Author and UNCW professor Philip Gerard starts book series on North Carolina history
For decades, the N.C. Division of Archives and History churned out a shelf of short paperbacks and pamphlets on eras and topics in North Carolina history.
Now, Wilmington writer Philip Gerard is taking up the task with "North Carolina in the 1940s: The Decade of Transformation." His publisher, Blair, sees this as the first in a series. A companion volume, "North Carolina in the 1950s," is due for release in March.
Gerard, a professor in the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a former department chair, is best known for his historical novel about the 1898 coup and massacre, "Cape Fear Rising." He's also written plenty of history, including "Secret Soldiers," about camouflage and deception in World War II. His series of Civil War columns for Our State magazine was compiled into a fine volume, "The Last Battleground."
"North Carolina in the 1940s" follows the pattern of "The Last Battleground." Individual chapters highlight particular topics, written in the present tense to make the subjects more immediate.
The Second World War, of course, brought tens of thousands of GIs to the state. Camp Lejeune was founded on the New River to train Marines for amphibious operations. World War I's Camp Bragg was expanded into Fort Bragg, becoming the home to America's airborne divisions. Generals such as Matthew Ridgeway, James Gavin and Maxwell Taylor honed their skills there under the command of a former farmboy from Dunn named William Carey Lee.
But much was happening on the home front. As Gerard notes, the '40s were the decade when, for many Tar Heels, the lights came on. At the start of the decade, roughly three quarters of North Carolina farms had no electricity and relied on wells for their water. Rural electrification in the midst of the war would change all that.
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Gerard devotes an entire chapter to Wilmington's shipyard. Opening just before the war's outbreak, it churned out 243 vessels before its shutdown in 1946. Most of these were Liberty ships, many of them later anchored in the Brunswick River on the western banks of Eagles Island. The first, the SS Zebulon B. Vance, was launched the day before the Pearl Harbor attack.
Elsewhere, Gerard looks at the impact of polio, focusing on the "Miracle of Hickory" in 1944, when town residents built a new hospital almost overnight to confront an outbreak. Far fewer children died, or were crippled, as a result. (Novelist Diane Chamberlain dramatized the story in her book, "A Stolen Marriage.")
Gerard doesn't neglect popular culture. Ava Gardner, a girl from Grabtown, outside Smithfield, made her way to Hollywood, broke into pictures, married Mickey Rooney and ended the decade as an A-list star. In Charlotte, radio station WBT became a country music powerhouse, and Charlotte nearly edged out Nashville as the country music capital. The 1940s would see the emergence of three native Tar Heels as musical giants: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and a banjo picker named Earl Scruggs.
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Other chapters highlight efforts to unionize the tobacco industry, the building of the great Fontana Dam in western North Carolina and massive hurricanes of the decade. Gerard takes a look at short-lived Black Mountain College, an outpost of the avant-garde in the Tar Heel hills. (Among the thinkers it attracted were Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.)
"North Carolina in the 1940s" targets the general reader and would be ideal for students and newcomers. Old timers might even learn a thing or two.
Book review
'NORTH CAROLINA IN THE 1940s: The Decade of Transformation'
By Philip Gerard
Durham: Blair, $19.95
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: UNCW professor, author Philip Gerard starts book series on NC history
