The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness by Angie Maxwell (review)

At the heart of white identity in the twentieth-century American South lay an enduring ostracism from the American norm, one whose roots extended to antebellum contention over politics and culture, and whose political and cultural manifestations defined southern whiteness in opposition to northern (read American) identity. The result was a regional inferiority complex marked by defensiveness and defiance and constructed against the standing indictment entailed in historically entrenched northern disapproval.

In her analysis of The Indicted South, Angie Maxwell argues that southern whiteness is historically distinct and, in its complexity, resists conflation with other conceptualizations of whiteness. “Southern whiteness,” she writes, “is unique in the sense that it is constructed by oppressing a black ‘other,’ while serving paradoxically as the ‘other’ in the larger construct of American identity in the twentieth century…What began and continued to be a nonblack identity became, in effect, a nonnorthern, nonliberal, nonmodern, and nonscientific overdetermined whiteness” (22). The South’s history of racial oppression remained a central aspect of white southern identity, to be sure, but Maxwell argues that the “unifying sense of inferiority” (4) in the face of northern disapproval gave shape to the oppositional elements of southern whiteness.

To make her point, Maxwell explores three broad and nuanced case studies that illustrate the oppositional posture of twentieth-century southern whiteness. In the book’s first section, Maxwell examines the Scopes trial and the dynamic among William Jennings Bryan, defender of creationism, Clarence Darrow, defender of evolution, and H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore columnist whose antipathy for the South’s rejection of science played to a national audience and typified northern condemnation of the South. Maxwell also discusses the founding of William Jennings Bryan College in Tennessee, which she defines as an act of reactionary fundamentalism.

Next, Maxwell examines the ways in which the Fugitive literary movement, started at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson, was first a reaction to the disparagement of the South that accompanied the Scopes trial and an attempt to prove that the South could in fact produce literary talent. As the group morphed into the Agrarians in the 1930s, their romanticizing of Southern life was a defensive response to the unrelenting Menckenesque critique of the South, and in their incarnation as the New Critics in the 1940s, the writers tried to remove the study of literature from historical context, an attempt to disassociate southern literature from the region’s slaveholding past.

Finally, Maxwell discusses the sectionalism and reinvigorated sense of inferiority that followed the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Focusing on the massive resistance movement in Virginia, led by newspaper editor James J. Kilpatrick, Maxwell draws a clear link between the states’ rights claims of southern white conservatives in the 1950s, which defended segregation as a constitutional right, and later efforts to reaffirm white privilege through legal means that might be contrasted with overt racism. “It was, in effect, a polite, legalistic, and intellectual (or so many white southerners thought) racism, but no less violent in spirit,” Maxwell writes. “The new enemies that Kilpatrick would engage—the expanding federal government, judicial activists, and the liberal media—remain definitive foes of contemporary southern conservatism” (171).

This study, which relies on a mix of primary and secondary sources, expands the canon on whiteness generally and brings new depth to research on southern whiteness. The book will be useful to scholars of twentieth–century southern and civil rights history and literature, and can be assigned, in whole or by section, in a range of courses.