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In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from down-town and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes. As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis shifted from building homes to protecting them as residents tried to maintain their standard of living against outside threats - including the growing civil rights movement - through grassroots conservative politics based on an ideal of white homeowner rights. As the citizens of South Gate struggled to defend their segregated American Dream of suburban community, they fanned the flames of racial inequality that erupted in the 1965 Watts riots.

It is a paradox of our history that the South-a region historically identified with political exclusion-has given birth to some of America's most remarkable democratic movements. These two volumes from the University Press of Kentucky remind us again of this seemingly contradictory reality. Tracy Campbell and Robert E. Botsch each rescue social movements from historical obscurity, showing in the process how the populist legacy continues to provide what C. Vann Woodward once called a "periodic therapy" for America.1 Campbell offers us an economical, thoroughly researched, and imaginatively written account of an attempt by Kentucky and Tennessee tobacco farmers to organize against the tobacco trust, an effort that culminated in the "Tobacco Wars" of 1904-1908. Botsch, meanwhile, advances an informative analysis of the attempts by 1970s Carolina textile workers and neopopulist organizers to build a movement among the victims of byssinosis, commonly known as "brown lung" disease. Much can be learned from looking at these volumes in tandem, for these movements shared much in common. Both were generated by the victims of economic sectors on the verge of decline or reorganization and led by activists who tapped the contradictory legacy of southern populism. Both grappled with the problem of organizing blacks and whites together in a region in which race was the primary social boundary-the tobacco farmers during the era of the rise of Jim Crow, the textile workers during its decline. And both movements struggled against the limits of reform when national political trends stymied their efforts. Tracy Campbell's account of the Tobacco Wars, "one of the final defenses in