One of the most overlooked periods in the history of the American South has been the early twentieth century. Seeking to understand this peculiar region, scholars have focused on the events that marked it most visibly: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the implementation of segregation and disfranchisement at the turn of the century, and the rapid changes of the post-World War II period, including the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of southern Republicanism. Yet the early twentieth century was a critical period in the history of the South, a time of entrenched segregation and political and social conservatism that was, nevertheless, marked by the beginnings of economic modernization. In Dixie Highway, College of Charleston history professor Tammy Ingram joins a growing number of southern historians interested in highlighting the changes that shaped the region’s economy in the years between the turn of the century and World War II. In her history of the Dixie Highway, she demonstrates that road-building, and particularly the effort to organize and improve a highway stretching from Michigan to Miami, was “a crucial linchpin in the transition to the modern South” (p. 2). In pursuit of the highway, sold as a way to bring vacationers and developers into the region, southerners fought over funding and location, they debated the nature of and implications for state and federal aid, and they struggled to hang on to the social hierarchies and inequalities that marked southern life.

Ingram begins with the best-studied period of southern infrastructure improvement, the Progressive-era “Good Roads Movement” in which southerners dedicated their own time and money to improve the roads that traversed the countryside. Yet southerners could not agree on the scope or purpose for automotive transportation; even as citizens came to an agreement on the need for better roads, farmers demanded farm-to-market connections while drivers, and later economic developers, envisioned a network of improved highways connecting the region and its products to manufacturers and markets across the country. Southerners also divided over funding for road projects, uncertain whether the use of federal or state funds would unduly burden communities with change and oversight. When the Midwestern businessman Carl Fisher proposed what would become the Dixie Highway, a privately planned and marked route connecting North and South, such divisions came to a head.

Focusing her attention on Georgia, the state with more mileage, fiercer debates, and more vocal boosters than any of its southern neighbors, Ingram delves into the decisions that shaped the highway’s route and its impact. Southerners understood that a major road might bring commercial development and reduce their reliance on cotton and agriculture, and as a result, civic and business leaders scrambled to present their communities as essential to the route of the highway. The outbreak of World War I provided further impetus as Dixie Highway boosters used the defense effort to highlight the need for federal funding for what might become a “military highway” in emergencies. The war ended too quickly for boosters to realize a federally funded military road network, but as Ingram notes, it did provide southerners with a brief glimpse into the necessity of federal funding and organization. Moreover, the wartime experience of road-building debates in Georgia was a foundational moment in the career of Dwight Eisenhower, who was stationed in the state during the war, and who would go on to implement that very vision of federally-funded and organized highways with the modern interstate highway system when he became president.

For southerners, federal funding for infrastructure projects was both a blessing and a curse. Such outlays allowed southern communities and states to avoid taxes and tolls that might otherwise be necessary for such expensive projects, but funding also meant that the federal government might employ greater oversight into the methods by which southerners preserved political, economic, and social inequality. Ingram exemplifies this concern with an extended analysis of Georgia’s use of convict labor on southern highway projects. Southern leaders saw the use of chain gangs as the perfect stop-gap measure; communities could embrace modernization in the form of new highways and the commercial concerns and economic integration that would accompany them, but they could preserve the racial status quo by building those roads with predominantly African American convicts whose labor was co-opted by the state. As Ingram notes, the use of chain gangs “prioritized racial supremacy and deployed black labor in the name of southern progress” (p. 161).

Even as northern states completed their sections of the Dixie Highway, and as parts took shape in southern states, road-building became a heated topic in southern politics. Demagogic politicians saw highway funding as the perfect scapegoat for reactionary campaigns. In Georgia, politicians routinely painted state highway commissions as corrupt and nepotistic, and they denounced federal and state funding as a form of outside control. By the late 1920s and 1930s, the preferred form of funding became gas taxes and pay-as-you-go roads, allowing southern states to avoid large bond issues and to ensure that those who used the roads, including out of state visitors, bore the burden. Yet the true end of the Dixie Highway came in 1926, when parts of it and other marked and unmarked roads were assumed by the numbered federal highway system.

Though brief, Ingram’s history of the Dixie Highway is an important, useful, and readable addition to the history of the modernizing South. In the numerous debates and squabbles that accompanied plans for the highway, she exposes the complicated relationship that southerners had with the federal government and the means by which the South might become more fully integrated into the national economy. Ingram’s scope is limited; her focus is on the debate in Georgia, drawn from the records of politicians, associations, and government agencies interested in the state’s road-building program. Yet the larger themes that inform Ingram’s research demand more attention. In Dixie Highway, she raises important questions about modernization and development, the ways that southerners debated the merits of growth and the manner in which they mobilized to make such growth happen. Those scholars interested in the South’s transformation across the twentieth century, and particularly those interested in the modernization of the southern economy, will want to take note of these questions and build on Ingram’s work in order to seek answers for them.