A Loss? Or a Labor?

Pete Daniel. Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiv +378 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Let us begin by discussing the title. "Revolutions" is certainly an apt umbrella under which to gather the braided central themes comprising Pete Daniel's guided tour of the turbulent post-World War II southern scene. Focusing in turn on three major developments of the era--the agricultural transformation sending waves of rural southerners to the cities, the cultural explosion that brought forth rock 'n' roll, and the early stages of the civil rights upheaval--Daniel offers us a kaleidoscopic survey of an era of wrenching social change and resistance to change as it was experienced and grappled with by a broad array of southerners, white and black, eminent and obscure. Those familiar with Daniel's earlier writings will find it unsurprising that his affections lie with the "low-downs" of both races, celebratory of their courage and cultural vitality and compassionate toward their failings. For the most part, Daniel is respectful of his voices, in all their idiosyncratic variety, and allows them wide latitude to speak. Yet this approach--along with some ultimately telling omissions--sacrifices analytic tightness; the book in the end reads like pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. The theme of "revolutions" groups, rather than connects, the varied subjects of this shape-shifting work.

And as for that second word, "lost"--well, let us see.

The most clearly "lost" revolution, in Daniel's estimation, is the first one he treats, the massive agricultural revolution of the postwar South; indeed, he terms it a "counterrevolution," although he actually means something more like what some might term a "revolution from above." Daniel has written of this transformation before, notably in his 1985 book Breaking the Land, and his argument here will be familiar, if less nuanced than in that earlier version. He regards this revolution as an unmitigated social disaster; borrowing from James C. Scott's recent Seeing Like a State (1998), he treats it as a "high modernist" imposition by a juggernaut "rogue bureaucracy" (p. 61), namely the United States Department of Agriculture, on a vital peasant culture whose "local knowledge" was cavalierly swept aside, with both socially and environmentally disastrous results. Tenants, sharecroppers, and small white farmers were swept from the land and driven into cities where they lived as sullen outcasts, while their human labor was replaced with machines and poisonous chemicals, and human-scaled units were supplanted by "agribusiness."

Lord knows there is much to be appalled about in this transformation, in the roughness with which the strong treated the weak and their lack of respect for the integrity of Nature. There may even be something to the implicit argument that different choices might have been made in southern agriculture that could have preserved something of the old southern rural way of life. However, the argument suffers from major omissions. First, in its unabashed romanticization of the pre-World War II rural South, it ignores its endemic poverty and oppression. "Agribusiness" was not a postwar innovation in the South; indeed, it first appeared at Jamestown and was the essence of the plantation system. Daniel's "peasantry" was in large part a rural proletariat, frequently subject (as the author of The Shadow of Slavery (1972) well knows) to coercion and ill treatment. If the postwar era had its pesticides, the early twentieth century had its deforestation and its soil erosion and exhaustion, resulting in massive fertilizer expenses, droughts, and floods; compared to the environmental devastation of the early twentieth century, the postwar record actually looks a bit less bleak.

Moreover, while the heritage of slavery, white supremacy, and massive inequalities of wealth and power made the process of transformation a brutal one, Daniel offers no compelling alternative. Is there any good reason to believe that the southern countryside could have continued to support its prewar...