Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968 (review)

400Southern Cultures on which to blame Union morale problems and a threat around which to rally potentially wayward Republicans at crucial moments with Davis's inability to use his opponents as political whipping boys. In McKitrick's view Lincoln parried his internal political opposition effectively, tarring it with the brush of disloyalty if necessary to rally support for some of his more controversial policies. In the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's opposition was too inchoate to counter so directly. The Confederacy's internal disputes were usually framed as personal feuds instead of party questions, and bewildering cults of personality replaced clean lines of party rivalry as the guiding landmarks on the political battleground. Another keen insight that Rabie leaves largely undeveloped is his concluding observation that despite the failure of the Confederacy, postbellum white southerners remained ambivalent about the virtues of party competition for many decades. White southerners reaffiliated with the Democratic party during the postbellum era more to protect their regional interest in white supremacy than out of any larger identification with the national party system. Indeed, the idea of developing a broad consensus among white southerners, whether nurtured through a "one-party" system, a "no-party" system, or an antiparty ideology , in order to present a solid front to the rest of the nation on race-related questions has remained strong in the region well into the late twentieth century. Finally, the tension Rabie so deftly describes between nationalists and libertarians in the Confederacy arguably has crude parallels in post-Cold War America, where, without the galvanizing influence of a common menace, resurgent localism and a plethora of broadly libertarian ideas challenge the nation's sense of common purpose and collective identity. While white southerners celebrate the national symbols of spread-eagle patriotism with unsurpassed enthusiasm, they appear to have cast their lot overwhelmingly with the libertarian side in the cunent debate. The South remains a hothouse for ideologies of localism and parochial defiance, and is even willing to accept Yankees as leaders of their cause, provided they have taken up a southern address. The question that remains open is what the rest of the Union will do this time: join southerners in their crusade for decentralization or beat them once again in defense of a common American destiny. Whatever the outcome, there is at least consolation in the fact that the result will be decided at the ballot box and not the cannon's mouth. Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968. By Alan Draper. ILR Press, 1994. Cloth, $35.00. Reviewed by John Salmond, professor ofAmerican history at La Trobe University in Australia. This modest little book makes a big contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between the civil rights and labor movements during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular it challenges the contention, voiced by some practitioners of the "new labor history," that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and its southern state affiliates gave only the most lukewarm support to the civil rights struggle, deferring far too often to white demands to take a "hands-off" approach rather than bolster the efforts of black labor activists to create a strong labor movement built around black-led locals. In fact, the AFL-CIO leadership, recognizing the chance to use the movement to begin a class-based realignment of southern politics of Reviews401 the type already achieved elsewhere and in particular to create a new, labor-responsive, biracial Democratic Party, gave it its undivided support. After an incisive introductory chapter surveying the historiography of labor's relationship with the civil rights movement, Draper discusses the AFL-CIO's reaction to two key stages in the struggle to end segregation: the Brown decision and the consequent massive resistance to school desegregation in Virginia and Arkansas. Next, he analyses labor's attempts to desegregate its own regional institutions and to use its influence to force change in the regional branches of the Democratic Party. The book concludes with two fascinating case studies of labor at work in Alabama and Mississippi. The Mississippi study, drawn from the papers and recollections of Claude Ramsay, state...