Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. (Book Reviews).

Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. By Pete Daniel. (Chapel Hill and London: Published by the University of North Carolina Press for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., c. 2000. Pp. xiv, 378. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4848-4; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2537-9.)

Lost Revolutions traces three interconnected movements during the decade of the 1950s: the decline of labor-intensive agriculture; the dawning of the civil rights movement; and working-class cultural achievements in popular music and stock car racing. The revolutions lost consisted of grassroots efforts, mainly by poor whites and blacks, to occupy separate space for themselves within southern life. The revolutions were "lost" because the federal government acted slowly and ineptly to enforce integration and encouraged chemical and mechanical agriculture that displaced tenants and small farmers while polluting the land with toxic chemicals. The cultural revolutions fared little better, though their villain was not so much the federal government as corporate America, which co-opted, mainstreamed, sanitized, and bastardized popular music and stock car racing.

The story of the displacement of eleven million southerners forced off the land in the two decades after the Second World War is a familiar one. In fact, Daniel himself described the origins of that great migration in an earlier book, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana, 1985). Gone from this new version of the story is Daniel's earlier sense of the inevitability of displacement. Reading Lost Revolutions, one could easily conclude that had USDA policy been different, small black farms might still be scattered across the South.

The current book effectively connects the trend toward agricultural displacement with racial change. Creating anxiety among displaced poor whites and hope for a better day among displaced poor blacks, the civil rights movement worked in contradictory ways. The racial villains in Daniel's story, however, are not poor whites, but rather their middle- and upper-class cohorts. By focusing mainly on Citizens' Councils and less on the Klan and unorganized violence, he accurately reveals the interaction of fundamentalist Christianity, patriarchy, and social/economic conservatism. Perhaps, in fact, Daniel exonerates poor whites too easily. Although one can be critical of Citizens' Councils members who used economic reprisals to defeat black activists and only reluctantly raised their voices against overt violence, there is nonetheless a substantial difference between such policies and the violence organized and perpetrated by people such as the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, rubber worker and KKK Grand Dragon Robert G. Shelton or the men accused of bombing Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. On occasion Daniel strays perilously close to romanticizing white working-class culture. Among white racial attitudes across all class lines, there seems to be precious little that is good to choose from during the 1950s.

Daniel does reveal the complexity of white reaction to racial change and the courageous and usually costly stand of individual white and black ministers, teachers, and students. It is notable, perhaps, that virtually all his white heroes and heroines came from the middle and upper classes. On the other hand, one of the book's strengths is its revelation of the key role played by white-controlled state farm bureaus and land-grant universities in actively supporting segregation and attempting to stifle black protest. Well researched (like all of the book), this is an especially revealing episode of government and middle-class support for segregation.

Equally revealing are Daniel's essays on stock car racing and southern popular music. Racing evolved from a 1950s poor-white, male-dominated, bootlegging culture to the sanitized NASCAR craze of the 1970s. And African American rhythm and blues joined with white country music to provide the nation with rock `n' roll, though it too was manipulated by recording companies. These chapters are some of the strongest in a book that is sometimes episodic, as if the chapters were written as separate essays to present as professional papers. This makes for splendid, tightly constructed elements but without comprehensive coverage.

One last word of warning. Those who take the book's subtitle, The South in the 1950s, literally will be disappointed. The study deals only with the three interconnected movements described earlier. For instance, discussion of religion deals only with the issue of race. Billy Graham and Oral Roberts, arguably the two most influential American religious figures of the decade, appear nowhere in the book. Neither does college football, the sport of choice before the coming of professional athletics to the South. Nor do the seeds of modern Sun Belt business and industry, the South according to Southern Living, the rise of suburban Republicanism, or other middle- or upper-class trends. The reader will need to remember that many of these 1950s "revolutions" were won, not lost. In short, the history of the 1950s South remains to be written. But within the strict boundaries of Daniel's self-described mission, he has broken hard and rocky ground.