The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America’s New Conservatism by Glenn Feldman (review)

In his final contribution to the canon of southern political history, the late Glenn Feldman offers a deeply sourced and compelling argument for historians of white southern defiance, American conservatism, and the Republican ascendance. In The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America’s New Conservatism, Feldman uses correspondence, public statements, and local media coverage to investigate the rhetoric and ideology of Alabama’s political leaders from 1933 to 1952 to simplify historians’ understanding of how white southerners made the transition to a conservatism that resided within the Republican Party, so long the pariah of Civil War and Reconstruction memory. Beginning with the Redemption era and concluding with the earliest movements of white southerners into the Republican Party, Feldman’s narrative moves effortlessly from the local Big Mule/black belt political coalition in Alabama to the regional intricacies of the American South in the midst of economic crisis, war, and the civil rights movement. Feldman does so without consigning these moments to southern exceptionalism. Rather, Feldman’s effectiveness in embracing the contexts that construct American politics challenges historians to reconsider the “Cult of Nuance” that, he warns, threatens to relegate historical scholarship to “infinite relativism” and “magnificent irrelevance” (p. 279).

Feldman’s work tracks a series of coalition-building moments in Alabama beginning with what he calls the “First Great Melding” of neo-Bourbons and neo-Kluxers, elite and plain folk, in opposition to the New Deal (p. 36). In an attempt to scale back the intrusions of federal oversight over existing forms of unbounded capitalism, he argues, elite business leaders tied their economic interests to white supremacy in an attempt to win the plain white folk to their side. Thus began the protracted process of cementing white supremacy as the root and currency of southern and, later, national politics.

The sweep of this book surfaces, perhaps more clearly than anything thus far, the stability of white supremacy in the South and how it recalibrated the national political landscape and partisan identities. Feldman’s South and its leadership in the conservative ascendance cannot be explained through isolated incidents of defiance. From the moment that Reconstruction ended and local oversight returned, he writes, the South experienced a series of “Sophistic Pruning[s],” self-directed efforts to scale back excessive race-based violence as a way to avoid federal interference (p. 4). Viewed through such a tendency, alliances among white factions that would otherwise be acting at cross-purposes make sense.

Feldman’s attention to the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948 is a convincing application of this formula. Over the course of three chapters he challenges prevailing ideas about the reluctance with which white moderates embraced the race-baiting rhetoric that came to characterize post-1948 political strategies. Instead, Feldman urges another interpretation that distances moderates from resigned pragmatism and suggests that they played an active and even enthusiastic role in prioritizing white supremacy as the earliest and most frequent tool of political defiance. Historians, he chastens, have been unduly distracted by the loyalist-Dixiecrat divide that the 1948 Democratic National Convention initiated. Taking a longer arc, Feldman sees a shared commitment between the two factions to white supremacy and describes their split as tactical, not ideological. His attention to Alabama’s Lister Hill and John J. Sparkman, with their embrace of racist fearmongering despite their history of progressive politics in their home state and in Washington, D.C., is a linchpin of this suggestion.

Feldman’s work challenges scholars of southern politics to delve into the contours of white supremacy and its allies to reconsider the order in which they understand trends of white flight, anti-labor organizing, states’ rights, and religious fundamentalism. Within each of these strands of modern conservatism racial solidarity was intentional. As the conservative coalition became more diverse...