| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Editor for Justice: The Life of Louis I. Jaffé. By Alexander S. Leidholdt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xviii, 507 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-2751-5.)

The twentieth-century American South in the period before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 is often thought of in terms of H. L. Mencken's devastating criticism of it as an intellectual desert, a "'Sahara of the Bozart'" (beaux arts) (p. 139). But Mencken clearly admired a handful of southern newspaper editors, including Louis I. Jaffé of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. P. B. Young, the editor of the black Norfolk Journal and Guide, said of Jaffé in 1927 that he was one of the leading liberal journalists in the South, "'a true exponent of the New South'" (p. 211).

Alexander S. Leidholdt's Editor for Justice analyzes the social history of the southern states in the period between the two world wars by examining the professional and personal life of Jaffé, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for one in a long line of antilynching editorials. Jaffé—on his editorial page—may have been one of the first southern editors to capitalize "Negro" (p. 213) in the 1920s, but he did not begin to support integration until after World War II.

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