| "New South Nation" tells the story of the generation of white southern men who restored the South to national power in the half-century after the Civil War. It traces the lives of a central cast of characters---including the editor Josephus Daniels, the publisher Walter Hines Page, the businessman William McAdoo, and the educator-turned-politician Woodrow Wilson---from their Reconstruction childhoods to their adult careers as they navigated currents of race, region, and power in their search to make the South once again relevant in national politics. While various characters move in and out of the narrative---from university president Edwin A. Alderman to Texas Representative Albert S. Burleson, from novelist Thomas Dixon to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams---what remains constant is a worldview shaped in Reconstruction, a progressive vision of an educated New South, a dedication to white supremacy, and a belief in their own destiny to define the South's new place in the republic.;Coming of age in the 1880s and coming to power in the 1890s, this generation forged a new political and racial order in the South by the early twentieth century. Some had remained at home to promote this New South, while others, who had left their native region for professional opportunities elsewhere, protected their gains from afar. Wilson's election in 1912 brought them back together and placed them in national power. Fully half of his Cabinet hailed from Dixie, and their arrival in the District of Columbia represented national reunion. For the next eight years, whether imposing racial segregation in the federal departments or pushing their brand of progressive politics, these men returned the South to the political mainstream. In effect, they transformed the New Freedom into a New South Freedom, and when the United States joined World War I, they had a chance to introduce their New South ideology to the world. These men nationalized the South, they southernized the nation, and they applied their childhood lessons of political and racial order to their vision of a post-World War I world. "New South Nation" tells the story of the South rising again. It explores the difference these white southern men made in shaping the American century. |
