Southernization of America

Tucker Cynthia

Description

Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect in a powerful series of essays on the role of the South in Americas long descent into Trumpism. In 1974 the great Southern author John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive even deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They see the dark sidethe morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today with its thinly disguised (if indeed it is disguised all all) embrace of white supremacy and the subversion of democratic ideals. They explore the "birtherism" of Donald Trump and the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, the demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nations capitalall of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacy Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South, regarded by some as the heart of the countrys systemic racism, might lead the way on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard, colleagues and frequent collaborators at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, bring a multi-racial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.

Sujets

• USA
• Central government
• Ideology
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588384607
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

More Advance Praise
Authored by two of the most insightful Southern intellectuals of our time, The Southernization of America is well worth a read by anyone trying to understand American politics in the aftermath of Trump. - Adam H. Domby, author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory
Necessary reading for all who would understand the current crisis in which the nation finds itself-turned against its ideals and turned toward abiding bigotry. Knowing how we got here is a critical step toward finding a way out. - Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints
Tucker and Gaillard explore the lingering influence of the old Confederacy on modern American politics. One reads this book with a shock of recognition and dismay, but also with the hope that the leaders of the future may emerge from the battlegrounds of the past. - Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer-winning author of The Plague Year and The Looming Tower
Indispensable reading on how the promise of American democracy remains under siege by violence and hate-and what will be required to ensure it has a fighting chance. - Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind
Tucker and Gaillard have deconstructed how their beloved South, always desperate to find an exportable commodity, continues to discover ready markets for the xenophobia, white supremacy, and hypocrisy that defined it for decades. And yet the authors connect dots that give Americans of goodwill hope for the future. - Hank Klibanoff, coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation , and creator of the Peabody Award-winning podcast, Buried Truths
A smart, transformative book. Helps explain why the best and the worst of American politics today ties back to the history of the South. - Ben Montgomery, author of A Shot in the Moonlight
With a journalistic eye for detail, Gaillard and Tucker present a bracing account of America s reckoning with race and justice over the past half-century. The result is a sobering but clarifying narrative of where we ve been, and a call to persevere in pursuit of our democratic ideals. - Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Building on John Egerton s foundation of studying the South within a national framework, Gaillard and Tucker show that any tour of recent American political life goes through the South. The book urges us to ask if we should consider Donald Trump a Southern president. - Ted Ownby, William F. Winter Professor of History and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi
Tucker and Gaillard sketch a picture of a modern America shaped by multiracial freedom struggles as well as by the vicious, protean structures of white supremacy. The Southernization of America issues a charge to its readers: choose democracy in defiance of our country s most narrow impulses and with a resolve equal to that of previous generations, or else. - Adriane Lentz-Smith, author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I
T HE S OUTHERNIZATION OF A MERICA

To Mary L. Marshall Tucker, and in loving memory of John A. Tucker
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2022 by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.
P UBLISHER S C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Names: Gaillard, Frye, 1946- , and Tucker, Cynthia, 1955- , authors.
Title: The southernization of America : a story of democracy in the balance / Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker.
Description: Montgomery, AL : NewSouth Books, [2022] Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021045565 (print) ISBN 9781588384560 (hardback) ISBN 978158838460 (ebook)
Subjects: Politics and government-United States-the South-19th-21st centuries Race relations-United States-the South-19th-21st centuries Civil rights-History-20th century Social Culture-United States-20th-21st centuries Voting rights-United States-the South-19th-21st centuries.
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future.
Contents
Note to Readers
Introduction
The Fragile Promise
Traumas of the New Millennium
The Golden Escalator
Black Lives Matter and Symbols of the Past
Biden s Road to Georgia
God s Chosen
Democracy in the Balance
Index
Note to Readers
This book was suggested to coauthors Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard by NewSouth s editor, Randall Williams. All three were friends of and are admirers of John Egerton and know well his work of four decades ago, The Americanization of Dixie , now rendered sadly ironic. The present volume represents the combined reflections of Tucker and Gaillard, veteran journalists who are now colleagues at the University of South Alabama. Both are Alabama natives with family roots running deep in the South. Tucker is African American, Gaillard is white. Over their careers, both have written extensively about their home region. Of the alternating essays that follow, those with first-person references carry the byline of the primary author. Each chapter explores the undeniable Southern influence-for better or worse-on the life and political climate of America.
T HE S OUTHERNIZATION OF A MERICA
Introduction
I n 1974, the great Southern journalist John Egerton wrote a prescient book entitled The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America . In a series of connected but self-contained essays, he made the point that something fundamental was changing-both in his native South, and in the country as a whole. But even Egerton seemed not to be sure exactly how things would unfold.
He was, as those of us who knew him could attest, one of the great and gentle souls of his time, a man deeply committed to racial justice who wanted badly to believe that it would be a good thing if this troubled place in which he lived-this part of America that had once fought a war for the right to own slaves-could emerge from the strife of the civil rights years somehow chastened and wiser for the journey; if it could narrow its distance from the rest of the country and perhaps even lead it toward better days. That was the hope. But Egerton, as was his habit, saw darker possibilities as well. Giving voice to his fears, he wrote:

The South and the nation are not exchanging strengths as much as they are exchanging sins; more often than not, they are sharing and spreading the worst in each other, while the best languishes and withers. There are exceptions, of course . . . But the dominant trends are unmistakable: deep divisions along race and class lines, an obsession with growth and acquisition and consumption, a headlong rush to the cities and suburbs, diminution and waste of natural resources, institutional malfunctioning, abuse of political and economic power, increasing depersonalization, and a steady erosion of a sense of place, of community, of belonging.
F OR A WHILE IT was easy enough to make the case that Egerton s gloom was misplaced, or at least overstated. The anecdotal evidence was all around. In Virginia, Republican governor Linwood Holton had stunned political observers when he was elected in 1969 on a promise of racial reconciliation. In contrast to the Southern Democrats who had controlled Virginia for a hundred years, Holton proclaimed that the era of defiance -of resistance to civil rights progress-was coming to an end. He supported school desegregation, appointed women and minorities to state government, and promised to make Virginia a model in race relations. In Florida, new Democratic governor Reubin Askew sounded nearly identical themes. He supported busing as a tool for integrating schools-a moral and educational imperative, he said-and while appointing African Americans to the highest levels of state government, he set such a standard for integrity and competence that Harvard s John F. Kennedy School of Government rated him one of the top ten governors of the twentieth century. And, of course, there was Jimmy Carter. Elected governor of Georgia in 1970, Carter proclaimed in his inaugural address that the time for racial discrimination is over. Easily the most ambitious of these New South champions, he soon set out for the presidency with Southernness at the heart of his appeal. He said:

I ve been the product of an emerging South. I see the clear advantages of throwing off the millstone of racial prejudice. I think it s a process that s compatible with the moral and ethical standards of our nation-the heritage of our country, as envisioned by our forefathers. I also see that we have a special responsibility here. When we are meek, or quiescent, or silent on the subject of civil rights at home or human rights abroad, there is no other voice on Earth that can replace the lost voice, the absent voice, of the United States. This is what the persecutors want, and this is what the persecuted fear.
For many Americans, it was mesmerizing-a peanut farmer from the deepest South reconnecting the country with its finest ideals. In 1976, when Carter won the Democratic nomination, he stood side by side at the national convention, gazing out across the sea of delegates, with Martin Luther King Sr. There they were, two native Georgians, one black, one white, a Southern governor and a civil rights lion, sharing a moment that felt like a revival-not only of the faith they both proclaimed, but of a dream deferred-of shining hopes and possibilities in which so many of us wanted