The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson. By William E. Leuchtenburg. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 668. $45.00, ISBN 0-8071-3079-6.)

In this insightful book, William E. Leuchtenburg makes a strong case for the role of individuals in converting social forces into making change, the importance of place in shaping those individuals, and the conviction that political history remains "of abiding importance" (p. 2).

He tells in detail how Franklin D. Roosevelt developed a sense of connection with and affection for Georgia after his initial visit in 1924 to Warm Springs in the quest for physical restoration from the ravages of polio. FDR quickly got to know people. From conversations and personal observations, he developed an understanding of the depth of poverty in the region that flowed from economic devastation still related to the losses and aftermath of the Civil War. Roosevelt left to wife Eleanor, who had direct ancestral relations with Georgia slave owners, the role of active champion of the African American quest for civil rights. But FDR and his New Dealers broke loose from the pull of the past and created a climate for change, which "shook established racial patterns," sometimes heeded "demands for greater equality," and "deeply angered the guardians of white supremacy" (p. 55).

Harry S Truman, although rooted by geography and kinship ties to a part of Missouri strongly pro-Confederate, reacted strongly out of personal conviction to stories of black veterans returning home to the South after World War II and being subjected to racial violence based on a lack of subservience to whites. In a 1947 speech "that sent chills through the white South," Truman told a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People rally at the Lincoln memorial, broadcast worldwide by radio, "The extension of civil rights today means, not protection of the people against the government, but protection of the people by the government. We must make the Federal Government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans. And ... I mean all Americans" (p. 171).

Leuchtenburg argues persuasively that in making civil rights for the first time since Reconstruction a proper concern for the national government and the Democratic Party "the main protagonist for the rights of blacks" for the first time ever, Truman made possible "the much more far-reaching changes wrought by Lyndon Johnson" (p. 371).

But Johnson, like Truman in never fully dropping the word nigger from his vocabulary, combined conviction, political skill, and finesse, and a willingness to fully use the power of the presidency, to push and cajole Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He instructed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, "I want you to write the goddamnedest toughest voting rights act that you can devise." But Johnson also understood the need to overcome the effects of past discrimination as "the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights" (p. 335). And unlike prominent academics and others who believed that full access to the ballot by blacks in the South would lead to long-term progressive political dominance, LBJ foresaw the subsequent move to Republican dominance rooted in a race-based "southern strategy."

Although Leuchtenburg characterizes Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "closet racist" who contributed little, he overlooks the role of his attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., who possessed a quiet passion for civil rights linked to an equally quiet pride in his kinship with suffragist leader Susan Brownell Anthony (p. 415). Brownell played a major role in gaining the appointment of a heroic band of progressive Republican judges who played the key role in the Deep South in transforming Brown v. Board of Education (1954) into a broad mandate for racial equality. Judges such as Elbert Tuttle of Georgia, John Minor Wisdom of Louisiana, John R. Brown of Texas, and Frank M. Johnson Jr. of Alabama established legal principles that the Supreme Court accepted and that buttressed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The author's 114 pages of endnotes reflect extensive and exhaustive research that includes another 98 pages of references to manuscripts, oral histories, books, articles, and published and unpublished essays that are cited throughout the text.

As the South continues to play out its regional destiny that remains linked to a unique history within the American experience, Leuchtenburg provides an insightful examination and clarification of the linked roles of three presidents deeply connected to the region in its more recent period of historic transformation.

JACK BASS

College of Charleston