Sull'Autore
Ira Katznelson is interim provost, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, and deputy director of Columbia World Projects at Columbia University. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) and Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of mostra altro Our Time (2013). mostra meno
Serie
Opere di Ira Katznelson
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005) 419 copie
Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (1986) 35 copie
Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003) 30 copie
Opere correlate
The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (2003) — Collaboratore — 30 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Katznelson, Ira
- Data di nascita
- 1944
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Attività lavorative
- political scientist
historian
professor - Organizzazioni
- Columbia University (Ruggles Professor of Politcal Science and History)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 21
- Opere correlate
- 2
- Utenti
- 1,076
- Popolarità
- #23,896
- Voto
- 4.0
- Recensioni
- 11
- ISBN
- 73
- Preferito da
- 1
Even though FDR was an aristocratic Northerner, Southern representatives were crucial to his legislative agenda. Because the South was basically a one-party region, once Southern Democrats made it through their primaries they were assured of winning elections. In an era of the seniority system, that meant that after the big Democratic waves of the New Deal coalition, they occupied a disproportionately large percentage of the leadership spots, as well as frequently remaining a majority of the party caucus. Additionally, Southern Democrats were often able to cast the deciding votes in disputes between Republicans and nonsouthern Democrats, able to extract whatever concessions they needed from bills that threatened the Jim Crow system or white superiority in general.
An example that Katznelson doesn't use is in my hometown of Austin: while the Santa Rita Courts were the first public housing in the country, there were three separate projects that were segregated by race in accordance with Southern values. I was surprised to read that Southern representatives were initially fairly economically progressive in terms of big public works projects like the TVA or the LCRA, but they inevitably dissented whenever a piece of economic legislation threatened to treat blacks and whites equally. Labor unions were nearly the only institution that was making progress in the fight for racial equality, and much of the modern South's antipathy to unions can be traced back to this period. Katznelson quotes a contemporary magazine article thus: "The only local institution that southern whites and Negroes have in common today is the labor union" and shows that over time, as the New Deal's economic component became more important, Southern Congressmen voted increasingly with Republicans to frustrate Roosevelt and other liberals.
The South has always been more militaristic than the rest of the country (if not quite as good at actually winning wars), and when World War 2 finally reached America Southern Congressmen were oddly eager to give the federal government vast powers to fight the Axis. Katznelson's explanations for why German efforts to promote solidarity between their similar racial ideologies during the runup to the war didn't take aren't very convincing to me, but he does a good job of showing the efforts of the Southerners to get disproportionate defense spending in their districts. I wish he had pointed out that this legacy lingers in the fact that Southerners like Stennis and Vinson got aircraft carriers named after them despite their frequently-deplorable records on civil rights and other issues. Regardless, the South's peculiar combination of nationalism and xenophobia fit perfectly into the paranoid Cold War period, when Southerners were exceptionally diligent in Red Scare witch hunts (though of course Joseph McCarthy was not a Southerner).
The overall lessons that I took away from Katznelson included a new respect for how LBJ was able to transcend his background and get through so much good legislation in the Great Society. His compatriots were clever and tenacious in their ability to water down laws to protect Jim Crow; that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually passed is a miracle. The way that the fear caused by economic and military crises can shape responses to them is well done here in the contrasts drawn between the US and the European dictatorships that abandoned democracy in a way the US never did. Additionally, I appreciated his focus on Congress, in contrast to so much literature that treats the President as a powerful sovereign and Congress as a faceless bill-generating machine. That makes his exploration of the South's attitude towards the way that things like trade policies and treaties should be negotiated very good. Furthermore, I was struck by how the South maintained its particular identity over many decades and despite many large demographic changes - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once gave an interesting if predictably partisan speech to the US Council for National Policy in June 1997 where he analogized the US South to Quebec, and I think further study of the similarities and differences between the two in the effects of the regions on their respective national politics would be extremely enlightening.
Overall this book is an important contribution to understanding how the legacy of the South's unique culture has affected American history. While non-Southerners might rightly question why such a backwards region is able to have such a pernicious effect on the national discourse, continued population flows to Southern states make understanding why its legislators have such regressive and reactionary views more important than ever.… (altro)