Imagine being a white southern Democratic member of Congress in 1877. You represent a region that just over a decade ago was in open war with the rest of the nation. You work in a city that you might have hoped to destroy in your prior life as a Confederate. The South, the battleground for most of the Civil War, still reels from the economic, social, and political wounds of that horrific conflict. Your region, by far the poorest, confronts an economic system that seems almost designed by the victorious North to worsen southern poverty. Worst of all, from your perspective, the North thrust on you 11 years of Reconstruction, in which your hated enemy, the northern white Republicans, empowered and enfranchised your greatest object of fear, the formerly enslaved African Americans. These newly freed voters remain on the rolls throughout the South and in many localities constitute a clear majority, with their rights to citizenship and voting enshrined in the Constitution.

The story of how southern delegations over decades of Congress succeeded in turning this weak position into extraordinary national power is the topic of a new book, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction, by David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski. In its sweep, depth, and rigor, we can think of no other title that does as much justice to this important topic. The authors are bold enough to reference V. O. Key in their ambitious introduction, and the highest praise we can offer for their book is that it compares with his classic.

The book usefully divides the period 1877–1932 into three broad eras: 1877–1900, 1900–15, and 1915–32. In the first era, the South was at its weakest, forced to put up with numerous policies that exacerbated its wretched economic state. Huge sums went to the pensions of Union veterans, while no federal dollars went to Confederate soldiers. These pensions were funded by what the South correctly perceived as a deeply unfair tariff system, in which the fabulously wealthy Northeast paid a far smaller percent of its wealth into the coffers of Washington than did the destitute South. Southern calls for a federal income tax, which would have been far better for it, went largely unheeded in this era (p. 108). Similarly, the agrarian South would have benefited from the Populist reforms of the 1890s, as opposed to the Wall Street-tilted policies that prevailed (p. 107).

But as the authors note, the South put every issue behind a burning imperative to maintain white supremacy, so recently won in the settlement of the divisive election of 1876. Again and again, the South voted against its own interests in order to prevent any future federal intervention on behalf of African Americans. This calculus changes dramatically beginning in 1890, with the near-total disenfranchisement of African Americans. As black southerners were lynched, massacred, raped, intimidated, and otherwise mistreated, the white South gradually and gleefully realized that northern whites had lost their appetite for intervention in the name of justice.

Thus, in the dawn of the new century, the white South rose up and began to exert power beyond the mere preservation of white supremacy. It began to challenge the Republican Party on economics and achieved victories in several key showdowns. While still fervently resisting any federal effort to empower African Americans, however minor, the South no longer feared that expansions of the federal government would inevitably lead to a loss of southern racial autonomy. In the 1880s and ’90s, many in the South had feared that if the railroad barons were regulated, the North would force the integration of southern railroads, but by the twentieth century they believed they could have their progressive reforms without losing their racist privileges. And for the most part, the South was so powerful that it succeeded, particularly with Virginia-born progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson in office. The authors portray well the confusing cross-currents of this era, in which paladins of progressivism could be far more racist than laissez-faire robber barons. The South did not win every battle, being defeated on early twentieth-century imperialism and the question of free silver. But the South could never be ignored and often found itself part of winning coalitions.

Even when the GOP reestablishes conservative dominance in Congress after World War I, the Democratic South’s congressional power is entrenched to such an extent that it remained arguably the region most adept at getting its will into legislation or, at least, seldom losing on its key concerns. Indeed, the Jim Crow southern congressional delegation in many ways laid the groundwork for crucial New Deal reforms, particularly in agriculture and infrastructure. This is one of the many deft historical judgments that the authors bring to light and that situates their book usefully among the classics of congressional scholarship. For example, Barbara Sinclair’s half-century longitudinal study of voting patterns in the US House of Representatives documented that during the New Deal, southern Democrats were as liberal as their northern co-partisans on four of five policy dimensions, with civil rights being the exception (Barbara Sinclair, Congressional Realignment, 1982). This book by Bateman and his coauthors serves as something of a prequel to Sinclair’s work.

Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski deserve great credit for several impressive aspects of this book. First, they apply modern methodologies of congressional analysis to 60 years of legislative history. By analyzing the pivotal members of Congress at different periods and on different issues, they provide quantitative support for many of their arguments. They use these techniques to help explain how a defeated region could rise so quickly back to power. Second, they bring to light how many of the issues in racial debates in the modern era were presaged during this much-forgotten time, such as racial gerrymandering (p. 188), efforts to use federal financing of education to force better treatment for black students (p. 140), and prescient southern fears about the Commerce Clause becoming a vehicle for black equality (p. 280), among others. Even modern white conservative claims about reverse discrimination were first aired in Congress in the 1880s, in a context even more afactual than the current one (p. 142).

Third, the authors reveal hidden aspects of the white South’s confused soul, finding unexpectedly strong southern support for labor movements and even some sympathy for the Paris Communards (p. 165)! Finally, the authors ably prove what most texts on the period merely argue: that southern solidarity on racial questions was the great source of their power. Marshaling voting data over decades, they show how this minority region leveraged its raging hatred of blacks by voting as an unmovable bloc on any question touching on race, while simultaneously shaping the rules of the House and Senate over decades to maintain their power.

The southern part in forming the “classic” Congress of the mid-twentieth century cannot be underestimated. The South played a key role in destroying the centralized leadership of the House that had prevailed under Cannon and Reed and helped prevent any similar structure from emerging in the Senate. This made committees supremely powerful in Washington. They firmly supported the seniority committee system in both chambers, which, given that the South was essentially a one-party system, ended up empowering that region more than any other. The modern rules of the filibuster were largely crafted by southern hands for southern ends (p. 330). As the authors note, the famous bipartisan issue-specific coalitions that dominated congressional legislating were built on the basis of ignoring the plight of southern blacks.

However, several problems do appear regularly in the text. First, more attention might have been given to interbranch relations with the president. With the notable exception of Wilson, most presidents are not presented but for a brief description of their attitude toward the South and white supremacy. In addition, repetitive lists of legislators, who are usually not described and frequently never appear again in the text, add little to our understanding of the times or the issues (as on p. 361, where seven southern senators are named as voting against anti-strike clauses). On p. 368, we are told that a Charles Crisp opposed an agricultural reform bill, but are we supposed to remember his office, state, and party affiliation from two mentions more than 200 pages earlier, among scores of other legislators covered in the intervening pages?

The authors could have also been more selective concerning which issues get highlighted, especially when the stories of bills tend toward repetition. In a sense, the book is both too long and too short, because some of the issues involved in these complex questions are not described with enough detail to grasp much of their meaning, whereas so many of them are presented that no such explanation could have been provided in a more reasonably sized book. The discussion of regulatory minutiae such as the content of competing antitrust bills during Wilson’s presidency seemed extraneous to the broad themes of the book (p. 296). By contrast, the discussion of how southern racial concerns affected the wartime draft legislation is well written, terse, and pertinent (p. 314).

The last chapter, in which the authors highlight their findings and extend their meaning into the next 90 years of American politics, is ultimately unsatisfying, in large part because of the constraints of time and space. They are unable to explore fully the grandeur, tragedy, and irony of southern politics that has transpired, a history shaped in part by the forces detailed in this volume. Additionally, the prose in this section is not equal to the scholarship. Key insights are left to the reader to ponder. The authors earlier observe that southern demagogues “coupled occasionally populist programs with an aggressive emphasis on corrupt elites, a celebration of violence, and above all, the determination to preserve white supremacy” (p. 240) and that southern populists were “singularly without ideological moorings” and eschewed the cooperative democratic vision found in other populists. Perhaps because their book was finished before Trump’s election in 2016, the authors fail to apply this observation to the obvious modern parallel, a comparison that may have produced sobering similarities.

Still, these criticisms in no way can obscure the conclusion that this book will quickly become the canonical text on the topic of the South’s rise to congressional dominance during most of the twentieth century.