The Political South in the Twentieth Century [Book Review]

Abstract

Merchandized as a supplementary text for United States history survey courses, Monroe Lee Billington's new "brief synthesis" (p. 186) summarizes part of the uneven secondary literature on twentieth-century southern politics. Billington has done no primary research: used no manuscript collections, analyzed no election or census returns, interviewed no one. His book has no coherent theme, no original analyses of important occurrences or trends, no striking portraits of colorful southern politicos, not even an adequate narrative of events. His bibliography is very sketchy, and he has relegated footnotes, not to the back of the book, but to the imagination. Frequently self-contradictory, often grossly exaggerated, sometimes incorrect, the book is consistently superficial and cliché-ridden. Its marketing virtues are that it is short, has a moral stance so vague and bland as to be inoffensive to anyone to the left of George Wallace, and requires neither sophistication nor thoughtful effort to read.

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