Harvard historian Sullivan carefully details the impact of
Roosevelt's later New Deal in the Old South, noting that any step
forward often meant two steps back. A case in point, she writes,
was Roosevelt's 1936 industrial-union program, spearheaded by the
CIO, which "threatened to undermine the region's tradition of
low-wage, nonunion industries" and stirred up heated opposistion.
Efforts by influential northern blacks to hasten civil-rights
advances in the South also aroused considerable opposition; when
Roosevelt failed to pack the Supreme Court in his second term,
Sullivan notes, southern Democrats (with the notable exception of
longtime Florida senator Claude Pepper) allied with Republicans to
block reform in the region and eventually to remake the Democratic
party as a more conservative, anticommunist entity in the postwar
era. Other incidents that contributed to a profound white backlash
in the South included the famed Scottsboro case of 1930, which drew
national attention to the region for a decade, and the Harlan
County coal strike of the mid-1930s, to which Sullivan brings fresh
insights based on recent documentary work on labor organizing. Of
special interest to students of contemporary politics is Sullivan's
examination of Henry Wallace's third-party presidential bid in
1948, a campaign that in the author's view, taken with earlier New
Deal programs, prefigured Southern civil-rights agitation in later
decades; as she writes, "although little, if any, memory of the New
Deal years informed the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the
activists of the earlier decades tilled the ground for future
change." Ultimately, Sullivan notes, civil-rights advances were
furthered by African-Americans' participation in WW II, when
soldiers who had fought against fascism abroad began to agitate for
democracy at home. A dry and sometimes narrow work of history,
meant for a specialist audience. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the 1930s and 1940s, a loose alliance of blacks and whites,
individuals and organizations, came together to offer a radical
alternative to southern conservative politics. In "Days of Hope,"
Patricia Sullivan traces the rise and fall of this movement. Using
oral interviews with participants in this movement as well as
documentary sources, she demonstrates that the New Deal era
inspired a coalition of liberals, black activists, labor
organizers, and Communist Party workers who sought to secure the
New Deal's social and economic reforms by broadening the base of
political participation in the South. From its origins in a
nationwide campaign to abolish the poll tax, the initiative to
expand democracy in the South developed into a regional drive to
register voters and elect liberals to Congress. The NAACP, the CIO
Political Action Committee, and the Southern Conference for Human
Welfare coordinated this effort, which combined local activism with
national strategic planning. Although it dramatically increased
black voter registration and led to some electoral successes, the
movement ultimately faltered, according to Sullivan, because the
anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War and a militant backlash from
segregationists fractured the coalition and marginalized southern
radicals. Nevertheless, the story of this campaign invites a fuller
consideration of the possibilities and constraints that have shaped
the struggle for racial democracy in America since the 1930s.
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