1 of 3
In college I nearly got one of my history professors fired. At least that's how he reacted when I told him how much I appreciated the way he taught his course on World War II. I wrote in my class evaluation that I learned so much about how the war turned on national leadership and military strategy. We studied how Stalin saved his country when he deferred to his great general, Georgi Zhukov. We read about France's inept and unprepared leadership. We talked about how Hitler never acknowledged his weaknesses and misjudgments and trusted no one to share military command. Apparently these offenses can cost a young professor his shot at tenure.
The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson
|
This kind of history lives on in the wildly popular books of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. But you probably won't find their titles on your local history professor's shelves. Social and cultural history dominate there, the more obscure the topic the better. I never had a chance to study Napoleon or the U.S. Civil War, but opportunities abounded for in-depth research on queer history and feminist theory.
William Leuchtenburg knows he isn't supposed to study politics and government, but he doesn't care. In The White House Looks South, the distinguished historian and professor emeritus at North Carolina-Chapel Hill tells the story of how the South coped with poverty and reluctantly shed segregation. He heaps credit for the transformation on his three protagonists: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. Leuchtenburg's account meticulously documents how these three men prodded the nation toward overdue justice, both racial and economic.
It's difficult to overestimate the racism that permeated the nation, especially the South, for most of the 20th century. With institutionalized hatred firmly entrenched, leaders and ordinary folk alike openly blocked black equality. Indeed, neither Roosevelt nor Truman, with their party's deep Southern roots, did much to directly advance civil rights. Roosevelt would not risk his New Deal by provoking stalwart Southern senators. He even declined to take action against lynching. The well-to-do New Yorker worried more about Southern poverty, which he observed during frequent recuperation trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, the village where he died in 1945.
At the same time, FDR's four-term bandwagon portended the end of the South's longtime grip on Roosevelt's party. The South accounted for 93 percent of the Democrats' electoral votes in 1924; 12 years later, in 1936, the region claimed just 24 percent. The math made it simple for subsequent Democratic leaders to spurn their former enablers. The new FDR coalition scared old-line Democrats, with one disaffected editor describing their "pigmented skin, thick accents, the smell of mine and factory about them, or the cultured pallor of the college classroom; new leaders with ideas as alien to Southern traditionalists as if they were from another planet."
Despite the bluster, Roosevelt maintained wide Southern support by rallying populist angst against the business class that dominated small towns and cities alike. And they knew whom to thank for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which delivered jobs and electricity to isolated Southern hamlets.
Roosevelt adopted the South as his second home, and Truman represented a border state. But neither officially represented the South, once taken for granted as an insurmountable obstacle to the presidency. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson lost the 1960 nomination largely due to geography. True to his region, he had consistently voted against measures to stop lynching, secure voting rights, and eliminate segregation. That record torpedoed him with the emerging civil rights wing of the party, especially blacks in the industrial North. Most Southern politicians left for Washington to protect one thing—segregation. And Americans knew the South for one thing—segregation. They would not elevate any such leader to the White House.
share this page
RSS Feed
