropolitanization, and Anticommunism
- 2 Race, Rights, and the Liberal Consensus
- 3 Wars against Liberalism
- 4 Southern, Suburban, and Sunbelt Strategies
- 5 Mobilizing the Religious Right in the Politicized “Bible Belt”
- 6 Reagan’s Sunbelt, Reagan’s America
- 7 Shades of Red, Shades of Blue
- Epilogue
- Index
- References
Summary
World War II transformed the modern American Sunbelt. That war – or more specifically, the massive amount of money spent by the federal government to mobilize the nation and fight that war – accelerated the regional convergence and economic development of metropolitan communities across the South and West. Much of that economic development was rooted in industrial growth connected to national security interests, defense contracts, military expansion, and technology. It was concurrently fueled by and cyclically reflected in the rapid growth of related but increasingly postindustrial sectors such as higher education, finance, real estate, retail, and tourism. Economic expansion across the Sunbelt resulted in population growth, and population growth contributed to greater political significance.
The Sunbelt’s early growth also coincided with the development of a national political culture that was powerfully shaped by anticommunism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as cities across the South and West were booming, Americans everywhere – whether liberal or conservative – operated within a contextual framework that prioritized the containment (and eventual defeat) of communism. Seen by many as both a challenge to U.S. interests abroad as well as American values at home, communism – in all its loosely defined and fearfully imagined forms – quickly became the nation’s top perceived threat.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Politics in the Postwar SunbeltConservative Growth in a Battleground Region, pp. 17 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998)Google Scholar
, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1893
, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar
, Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism, and the American Dream (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987)Google Scholar
, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar
, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920–1990 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012)Google Scholar
, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: The Noonday Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)Google Scholar
, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar
, Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013)Google Scholar
, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008)Google Scholar
, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 396–407Google Scholar
, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar
, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1986)Google Scholar
, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar
, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013)Google Scholar
, World War II & the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, A Brief History of the American West Since 1945 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Publishers, 2001), 95–107Google Scholar
, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006)Google Scholar
, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009)Google Scholar
, North Carolina: Change and Tradition in a Southern State (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2009)Google Scholar
, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 112Google Scholar
, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10–38, 61–81Google Scholar
, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972)Google Scholar
, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar
, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
and , Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar
, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004)Google Scholar
, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001)Google Scholar
, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009)Google Scholar
, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952 (New York: The Free Press, 1999)Google Scholar
, “The Paranoid Style and Its Limits: The Power, Influence, and Failure of the Postwar Texas Far Right,” in and , eds., The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013)Google Scholar
, Red Scare!: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985)Google Scholar
, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860–2009 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012)Google Scholar