In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina.

In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina. By Charles J. Holden. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xii], 164. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-476-1.)

In this fine brief study of four South Carolina conservatives, Charles J. Holden seeks to establish the continuity of southern conservatism. Basing his analysis on manuscript and published writings, Holden traces the intellectual lives, in rough chronological order, of planter and college professor Frederick A. Porcher, lawyer and politician Edward McCrady Jr., writer Theodore D. Jervey Jr., and editor William Watts Ball. The historical breadth of Holden's study is wide, stretching from the antebellum period through 1948. He finds three core positions persisting throughout these years: support for white supremacy, opposition to the democratization of southern public life, and a tendency to use history to justify conservative beliefs. South Carolina conservatives, Holden writes, "believed that history proved beyond doubt that a local elite should rule a decentralized political system and that the white 'race' was superior" (p. 113).

Holden's treatments of the thinkers are exceedingly short (with the exception of Porcher), tending to leave his readers at once hungry for more and uncertain of the historical importance of his subjects. He provides no particular rationale for his choices other than their general representativeness. Holden argues that historians of conservatism have almost completely ignored the development of southern conservatism between 1860 and the 1920s and seeks to redress the balance. However, rather than placing southern conservatives in the context of the larger history of conservative thought in America, a more logical context is Eugene D. Genovese's recent history of southern conservatism, promulgated in works such as The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Genovese presents southern conservatives as severe and discerning critics of bourgeois liberalism, favoring a communal, family-based, and paternalistic social order as an alternative.

Holden would seem poised to test Genovese's argument, determining if such an anti-market republican tradition characterizes South Carolina conservatism. Holden fails to do this, and it is unclear whether his thinkers confirm Genovese's argument. Holden's thinkers did not envision the South as an organic society. Although they evince some symptoms of lingering paternalism, they were, in general, spokesmen for a tradition-based, elitist conservatism much cruder than Genovese's more sophisticated construct. The effort to thwart democracy (McCrady was, for example, a key advocate of disfranchising poor whites as well as blacks), secure the authority of Charleston and plantation-based elites, and strengthen white supremacy was the chief imperative of the four South Carolinians. Holden's conservatives seem primarily concerned, in the words of their inveterate political opponent Ben Tillman, "to get all they can, and keep all they get" (p. 60). As a critic of bourgeois liberalism who engaged in an intellectual flirtation with the Roman Catholic Church (a southern conservative predilection much in need of study) and reflected in interesting ways on the necessity of "forgetting" for southern social unity before the Civil War, Porcher is intriguing (p. 22). Yet, Porcher became an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism after the war and like the others seems to have adapted easily to Yankee commercial values. Holden's study is interesting and engaging and succeeds, in the end, in whetting the appetites of historians of conservatism for more in the future.

PAUL V. MURPHY 

Grand Valley State University