SOCIOLOGISTS AS HISTORIANS AND PLANTERS AS INDUSTRIALISTS

The anomalousness of the southern economic and social system did not end with the abolition of slavery. Because of this, the fascination and puzzlement with which historians, economists, and social scientists have approached the antebellum South has now propelled them into examining the postwar period as well. As with slavery, investigation has focused on the society's labor system and ruling class, and, as with the studies of the earlier era, innovative methods and approaches from the social sciences are being applied. The problem of why the South remained anomalous after the war and emancipation has provoked Dwight Billings, Jr.'s curiosity, and his book, Planters and the 'Making of a New South': Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900, revolves around a major interpretation of postwar southern history now accepted as an orthodoxy, which argues for dramatic social change after the 1870s. The thesis Billings is concerned with is, of course, the proposition Vann Woodward expounded in the early 1950s -that as Reconstruction ended in the mid-1870s, a new class, whom he called the Redeemers, rose to primacy in the South. These men were not from the old planter class but represented a middle class, espousing bourgeois values and advocating industrialization and urbanization. The rise to power of these proponents of a business civilization for the South marked the inauguration of the New South and effected a dramatic discontinuity in southern history. The indefinite article preceding and the inverted commas surrounding New South in the title of Billings's book give the reader early warning that he questions "the Woodward thesis." What is not so readily apparent from the title page is that the author is a sociologist, not a historian. And yet, he is writing a book to refute the interpretation of a historian. This is unusual,