Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture.

By Peter Applebome Times Books, $25

The old man's eyes were watery, his Coke can halfempty, the soggy Garcia y Vega cigar unlit. He grimaced, and shifted his gaunt frame, awkwardly adjusting his synthetic gray suit coat. George Wallace was in pain, of course; had been, constantly, since that day in 1972 when a would-be assassin fired five bullets into him. It was an autumn morning last year--the kind of warm but brisk Southern fall day natives call "sweater weather"--and I was in Montgomery to meet the ancient former Alabama governor. The voice that had once so effectively taunted "pointyheaded pseudo-intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight" was gone now, replaced by the hoarsest of whispers; disease had gnawed away at his throat.

But glory was not far from his mind--or his gaze. Dominating the office was a huge oil portrait of virile Wallace in his prime. His hair was coal-black, slicked into a pompadour; he wore a skinny, early sixties tie; most important, he stood before a blood-red Alabama flag and the gubernatorial seal. And so history blended with legend, as it does so often in the old Confederacy. The fact of the old man trapped in a steel wheelchair, rasping out words, dueled with the mythic image of power. I was there to try to reconstruct how Wallace had played the press, and I asked him whether, with the benefit of years, he thought national reporters had had the story of the South in the fifties and sixties right. Did they get it? "I don't think they ever understood the South," he wheezed, pulling at his can of Coca-Cola. "Course, they understood more after I ran for president. They understood a lot more then."

That is dead-on history. It's become something of a cliche to point out that the South may have really won the Civil War: The center of political power has moved, along with millions of people, from the Northeast corridor and the industrial Midwest to the shiny suburbs of the Sunbelt. States' rights has become respectable: Now it's called "devolution." The fire-eating rhetoric that led to Sumter is now relatively common, even in moderate Democratic circles. Meanwhile, Southerners dominate politics: The President is an Arkansan, the vice president a Tennessean, the speaker of the House a Georgian, the Senate majority leader a Mississippian. And so to understand America, you must first understand the South.

That is Peter Applebome's thesis, and there are few journalists at work in the country today better qualified to take us South again, and to try to make sense of the nation's most perplexing--and now most important--place. The veteran Atlanta bureau chief of The New York Times, Applebome is a diligent reporter and an elegant writer. His knowing dispatches have long educated national readers about the land of Carter and Clinton, a region particularly susceptible to quick, and confusing, caricature. (This is a culture, after all, that gave us both To Kill a Mockingbird and "The Dukes of Hazzard.") For people still attempting to dope out what, exactly, is "Southern," or whether there is a "New South," or whether there is still a distinctive regional identity lurking in a world, as Applebome puts it, of Bennigan's and Blockbusters, this book is the perfect primer.

It joins a large literature on just these questions. (The South and its native sons are nothing if not selfabsorbed.) The best, perhaps, is John Egerton's 1973 book The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. As Applebome notes, the second half of the title is much-overlooked, but is actually more intriguing now: The country's habits of life and mind are increasingly Southern. You may not drawl, but you think, and live, a lot like those of us (I'm from Chattanooga) who do. People in Hartford or Sacramento can deny it all they like, but a growing majority of Americans share Southern characteristics:--they are basically decent, anxious not to be bothered either by government or other "outsiders," and all too vulnerable to giving into their worst instincts toward racism and bigotry. For over a century, it's been generally thought that the redemption of the South would come only when it adopted the customs of the North. But today the country could learn important lessons from Southern history, and from Southerners.

The region must be dealt with; the numbers demand it. Applebome musters an impressive roster of statistics. Between 1970 and 1990, the 11 states of the old Confederacy grew at twice the national rate, which in turn increased the South's congressional base--it's gained 17 seats in the House since 1960, while states like New York and Massachusetts have lost representation. Applebome makes an interesting point about the electoral college--a presidential candidate could now win the White House by carrying precisely the same states Nixon did when he lost to John Kennedy in 1960. There is popular culture, too: Nashville is now churning out middleclass hits, and Applebome notes that family vacation spots like Orlando and Myrtle Beach are the Catskills and Coney Islands of the nineties. Then there's the cash flow. In 1993, over half of the nation's new jobs were created in the South; eight of the top 10 states in terms of manufacturing growth were in the old Confederacy, too.

Politics and race are the two great verities of Southern life. Southerners and outsiders alike usually make two glib assumptions about both subjects: that the old Confederacy is reflexively anti-government and that it is riven with racial divisions. But the truth is more complicated, and if the South truly understood the rhythms of its own culture, it could push the country forward on both counts. True, it won't be easy. Applebome smartly profiles Cobb County, Georgia--Newt Gingrich's district--where conservative sentiment is as thick as kudzu. But Cobb is a top per-capita recipient of federal dollars (third in the nation, in fact, trailing only the districts that host the Pentagon and the Kennedy Space Center). This is a common scene across the South: people inveighing against Washington, muttering--in the most respectable, buttoned-down and bourbon-sipping company--about the Clintons and the liberals. But these folks ought to be reminded of FDR or the new highway out in the county or defense contracts. Then the mood would brighten, and talk would turn to prosperity and good times.

From electrifying the countryside to building airports, interstates, and military bases, it was government, of course, that transformed the Cotton Belt into the Sunbelt. And Southerners, who are rather like the Romans--they worship their ancestors and revere, sometimes too much, the past--instinctively understand that. They ought to be capable of making distinctions about good government and bad government, when a program should go away and when it should be sustained, for they have seen the best and worst of Washington in their backyards. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, did its job, but now hangs around, like a poor relation. If the country could come to a similarly judicious attitude about smart public enterprise--and if Southerners could stop being embarrassed by their own debt to government, and lead the way--we would all be much better off.

After all, the most spectacular example of sensible federal action came in the South during the civil rights era, and it represented the nation's most moving piece of shared history since World War II. Mining that experience could force an important change of heart about government generally. Of course, the movement provoked substantial white backlash at the time, and surely the current anti-Washington sentiment owes something to that. But thinking Southerners know that the real secret to the South's economic boom was the epic abolition of Jim Crow. The North should watch its moral high-handedness here: C. Vann Woodward famously documented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow the systematic exclusion of blacks from public life in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other Northern cities in the decades before the Civil War, and as late as the 1930s all of the border states, including Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Oklahoma, mandated some forms of segregation. And this was just legalized segregation. As Applebome points out, "[Today] blacks and whites certainly deal with one another more intimately and have more shared experience in Selma than in New York City."

The movement was a quintessential Southern story of struggle and redemption, and the guiding force for good was Washington. The same kind of thinking should be applied today to other problems: failing schools, the inner cities. It won't be as easy, of course. Courts could strike down segregation and can't very nimbly fix a neighborhood. But government should play some kind of role, and the country could learn from the example of the transformation of Dixie in the 40 years since Brown vs. Board of Education.

The South as national leader for good--it is, I admit, an unlikely thought. But given the pull of history, and demographics, it may be inevitable that the South will have the country's fate in its hands. The region dominated the nation once before, in its early years. Southerners authored the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and for 49 of the republic's first 72 years, a slaveholding Southerner was president of the United States; the Congress and the Supreme Court were heavily Southern. Lincoln ended all that, as he rightly ended so much else. But the region is stirring again. Instead of screwing it up once more by hurling ourselves into the ditch of racism and recrimination, it is essential that grace and generosity of spirit--the fictional South of Atticus Finch, the real South of Ralph McGill--triumph. Southerners have better manners, which isn't just a quaint affectation. We believe, with Jane Austen, that manners are morals.

The task is to take that understanding and apply it not only to private matters but to public ones. If we can do that in the deepest chambers of the old Confederacy, we can do it everywhere. Even Wallace, the old hater, is making the right noises. The end is coming, and he is campaigning for redemption. "Segregation was wrong, wrong," he'll gasp at you, hungry for forgiveness. On the 30th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, three decades after Wallace unleashed his troopers on men and women like John Lewis, the old governor joined hands with the Rev. Joseph Lowery and sang "We Shall Overcome" he cynical conversion of a dying old man? Probably. Better than nothing? Certainly. A sign of where the country's headed? Hopefully.

Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is Newsweek's national affairs editor.