Jefferson Cowie Misunderstands Freedom
Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Energy, by Jefferson Cowie, Fundamental Books, 512 pages, $35
Jefferson Cowie is a prodigious researcher who typically exhibits sensitivity to historic complexities, and his narrative expertise shine. The Vanderbilt historian’s newest e-book, Freedom’s Dominion, is readable and infrequently provocative. But it surely superimposes a doubtful thesis about Southern historical past over the information, arguing that “land dispossession, slavery, energy, and oppression don’t stand in distinction to freedom—they’re expressions of it.”
By Cowie’s account, whites have repeatedly used the doctrine of states’ rights to justify their “freedom to dominate” others. The Southern worldview, he argues, was a doctrine of “racialized radical anti-statism,” which later unfold to the North and finally turned normalized within the fashionable Republican Social gathering.
Central to the e-book’s narrative is Barbour County, Alabama, and particularly its largest neighborhood, Eufaula—a spot Cowie regards as a microcosm of the white South, and to some extent white America. Whites in each Eufaula and the encompassing county first asserted their “freedom to dominate” by negating treaty ensures and occupying Creek tribal lands for themselves. In justifying their theft, the culprits, in collusion with Alabama’s main politicos, cited the sanctity of native management; Cowie calls this a “frenzy of racialized anti-statism.”
In Cowie’s narrative, one other alleged freedom—the “freedom to enslave”—animated Barbour County’s campaigns to scuttle each Reconstruction and plans for extra equitable land possession. As soon as whites had consolidated their energy by means of fraud and violence, they meticulously protected their model of “freedom” by means of such measures as Jim Crow legal guidelines, the convict leasing system, and lynching (“a uniquely sinister type of liberty: the liberty to take a life with impunity”). With the demise of Reconstruction, “freedom proved to be zero-sum: any enhance in Black freedom meant a lower in white freedom,” Cowie writes. “To talk of emancipation immediately with out historicizing and understanding efforts by whites to recapture their freedom to dominate, with out seeing how emancipation of African Individuals was made into the oppression of whites, is to fail to grasp a central downside of American historical past.”
All through the lengthy post-Reconstruction interval of “repose on questions of intervention within the South,” whites had little to worry from the federal authorities. The New Deal did not problem, and in some methods strengthened, oppression of African Individuals. Cowie argues that President Franklin Roosevelt needed to rely on highly effective Southern politicians to push by means of his program, and that that they had adequate clout to blunt anti-lynching payments and different threats to white supremacy.
Put up–World Battle II actions weaved collectively “racial conservatism and financial conservatism,” which might change into “linked to the purpose of being a single laissez-faire, freedom-loving ideology recognized merely as conservatism,” Cowie says. “Federal intervention of any sort—whether or not on lynching, segregation, voting or the regulation of the labor market—constituted a menace upon the sovereignty of a free individuals.”
The pivotal participant on this a part of Cowie’s story was Barbour County’s personal George C. Wallace, who as governor achieved fame for his invocations of “freedom” and states’ rights, together with his notorious 1963 stand within the schoolhouse door on the College of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his subsequent presidential campaigns, Cowie writes, Wallace pursued a “Northern technique” that carried his “racialized anti-statism” to “the blue-collar ethnics” and “the West.” Many of those Wallace voters quickly joined “the normal however right-moving Republican Social gathering,” creating “a political juggernaut.”
Freedom’s Dominion closes with a forceful plea for a brand new federal mission to “defend the civil and political rights on the native degree for all individuals—cries of freedom on the contrary be damned.”
A serious weak point of Cowie’s thesis is its deadly dependence on extremely subjective wordplay in regards to the that means of freedom. Regardless of some {qualifications} on the contrary, his e-book rests on the premise that white rhetoric in some sense corresponded to a coherent and constant perception system—that lynching, disenfranchisement, genocide, and Jim Crow represented a real, albeit twisted, variant of freedom that went past mere “ideological window dressing.”
However even when most white Southerners genuinely believed they had been champions of “freedom,” that does not make it true, any greater than it might be truthful to conclude that Stalinists had been legitimately advancing their purported ideas of “democracy” and “justice” once they defended the purge trials of the Thirties. Historians have an obligation to query acknowledged assumptions, together with these superior by self-interested whites in Barbour County.
Cowie’s personal reporting of salient information undermines the concept all that Southern verbiage aligned with a real, or remotely coherent, pro-freedom agenda, even one which reserves freedom to members of 1 race. That pretense was virtually routinely solid apart when it conflicted with comfort. As Cowie notes, for instance, the whites who dispossessed Creek lands rapidly dropped the concept of native management as soon as their actions provoked a battle that threatened their very survival: “This time, the states’rights, freedom-loving intruders turned desperately to the federal authorities to guard them from the issue that they themselves had created.”
A newer instance got here within the aftermath of the Supreme Courtroom’s 1954 determination in Brown v. Board of Training, which overturned racial segregation in public faculties. To evade college integration, Eufaula’s metropolis fathers used the federal Housing Act of 1949, a signature accomplishment of President Harry Truman’s Honest Deal, to obliterate a complete black neighborhood by means of eminent area. “Within the metropolis’s struggle towards crucial federal intervention in U.S. civil rights historical past,” Cowie factors out, “it armed itself with one other wing of federal energy.”
Whereas Cowie acknowledges the usually adverse penalties of New Deal and Honest Deal initiatives for African Individuals, equivalent to using slum-clearance applications to destroy black neighborhoods, he exhibits an unlucky tendency to make excuses for the liberals “who needed to enhance the lives of the poor.” They stored falling sufferer to “political restrictions,” or had been saddled with a “muddled mission,” or got inadequate “instruments and sources for getting the job executed.” If the following historical past of those applications is an indicator, Cowie would do higher to ask whether or not these failures had been endemic to the “mission” itself.
Equally, Cowie is all too prepared to provide Roosevelt, whom he credit with studying “the politics with horrible readability,” the advantage of the doubt for failing to press anti-lynching laws. When weighing the political calculus, Cowie concludes, the president had “an excessive amount of at stake—social safety, collective bargaining, honest labor requirements, housing, the Works Progress Administration, rural electrification, banking reform, and a bunch of different new authorities applications—to get behind race relations with any vigor.”
Such statements rationalize inaction by a president who, when he needed one thing, had a legendary knack for getting it. From 1937 to 1939, lopsided congressional majorities gave Roosevelt greater than adequate political alternative to each shield the New Deal and push a proposed anti-lynching invoice—if an anti-lynching invoice was really a precedence. However he by no means publicly got here out in assist. In 1940, his influential, conservative, and Southern vp, John Nance Garner, privately endorsed such a invoice. Roosevelt continued to do nothing.
Cowie additionally wrongly implies that the states’ rights doctrine was distinctive to the South. He fails to acknowledge, for instance, the vigorous assertion of that precept by Northern states within the 1850s by means of private liberty legal guidelines meant to undermine the Fugitive Slave Act. It’s telling that the time period states’ rights was virtually fully absent from Southern declarations for secession, which extra typically centered on a really totally different, and typically dynamically opposed, “compact concept”: The secessionists complained that the federal authorities had did not sufficiently implement the Structure’s Fugitive Slave Clause. Different revealing indicators of Accomplice insincerity and opportunism embody the knee-jerk opposition to secessionist actions in West Virginia and in Jones County, Mississippi. A lot later, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus confirmed his contempt for localism by overriding Little Rock’s determination to combine its faculties.
Cowie is aware of methods to inform an excellent story. And typically he hits the mark; his first chapters, coping with the expulsion of the Creek, are particularly properly executed. However his e-book grows weaker as its broader thesis in regards to the that means and utility of freedom turns into ever extra compelled and untenable.
