Ben Tillman amd the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. (Book Reviews).

Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction White of Supremacy. By Stephen Kantrowitz. The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. [x], 422. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4839-5; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2530-1.)

Stephen Kantrowitz has written an interesting, eloquent, and important study of Ben Tillman and his vision of white supremacy. Tillman is a larger-than-life figure who is well known to historians but little understood by them. Most often, Tillman provides a voice and a face--an ugly one at that--to the "revolt of the rednecks" that toppled elite Democratic rule and ushered in a reign of demagogues that blighted the South until recent times. Kantrowitz tells a very different story.

Tillman's life project, according to Kantrowitz, was the "reconstruction" of the white male monopoly on legitimate authority that had existed in his youth. Slavery and the white defense of it, Kantrowitz contends, were formative influences on Tillman. Born to a wealthy upcountry planter family in already notoriously violent Edgefield County, Tillman was steeped in the antebellum patriarchal order that defined white male privilege in terms of self-mastery and mastery over others, especially racial inferiors.

The reconstruction that Tillman sought "would take time and patience" (p. 41). Tillman first had to establish his mastery over the former slaves who staffed his farms. On the cotton frontier of Florida and then back in Edgefield, largely on the basis of inheritance, he became the lord of a dominion of many thousand acres. (How precisely he exercised his authority in this domain is not explored by Kantrowitz.) The type of mastery that Tillman sought required means beyond those that any individual planter possessed. Consequently, he became an officer in the terrorist campaign to establish white supremacy. Better than any previous study, Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman reveals the enduring significance of violence for politics in postbellum South Carolina. Not only did the Red Shirt campaign of 1876 crush the Democrats' opponents, but it also came to occupy a hallowed place in the historical memory of many whites--in none more so than Tillman's . For him, his membership in the Red Shirt militia was his moral equivalent to service as a soldier in the "Lost Cause."

Beginning in the 1880s (and in chapter 4 of Kantrowitz's book), Tillman emerged as a major force in state politics. His ascendancy flowed from his skills at mobilizing the resentments of farmers against the "money power" and parasitic "aristocrats." But aside from securing the establishment of Clemson University as a school for "white farmer boys," Tillman offered an "almost purely rhetorical ... vision of reform." Kantrowitz explains persuasively why Tillman so easily suffocated any radical Populist challenge in South Carolina: "[F]ew white men could articulate a critique of the social order," he argues, because Tillman had already defined and appropriated the language of "white manhood" that Populists and other dissidents sought to employ (p. 155).

The value and persuasiveness of Kantrowitz's interpretation become especially clear in his discussion of the remarkably violent rhetoric that surrounded Tillman's awkward system of state-run liquor retailers (the so-called dispensary system) Kantrowitz traces Tillman's motivations for this unprecedented extension of state authority (including surprisingly intrusive enforcement) to his intent to defuse the threat that prohibition posed to white supremacy. Similarly, we might wonder why the "voice of the people" would support constitutional reforms that threatened to disenfranchise poor whites. But there was no paradox. Suffrage restriction restored power and mastery to the same elites who had led the charge to defend slavery and then later against Reconstruction.

Having remade white supremacy in South Carolina, Tillman moved on to the U.S. Senate and to the "reconstruction" of the nation along similar white supremacist lines. "Pitchfork Ben" left little mark as a legislator, but he could be counted on like clockwork to vent extreme endorsements of lynching and the inviolable supremacy of whites. Kantrowitz contends that Tillman disseminated his paternalist and racist fantasies to a nation that was at once tantalized, shocked, and swayed by them.

Kantrowitz has written an ambitious book that succeeds in its goal of demonstrating how the discourse of gender and race became the political lexicon of white supremacy. He insists that "any real analysis of white supremacy" must "pay close attention to words and ideas" no less than "mechanisms of physical violence and economic coercion" (p. 3). Tillmanism, not Tillman, then, is Kantrowitz's subject.

No criticism is intended when I suggest that those interested in a conventional biography should turn elsewhere. Kantrowitz betrays little interest in the details of Tillman's life. Readers, for instance, will be surprised to learn that Tillman had a "beloved" daughter Addie; she is introduced and dies in the same sentence (p. 252). Likewise, Tillman is often virtually invisible in the first four chapters. Instead, he appears as a voiceless figure whose identity and agency is defined by his collective affiliations (e.g., landholders, slaveholders, Red Shirts). His ideas apparently were indistinguishable from those of his more articulate and visible comrades.

What this book does beg for is a complementary study of the sinews of Tillman's power. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that "deeds" have greater historical relevance than "words" but rather that the relationship of discourse to the mechanics of Tillman's power, patronage, organization, and policy merits further scrutiny. But when such a study is undertaken, and when other scholars revisit the other architects of postbellum white supremacy, they necessarily will begin with Kantrowitz's impressive study.