| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie. By Augustus B. Cochran III. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. x, 307 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1089-8.)

In his landmark 1949 study, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key detailed an exotic landscape of demagogues and strongmen, chaotic personal factions and ironclad one-party rule. The South, Key argued, resembled the colonial outposts of the great empires—economically backward regions where the maintenance of white control, especially in those areas with black majorities, promoted bizarre, undemocratic practices and required the tolerance and tacit support of national leaders. 1

Since the civil rights revolution, more than a dozen political scientists have retraced Key's footsteps, many of them even replicating his detailed state-by-state survey of the region's factions, leaders, and campaigns. With a few notable exceptions, these studies have followed the general trajectory of southern studies, revisiting age-old questions about the persistence of regional distinctiveness. Some have suggested that the contemporary South merged into the national mainstream, shedding its unwavering allegiance to the Democratic party and its obsession with white supremacy. Others have stressed the peculiar and persistent legacies of segregation and underdevelopment, even as southerners came to occupy the White House and leadership positions on Capitol Hill. . . .

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