Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s

Abstract

Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. By Pete Daniel. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. 392. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustration, index. $45.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.) Pete Daniel's Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s is a strange, compelling, and finally deeply divided book, a bizarre mix, beneath its ordered, reassuring prose, of sober scholarship, fiery critique, and nostalgic celebration. How could it be otherwise, being a book about the American South with B. B. King and Elvis Presley on the cover? Daniel's title and his introduction make his primary thesis clear enough: lost opportunities littered the southern landscape (p. 3) in the two decades after World War Two. Failed by its leaders-a timorous clergy (p. 2), indecisive white liberals (p. 2), bureaucrats (p. 39) at every level whose policies drove eleven million black and white southern farmers from the land, and craven politicians were chained to segregation and racial prejudice (pp. 1-2)-the region missed its chance for peaceful and harmonious progress. The South's best contributions, instead, came from its most despised people, the poor blacks and whites who, even as they were dispossessed from the lands and the land-based occupations of their fathers and mothers and forced into industrial jobs in southern and northern cities, carried their low culture with them and successfully impressed it on the nation's consciousness. Daniel opens his story in 1945, in the exhilarating promise of postwar peace and prosperity, and closes it with the brutal violence unleashed on black and white civil rights workers during 1964's Freedom Summer. The heart of this book is the period between, the story of how it mostly went wrong. Southern black soldiers came back from war with experience of a larger, freer world than they had previously known. Southern women had wartime work experience in jobs previously restricted to men. Gay and lesbian soldiers and workers who had never been aware of the existence of a national gay and lesbian cohort discovered friendly bars and made fast friends (p. 19). Few were prepared for a return to the region's status quo. Lost Revolutions is the first of all a story of hopes betrayed. Daniel is most authoritative discussing agricultural history, and the story he tells is a horrific one-a corpulent and obfuscating bureaucracy imposed an agribusiness approach upon a traditional labor-intensive rural order by means of government subsidies administered by local elites, land-grant university research, and corporate drumming (p. 41). His indictment of bureaucratic promotion of chemical herbicides and pesticides (and withholding of studies demonstrating health and environmental risks) is especially vivid and compelling. The bad guys greatly outnumber the good guys in this narrative, and Daniel pulls no punches. Names are named, and photographs which should have been mug shots are included. Lost Revolutions is very nearly as incisive in its discussion of civil rights issues in the 1950s, and the basic narrative is dismayingly similar to the agricultural history. Politicians, school administrators, and ministers take the place of agricultural bureaucrats, and African Americans take the place of small farmers, but once again the story is one of failure of both vision and nerve. The better sort lacked all conviction, and they left the initiative to the worst. Daniel's account centers on voter registration drives and school integration issues, and more specifically on two watersheds of the decade-the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. …