Lowndes breaks fresh ground in this history of contemporary conservatism, refuting the backlash thesis, which holds that Southern voters turned to the Republican Party after the Democrats embraced a civil rights platform. The author reveals how the backlash was anything but reactionary—it was the result of long-running mobilizing strategies by conservatives who made successful appeals to white voters and divergent elements in Southern politics: “the bourbon politics of the black belt regions… the complex tradition of southern populism; and the political aspirations of the emergent metropolitan bourgeoisie.” The book highlights the largely unknown Charles Wallace Collins, who first aligned segregationists and conservatives and provided the philosophical underpinnings for the states’ rights movement. Well-researched and readable sections detail the crucial role of the staunchly anti–civil rights National Review and how Southern conservatism was variously interpreted and shaped by its progenitors and champions from George Wallace to Richard Nixon..[H]is book is a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary conservatism.
—Publisher’s Weekly
“This book brilliantly describes the ideology of American conservatism. A richly detailed analysis that helps illuminate the development, rise, and the discursive peculiarities of this political movement.”—Anne Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
“This is an original, well-written, and important analysis of how the implosion of Southern segregation resulted in new party alignments, racial cleavage, and ideological divisions in American politics. Drawing on new primary sources and developing important theoretical arguments, Lowndes has made a major contribution to American political development.”—Desmond King, University of Oxford and author of The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation
“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”—Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White
“In reconstructing the intellectual, ideological, cultural, and institutional histories of the New Right’s genesis and development, From the New Deal to the New Right challenges many conventional views about the movement’s origins and content. This is an important contribution to our understanding of the southern, and racialist, roots of modern conservatism and with its rich, interdisciplinary focus, provides a very useful model of what the systematic study of politics can be.”—Adolph Reed Jr., University of Pennsylvania
<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”,”serif”; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>
|
When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he remarked that he had “signed the South away for a generation.” Most historians have tended to agree, attributing the rise of the southern Republicans to a white backlash against 1960s liberalism. Joseph E. Lowndes, however, thinks otherwise. More attention needs to be paid, he argues, to a long-term process of conservative mobilization, primarily the construction of a populist discourse that persuaded voters across America to view racial reforms as part of a wider attack on their freedoms by an expansionist central government. Thus, southern segregationists were able to forge alliances with nonsouthern conservatives in a way that decisively shaped the modern American political landscape. As early as the late 1940s southerners, such as the writer Charles Wallace Collins, were urging an end to the Solid South. In the 1950s northerners, such as the staff of the National Review, were endorsing massive resistance so long as it was a question of states’ rights rather than outright racism. This laid the foundations for more famous instances of conservative bridge building: the Barry Goldwater campaign, George Wallace’s bids for the presidency, and Richard M. Nixon’s appeals to the “silent majority.” Less obviously, Lowndes suggests, these efforts spanned the realm of culture as well as politics. He demonstrates this through the work of Asa “Forrest” Carter, the Klansman turned author whose novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1973), filmed by Clint Eastwood as The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976, provided a powerful narrative of American identity as centering on resistance to the incursions of a centralizing state. |
|||
|
This is a sharp and stimulating book that at times brings a new perspective to familiar terrain. The material on the post–World War II courtship of Republicans and southern Democrats is particularly compelling. Here, Lowndes uncovers a whole network of writers, activists, and politicians engaged in the project of building a conservative alliance. Along the way, this network wrestled with the delicate issues of how to work with segregationists without embracing segregation and how to wean southerners away from the New Deal. The final substantive chapter, on Carter, reveals Lowndes’s aptitude for forging unlikely but revealing connections, such as Carter’s antistatist conservatism and the New Left’s antiauthoritarianism. |
|||
|
While the chapters on Collins, Goldwater, the National Review, and Carter are highly effective, those on Wallace and Nixon are less so. Since there is already a flourishing historiography on conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, Lowndes’s account at times has a somewhat well-worn feel. This is particularly so because the author does not really engage with this historiography; one is left wondering how Lowndes might relate his own work to that of Dan Carter, Matt Lassiter, Lisa McGirr, and others. However, this is a minor quibble with an otherwise thought-provoking monograph, written in a crisp style that eschews jargon and excess narrative detail. As a result, while From the New Deal to the New Right contains much to interest specialists in the field, it is also clear and lively enough to engage undergraduates. Journal of American History |
|||
|
|||
|
|
