New Deal / New South

An Anthony J. Badger Reader

Anthony J. Badger

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781610752770
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The twelve essays in this book, several published here for the first time, represent some of Tony Badger's best work in his ongoing examination of how white liberal southern politicians who came to prominence in the New Deal and World War II handled the race issue when it became central to politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s thought a new generation of southerners would wrestle Congress back from the conservatives. The Supreme Court thought that responsible southern leaders would lead their communities to general school desegregation after the Brown decision. John F. Kennedy believed that moderate southern leaders would, with government support, facilitate peaceful racial change. Badger's writings demonstrate how all of these hopes were misplaced. Badger shows time and time again that moderates did not control southern politics. Southern liberal politicians for the most part were paralyzed by their fear that ordinary southerners were all-too-aroused by the threat of integration and were reluctant to offer a coherent alternative to the conservative strategy of resistance.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Huey Long and the New Deal
• 2. How Did the New Deal Change the South?
• 3. The Modernization of the South: The Lament for Rural Worlds Lost
• 4. Whatever Happened to Roosevelt’s New Generation of Southerners?
• 5. Southerners Who Refused to Sign the Southern Manifesto
• 6. The White Reaction to Brown: Arkansas, the Southern Manifesto, and Massive Resistance
• 7. “Closet Moderates”: Why White Liberals Failed, 1940–1970
• 8. From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change
• 9. “When I Took the Oath of Office, I Took No Vow of Poverty”: Race, Corruption, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1928–2000
• 10. The Dilemma of Biracial Politics in the South since 1965
• 11. Southern New Dealers Confront the World: Lyndon Johnson, Albert Gore, and Vietnam
• 12. The Anti-Gore Campaign of 1970 (with Michael S. Martin)
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author