| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joe Creech. Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. xxx, 232. Cloth $60.00, paper $25.00.
Since the 2000 election, observers of the American political map, with its distinct "red" and "blue" swatches, have commented on the apparently undying affiliation of rural states from the Southeast to the Northwest with the Republican Party. Writers like Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas (2004) wonder aloud how these states could have traded the radical politics of the nineteenth century for the social and economic conservativism of the twentieth and twenty-first. After this year's mid-term elections, when some once-red states like Montana began to look blue again, the relationship between the legacy of radicalism and the landscape of contemporary politics in rural America became more confounding than ever.	1
In this book, Joe Creech begins to untangle the web of rural politics in the Populist era in a way that can help us better understand our current divisions. Populism, he reminds us, has been the subject of intense historiographic debate: were these radical farmers proto-progressives as C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn would have had us believe, or were they the rabid anti-intellectuals and anti-modernists portrayed by Richard Hofstadter? Creech presents a significant new perspective on this debate, arguing that Populism may have seemed both liberal and conservative because it was strongly influenced by evangelical Protestantism, which was itself both a backward and forward-looking movement. Although he focuses on the southern branch of the Populist Party, and on its work in North Carolina in particular, Creech does occasionally point to the broader significance of his research. For example, he explains that given the importance of evangelical Protestantism to Populism, "the image of William Jennings Bryan, the 'great commoner'-turned-fundamentalist, prosecuting John T. Scopes ... is not as incongruous as it might seem at first glance" (p. 179).	. . .

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