Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement.

Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement. By Kent Redding. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2003. Pp. x, 180. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02808-2.)

Historians who have examined the disfranchisement campaigns in the South around 1900 have, in Kent Redding's view, focused their attention on why they occurred, rather than when and how. Redding is a sociologist, and he brings a new disciplinary perspective to the topic of southern disfranchisement. Not surprisingly, he is interested in the social relations that underpinned and shaped the political system, particularly the ways in which the leadership of the Democratic Party (later to become the political instrument for disfranchisement) mobilized electoral support. Focusing his investigation on North Carolina, Redding discovers that during the 1880s the state's Democratic Party was extremely decentralized, with its electoral organization based on local networks of influence at the county or even township level among leading men and their kin and neighbors. This "vertical" and local arrangement, institutionalized by the county government act of 1877, mobilized voters at the grass roots and obviated the need for central control of election issues and campaigns.

But in the 1890s the state's Democrats were confronted by an enormous challenge. As Redding tells it, the commercialization of agriculture and the emergence of social and economic issues that divided the party's overwhelmingly white base of support reinvigorated the state's minority Republican Party and also generated a new party, the Populists. After forming an electoral alliance, this anti-Democratic coalition succeeded in winning control of the state assembly in 1894 and again in 1896, when it also elected the governor. The key to the success of fusion was, so Redding suggests, its ability to mobilize support by a "horizontal" organization of blacks and farmers, in other words, by forging an incipient class-based insurgency that undermined the Democrats' top-down "vertical" structure. Humiliated by this reversal, North Carolina's Democrats countered massively in 1898; they reorganized the party into a centralized, statewide apparatus and invoked "white supremacy" as the rallying cry to overawe and split the fusionists' interracial and "horizontal" electoral structure. In this way, the Democrats politicized race and regained power, a process that was actually a lot less creative and innovative than the book's postmodernist title, Making Race, Making Power, suggests.

The study offers some interesting observations and insights about the Old North State's politics in the post-Reconstruction decades. Yet its major conclusion regarding rival parties' contrasting formulas for "vertical" and "horizontal" mobilization is less innovative than it seems, because the centrality of local "rings" and "courthouse cliques" to the post-Civil War Democratic Party has long been known and accepted by southern historians, as has the abortive attempt of the Farmers' Alliance and the Populists to form alliances with black farmers and black Republicans. As for its promise of an alternative explanation for when disfranchisement occurred, the study falls short. Remarkably, only four pages are devoted to origins and conduct of the actual campaign for disfranchisement in 1899-1900. In fact, the initiative for a disfranchising constitutional amendment followed immediately on the heels of the devastatingly successful "white supremacy" campaign aimed at regaining control of the state legislature. The Democrats' post-election momentum was so great that they could not possibly pass up the opportunity to destroy the Republicans and Populists, rather than let them live to fight another day. This explains the timing of disfranchisement, not the long and convoluted discussion of the social structure of North Carolina politics over the previous two decades. The latter provides insight into why and when the state's Democrats "played the race card" and rearranged their electoral strategy. But disfranchisement was an outgrowth of the 1898 campaign, not its raison d'etre.

University of Illinois at Chicago 

MICHAEL PERMAN