Race, Class and Politics in Southern History: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Durden (review)

84civil war history traditional descriptions of patriarchy in the Old South, contributes importantly to our understanding of this complexity. Ann W. Boucher University of Alabama, Huntsville Race, Class and Politics in Southern History: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Durden. Edited by Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Charles L. Flynn, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv, 290. $35.00.) This book of essays by students and colleagues of Duke Professor Robert F. Durden has much merit. Although organized around the themes of race, class, and politics, the work also deals briefly with gender, as the study of Ruth Currie-McDaniel ("The Wives of the Carpetbaggers") reveals. Most of the pieces here examine the period from the Civil War through the era of progressivism, and only one of them, Bruce Clayton's "The Proto-Dorian Revolution: W. J. Cash and the Race Question," touches upon the period after the Great Depression. Thus, the claim for the book's broad coverage on the dust jacket is slightly misleading, although the editors are careful to indicate the study's chronological limitation in their preface. The editors have done a superb job in organizing their volume. They have divided it into three parts, with each containing two or three essays. Part 1 is devoted to Reconstruction in the American South, the issue of racism, and efforts at reform, with essays by Paul Escott and Ruth Currie-McDaniel. Charles L. Flynn, Jr., Eric Anderson, and Richard L. Watson, Jr., have admirably explored southern populism in Part 2. The editors turn their attention to class divisions and racial bonds in the post-Reconstruction South in the last section of the book, with articles by Raymond Gavins, Jeffrey Crow, and Bruce Clayton. While each of the sections is characterized by considerable strength, this reviewer found Part 3 the most interesting and intellectually provocative, probably because of special professional interests more than anything else. As with most books of this type, the contributors have usually spelled out their ideas in more detail in other publications. Yet the majority of the pieces have a real freshness, as most of the authors' longer works are of fairly recent vintage. Significantly, they have now placed their views in compact form, which makes their ideas readily available to serious scholars and to general students of Southern history. Crow, Escott, and Flynn have edited carefully, and, as a result, they have produced a literary work that has a great deal of stylistic consistency. By and large, they have eliminated much of the repetition that invariably occurs when authors borrow freely from themselves. BOOK REVIEWS85 The essays here lean heavily toward events in North Carolina history, although the contributors have placed their work within a broad historiographical setting. There are, of course, some exceptions to this narrow focus, as evidenced by the articles of Currie-McDaniel and Clayton. But even when the writers concentrate specifically upon the Tarheel State, they usually make worthwhile contributions. The essay of Raymond Gavins is an excellent example. Gavins has taken a close look at the nadir in black life in North Carolina that came between the overthrow of Reconstruction and 1900. In his fine and probing piece, Gavins laments the paucity of major studies of black intellectual and institutional life during this period of Southern history, and he challenges scholars to look again at this era for a "clearer portrait ... of the Negro community" (176). Gavins calls for a shift in scholarly focus, urging historians to stress African-American perspectives in their writing. Race, the Duke historian contends, was much stronger than class in the operation of Southern society. Much of the solidarity among blacks in the later part of the nineteenth century came in direct response to the growing racism of the age. One of the book's most stimulating essays is Paul Escott's "White Republicanism and the Ku Klux Klan Terror: The North Carolina Piedmont during Reconstruction." While Escott spends too much time with pre-Civil War southern politics, the contribution he makes in his work is large indeed. He shows that biracial politics and Republicanism "challenged upper class hegemony in the North Carolina Piedmont" (5), and that they...