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  • Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South
  • Walter L. Buenger
Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South. By Michael Perman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp 408. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780807833247, $35.00 cloth.)

Michael Perman wrote this overview of southern politics during the past two centuries for the general reader and for use in the undergraduate classroom as much as for the usual academic audience. Two preconceptions underlie this book, unstated but obvious. Perman clearly believes there is a core and a periphery to the South with the core consisting of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Texas, along with Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Tennessee, is on the rim of the South, and Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Missouri, and Oklahoma are on the border. Thus Mississippi more clearly defines the South than does Texas. In addition, Perman's southerners are white with blacks appearing as the feared other. Blacks and whites move through this story with little room for Indians, Latinos, and European immigrants, and with little room for black influence on the outcome of events or interaction between blacks and whites.

Given this vantage point on the South, Perman's main theme, apparent in the title, offers few surprises. Because of the white need to subordinate blacks, under slavery and thereafter, whites developed particular political institutions and sought unity in their ranks, especially when operating in the national political arena. This drive led to a one-party South and remarkable fealty among whites to that one party, usually the Democratic Party. The national political system worked to the advantage of the Democrats who could be amorphous and chaotic on the local scene as long as they acted with one voice to preserve slavery and then segregation, lynching, and other facets of post-Civil War racial subordination. Southern politics was thus in some sense undemocratic for whites in that it discouraged political competition on economic issues or other issues of importance, and politics' purpose was the preservation of racial subordination.

This work exhibits several strengths. It is well written and accessible as befits a book aimed at a general audience. It has a clearly articulated and coherent argument. It provides a good introduction to prominent southern politicians, particularly [End Page 443] those of the Deep South. It highlights the profound connection between race and politics apparent throughout the history of the South. It moves beyond reporting political events as just one election after another and ties politics to larger societal ends. It connects politics on the local level with politics on the national level.

Viewed from Texas, however, the book's weaknesses outweigh its strengths. Indeed Texas and political events in the state go largely unmentioned. You could not tell from this book that many scholars look first to Texas to understand populism. Texans key to the development of the New Deal go unnoticed or at best little noticed. Jesse Jones, for example, who headed up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and was a power in the Democratic Party from World War I to the 1950s, rates not one word. George Wallace gets more space than Lyndon Johnson. Not surprisingly the work presents almost a stereotype of the South, and remains focused on southern conservatives and reactionaries with little on southerners with a more progressive or liberal streak such as Wright Patman or Ralph Yarborough. No black or Latino politicians make it into the pages, and there is scarcely a nod toward how they or Indians and immigrants influenced the larger political arena. These weaknesses are outgrowths of Perman's preconceptions about the South, preconceptions that a growing number of historians do not accept.

In the end this is a useful but limited introduction to southern politics. All serious students of the South would agree that race and the white drive to subordinate blacks played a key role in everything, not just politics. But the South was more than Mississippi, and more than a place where politics always boiled down to the white drive to maintain hegemony over blacks. Texas was equally southern, the divisions in the South extended beyond the black-white...

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