Reviews for Building Toward Civil War: Generational Rhythms in American Politics

The average rating for Building Toward Civil War: Generational Rhythms in American Politics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-24 00:00:00 Robert Rubin Angela Lakwete in her 2003 book Inventing the Cotton Gin, seeks to demythologize Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin and its place in the story of American Slavery. Inventing the Cotton Gin was written to dispel a history in which cotton production was confined to coastal pockets favorable to the long staple variety, and cleaned by hand, until the inventive Yankee Eli Whitney invented a machine which made short staple cotton useful and the extension of slavery to the interior southwest practical. As Lakwete has it, this story was concocted mainly to confirm post-Civil War northern triumphalism, portraying northerners as victorious technological machine users and southerners as slow, lazy and uninventive. In its place she recounts the history of cotton gins, stretching east from ancient India to the medieval Near East and across the Atlantic and also north from the natives of Brazil. In the place of a single sainted inventor, she brings to her pages the story of countless small technical shifts and competing marketing strategies, forming a window into southern industrialization clustered in the towns and seats of cotton counties and manned by mechanics who were white and black, enslaved and free. It is an account of technology that supersedes the story of Eli Whitney which "begins with inept planters and sleepy finger-ginning slaves and ends with battlefield dead," that "celebrates Yankee ingenuity and victory and insinuates southern incompetence in passivity and defeat." However, oddly, Lakwete seems to have missed or not wanted to discuss another aspect of the cotton gin story - namely the passing off of responsibility for slavery's spread and entrenchment within early America to an accident of technological development. Lakwete attributes the spread of cotton plantations into the Old Southwest to the rise in demand for it from industrializing British and American manufacturers. That there was no real barrier to plantation agriculture moving inland compromises the story which Oakes presents as the eventual shared conviction of Lincoln and Douglass - that the founders were very serious or desirous at all beyond hand waving wishes that slavery end in the United States. Instead of slavery being small, isolated and coastally confined but rescued by an incident of unforeseeable technological progress, the history of American slavery is of a continuous piece with colonial slavery, if the object of shifting justifications

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-10 00:00:00 Janet Dayringer The presidential election of 1948 is best remembered today for Harry Truman's famous come-from-behind victory and the iconic photo of him waving the inaccurate Chicago Tribune front page over his smiling face. Appended to it as a footnote is the third-party candidacy of Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, who ran as the nominee of the "States Rights Democrats." Yet Kari Frederickson makes an excellent argument that Thurmond's candidacy may well have been the one with the more lasting significance in American political history, as it helped to end the long-standing dominance of the Democratic Party in Southern politics and bring about the political shift that has made the region into a Republican bastion today. That Democratic Party's virtual monopoly in the South back then, as Frederickson notes, was the result of the allegiance of the white voters, who from Reconstruction onward depended on it to resist the intrusion of the federal government into race relations in the region. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, however, strained this relationship by fostering Southern politicians who were economically liberal and supportive of greater federal involvement in the lives of their (white) constituents. Because of this, the traditional elites in the South's Black Belt were increasingly disenchanted with the national party leadership, a disenchantment that grew with Harry Truman's advocacy of greater intervention on civil rights issues in the region. It was this opposition that coalesced into the Dixiecrat movement. Frederickson makes it clear that its members never really believed that they could elect Thurmond president in 1948; rather, their goal was to throw the election into the House of Representatives by denying Truman and the Republican nominee Thomas Dewey the 146 electoral votes of the South, then to leverage concessions to the region in return for their support for one of the candidates. In the end, though, their efforts proved a failure, as the South failed to rally behind Thurmond. Most politicians the region distanced themselves from the Dixiecrats lest they sacrifice the political influence they already possessed, while the voters' ties to the Democratic Party proved more durable. Ironically, nothing proved this better than the victories in the four states that Thurmond won, all of which were ones in which the Dixiecrats had secured control of the state party machinery. Truman's victory, however, obscured that 1948 was the start of greater volatility in the Southern vote, especially in presidential elections, as the region gradually developed a two-party system, albeit one that in the end couldn't survive the increasing embrace of civil rights issues by the Democrats nationally. Well research and expertly analyzed, Frederickson's book is an excellent examination of an often-overlooked aspect of a key event in American political history, She is careful not to draw a clear line connecting the Dixiecrats to the Republican Party's dominance in the South today, though her evidence makes it easier to understand the background and origins of that shift. Where her study falls short is in its exclusive focus on the political situation in the South, as Frederickson never really addresses the developments in the overall national political environment (such as the outreach by the Democrats to African American voters in the North) that were driving the changes that spawned the Dixiecrats' disaffection. Yet this is a flaw that can be forgiven given the insights she provides into the rise and fall of the Dixiecrat movement. It's a book that every student of American political history should read, as well as anyone who wants to know how American politics got to the state that it is in today ' for while history may not repeat itself, we function within the grooves set by the past nonetheless.