Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction

Abstract

A brief review cannot do this book justice. Written by three generations of political scientists who double as political historians—David A. Bateman of Cornell University; his adviser, John S. Lapinski, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Lapinski's adviser, Ira Katznelson, of Columbia University—it is an ambitious, massive, magisterial effort to explain “how southern politics remade the United States above and below the Mason-Dixon Line” between 1877 and 1933 (p. 8). It takes its place alongside V. O. Key Jr.'s Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) and C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South (1951) as one of the most important works on the topic. The book examines southerners in Congress after Reconstruction. From 1877 to 1900, southern lawmakers, deeply insecure about the survival of white supremacy, spent their limited political capital working to secure white hegemony. This often meant sacrificing critical economic policies such as the Blair Federal Educational Bill in the 1880s, which would have provided significant federal school funding but which southerners feared might “renew the active involvement of the nation in southern racial affairs” (p. 153). Similar things happened with tax and tariff policies.