| NEW
DEAL / NEW SOUTH
An Anthony J. Badger Reader
Anthony J. Badger
Foreword by James C. Cobb
How
liberal southern politicians lost the South
”This
book promises to inform and enlighten in a multitude of ways,
not the least of them being the insights it offers into the
progression of an exceptionally talented historian’s
interests and awareness as Tony shares his professional and
personal odyssey from New Deal historian to southern historian.”
—from the foreword by James C. Cobb
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.
Anthony J. Badger is Paul Mellon Professor
of American History at Cambridge University and Master of
Clare College. He is the author of a number of books, including
North Carolina and the New Deal; The New Deal:
The Depression Years, 1933–1940; The Making
of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (with
Brian Ward); and Contesting Democracy (with Byron
Shafer).
James C. Cobb is the B. Phinizy Spalding
Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia. His
most recent book is Away Down South: A History of Southern
Identity.
June
2007
6 x 9, 320 pages, index
$19.95 (s) paper
978-1-55728-844-8
$64.95 (s) cloth
978-1-55728-843-1
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