A Congressional race in North Carolina provides the action for the 2012 comedy film The Campaign, in which Will Ferrell's louche, adulterous Democrat faces off against Zach Galifianakis's oddball evangelical Republican. Dirty television ads are aired, accusations of socialism and irreligion are exchanged, and gunshots are fired. A rather heavy-handed political satire, the movie is ultimately a good deal less interesting than many of the elections which form the backbone of Tom Eamon's The Making of a Southern Democracy.

Eamon, an associate professor at East Carolina University, has written the first comprehensive account of North Carolina's politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. From his perch at ECU, he has watched that political history unfurl at first hand and his narrative reflects the “personal observations and impressions of the writer” (331). The book is no impressionistic memoir, however, and its conclusions are grounded on solid empirical foundations, drawing on newspaper archives, election and polling data, and some forty-five interviews conducted by the author.

The story he tells is of a state in transition, from white supremacy to multiracial democracy, from a tobacco and textile state to a high-tech sunbelt economy, and from Democratic fiefdom to Republican stronghold. The collapse of the racial caste system is the first theme, covering the painful dismantling of legal segregation, the enfranchisement of black citizens, and the concomitant transformation of state politics. In 1950, a senatorial candidate could be fatally wounded by accusations that he planned to utilize the “bloc vote” in “well-known Negro precincts” (29). By the 1990s, Harvey Gantt, an African American Democrat, could run strong campaigns for the Senate, and in 2008 North Carolina voted, albeit narrowly, for a black President.

Alongside this, The Making of a Southern Democracy is also about the unmaking of the southern democracy and the rise of two-party competition in a formerly one-party region. Eamon's interpretation of this shift is a familiar one: Republicans exploited growing social conservatism, including on issues of race, and antistatism (on nonmilitary spending at least) to shatter statewide Democratic control. At the centre of these efforts was ultraconservative five-term senator Jesse Helms, whose allies turned the Congressional Club, an entity initially created to erase his campaign debts, into “one of the most effective fund-raisers in the United States” (186). The book concludes after the 2012 elections with the state governorship and lieutenant governorship in Republican hands, and the GOP wielding veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

The third theme defining Eamon's account is the importance of elections. The book is littered with “watershed” contests that have shaped the direction of North Carolina. One such example is 1972, when Helms first won his seat, defeating Democrat Nick Galifianakis (a Greek American whose nephew would become the Hollywood actor mentioned above) to become the state's first Republican senator since the 1890s. Though the listing of primaries, candidates, and campaigns can occasionally be wearying, Eamon leavens it with lively character sketches and a clear prose style. Worthy of note is his confident grasp of the state's political geography, and he carefully differentiates between the distinct political cultures of the coastal, piedmont, and mountain regions.

Eamon's final theme is “that people make a difference … often a big difference” (2) for good and ill. The heroes of Eamon's tale are the business-friendly progressive governors, men like Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt. Sanford, governor from 1961 to 1965, was both a shrewd politico and “a moralist who felt his people deserved a new Age of Enlightenment” (68). To this end he enacted sweeping educational reforms, financed by an unpopular food sales tax, and steered the state through the stormy waters of desegregation. The canny and energetic Hunt, governor from 1977 to 1985 and from 1993 to 2001, is dubbed “the master” (169), a politician who “artfully blended business-friendly rhetoric with economic populist ideals” (285). As for Sanford, education reform was a hallmark of Hunt's governorships and, among other initiatives, he successfully pushed the legislature to establish new statewide tests and develop public schools as community hubs.

Indeed, education, particularly higher education, is a defining feature of the book. Eamon parallels the state's political evolution with the growth and integration of its seventeen-campus university system. The intertwining of North Carolina's political and educational elites is a persistent refrain and he makes a persuasive case that the presidency of the University of North Carolina system was “one of the most political and significant roles a North Carolinian could have” (276).

Though Professor Eamon's book presents no iconoclastic thesis, as a thorough and well-documented survey of the political history of postwar North Carolina it more than acquits itself. It will no doubt prove an invaluable reference work for the scholar and lay reader alike.