We warmly thank Professors Bullock, MacManus, Mayer, and Rozell for their careful reading of Southern Nation. It is an honor to be so generously reviewed. We especially appreciate their wish that we had given more attention to the relationship between southern members of Congress and presidents and that we had been more selective in detailing the legislative histories in perhaps too many policy areas.

These features reflect trade-offs implicit in our analytical objectives. Woodrow Wilson does not stand alone in our story. We highlighted the role of Rutherford B. Hayes in defending Reconstruction-era electoral laws, the (non-)working relationship between Benjamin Tillman and Theodore Roosevelt, and the fateful decisions of Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft to abandon African Americans in the South.

But our primary focus was on Congress, the critical institution of southern power. As our interlocutors note in The South and the Transformation of U.S. Politics, southerners were excluded from the presidency. With the South generally in the minority in Congress, the passage or defeat of legislation hinged less on relations with a given president than on whether southern members of the House and Senate could garner sufficient support from outside the South. We thus sought to identify the conditions that produced this result.

Casting a wide net of issues and debates reflected our wish to examine empirically “what most texts on the period merely argue,” namely, “that southern solidarity on racial questions was the great source of their power,” and to discern the extent to which such questions were implicated in many of the era’s issues. To probe this orienting hypothesis, we could devise no single statistical measure that would reliably recover the imprint of southern influence. The research task, accordingly, was to construct wide-ranging case studies of legislative proposals, based on the explicit selection criteria laid out in chapter 2, and to examine these instances for evidence of the book’s theorized patterns of southern influence and racial anxiety in a narrative form that would allow readers to evaluate our evidence.

An additional criticism laments how the book’s concluding chapter elides the “grandeur, tragedy, and irony of southern politics” after the close of our period and fails to more explicitly compare the “obvious modern parallel” with southern politics in the time of Trump. Though Southern Nation does consider some important developments from 1932 to today, this coda to our analytical history of a much earlier period could not sufficiently cover the sweeping and complex history since the New Deal, a long moment amply, often brilliantly, documented and assessed by others, indeed individually and collectively by the reviewers!

In any event, caution is warranted in drawing parallels, as between racist backlashes a generation after achieving major legislative advances in the civil and political rights of African Americans; this emphasis risks conflating the politically relevant “South” with the “white South”—a conflation that the reviewers persuasively demonstrate can only hinder our understanding of contemporary southern politics.

Perhaps a different parallel might have been more appropriate. Precisely because southerners of all backgrounds continue to have the opportunity to engage in politics and forge coalitions, the post–civil rights situation today may be compared to the “experiment, testing, and uncertainty” that C. Vann Woodward identified in the era of “forgotten alternatives” before the suppression of the Populists and disenfranchisement of black voters. Still, we must tread carefully not to fashion any such analogies too swiftly or treat historical precedents as presently determinative. As Bullock, MacManus, Mayer, and Rozell teach, though today’s southern politics is indelibly marked by its past, it no longer is confined by the contours of this history.