Federal Power, Southern Power:
A Long View, 1860–1940

Jacqueline Jones

It is one of the great ironies of the Civil War that the white South, after its defeat in 1865, managed to wage a largely successful, century-long crusade against the incursion of federal authority into southern territory. The Confederates lost their secessionist bid and forfeited their claim to slavery. Yet after Reconstruction, white southerners gradually reasserted their prerogatives in the areas of voters' rights and racial segregation, thus distinguishing the former Confederate states from their northern counterparts. Beginning in the 1930s, New Deal legislation promoting social welfare entitlements and workers' rights helped erode southern distinctiveness. During and after World War II, federal and northern dollars poured into the South, transmitted by military bases, defense plants, and private corporations seeking cheap labor. Local chambers of commerce came to understand that Jim Crow excesses had the potential to repel new investments and highly skilled workers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the southern apartheid system, and late-twentieth-century Sun Belt prosperity further distanced the white South from its heritage of parochialism. Still, symbols of defiance toward federal authority remained part of the southern landscape—Confederate flags displayed on pickup trucks if not atop state capitols, high school students standing to pray before the kickoff at a Friday night football game.	1
This narrative, though appealing in its simplicity, glosses over the rich and complicated history of the relation between the federal government and the South since the Civil War. The two fine articles in this round table remind us that it is difficult to generalize about the historic relationship between federal authority, on the one hand, and the South or the white South or even white southern men (among other groups), on the other. The stories told by both authors also suggest that it is possible to discern links among three periods of federal activity in the South—the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and the decade of the New Deal. Taken together, these stories reveal, first, the persistent efforts of local authorities to thwart federal power and circumvent federal authority and, second, the enduring tensions between southern blacks and whites and between rich and poor. At the same time, the World War I South offers a fascinating case study of how federal policies were designed to shape family roles and communities along class and racial lines. Throughout both these articles can be heard the echoes of a turbulent Confederate history, even as both essays foreshadow the social welfare debates of the 1930s.	2
In his article "War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen's Dependents in the South, 1917–1921," K. Walter Hickel argues that the War Risk Insurance Act (WRIA), which developed a system of "allotments and allowances" for servicemen's families, represented a form of social spending unprecedented in American history. By sending a monthly stipend directly to soldiers' wives, the state facilitated female economic independence, and women eagerly took advantage of the program. War risk insurance thus provided a direct link between ordinary women and the state, a link that at least some southern men found troubling. In "The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South," Jeanette Keith suggests that, contrary to the white South's reputation for militant patriotism, draft resistance among poor men was deep and pervasive throughout the South during World War I. Taken together, the articles reveal that, although the federal government disproportionately burdened the sons of southern sharecroppers and laborers, who were much more likely to be drafted than were their social betters, that same government stepped in to provide many, if not all, servicemen's dependents with financial support. The support was not only reliable but generous given the South's relatively low cost (and standard) of living.	. . .