The First New South: 1865-1920.

Link, William A.

In this brief book intended for an undergraduate audience, Howard N. Rabinowitz addresses the evolution of what he and other scholars have characterized as the "first" New South that emerged during the generation following the Civil War. As Rabinowitz's ample bibliography attests, the field of post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction Southern history is a crowded one. Although scores of monographs have examined virtually every dimension of Southern life, C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South (1951) and, more recently, Edward Ayers's The Promise of the New South (1992), have dominated the field. Though converging in a basic pessimism, Woodward and Ayers are strikingly different in approach. Woodward examined how a new social and political elite secured power, Ayers the diverse but often complex experiences of ordinary Southerners.

Rabinowitz enters this terrain clearly sympathetic to Woodward. Although he acknowledges considerable change in the post-1920 South, Rabinowitz poses questions about elite power; in the New South, he asserts that there was continuity over change and distinctiveness over sameness. After the Civil War, rather than shedding its dependence on the traditional crops of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco, Southerners became even more wedded to the plantation system. Slavery was abolished, but under the crop lien system, new and eventually oppressive arrangements of labor and credit triumphed. Although historians disagree about who controlled land, credit, and labor (planters, merchants, or merchant-planters), how much leverage sharecroppers and tenants exerted over it, and to what extent subsistence-based yeoman farmers were affected by it, most scholars would agree with Rabinowitz's conclusion that this system had "lost much of its flexibility and independence" by the end of the nineteenth century (p. 17) and was a major factor in the rural South's squalid backwardness.

Industrialization had a pronounced effect, as Rabinowitz shows, on the post-Reconstruction South. Spearheading economic change was a new railroad network; with it came a new market economy and capitalists intent on exploiting the mining, lumbering, and human resources of the Southern hinterlands. Particularly important were cotton mills and a new system of class relations; the mill community, asserts Rabinowitz, became a "plantation for poor whites." Despite these changes, Rabinowitz agrees with the conclusion offered more than four decades ago in Woodward's Origins of the New South: the South had "merely succeeded in standing still in its race with the North" (p. 48).

Continuity rather than change prevailed in other areas of Southern life. Between 1877 and 1920, there was an "underlying continuity" (p. 80) to Southern politics. Overthrowing Reconstruction and preserving a backward political order, Southern Redeemers ruthlessly maintained power by waging a "continuing battle to control or even eliminate the votes of blacks and lower-class whites" (p. 80). Even so, African-Americans devised ways of resisting racial oppression and an increasingly hostile environment. Significant differences of wealth, education, and status divided Southern whites, Rabinowitz argues, but these differences were overcome by two factors: the Lost Cause and white supremacy. The Lost Cause supplied a language of cultural nationalism that transcended class and gender. Meanwhile, Southern whites shared an adherence to white supremacy.

Rabinowitz concludes with the observation that "the point is not that the First New South was not new, but that it was not new enough." One could add that those interested in something new in The First New South will be disappointed. Like Woodward, Rabinowitz is more interested in elites than ordinary folk. There are few voices from mill workers or rural people - black or white - in his account, little indication of the various ways outside of politics in which they sought dignity in an often oppressive cultural and political system. Like Woodward, Rabinowitz concerns himself chiefly with politics as historians have traditionally defined it, and, accordingly he grants more attention to political elites.

In a book of this size, moreover, the complexities of the subject suffer. Throughout, there is a sloppy regard for multiple regions and subregions that comprise "the South," little attempt to distinguish states as varied as Texas and Virginia, let alone regions as diverse as the Carolina Piedmont and the Mississippi Delta. For a study that otherwise considers this subject in an up-to-date fashion, there is remarkably little attention to gender. Southern women are mostly invisible in this account, and appear sparingly (only three pages in one entry) in his index. There is little or no mention of the WCTU, the role of women in Southern evangelicalism, or the often-ignored subject of woman suffrage. Absent also is much mention of Southern culture, either in the variety that reached Southern elites or ordinary folk.

WILLIAM A. LINK University of North Carolina at Greensboro