Book Review

Michelle Brattain's study of the political persuasion of white textile workers in Rome, Georgia, between the Great Depression and the 1970s departs from recent studies that downplayed racism and that emphasized worker resistance to employer domination and the ability to sustain an alternative culture of cooperation and reciprocity as central to the identity of white mill hands. For Brattain, whiteness defined Rome's working class. She does not bluntly argue that white workers acted on their racial rather than their class interests. Throughout, she teases out the complexities of their identity, arguing that race shaped their class interests and that the two were inextricably linked. Southern politics was not so simple either. The power of Georgia Democrats rested on their "remarkable flexibility in accommodating so many white agendas." Eugene Talmadge, though a fierce opponent of the New Deal, could appeal to textile workers as a friend of labor because he vowed to oppose the National Recovery Administration's mandate to pay black highway workers a higher wage than that received by white mill hands in textile factories. Whiteness thus disguised the exploitation central to southern industry and boosterism and compelled mill hands fiercely to resist federal encroachment into their community.

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