From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (review)

numerous media and scholarly accounts of the strike are put to the test of evidence gathered from a diverse collection of archival sources, oral histories, and autobiographical accounts. Salmond's reexamination also benefits from attention to more recent concerns of labor historians, such as gender, race, and the muddled character ofsouthern protests. Salmond's use oforal history, for example , supports the contention of contemporaries, such as radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, that women played a singular role in the work of the strike. Salmond also provides a frank discussion of the division between union leaders and the rank and file on matters of racial equality, and qualifies the nonideological but hunger-induced nature of southern strike-breaking. As contemporaries suggested, and Salmond agrees, whether a worker crossed the picket line did not necessarily indicate which side he or she was really on. Although the murders of Aderholt and Wiggins were never conclusively solved, Salmond notes that many Gastonians and scholars believed that Aderholt was actually shot by one of his own deputies. Of those accused of killing Wiggins, Salmond suggests that the "preponderance of evidence" pointed toward Horace Wheelus, an employee of the Loray mill. But in the end, he concludes, "it did not matter." Today, as Gastonians openly debate what to do with the now-defunct Loray mill building, many observers still marvel at the collective silence that discouraged local discussion of the events of 1929 for so many years. Salmond's new work helps assure that the strike will be better understood and not forgotten. And in performing the valuable service ofrecounting this history and organizing it into a contemporary, even-handed, and intelligent form, he has also created a beautifully written, highly readable book to be enjoyed by scholars and nonscholars alike. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 By Dan T. Carter Louisiana State University Press 134 pp. Cloth, $22.95 Reviewed by Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reviews 97 The first time I voted in a presidential election was in November 1968, when I drove from Loyola University in New Orleans through a rainstorm to Baton Rouge to cast a ballot in the precinct near my parents' home. Upon arriving at the fire station at the east end of Government Street, I encountered a long line of white middle-class voters, several of them engaged in a very public debate over the question: Should you vote for George Wallace or Richard Nixon? Sensing that I might be the only person in that early-evening line ready to vote for Hubert Humphrey, I kept silent and listened. What I heard, it is clear in retrospect , were the voices of a new majority just beginning to shift into place. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg reported in The RealMajority (1970) that four ofevery five Wallace voters in the South would have voted for Nixon had the Alabama segregationist not run as the candidate of the American Independent Party. Wallace carried Louisiana and four other states in 1968, while Nixon won the presidency. "As the campaign of 1968 drew to a close," Dan T Carter writes, "it was clear that George Wallace had been the first politician to sense and then exploit the changes America came to know by many names: white backlash, the silent majority , the alienated voters. . . . [He] opened the door for his successors to manipulate and exploit the politics of anger." In this slender volume, Carter, Kenan Professor ofHistory at Emory University, peers through that door and describes the decline in discourse that has marked U.S. politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich came out a year after the publication of Carter's powerful biography of the former Alabama governor, The Politics ofRage (1995 ), but three ofits four chapters were produced before the biography's publication . These chapters consist of the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures that Carter delivered at Louisiana State University in 1991. Without altering the three lectures, Carter added a fourth chapter to deal with the 1992 victory ofPresident Clinton and with...