From the Constitutional Convention to the Civil War to the civil rights movement, the South has exerted an outsized influence on American government and history while being distinctly anti-government. It continues to do so today with Tea Party politics. Southern states have profited immensely from federal projects, tax expenditures, and public spending, yet the region's relationship with the central government and the courts can, at the best of times, be described as contentious. Nation within a Nation features cutting-edge work by lead scholars in the fields of history, political science, and human geography, who examine the causes—real and perceived—for the South's perpetual state of rebellion, which remains one of its most defining characteristics.
Nation within a Nation features cutting-edge work by lead scholars in the fields of history, political science, and human geography who examine the causes—real and perceived—of the South’s perpetual state of rebellion, which remains one of its most defining characteristics.
Content
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Glenn Feldman
Part I. Past to Present
1. First to Secede, Last to Accede: South Carolina’s Resistance to the Republic, 1780–Present 19
Thomas F. Schaller
Part II. Race, War, and Culture
2. Tom Watson and Resistance to Federal War Policies in Georgia during World War I 67
Zachary C. Smith
3. “Negroes, the New Deal, and . . . Karl Marx”: Southern Antistatism in Depression and War 102
Jason Morgan Ward
4. Dixiecrats, Dissenting Delegates, and the Dying Democratic Party: Mississippi’s Right Turn from Roosevelt to Johnson 122
Rebecca Miller Davis
5. Right Turn? The Republican Party and African American Politics in Post-1965 Mississippi 149
Chris Danielson
Part III. A Nation within a Nation?
6. Texas Philosophy, Nashville Agrarianism, Reagan Republicanism, and the Neo-Confederacy: The Influence of M. E. Bradford 181
Fred Arthur Bailey
7. The Evil Empire Within: Southern Nationalism and the Washington Problem 205
David R. Jansson
Part IV. Economic Development and Reform
8. Getting Farmers—and Tourists—“Out of the Mud”: Alabama’s Nineteenth-Century Experience with Public Projects and Its Response to the Federal Road Aid Acts of 1916 and 1921 229
Martin T. Olliff
9. “From Nothin’ to Somethin’”: The Tennessee Valley Authority and Federal-Local Cooperation in the Sun Belt South, 1940–1960 261
Matthew L. Downs
10. Lighting the “Dark and Evil World”: Judge J. Smith Henley, Arkansas, and the Federal Judiciary’s Reform of the Southern Prison 287
Gregory L. Richard
Part V. Tax Fury and the Tea Party
11. The Tea Party in the South: Populism Revisited? 303
Allan B. McBride
12. Deal or No Deal: Taxes, Government Spending, and Alabamians Having Their Cake and Eating It Too 325
Natalie Motise Davis
List of Contributors 343
Index 345
