Regulation of economic institutions, and the role of local elites in shaping the direction of economic reform within the local community during the New Deal and World War II, provides the central theme of this work. The shifting locus of reform and regulation from the state capital to the federal capital necessarily affected the control of those institutions basic to conservative dominance within the local community: land---or more generally, property---and labor. In an effort to maintain their dominance, local elites adopted strategies that enabled them to recast core values of community, individualism, and democracy into a new economic framework, thus providing an element of continuity in a sea of change. The basis for these values in local economic institutions provides a fundamental theme of this work, for in studying the response of conservative elites to the economic transformation of the local community, we can more fully understand the continuity of conservative values from the racially-segregated, solidly Democratic South of the past to the racially integrated, increasingly Republican-dominated 'modern South' of our own era. Thus, this study of one Southern community, Caddo Parish, Louisiana, offers a unique perspective into this process of transformation, demonstrating how conservative leaders manipulated the currents of ideology and reform within both state and nation to reinforce their dominance within the local sphere. In the process, it illustrates the diversity of interests within the conservative elite and the variety of their responses to change, and on that basis projects the future course of political evolution within the state and nation
