John Egerton’s now-classic The Americanization of Dixie from 1974 is a top-notch journalist’s examination of the late Civil Rights to post-Civil Right South. Egerton’s expository prose carries us all over the South with overarching topics serving as the organizational structure for his chapters. A strength of this journalist’s narrative is its accessibility, which makes for easier reading. (Had a historian or sociologist taken the same subject and framework, we’d have an altogether different book.)

The book opens by carrying us to a convention of Southern historians. This event gives him a chance to wax philosophic about the state of the South and to remark that this kind of gathering is only possible because of the belief in Southern exceptionalism. (He doesn’t use that term, but that’s what he’s talking about.) If Southerners didn’t buy into the myth of being distinctive from other Americans, there would be no Southern writers, Southern historians, etc.

After that introduction, the first of the chapters discusses “Agriculture,” followed by one about “Land.” That initial discussion features a generational small farmer who is being bested by corporate operations, yet he still works to create the circumstances for family to keep their farm going. That theme continues in chapter two as we read about the negative effects of a Tennessee Valley Authority project that did not respect the local people, their values, and their heritage when creating a huge recreation area— basically, a massive park. In both chapters, we read about the negative effects of what the national narrative would call “improvements” or “progress.”

Those two chapters are followed by one on “Education.” The year 1974 being what it was, the hyperfocus of the chapter was on integration, using Greenville, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Nashville, Tennessee as examples. The Swann ruling had come down only a few year earlier, and Nixon was still in The White House. Despite fifty years now passed, the arguments we read about were basically the same: equity and opportunity, social class and housing patterns, haves and have nots. Egerton lays what was revealed about the actual practice of integration. Pulling off that scab of race showed how deep the wound was, how affluent whites could flee, how housing was part of the equation, how black teachers and principals would be affected, how politicians built careers on the melee, and even how the North was just as guilty of segregation as the South was. When the Brown ruling could no longer be avoided, resistance took the form of tokenism, feigned compliance, and segregation academies. Egerton’s conclusion in the chapter has proven, ultimately, to be spot on: the South had some racially integrated schools for time, but that in itself didn’t accomplish much in the way of true societal progress.

Moving on to “Industry,” Egerton introduces us to “The New Carpetbaggers.” This chapter opens with amalgam of facts and figures. His narrative centers on the idea that the South needed the injection of Northern capital, but it also on the narrative that it lost its character when poverty and rural isolation were somewhat remedied. Unfortunately, he devotes most of the chapter to an over-long story about a friend’s rambling tale of international business. His point seems to be that the South of the early 1970s was the then-current place for corporate colonization and exploitation.

In this discussion, Egerton remarks briefly upon the Agrarians, and though that group is often criticized today as a gaggle of racists and neophobes, the current situation is exactly the kind of thing they warned against. The South, they believed, would be at its best if the region remained rural and bucolic, avoiding industry. They lost the culture war, badly, but most honest people today acknowledge that buying cheap stuff, discarding it, then buying more is a practice that is destroying the planet . . . and our humanity.

Which brings us to “Politics,” a chapter that was more thorough, more developed, and more interesting. This was the very beginning of the period of flux when the “Solid South” of the Democrats was falling apart but the Republicans hadn’t yet made the region fully their own. The early pages are devoted to Richard Nixon, whose Southern Strategy was big news after this 1972 re-election victory. Mid-chapter, he writes about the changing faces of Southern politics as more Republicans and blacks appeared in elective offices. Yet, it was this passage on the actually diversity of the Southern electorate that caught my attention:

The turbulence [of a changing political landscape that needs to encompass affluent whites, poor whites, and all blacks] remains as new factions emerge and splinter— there are old-line conservative Democrats, New Deal liberals, old-guard Republicans, progressive urban Republicans, populist Democrats, Wallaceites, women and youth groups that nearly constitute independent forces, blacks Democrats, black third-party groups, and even blacks for Nixon. All that is reflective of national trends, and it is fractious and confusing, but in the South, at least, it is certainly more to be desired than the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule.

Myths and beliefs about the pre-Civil Rights South have said that there was one kind of Southern voter, but that wasn’t true. Looking at modern times, states like Georgia and North Carolina have something resembling two-party politics, but politically most Southern states returned to “the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule” in the 2010s.

Another remarkable passage within this chapter is Egerton’s description of the populist voter, back then considered a “Wallace voter.” He describes “the average American,” a white working-class man who feels “intimidated and victimized by bigness,” e.g. corporations, the federal government, major cities. He considers himself “conservative” and “old-fashioned.” This voter’s male-centered, white-focused values center on a particular formula of patriotism, hard work, and intolerance of countercultural forces, like women’s liberation, civil rights protestors, and rebellious youth. His other foes are the ones who fashion his life with their policies and practices, like bankers, union leaders, politicians, and intellectuals. In short, this guy (and probably his wife and friends) believe that they are under attack from all sides, that the rich and powerful are out to railroad him, and that the strange, the poor, and the non-whites are trying to destroy everything they understand. This may have been the Wallace voter in the early 1970s, but it is definitely also the Southern populist Republican voter of the late 2010s to mid-2020s.

Next, in “Cities,” Egerton makes the same flub that he did in “Industry.” He spent the whole chapter on Columbia, South Carolina and barely anything else. Nothing against Columbia, but I can’t think of a single Southern city that’s indicative of most Southern cities. However, the writer answered my concerns somewhat with this:

Something is happening in Columbia – something not unlike what is happening in cities all over the nation – that confuses and frustrates and discourages people, segregationists and integrationists and separatists alike. There are so many manifestations of the malaise that it is almost impossible to describe it, but what is happening is something like this: desegregation has arrived, but inequality persists, and so do friction and hostility and discord. Neither those who sought the demise of segregation nor those who resisted it are pleased with what is now taking place.

To elaborate, other portions of the chapter get into the nuances of the school board and the local chamber, school choice and the dissatisfaction that breeds calls for it. Connecting these facts to the theme of Americanization, we learn that there were 153 cities of 100,000 people or more in the US, and 46 of them were in the South. Some were already experiencing “runaway growth,” like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta. Which would mean that the problems won’t be fixed, they’ll just be bigger and more concentrated.

Finally, in “Culture,” Egerton returns to covering a lot of material in relatively few pages. He starts with the harsh assessments of HL Mencken, then moves on to college football at Ole Miss, countercultural communes like Koinonia and The Farm, and the Southern Baptists. He opens by refuting the “Sahara of the Bozarts” myth. No, Southern culture is rich and deep, even though it is not grounded in the same ways as wealthy Northern cities. Among other topics are a traveling preacher named the Goat Man and boxer Joe Frazier’s purchase of an former cotton plantation for his mother. Egerton also gives us glimpses into the South’s über-religious young “Jesus freaks.” Finally, he lands on the ways that national media and entertainment – movies, music, TV – have affected Southerners. There’s also the region’s big export: country music, which was rising steadily in popularity all over the nation.

The epilogue, which is pretty ephemeral, switches back and forth between a narrative of the writer’s trip home (which is noted in regular font) and paragraph-long tidbits that summarize his findings (which are noted in italics). His point in all of it seems to be that the massive degree of change experienced by the South in the 1950s and ’60s was having results that were more like shuffling the deck than garnering  a winning hand. Certainly, the region was becoming less exceptional and more mainstream, but the effects were not all positive, even for the people who sought and got the changes. In The Americanization of Dixie, John Egerton offers a narrative that is more complex than the common one shared today about the Civil Rights movement being an unequivocal victory in all ways. In this one, there were winners and losers on both sides.

Reviewed by Foster Dickson, editor of Nobody’s Home