Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction ed. by David Bateman, Ira Katznelson and John S. Lapinsk (review)

Southern Nation analyzes the period between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1933 (the start of the New Deal). The authors examine what White southern Democrats did after they regained control of their congressional delegations and investigate “when and how the states that had practiced chattel slavery on the eve of the Civil War conducted themselves inside the national polity” (p. 3). Their particular focus is Congress because this branch of the government “became the chief arena within which southern delegations could seek to shape their region’s— and the country’s—character” (p. 4). Southern behavior was never consistent. Members of Congress often behaved in complex, idiosyncratic, and often puzzling ways. However, one important consistency ran through the struggles of the White southern members: an inflexible commitment “to safeguard the ability of their state and local governments to shape and police the region’s racial order after slavery” (p. 6). The goal of the volume is to explore how the US became a “southern nation” in policy, partisan, and institutional terms.

Over the course of eight chapters, the authors offer a number of fascinating discussions. As they note, one of the book’s contributions is “demonstrating not only the means used in Congress to protect southern states as they fashioned segregated white hegemony, but the quite profound price this victory entailed” (p. 75). Anyone familiar with the history of Jim Crow already knows one price of this behavior—African Americans locked into second-class citizenship for generations. Importantly, White southern commitment to White supremacy frequently led members of Congress to cut deals that hurt or went against their region’s interests. For example, White southern members of Congress compromised on the tariff in order to avoid the Lodge Bill that would have undermined White supremacy. The White South had to “weigh their desire to restrain the corporate power of the railroads against the cause of white supremacy” (p. 131). In addition, White southerners repeatedly “set aside central economic priorities in order to preserve southern autonomy in matters of race and maintain a national coalition that would sustain home rule” (p. 155). Thus, White southern members of Congress “failed to reconfigure or substantially modify an economic order that reinforced a dependent, even colonized region” (p. 103).

However, as the authors discuss, the failure to modify the economic order contrasts sharply with White southern successes in the arenas of race and home rule, driven by an iron commitment to White supremacy. The White South, therefore, could win victories and achieve successes, but the victories and successes came at a high price. Still, despite the high price of their victories, White southern Democrats made Congress into “an institution that would facilitate the considerable range and variety of their preferences to be represented without imperiling their ability to act as a cohesive and determined bloc to defend white supremacy” (p. 221). Woodrow Wilson’s presidency demonstrated that the White South shaped progressive reforms while, at the same time, embedding White supremacy inside a transformed US state.

The authors also explore how African American members of Congress from the southern states reacted to these White southern strategies. Black members of Congress protested vociferously and fought back. For example, in 1884, when Congress considered a commerce bill brought forward by John H. Reagan of Texas, James O’Hara, an African American representative from North Carolina, introduced an amendment that prohibited railroad companies from separating passengers by race. Reagan “had to concede that Congress had the power to prohibit discrimination or the segregation of passengers” (p. 128). Most other White southern Democrats refused to make this concession. Charles Crisp of Georgia, a future speaker of the House, proposed an amendment protecting railroad companies offering separate accommodations. O’Hara’s amendment was not a cynical effort to kill the bill, as some scholars have argued, but rather, “a...