Ira Katznelson

The South has had an oversized influence on American history, rarely for the better. For a number of reasons (the culture of the initial Scotch-Irish founding population, the more aristocracy-friendly agricultural economy, the harsh system of racial apartheid), the South has remained stubbornly distinct as a society, and its representatives in the federal government have been ferocious about opposing any initiatives they saw as counter to the South's interests and values. Katznelson's focus here is on how important the South's representatives were to shaping the New Deal, America's conduct in World War 2, and the immediate Cold War aftermath, a thesis which rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Even though FDR was an aristocratic Northerner, Southern representatives were crucial to his legislative agenda. Because the South was basically a one-party region, once Southern Democrats made it through their primaries they were assured of winning elections. In an era of the seniority system, that meant that after the big Democratic waves of the New Deal coalition, they occupied a disproportionately large percentage of the leadership spots, as well as frequently remaining a majority of the party caucus. Additionally, Southern Democrats were often able to cast the deciding votes in disputes between Republicans and nonsouthern Democrats, able to extract whatever concessions they needed from bills that threatened the Jim Crow system or white superiority in general.

An example that Katznelson doesn't use is in my hometown of Austin: while the Santa Rita Courts were the first public housing in the country, there were three separate projects that were segregated by race in accordance with Southern values. I was surprised to read that Southern representatives were initially fairly economically progressive in terms of big public works projects like the TVA or the LCRA, but they inevitably dissented whenever a piece of economic legislation threatened to treat blacks and whites equally. Labor unions were nearly the only institution that was making progress in the fight for racial equality, and much of the modern South's antipathy to unions can be traced back to this period. Katznelson quotes a contemporary magazine article thus: "The only local institution that southern whites and Negroes have in common today is the labor union" and shows that over time, as the New Deal's economic component became more important, Southern Congressmen voted increasingly with Republicans to frustrate Roosevelt and other liberals.

The South has always been more militaristic than the rest of the country (if not quite as good at actually winning wars), and when World War 2 finally reached America Southern Congressmen were oddly eager to give the federal government vast powers to fight the Axis. Katznelson's explanations for why German efforts to promote solidarity between their similar racial ideologies during the runup to the war didn't take aren't very convincing to me, but he does a good job of showing the efforts of the Southerners to get disproportionate defense spending in their districts. I wish he had pointed out that this legacy lingers in the fact that Southerners like Stennis and Vinson got aircraft carriers named after them despite their frequently-deplorable records on civil rights and other issues. Regardless, the South's peculiar combination of nationalism and xenophobia fit perfectly into the paranoid Cold War period, when Southerners were exceptionally diligent in Red Scare witch hunts (though of course Joseph McCarthy was not a Southerner).

The overall lessons that I took away from Katznelson included a new respect for how LBJ was able to transcend his background and get through so much good legislation in the Great Society. His compatriots were clever and tenacious in their ability to water down laws to protect Jim Crow; that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually passed is a miracle. The way that the fear caused by economic and military crises can shape responses to them is well done here in the contrasts drawn between the US and the European dictatorships that abandoned democracy in a way the US never did. Additionally, I appreciated his focus on Congress, in contrast to so much literature that treats the President as a powerful sovereign and Congress as a faceless bill-generating machine. That makes his exploration of the South's attitude towards the way that things like trade policies and treaties should be negotiated very good. Furthermore, I was struck by how the South maintained its particular identity over many decades and despite many large demographic changes - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once gave an interesting if predictably partisan speech to the US Council for National Policy in June 1997 where he analogized the US South to Quebec, and I think further study of the similarities and differences between the two in the effects of the regions on their respective national politics would be extremely enlightening.

Overall this book is an important contribution to understanding how the legacy of the South's unique culture has affected American history. While non-Southerners might rightly question why such a backwards region is able to have such a pernicious effect on the national discourse, continued population flows to Southern states make understanding why its legislators have such regressive and reactionary views more important than ever.… (plus d'informations)

The New Deal was a devil’s bargain: major programs to alleviate the suffering of the Depression, but with Southern-demanded local control so that whites could continue to control blacks and deny them the benefits of government intervention. This or none, they said, and the good white people of the north and west chose this. When the pro-union national law started to enable unions to make gains in the South, threatening to improve blacks’ relative positions, Southern Democrats switched sides and joined Republicans to write laws that deterred unionization in agriculture and stemmed the union tide in general. And while the GI Bill provided major benefits for some black men—as did participating in the WWII armed forces even under segregated conditions—the national Democrats didn’t even try very hard to avoid local control, meaning that black veterans were regularly denied the educational, vocational, and mortgage/business help that whites received. White middle-class wealth increased tenfold; black middle-class wealth did not, even as incomes by class/occupation started to equalize. Katznelson ends with a call to recognize current affirmative action for African-Americans as a response to deliberate exclusion from government benefits in the past, whether done on the retail level or wholesale (by excluding “domestics” and agricultural workers from Social Security at its inception, for example).… (plus d'informations)

This book approaches the New Deal from the perspective of the political accommodations that surrounded the efforts to pass progressive legislation. As the title suggests, fear was a major concern, and this insight remains relevant today. It probably touches on something basic in human nature, but that's beside the point for now. The fear of economic collapse, fascism, communism, Nazism...and later nuclear weapons all play a part. The political compromises needed to appease these fears explain some of the characteristics of New Deal and subsequent progressive legislation. Although much of it was (and remains) largely successful, it could have been more effective. Much of the book talks about the influence of southern states that feared that their established social order (Jim Crow/segregation) could be undermined by progressive New Deal policies that supported workers. On the other hand, Southern legislators wanted the economic boon that New Deal legislation brought to their states. They would remain solidly behind it as long as the legislation was tailored to avoid disrupting their established discriminatory practices.

I found this book an interesting and informative account of a pivotal, possibly revolutionary period in history. It also provides relevant historical background for the political squabbles in Congress and in the nation today.… (plus d'informations)