Southern Conservatism Research Articles

Pedagogy and the Politics of Organizing in Mississippi

This article reflects on a community-directed collaboration between students at a four-year liberal arts institution and a local organization in Mississippi to develop an index of women's economic security. It suggests that the collaborative nature of the course, as well as the relationship- and community-building witnessed in Mississippi offer counter-narratives to liberal individualism, southern conservatism, and the practice of social justice work.

Reagan’s Southern Comfort: The “Boll Weevil” Democrats in the “Reagan Revolution” of 1981

Abstract:In 1981, around fifty conservative southern Democrats in the House of Representatives, the so-called Boll Weevils, played a crucial role in the enactment of President Ronald Reagan’s economic agenda. The significance of this episode has thus far been underappreciated. This article illustrates the importance of the Boll Weevils’ support to the early success of Reagan’s presidency, as well its implications for both the South’s political landscape and for the national Republican Party.Though short-lived, this coalition would prove to be a significant rupture in the Democratic Party’s superiority in the South at the congressional level and highlighted the partisan fragmentation the region was undergoing. As this article will demonstrate, the events of 1981 returned southern conservatism to the center of power in Washington for the first time in over a decade and acted as a catalyst for a number of southern Democratic congressmen to move toward the GOP.

James M. Buchanan and the Political Economy of Desegregation

Were 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's formative contributions to political economy inspired in significant part by hostility to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision? Nancy MacLean's 2017 Democracy in Chains argues that public choice economics emerged from an opportunistic alliance with Virginia's “Massive Resistance” to school integration and should thus be situated within the racially tinged tradition of southern conservatism. While Buchanan wrote very little on the economics of race, archival evidence and his published works do not support this thesis. Buchanan's work is better understood with reference to his Chicago school mentor Frank Knight and the Italian public finance tradition rather than southern conservatism. To the contrary, we suggest Buchanan believed the competitive processes generated by an educational voucher system would likely undermine rather than rescue the racially segregated status quo. Furthermore, Buchanan's associations and activities suggest that racial hierarchy was not part of his normative vision.

The ‘Great Conservative Power’: James Henley Thornwell and the Gospel of Southern Conservatism

The ‘Great Conservative Power’: James Henley Thornwell and the Gospel of Southern Conservatism

James M. Buchanan, Public Choice, and the Political Economy of Desegregation

Recent historical works, most notably 2017’s Democracy in Chains, claim that 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan’s formative contributions to political economy were inspired in significant part by hostility to Brown v. Board of Education. This argument suggests that the research agenda of public choice economics emerged from an opportunistic alliance with Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to school integration and should thus be situated within the racially tinged tradition of southern conservatism. While Buchanan wrote very little on the economics of race, an extensive review of archival evidence as well as his published works refutes this claimed association. Buchanan’s work is better understood in the context of his Chicago school mentor Frank Knight as well as his own support for the public choice contributions of W.H. Hutt, rather than the unattested links to southern racial conservatism that are posited by MacLean. To the contrary, we show that Buchanan opposed segregation and believed that the competitive processes of an educational voucher system would undermine the Massive Resistance status quo. We accordingly reject the primary thesis of Democracy in Chains and offer a corrective account of the relationship between Buchanan and the segregation debate.

The Heat Is On: Cold War Conservatism

The Heat Is On: Cold War Conservatism Robert O. Self (bio) Colleen Doody . Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism. Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2013 . viii + 175 pp. Works cited, notes, and index. $50.00 . Elizabeth Tandy Shermer . Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013 . viii + 424 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $49.95 . Modern conservatism, like success in the old proverb, has many parents. The family tree includes, at the very least, anticommunists, segregationists, the pro-business lobby, anti-labor industrialists, Wall Street financiers, white suburbanites, and religious and moral traditionalists of varying stripes. In distinct regions of the country, and at distinct moments in time, these progenitors partnered in unique ways. Indeed, no other outcome is historically plausible in a continental nation of hundreds of millions of inhabitants with multiple acute regional, religious, class, and racial differences and governed through a profoundly decentralized majoritarian political system with only two competitive parties. American conservatism, not unlike American liberalism, is merely a loose set of ideas and sensibilities until it is given concrete form in specific policies, campaigns, and movements—that is, specific actions in politics and governance at various scales. This might seem rather obvious. But it is worth remembering, because too often historians seem to feel obligated to locate a single takeoff point for modern conservatism somewhere between 1933 and 1980. Reasonable arguments could be made for half a dozen or more such moments. On the other hand, we ought to resist the countervailing temptation to cast the Right, like the bourgeoisie in all of my history courses when I was an undergraduate, as always “rising.” Historians have made remarkable progress in the last two decades in specifying the who, what, where, and why of the Right’s post–New Deal evolution, from the Liberty League to the Moral Majority. Indeed, the historiographical pendulum may have swung so decisively that we now know conservatism better than we know liberalism. Fifty years hence, it is entirely possible—I might venture likely—that what will appear anomalous and will [End Page 513] require additional historical explanation will be liberalism’s mid–twentieth-century sway, not the Right’s late-century triumphs.1 And yet we still have a great deal to learn. The rising tide of historical studies of modern conservatism has not breached every bank. In particular, though a number of fine books on Southern conservatism have appeared in the last decade, we are still left with only partial explanations of how the cry of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” became, in a generation, the demand for “family values.” We’ve yet to see a systematic study of conservatives’ decades-long engagement with and assault on organized labor, from the Taft-Hartley Act to George W. Bush’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And only in the last few years have historians endeavored to explore the Right’s gender and sexual politics in relation to its economic project. As the writing of modern conservatism’s history proceeds, we can profitably jettison the “takeoff” and “rise” frameworks for a more flexible approach attentive to the varying degrees of right-wing consolidation that took place at different local and regional scales at distinct moments in time.2 There is something of this spirit in Elizabeth Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism, a local study of conservatism with sweeping ambitions. Borrowing from the sociologist Philip Selznick, Shermer focuses on the “grasstops” of Phoenix, Arizona, between the 1930s and the 1970s. Grasstops were local business elites, Chamber of Commerce and booster types who steered local economic development. Reflexively anti-labor and anti-regulation, they were not, Shermer shows, reflexively “laissez-fair ideologues.” Their opportunistic approach to building the mid-century political economy of Phoenix and its environs was based on the implicit understanding that capitalism is best constructed not of “free markets” but of investment opportunities for private capital facilitated by government action. They sought to build the Southwest not by rejecting the state but by clarifying what they believed the state should do, such as recruit investors, coordinate public-private development projects, and create business-friendly tax and regulatory environments. They also...

“Let the Empire Come”: Imperialism and Its Critics in the Reconstruction South

In 1869, a monarchist newspaper, The Imperialist, caused a “sensation” across the Union. In the South, where it circulated widely, most conservatives read it as a Radical blueprint to dismember the republic. These critics used the paper to rally the white electorate, and their response sheds light on the “phantasms of fear” Mark Summers has argued characterized Reconstruction politics. But the weekly also found adherents in the South. Whether out of admiration for the nation-building efforts of European monarchies, contempt for black suffrage, or hostility to Herrenvolk democracy, they saw a strong centralized government with a king at its head as a path to stabilization that would maintain their power and authority. The monarchist moment in the South was fleeting and never attracted widespread support, but proclamations of fidelity to the principles of The Imperialist illuminate a rarely-explored variant of southern conservatism.

James J. Kilpatrick: salesman for segregation

J. Kilpatrick was a nationally known television personality, journalist, and columnist whose conservative voice rang out loudly and widely through the twentieth century. As editor of the Richmond News Leader, writer for the National Review, debater in the Point/Counterpoint portion of CBS's 60 Minutes, and supporter of conservative political candidates like Barry Goldwater, Kilpatrick had many platforms for his race-based brand of southern conservatism. In James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation, William Hustwit delivers a comprehensive study of Kilpatrick's importance to the civil rights era and explores how his protracted resistance to both desegregation and egalitarianism culminated in an enduring form of conservatism that revealed a nation's unease with racial change.Relying on archival sources, including Kilpatrick's personal papers, Hustwit provides an invaluable look at what Gunnar Myrdal called the race problem in the white mind at the intersection of the postwar conservative and civil rights movements. Growing out of a painful family history and strongly conservative political cultures, Kilpatrick's personal values and self-interested opportunism contributed to America's ongoing struggles with race and reform.

The Tea Party and American Populism Today: Between Protest, Patriotism and Paranoia

This article takes a closer look at the Tea Party by adding a transatlantic perspective. Its aim is to show that the Tea Party is a genuine right-wing movement with strong affinities to the Republican Party which revives particular American traditions of conservatism and the radical right. Its support base is not ‘the mainstream’ but a particular cross section of the white middle classes. In this, it is the American mirror image of many European parties and movements of the populist radical right which share the Tea Party’s anti-establishment message, its ultra-patriotism and ethnocentrism. It also shares some of its characteristics with the Christian Right with which it competes and cooperates when aiming at influencing the Republican Party and Washington while marking the merger of the Christian Right with Southern conservatism.

Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Robert Luckett (bio) Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. By Jenny Irons. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010. Pp. xviii, 260. $49.95 cloth) The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission is perhaps the most infamous publically funded segregationist organization of the 1950s and 1960s Jim Crow South. While much has been said about the Sovereignty Commission in the historiography of the civil rights movement, few scholars have tackled the organization itself head-on. Yasuhiro Katagiri provides a detailed accounting of its actions in his book, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States Rights (2001), but, until Jenny Irons's work, no one had produced an in-depth analysis of the commission and its legacy. As a sociologist, Irons is particularly concerned with meaning and racial privilege. In this case, she analyzes the Sovereignty Commission, its agents, and its activities to reveal how whiteness was both constructed and reconstructed in the face of challenges by the collective action of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, she shows that, through the "affirmation" of whiteness and the "denigration" [End Page 303] of blackness, the commission played a key role in maintaining "racial privilege and power" (pp. xv, 20). Despite the changes brought on by the advances of the movement, these white leaders were able to adapt strategies of opposition that proved quite effective. Irons divides her book into two parts. The first examines the role of the Sovereignty Commission under the regimes of Governor James P. Coleman and Governor Ross Barnett, roughly 1956-64. She begins here because of the proximity of these white leaders to a more virulent brand of racism that was espoused by the likes of the Citizens' Council, the most important private segregationist watchdog group. Although she notes that Coleman was recognized as a more moderate politician within the realm of segregationists than was Barnett, she correctly indicates that both of these gubernatorial administrations were relatively secure in their segregationist positions and were not forced to respond to the civil rights movement in any new kind of way. After 1964, she argues that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act forced the state of Mississippi, beginning with Governor Paul Johnson, to reconsider how it tried to limit African American access to political, social, and economic opportunities. Even though she wants to claim black agency and repeatedly asserts that African Americans forced change upon the South through their actions, her story has a top-down approach. As Irons shows, the Sovereignty Commission helped to craft the "resistant accommodation" to the civil rights movement that came to dominate white southern conservatism for the rest of the twentieth century. In this regard, her work fits in nicely with the best historiography on the topic, such as Joseph Crespino's In Search of Another Country (2009). In his description, segregationists developed a strategy of "color-blind" politics in Mississippi, whereby they explicitly avoided issues of race but implicitly were determined to maintain white power. In helping us to understand this phenomenon, Irons's book is an important addition to the scholarship on racial privilege and oppression. Irons did leave room for others to pick up on her groundwork. In particular, she admits that, because she depends almost entirely [End Page 304] on Sovereignty Commission records for her primary research, she does not include the voices of black people, and she misses how they envisioned and were affected by the Sovereignty Commission. Interestingly, she observes that the commission did not usually engage in comprehensive investigations and its resulting reports on various cases during the movement were primarily consumed by commission members themselves. In the end, the most damaging work that the commission seemed to do, according to Irons, was "denying" that local blacks had any agency during the movement and "attributing blame" to outside agitators—a story that was familiar to and accepted by most white Southerners (p. 102). One is left to wonder how big of an impact this really had on the black community and the movement. As Irons points out, meaning is of the utmost importance in understanding how a "dominant group" maintains and reconstitutes power in the face of...

Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789-1861: Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society

In Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789 1861, Adam L. Tate discusses the nature of southern conservative thought between 1789 and 1861 by examining six conservatives whose lives and careers spanned the antebellum period: John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Caroline, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and Johnson Jones Hooper. Tate contends that southern conservatism derived its distinctive characteristics from its acceptance of aspects of John Locke s political theory as it was articulated during the American Revolution.Locke argued that the state and society were two entities that could be reformed and manipulated by men. Showing that most southern conservative intellectuals accepted Locke s premise regarding separation of state and society, Tate examines both the political views and social vision of the six conservatives surveyed. He pays special attention to how these conservatives dealt with states rights, republicanism, slavery, sectionalism, and religion, as well as western expansion and migration.Tate maintains that while southern conservatives forged a common political tradition based on Old Republican interpretations of the Constitution, they did not create a unified tradition of social thought. Even though most of them desired a cohesive southern intellectual movement, as well as a homogenous southern culture, their disagreements over the good society prevented them from creating a common southern social vision to accompany their states rights political tradition.

Jesse Helms's Politics of Pious Incitement: Race, Conservatism, and Southern Realignment in the 1950s

IN THE SOUTH, A REGION WHERE CULTURAL AND RACIAL CONSERVATISM coexisted with loyalty to the Democratic Party and wide support for liberal economic policies, Jesse Helms became a pivotal figure in constructing the new conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s. Before his thirty-second birthday, Helms, a native of North Carolina, was an award-winning newspaper reporter, city editor of the Raleigh Times, news director for Raleigh radio station WRAL, administrative assistant to Senator Willis Smith, and campaign worker for conservative candidates, including media adviser to Senator Richard B. Russell Jr.'s run for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. In 1953 Helms left Washington, D.C., to serve as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association (NCBA) and edit its magazine, the Tarheel Banker. Helms differed from typical southern conservatives of the fifties. Out of his Washington experience a young Helms developed a national vision for conservative power. He not only recognized that southern Democrats had more in common with western and midwestern Republicans--like Richard M. Nixon or Joseph R. McCarthy--than with liberal Democrats, but he also wanted to build a national conservative party. Although Helms's critics have often painted him as a fringe figure, such depictions represent wishful thinking rather than a serious appraisal of his influence. True, Helms--a polished, well-connected extremist in a banker's suit--expressed views labeled fringe during the postwar decades. He believed the liberal consensus was shallow, mainly an elite phenomenon. Many average voters shared his views. The problem was to determine how, with a moderate to liberal media, conservatives could reach these voters. He found solutions. By the 1970s, no one could doubt Helms's centrality to the conservative movement. He signed a fund-raising letter for the Moral Majority, and the money streamed in. His North Carolina Congressional Club (later renamed the National Congressional Club) supplied Ronald Reagan with money and ideas during his 1976 and 1980 campaigns. In My Life, Bill Clinton charged that Helms was behind Kenneth Starr's appointment as a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's activities. (1) Helms's influence in recent decades had deep roots. During the riffles, Helms began the work that made the fringe mainstream. He altered southern conservatism to make it acceptable outside the South, pushed for a national conservative party, and developed ways of communicating with common people--not only rural voters but also new suburbanites. Most of all, Helms nurtured the issues like opposition to desegregation that pushed southern whites toward the GOP. Since President Ronald Reagan's victories in the 1980s, historians have investigated the rise of the New Right. Dan T. Carter and Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall posit a top-down model with presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Alabama governor George C. Wallace leading the way. In Carter's view, Wallace's national campaigns exported Deep South politics to the rest of the country; Nixon's southern strategy simply stole the Alabama governor's fire. Carter depicts Wallace as a rock-star politician whose tour forged a new conservative majority. (2) In this standard narrative, the Wallace and Nixon campaigns molded a cross-class white constituency for conservatism that depended on racial anxiety, hostility to the cultural elite, anticommunism, and rejection of big government. This meant not only a new conservatism but also a southernization of American public life. More recently, Matthew D. Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South and Kevin M. Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism have challenged this top-down, out-of-the-Deep-South version of southernization. Lassiter and Kruse also complicate southern class relationships, demonstrating that rather than unifying whites, integration debates exacerbated class conflict. …

Virginia Is for Business

According to business pundits of the 1990s, the United States had finally liberated itself from the shackles of an Old Economy. Technology, entrepreneurialism, and the reduction of social regulations promised to restore American economic competitiveness. Nowhere else in the United States did this ideology achieve greater legitimacy than in the American South, where traditional southern conservatism merged with corporate neoliberalism to produce a potent ideological compound. Despite the enthusiasm for the New Economy, the driving force of public policy in the region had a decidedly Old Economy tack to it. At the center of economic development strategy was the willingness to use huge subsidies to lure mobile corporations to invest. The corporate subsidies program reflected the key assumptions of the New Economy ideology. Despite the overheated claims, the strategy failed to deliver freedom or prosperity to southern workers.

Perspectives of Social Justice in the American South: The Gay and Lesbian Movement

As a gay couple, we make an interesting pair: Thirty-four and thirty-five, one the son of a Greek immigrant from rural Pennsylvania and the other a fourth generation, native Floridian from a small Panhandle town. So, when we communicate our perspectives on family, values and our ideas of progress, it is nearly impossible to keep from rooting our discussions in the context of ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘how’’ as often as ‘‘where’’ and ‘‘when.’’ Consequently, our ten years of successful activism have taught us that sensitivities to local governments, local communities, and local customs are critical to defining the evolving notions of fairness and equality. We have spent countless days traveling throughout the Sunshine State. Recently, we lobbied in Tallahassee, reveled at Gators games at the University of Florida in Gainesville, visited family in DeFuniak Springs and hosted a judicial event in Ponte Vedra—places large and small from the Panhandle in the northwest to the First Coast in the northeast and the Treasure Coast in the southeast. We have spent a considerable amount of time immersed in the social fabric of the old Florida, the authentic Florida, and the Florida of what most would classify as the traditional South. These areas embrace a classic southern conservatism found throughout the region, and consequently, pose traditional challenges for social justice movements. While our formal participation in activism and a rights movement has been restricted to our local advocacy in Palm Beach County and the southeast Florida area, parts of which are surprisingly agrarian and rural, we never visit locations without a firm analytical mind about how gays and lesbians thrive and survive in these different areas.

A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter, and: The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868 (review)

The social and cultural history of the Civil War receives a humanizing perspective from a wealth of period diaries and journals. The work of editing and publishing the massive number of diaries remaining untranscribed in archival collections, or moldering inaccessible in private family collections, continues apace. A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky and The Leverett Letters represent two recent additions to this growing literature, providing important insights in areas of current concern such as the contours of Southern unionism, women's experience of the Civil War, and the culture of the South's planter class with its commitment to Confederate nationalism and Southern conservatism. [End Page 82]

Religion, Gender, and the Lost Cause in South Carolina's 1876 Governor's Race: "Hampton or Hell!"

GENERAL WADE HAMPTON, THE CONFEDERATE CAVALRY HERO, RODE again on October 7, 1876. Flanked by the paramilitary arm of the South Carolina Democratic Party--which was made up of local groups known as rifle clubs--Hampton entered the midlands town of Sumter, South Carolina, an important stop in his gubernatorial campaign tour. In the center of town, speakers' stand had been erected, and on it black-robed figure, bound in chains, stood solemnly before crowd of farmers and townspeople. As the hopeful candidate assumed his position on the platform, the shadowy figure flung off its chains and cast aside its robe of mourning, revealing beautiful young woman, with skin and dress of white, wearing tiara emblazoned with the words South Carolina. The journalist Alfred Brockenbrough Williams witnessed the crowd erupt at this performance, with many of the men openly weeping. Late into the night, Williams reported, frenzied horsemen rode through the town crying out or Hell! The candidacy of Wade in the 1876 governor's race seemed to these white South Carolinians to be the chance to restore South Carolina to home rule. (1) The historiography of southern has tended to focus on the ways in which conservative whites used fraud and violence to overturn Reconstruction regimes. Whether the story is told as heroic narrative of redemption or as dream of democracy deferred, the emphasis has centered on votes--whether bought, coerced, or fraudulently counted. (2) No new evidence challenges the role of intimidation and violence in this and other Redemption contests. Former Confederate brigadier general and leading straight-out Democrat, Martin Witherspoon Gary, certainly believed that for the campaign to succeed without compromise or cooperation with Republicans, every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro. (3) This article, however, also takes into account Gary's contention that the campaign must get up all the enthusiasm we can among the masses. (4) South Carolina Conservatives, like Gary, recognized that these white masses were the key to Democrats' regaining power in postbellum society. They understood, moreover, that power functioned best in context of cultural consensus. If Conservatives could control the tenets of that consensus in such way that the white masses acquiesced to domination by the Democratic elite, then Conservative rule would certainly be assured. To this end, in the 1876 campaign Conservatives successfully created and celebrated public spectacle that drew upon the racial and gendered obsessions of white Carolina culture. The ritual and rhetoric that accompanied the so-called Days of September and October 1876 depicted the conflict between Democrat Wade and Republican incumbent Daniel H. Chamberlain as religious struggle between good and evil (between Hampton and Hell) and preyed upon white anxieties about ideas of race and gender. As public representations of cultural ideology, the Days celebrations bring us into tightly woven network of memory and myth. A close examination of this ideology's manifestation as public spectacle in the campaign promises two important results. First, it opens window to the vexed question of southern conservatism. The attempt to define the conservative worldview of the South has generally focused on the lineaments of proslavery ideology or on the planter's relationship to bourgeois capitalism. Eugene D. Genovese's skillful explication sees southern conservatism as a variant of transatlantic traditionalism that expresses belief in transcendent order and accepts social stratification as necessary and proper. (5) But this ideology, as the Days celebrations suggest, lived in public spectacle as well as in the writings and ruminations of the southern learned divines and public intellectuals who populate the pages of Genovese's work. …

A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M. E. Bradford and His Achievements.

A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M. E. Bradford and His Achievements.

A Defender of Southern Conservatism M. E. Bradford and His Achievements (review)

A Defender of Southern Conservatism M. E. Bradford and His Achievements (review)

Domesticity All Dressed-Up: Gender in Antebellum Politics and Culture

FOR SOME TIME NOW, feminist scholars have redefined the boundaries of politics by theorizing carefully about gender ideologies and household structures, cultural politics and official politics of parties, ballot boxes and talkative cravated men in legislatures. Read together, these two new books evaluate a body of printed artifacts including novels, newspapers, and legislative petitions. In this discursive realm of publicity, public criticism^ and publishing, mostly from outside the legislative halls, women could engage in certain kinds of antebellum political and cultural debates. By examining such discourse, two well-trodden topics in antebellum scholarship, slavery and domesticity, receive a stylish new look in the hands of Elizabeth Varon, an Historian at Wellesley College, and Lora Romero, an English professor at Stanford. Topical similarity and a modem feminist perspective link these books. Besides that, Varon and Romero occupy completely different theoretical fields. We Mean to be Countedplaces the public words and actions of a select group of elite Virginia women into a Habennasian public of newspapers, novels, reform work, and partisan politics, departing from earlier southern scholarship in women's history, from what she calls private sphere histories of family life, mistresses, slaves, and the rhythm of plantation activity. Varon's is an intellectual history of the participation of witty, well-educated, and seductively opinionated women who were complicit in antebellum southern conservatism. In contrast, Romero's Homefronts sifts the ideology of domesticity through the Foucauldian filter of post-structuralism.

The southern tradition: the achievement and limitations of an American conservatism

In recent years American conservatism has found a new voice, a new way of picking up the political pieces left in the wake of liberal policies. But what seems innovative, Eugene Genovese shows us, may in fact have very old roots. Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to its sources in a rich southern tradition, his book introduces a revealing perspective on the politics of our day. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as one of history, The Southern Tradition is based on the intellectual journey of one of the most influential historians of the late twentieth century. To appreciate the tradition of southern conservatism, Genovese tells us, we must first understand the relation of southern thought to politics. Toward this end, he presents a historical overview that identifies the tenets, sensibilities, and attitudes of the southern-conservative world view. With these conditions in mind, he considers such political and constitutional issues as state rights, concurrent majority, and the nature and locus of political power in a constitutional republic. Of special interest are the southern-conservative critiques of equality and democracy, and of the Leviathan state in its liberal, socialist, and fascist forms. Genovese examines these critiques in light of the specific concept of property that has been central to southern social and political thought. Not only does this book illuminate a political tradition grounded in the writings of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, but it shows how this lineage has been augmented by powerful literary figures such as Allen Tate, Lewis Simpson, and Robert Penn Warren. Genovese here reconstitutes the historical canon, reenvisions the strengthsand weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens the spectrum of political debate for our time.