New South, new nature: Regional industrialization and environmental change in the post-New Deal American South

This dissertation explores a particular trajectory of regional industrialization and environmental change in the post-New Deal American South. Using the growth of the pulp and paper industry as a vehicle for telling a larger story about the industrial and environmental histories of the region, the dissertation focuses specifically on the ways in which large corporate enterprises, in concert with other actors, mobilized and organized the productive capacities of southern land and labor and integrated them into a highly competitive industrial form. Combining recent constructivist approaches to political economy with insights from environmental history and political ecology, the dissertation views regional industrialization as a historically situated process of social, political, and ecological construction. In contrast to more traditional views of post-World War II industrialization and theories of regional comparative advantage, the story told here emphasizes how various social actors devised new organizational forms and strategies necessary to deal with the various institutional and biophysical challenges specific to the region. In telling this story, the dissertation is organized around a series of problems that confronted firms as they expanded their operations in the region. Put most succinctly, these consisted of the making of a highly-productive “industrial forest” in the South; the social organization of logging and wood procurement; the management of race and class in the context of mill labor and the distinctive capital requirements in the industry; and the politics of environmental pollution associated with pulp and paper production. Because each of these problems embodied a distinctive aspect of regionalism, solving them required deep engagement with both the biophysical and the social landscape of the postbellum South. In the process, the history and geography of the South came to be intimately bound up with the construction of a new industrial order that dramatically reshaped both the competitive landscape of the industry and the industrial and biophysical landscape of the region.