Angie Maxwell has succeeded admirably in her quest to “think big and to write boldly” (ix). The product, The Indicted South, is, as a result, no mere pedestrian exercise in historiographical landfill. It is, instead, a bold and provocative examination of how southern inferiority – more precisely white southern self-perceptions of inferiority aggravated by outside criticism – have, over time, contributed to one of the most obvious and formidable buttresses of southern regional distinctiveness and exceptionalism. Maxwell builds on the work of many historians, journalists, literati, and other scholars, specifically W. J. Cash's concept of a “savage ideal,” Sheldon Hackney's ideas about a “siege mentality,” Robert Penn Warren's “Great Alibi,” sociologists Howard Odum and John Shelton Reed, historians C. Vann Woodward and Jack Temple Kirby, and especially the work of psychologist Alfred Adler on the “inferiority complex.”

Maxwell creatively organizes her thesis of a “unifying sense of inferiority” around three major episodes or movements in the southern past: the notorious 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee; the 1930s Fugitive Poet cum Southern Agrarian movement centered at Nashville's Vanderbilt University and culminating in the New Criticism; and the 1950s Virginia campaign for massive resistance and interposition (4) – but there is no shortage of material from which she could have chosen. In all three cases, episodes that are “often seen as separate” but are really “manifestations of the same anxieties and frustrations” (18), Maxwell finds that moderate to reasonable instincts on religion, literary studies, and race relations were, respectively, transformed into something more extreme and durable by a “bombardment of public condemnation” – or the perception of such – from outside the region (5).

The work is especially strong in the following ways. Maxwell's interdisciplinary approach is a strength, as is her realization that southern whiteness (although it may have begun with race) expanded to encompass a range of topics on which southern whites could be persistently conservative: religion, patriotism, education, anti-intellectualism, antistatism, antiscience, and a suspicious view of art, to name but a few. Maxwell is fearless enough to extend her historical analysis to the recent past, to connect the obvious dots between the southern past and present and to state clearly that the modern Republican Party is a “late twentieth-century realignment based on a states’ rights rhetoric inherited from Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats,” manifesting itself in the “Republican's Southern Strategy,” a realignment that is perhaps “the most significant consequence of this ongoing sense of [regional] inferiority” (26). Astute Republican strategists during the modern civil rights movement pounced on the “vulnerability of the white South … to compete for votes in the states of the Old Confederacy for the first time since Reconstruction.” Thus “new groups, such as the Tea Party … the Birthers … and the anti-environmentalists … are not new, but are old spirits that will not die” (237, 248). Maxwell's book is also a powerful brief for the case of southern distinctiveness. In musing on Edmund Ruffin's and George Fitzhugh's antebellum defenses of slavery and southern superiority, Maxwell writes, for example, that the pair were “mirroring a technique that would be used by southern communities to respond to public criticism in the future … highlight[ing] what they saw as northern hypocrisy, an effort to insist that the division between the two cultures was not as different as critics would admit” (20). A similar observation can be made, with a good deal of veracity, about many suburban-school historians and political scientists today.

This reviewer's complaints with the book are few and far between. Although Maxwell's discussion of the Southern Agrarians is insightful, I would like to have seen a bit more on Agrarianism and its extension, in recent years, to a place of honor among influential neo-Confederate scholars. Richard M. Weaver is mentioned only once, briefly (259–60), and M. E. Bradford, perhaps an even more important figure and certainly one central to the George Wallace and Ronald Reagan right, not at all. A more serious reservation is perhaps best articulated as a caveat instead of an actual criticism. That is, while the book's framework and analysis are certainly compelling, readers must be careful not to take Maxwell's argument to the point of a kind of determinism: the white South gravitated toward extremism and radicalism in politics because a hostile North criticized it too much. I do not think Maxwell makes this argument. But in less careful hands one might take phrases such as “the negative public spotlight created this treasury and dr[ew] its subjects together … [into] a strong group association … Alternating periods of reconciliation and rejection … often served simply to intensify this reactionary behavior, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for the South” (25) – and do exactly this. In sum, Maxwell has produced a powerful and important book worthy of significant attention.