Rightly or wrongly, the American South has defined American conservatism. While many historians debate the social and political building blocks that created this movement, Katherine Rye Jewell's Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century infuses the conversation with analysis on the southern character of capitalism. Her study of the Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC) asserts how one organization came to redefine the economic life of the whole South as a home for the free market, and influence the course of national conservatism.

Jon Edgerton, a textile manufacturer and former president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), founded the Southern States Industrial Council in 1933. Dollars for Dixie utilizes a wide range of sources from internal SSIC correspondence and industry meeting records to Congressional testimony and labor statistics to illustrate how Edgerton and other “southern industrialists … responded to the New Deal by gradually shedding their allegiance to a unique, separate southern economy” (4). The SSIC consequently transitioned from paternalistic protectionist policies to free-market ideals as essential for southern industrial expansion. Dollars for Dixie explains this in two parts: SSIC's compliance with the New Deal, and its subsequent replacement with a Milton Friedman-like ethos. It concludes with an Epilogue about the SSIC in the era of the free market's ascendency.

Part One, “Working within the New Deal,” outlines New South efforts to gain financial stability by employing culture as a tool for economic unity. Southern business leaders crafted a potent argument for regional exceptionalism to counteract compliance with the 1933 National Recovery Administration (NRA), whose edicts provided greater price regulation. Southern manufacturers feared these measures, insisting that the reduced-price gap undermined the only competitive edge the poor South had. To thwart this perceived northern attack on southern industry, the SSIC advocated protection for southern “infantile industries,” centered around paternalistic arguments that “subnormal workers … referring to women and African-Americans,” required less than their white male counterparts (41). The SSIC's goal in the early days was not outright defiance of the New Deal, but to manipulate it from within the system.

Part Two, “Free Enterprise and the South,” chronicles the gradual SSIC shift towards building a home for free enterprise. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the SSIC endorses the South as a uniquely American region, a place where market prices, not government regulation, dictate the economy. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the SSIC's views gradually reflect a new kind of southern conservatism, one that stresses the infantile region less and smaller government more. Intra-group correspondence describes the SSIC and the South's rightward movement, which precipitates a gradual regional courtship with the Republican Party.

Dollars for Dixie wraps up its narrative in the 1970s when the SSIC converts to the United States Business and Industrial Council (USBIC), a lobbying group that represents small and medium-sized American businesses – a transition representative of SSIC success in the nationalization of southern free-market conservatism.

Dollars for Dixie comes along in a moment of increased scholarly interest in economic, political and social conservative movements. What makes Dollars for Dixie an effective narrative is the explication of the SSIC's relation to such concepts, highlighting the SSIC's combination of culture and the free market as essential in the creation and nationalization of southern conservatism.

Given the unique evolution of different subregions within the South, Dollars for Dixie missed an important opportunity to further distinguish between the periphery and the Deep South, considering vastly different histories and economic development of areas such as North Carolina's Research Park or Atlanta, and those of the rest of the region. How did the SSIC view these distinct “Souths,” and do the appeals of the SSIC only exist outside the urban South?

Dollars for Dixie also missed a rather important discussion of slavery's legacy. The South's economy hinged on free labor for over three hundred years, and post-slavery's debt peonage and vagrancy laws gave businessmen and the state continued access to free labor. Greater reference to this would have upheld Jewell's assessment of SSIC rhetoric on the “southern way of life” and amplified how free-market ideology became popular in a region long defined by a reliance on free racially based labor.

Despite these minor shortcomings, Dollars for Dixie provides a deft story of the SSIC's role in reshaping the South and, consequently, modern conservatism. Jewell's work is densely packed with detail, and successfully conveys the complex story of the organization and individuals who drove southern economic policies. The application of immense detail and broad source usage aid Jewell's story of the relatively untold history of the SSIC and its defining role in southern and conservative history. Dollars for Dixie crucially adds to the growing body of work on southern economic conservatism.