In his classic 1949 study of Southern politics, V. O. Key asserted that the issue of race dominated the political process of the era in this region. In his recently published book Defending White Democracy, Mississippi State professor Jason Morgan Ward retraces some of the ground covered by Key and finds that the political tone in individual Southern states can in fact be understood by the black proportion of their populations. Furthermore, white resistance to racial equality did just not spring up spontaneously overnight or emerge unexpectedly after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision. Instead, Ward argues that the New Deal of the 1930s threatened white supremacy and stimulated a preemptive campaign to preserve the embattled Southern social order.

Jason Morgan Ward is less interested in all the complexities and contours of Southern political history than he is in tracing the origins of the self-consciously “segregationist” movement of the 1950s back to the racial struggles during the administration of FDR, World War II, and immediate postwar years. The author's primary assertion is that many historians are wrong to characterize the South's “massive resistance” to organized efforts to end legal forms of racial discrimination as a spontaneous mass backlash by ordinary whites to the civil rights movement. Instead he claims that white Southern militancy had its roots in a pre-emptive campaign by Southern elites beginning in the 1930s and 1940s to protect the status quo. Thus, long before the landmark Brown decision, a coordinated reactionary countermovement already existed and its political leaders were using new and innovative tools in their attempt to defend white democracy.

In just six short chapters, Ward reveals the critical historical continuities in Southern racial politics. The author shows how the ideology linked with race moved from the theme of “supremacy” to one of “segregation” and finally “equalization.” He examines how Southern leaders attempted to nationalize race and to “Southernize” concepts such as freedom of choice, state's rights, and foundational constitutionality. One later chapter diagnoses the rhetoric of “responsible” resistance while the last shows how diehard segregationists sought concessions from both major political parties through Southern bloc voting, overtures to conservative Republicans, and links to the “silent majority” in northern cities. Whatever the softened rhetoric or specific tactics of this reactionary countermovement, the book meticulously records how the proponents on one side of the struggle over civil rights rallied against social currents that they ultimately could not stop.

Defending White Democracy is well researched but the author's strength is in historical interpretation. Ward makes a strong case for his own assumptions about the chronology, leadership, cause and effect, and major themes of the civil rights “movements.” And it is hard to argue with the assertion in the subtext of this book that there is both continuity and change in the political issues that mobilize successive generations. However, the author does less well in his attempt at a compromise between the case-study approach and more comprehensive regional analysis. A few politicians, like Eugene Talmadge, Byrnes, Bilbo, Russell, and Strom Thurmond, from Deep South states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina are covered in depth while states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Virginia along with their leaders get relatively little attention. Progressive Southerners receive little or no notice and even some movement conservatives like John Stennis, Rankin, Smith, Colmer, Byrd, and many others are footnotes at most.

Although Ward focuses on the big picture, he does provide several detailed vignettes such as Senator Bilbo's “mayoral” management of Washington DC during his wartime chairmanship of the district's committee or Governor Byrnes's failed effort to avoid racial integration with his school equalization campaign in South Carolina. However, his interpretation of these events is not always completely persuasive. His explanation for the failure of the Dixiecrat revolt is an important case in point. The effort to create a Southern bargaining bloc in the Electoral College did not break down as a result of its impracticality, as the author insists. Instead, this effort to extract concession from the major parties during presidential elections proved to be unworkable because the insurgents were not able to win over the more moderate politicians in the Southern states that are not central to the text.

The author of the book under review here has done a fine service for readers by focusing on the segregationist side of the civil rights struggles. Too often contemporary historians have emphasized the winners in the conflict. At the same time, the book has flaws with its brevity and the narrow focus of its attention. Ward even exaggerates the distinctiveness of his perspective on Southern resistance to the civil rights movement since V. O. Key had already written a complementary if more lengthy, complex, nuanced, and data-driven account of the race issue in the subregion as the countermovement was emerging. However, the most problematic feature of this slim volume is Ward's conclusion that the Republican Party following Barry Goldwater made a mistake by embracing disgruntled Southern Democrats. In fact, the GOP has done little but benefit electorally in this region and with northern whites since the late 1960s after its shift against civil rights. A comparable partisan advantage for the Democrats may not come about until racial minorities make up a majority of the nation's voting population.