BOOKS
The Long Southern Strategy
How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics
Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields
The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."
In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners, particularly women. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasingly fundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right. With original, extensive data on national and regional opinions and voting behavior, Maxwell and Shields show why all three of those decisions were necessary for the South to turn from blue to red.
To make inroads in the South, however, GOP politicians not only had to take these positions, but they also had to sell them with a southern "accent." Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an "us vs. them" outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution. In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.
The Indicted South
Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness
Angie Maxwell
AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS
2015 V. O. Key Book Award, Southern Political Science Association
Honorable Mention, Holman Award, Society for the Study of Southern Literature
By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural conservatism.
Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the Southern Agrarians; and Virginia's campaign of Massive Resistance and Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.
The Legacy of Second-Wave Feminism in American Politics
Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, ed.
This book chronicles the influence of second wave feminism on everything from electoral politics to LGBTQ rights. The original descriptions of second wave feminism focused on elite, white voices, obscuring the accomplishments of many activists, as third wave feminists rightly criticized. Those limited narratives also prematurely marked the end of the movement, imposing an imaginary timeline on what is a continuous struggle for women’s rights. Within the chapters of this volume, scholars provide a more complex description of second wave feminism, in which the sustained efforts of women from many races, classes, sexual orientations, and religious traditions, in the fight for equality have had a long-term impact on American politics. These authors argue that even the “Second Wave” metaphor is incomplete, and should be replaced by a broader, more-inclusive metaphor that accurately depicts the overlapping and extended battle waged by women activists. With the gift of hindsight and the awareness of the limitations of and backlash to this “Second Wave,” the time is right to reflect on the feminist cause in America and to chart its path forward.
The Ongoing Burden of Southern History
Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South
Angie Maxwell, Jeannie Whayne, and Todd Shields, eds.
More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward’s landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a “southern burden” still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward’s ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student.
This interdisciplinary retrospective tackles questions of equality, white southern identity, the political legacy of Reconstruction, the heritage of Populism, and the place of the South within the nation, along with many others. From Woodward’s essays on populism and irony, historians find new insight into the burgeoning Tea Party, while they also shed light on the contemporary legacy of the redeemer Democrats. Using up-to-date election data, scholars locate a “shrinking” southern identity and point to the accomplishments of the recent influx of African American voters and political candidates. This penetrating analysis reinterprets Woodward’s classic for a new generation of readers interested in the modern South.
Contributors: Josephine A. V. Allen, Charles S. Bullock III, James C. Cobb, Donald R. Deskins Jr., Leigh Anne Duck, Angie Maxwell, Robert C. McMath, Wayne Parent, Sherman C. Puckett, Todd Shields, Hanes Walton Jr., Jeannie Whayne, Patrick G. Williams.
A Church, a School
Pulitzer Prize–Winning Civil Rights Editorials from the Atlanta Constitution
Ralph McGill
New Introduction by Angie Maxwell
Collected columns from an editor and activist for integration and racial tolerance in the South
Ralph McGill (1898–1969) was the editor in chief of the Atlanta Constitution during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement that followed Brown v. Board of Education, and he became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial tolerance in the South. In this Southern Classics edition, Angie Maxwell offers a new critical introduction that analyzes McGill's as an activist and advocate for social change. The editorials that compose A Church, a School marked McGill's emergence as a prolific advocate of nonviolence and social responsibility and
evidenced the progressive values of the Constitution.
A Church, a School contains twenty-nine editorials that elucidate the historical record of liberal Southern participation in the civil rights movement. This is not a record of what happened in the South in the late 1950s; rather it is a map of the intellectual and psychological terrain that liberal journalists, such as McGill, traveled and the obstacles they encountered.
Unlocking V. O. Key Jr.
“Southern Politics” for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Angie Maxwell and Todd G. Shields
Over sixty years ago, political scientist V. O. Key Jr. published his seminal work, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key’s book defined the field of southern politics and remains one of the most cited and influential works in twentieth-century political science and southern history.
In Unlocking V.O. Key Jr., prominent southern scholars in history, political science, and southern and American studies reconsider Key’s analysis, debating his omissions as well as highlighting the timeless elements of his work. Charles Reagan Wilson, Kari Frederickson, and Pearl K. Ford argue that Key’s exclusion of religion, violence, and African American political participation altered the field of southern politics. Keith Gaddie and Justin Wert draw attention to Key’s methodological innovations, while Margaret Reid questions Key’s limited and gendered vision of the southern electorate. Harold Stanley discusses the complexity of teaching Key in the twenty-first century. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston argue for the role that class and the economy played in the realignment of the South with the Republican Party, while Dan T. Carter points to race as the driving factor in this major shift. Susan MacManus tracks immigration trends in the region to explain contemporary southern political behavior.
Supported with a foreword by Byron E. Shafer that provides an overview of Key’s major contributions as a political scientist, and concluding with Wayne Parent’s discussion of Key and the contemporary student, Unlocking V. O. Key Jr. is a must-read companion to the classic Southern Politics in State and Nation.