Dollars for Dixie tells the story of modern American conservatism from the perspective of the Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC), organized in 1933 and spearheaded by John Edgerton, a Tennessee textile magnate. The SSIC's disdain for the New Deal grew from market and labor pressures particular to the South's collection of textile, petroleum, and coal producers. According to Katherine Rye Jewell, the social and economic perspectives of many postwar conservatives emerged among prewar SSIC members as a region-conscious solution to the North's competitive advantage. “Manufacturers’ efforts, in the end,” Jewell contends, were “less ideological than they were politically practical in an atmosphere that seemed to call for regional solidarity” (p. 97). Southern complaints, however, soon turned into a national conservative agenda as the SSIC “embraced the idea of free enterprise and recast the South as the nation's purest free market rather than an economic, social, and cultural outlier” (p. 128).

It is here that Jewell speaks to the present literature on the roots of the modern American right. Jewell presents southern industrialists as early, but overlooked, advocates for business-backed conservatism, organizing money, ideas, and aspirations around the same time as the subjects in Darren Dochuk's and Kim Phillips-Fein's books but before the authoritarian corporatists of Nancy MacLean's most-recent work. Like boardroom versions of Bethany Moreton's backcountry Walmart populists, southern industrialists built the foundation for right-wing politics, with the New Deal's political framework serving as the real source of conservative chagrin. Free enterprise, Jewell suggests, was a “fifth freedom to be added to Roosevelt's four,” and, therefore, the SSIC's political agenda was “the result of a series of confrontations with policy” (p. 167). Such confrontations were multifaceted, as demonstrated by the SSIC's organizing over the Fair Labor Standards Act, freight rates, union affirmation, and wartime contracts. Region-specific policy grievances also turned the SSIC into a kind of public relations consortium, as it worked to “remarket the South as the ‘bulwark of democracy,’ a repository of the nation's core values, around which a conservative movement could”—and, as Jewell argues, did—“coalesce” (p. 201).

During and after World War II, the SSIC expanded its activism. Concerning the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), SSIC leaders opposed it through “revised, color-blind rhetoric . . . that complemented the emerging business and conservative crusade to roll back the New Deal” (p. 204). By the time of Strom Thurmond's racist presidential run in 1948 and the CIO's Operation Dixie, the SSIC refashioned its free enterprise mantra into a national mission for taking over whichever party seemed most open to their advances and rabid Cold War anticommunism. In the 1950s, quite a few Republicans, along with southern Democrats embroiled in fights over property and business “rights” related to desegregation, seemed to be aligning with the SSIC's objectives. And yet, by 1960, the SSIC could count few legislative victories. Nevertheless, concludes Jewell, southern industrialists had legitimized a “common ground” perspective, namely, that “what was good for the South” in terms of the SSIC's bottom line “was good for the nation” (p. 268). Their perspective became conservative policy gospel in the decades that followed.

No one can read Jewell's book without recent politics in mind, not because the book forces the issue but because the research bears it out. Protectionist and internationalist positions were held by SSIC members and, hence, contemporary tensions in the Republican Party are hardly without precedent. Jewell suggests that modern conservatism made room for conflicting perspectives on trade because it had to do so, especially given the various bottom lines and local, national, or international market arrangements of SSIC-affiliated companies. On this score, Jewell's findings are helpful for making sense of how certain rhetorical and political strategies—especially “free enterprise”—crossed various industries while, at times, dividing corporate players from one another. Moreover, Jewell's take on the regionalist (meaning “southern”) roots of free enterprise politics convincingly backs up the start date for modern conservatism to the 1930s while also showing how anti–New Deal business politics bled into—or butted up against—the pork-barrel “whiggery” that Bruce Schulman long ago identified as a political ethic behind the beleaguered South's economic transformation into booming Sunbelt.

Regarding the book's main argument, Jewell's findings are less convincing, at least in identifying exactly what and whom the SSIC transformed as well as when and to what extent. To be sure, Jewell's subjects were managerial strategists, not movement conservatives, but the former do not really seem to have much to do with the latter in Dollars for Dixie. Page after page is devoted to the SSIC's internal politics, which is informative and often fascinating. But a bit better attentiveness to contextual connections would have helped to support Jewell's thesis that the SSIC played a “transformative” role in the conservative movement. For instance, white anger over racial desegregation—the foremost national, not regional, fight of the postwar era—goes almost unmentioned and certainly underanalyzed, save for the FEPC fight. Did the SSIC manage to affect the national course of strategic adjustments to the fight for broader black rights, or did white segregationism and “color-blind” conservatism simply proceed on a national stage without the SSIC's input and help?

Addressing such questions would have helped Jewell resolve, rather than reaffirm, a problem that keeps showing up in the recent literature. We now have any number of excellent studies (one might even say a “school” of sorts) about the roots and ramifications of business conservatism, with Dollars for Dixie certainly among them. The next step is to consider how movement conservatism and business conservatism advanced, informed, or even undercut each other. That endeavor should clarify how, and to what degree, business interests transformed American society and politics, and if they did so in the manner and to the extent that Jewell suggests.