Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South

Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South is Casey P. Cater’s recent book on how southern energy consolidation was a central process in constructing what he terms the “long New South” over the century spanning the 1880s and the 1970s. The book attempts to reconcile a southern historic exceptionalism with broader national urbanization trends, beginning in the late nineteenth century when the southern cities began to grow apace with the rest of the United States. For Cater, these cities served as the command centers for territorial energy pursuits, where southern utility corporations leveraged federal infrastructure funds for private profit. Cater is an energy historian based out of Atlanta, Georgia, which also happens to be the epicenter of the book’s narrative. “‘Regenerating Dixie,’” he explains, “is both an obvious riff on the New South and a term that clearly employs the present continuous tense.” Planning history in the US South, apart from some notable exceptions, is either wrapped in urban history, as in the work of David Goldfield, or buried in the region’s economic histories. As historian Alex Sayf Cummings recently summarized, “To take a bibliography of southern history on its face, one could conclude that urban planning never touched the American South.” From the anti-urban sentiment of the tidewater region, to the extension of the plantation model throughout the southeast that circumscribed authentic urban development to its southern coastal colonial town origins until the late nineteenth century, the South does not fit comfortably into the “official” planning history or the traditional nation-state contexts that frame it. Effective planning requires clear public–private, multilevel collaboration, in the form of explicit policy. Or it likes to think so. The South thinks of itself differently. Southern history is more poetry; gothic with ghostly innuendo. Planning aspires to be a high public art and science, and nineteenth-century Southern Victorianism reified only select aspects of “civilization” and flipped the rest of the Enlightenment on its head. Whether in discussions of regionalism or sectionalism, since the seventeenth century the history of the South has sought to weave itself into the larger national narrative while also claiming a kind of exceptional, unique character within that narrative. This is not its “new history” but rather its origin story. As Daniel Joseph Singal observed, “The plantation’s needs determined the South’s pattern of settlement, its principal transportation routes, and the location, size, and vitality of its cities . . . . In short, the plantation flourished at the expense of the development of the rest of southern society.” But Cater argues that southern electrification has broader significance for US histories of urban technologies, while recognizing the region’s “peculiarities.” “‘Different’ does not mean ‘exceptional’ . . . . It (southern electrification) was at once peculiar and universal.” It is a useful, Journal of Planning History