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Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina. By Anthony J. Badger. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Pp. xviii + 295. $20.00

Anthony Badger, an English historian, delves into the political economy of American farm policy under the New Deal in this study of the tobacco programs and North Carolina. He mainly uses the methods and sources of traditional political history, recording a narrative of federal tobacco policymaking through the 1930s and finding evidence of motivations and pressures in the personal papers of the leading political figures and in the administrative records of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Badger poses several questions for himself, such as the extent of local influence on federal policy and operation, the validity of claims of "Grass Roots Democracy" under the AAA, and whether the limitations of the New Deal were "self-imposed" or "beyond their control." But the bulk of the book is a detailed narrative of events, the explicit interpretive discussion coming mostly in a forty-page concluding chapter. The detail and specialization will keep it off the best-seller lists, but the author writes well and has reviewed his materials quite carefully, so that the book will surely be a standard reference on its particular subject matter.