Canada and the United States
This is such a good book to read that it seems
churlish to conciude that it could have been improved
by more professional copyediting. There are some
basic errors of fact. Theodore Roosevelt was not
elected President in 1901, for example (p. 151); he
succeeded the assassinated McKinley. Similarly, Nikita
Kruschchev invaded Hungary in 1956, not 1958 (p.
265). The gremlins did something odd to "Eastland"
(p. 190) and were active elsewhere. Nevertheless, these
are minor blemishes in what is a well-crafted, passionate study of three worthy southerners.
JOHN SALMOND
La Trobe University
MATTHEW D. LASSITER and ANDREW B. LEWIS, editors.
The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School
Desegregation in Virginia. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia. 1998. Pp. xv, 251. Cloth $49.50,
paper $18.50.
The Supreme Court's epic pronouncement in Brown v.
Board of Education (1954) that "separate-but-equal"
public schools were "inherently unequal," and its
subsequent decision in 1955 to implement desegregation "with all deliberate speed," evoked a full spectrum
of reactions among white southerners ranging from
grudging acceptance to outright hostility or "massive
resistance." Virginia, as it happens, was witness to the
entire range, and thus has been, and continues to be,
an excellent state for a case study. Previous work on
Virginia—and, more generally, on the civil rights
movement in the South—has tended to concentrate on
elites of both races and, more recently, on the behavior
of ordinary African Americans. But middle-class white
southerners, for the most part, have been left out of
the story. This collection of essays by former students
of Paul M. Gaston (to whom the book is dedicated)
attempts to redress the imbalance and, by and large,
succeeds admirably.
The book consists of a "Memoir" by Gaston, recalling his early days as an instructor in history at the
University of Virginia in the late 1950s, an introduction by editors Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B.
Lewis, and six substantive chapters. The editors' introduction provider a useful road map to the previous
literature and to the rest of the volume, putting forth
the main themes and actors. The critical question
addressed throughout the book is this: why did Virginia adopt a formal policy of massive resistance to
Brown in the late 1950s, only to see the policy crumble
a short time later, albeit with the crucial exception of
Prince Edward County? The answer, according to the
contributors, resides primarily in the state's geographically uneven racial make-up and in the behavior of
"moderate" southern whites who did not wish to
sacrifice their public schools on the altar of segregation. In the language of economics, the "demand" for
segregation was a negative function of the perceived
price of maintaining it (the loss of public education).
Chapter one, by J. Douglas Smith, examines the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 249
behavior of Armistead Lloyd Boothe who, as a middleaged lawyer from Alexandria, entered the Virginia
legislature for the first time in 1948. Like virtually all
of his colleagues, Boothe derived his political support
from the `Byrd Organization," a political machine that
reflected the philosophy—fiscal conservatism—of its
founder, Senator Harry Byrd, Sr., and was kept in
power by an extremely small portion of the Virginia
electorate. Ahead of his time, Boothe steered a narrow
course, at times working hard to demonstrate to his
colleagues the disadvantages of maintaining Jim Crow
at all costs, yet at other times going along with the
resisters (such as voting in favor of interposition) for
somewhat murky political motives.
Chapter two, by Joseph J. Thorndike, examines one
of the stranger aspects of massive resistance in Virginia: the campaign for interposition spearheaded by
James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News
Leader. A rather sorry doctrine on constitutional
grounds when it was first invoked by John C. Calhoun
before the Civil War, interposition called on state
legislatures to nullify Supreme Court (or other federal
decisions) when they appeared to abrogate the power
of states. Kilpatrick tried to promote interposition as a
matter of "states rights" but ultimately failed to garner
the support he wanted—primarily, it seems, because
he would not (or could not) transcend the obvious
racial subtext.
Chapter three, by Lewis, relates events surrounding
massive resistance in Charlottesville, home of the
University of Virginia. Two groups fought for political
support in the wake of school closings ordered by
Governor Lindsay Almond in the fall of 1958: the
Charlottesville Educational Foundation (CEF), which
sought to substitute a system of segregated private
schools supported by state funds for public schools,
and the Parents' Committee for Emergency Schooling
(PCES), a group organized by ten mothers who set up
a system of temporary public schools to be disbanded
when the public schools were reopened, even if they
were to be integrated at that time. The PCES emphasis
on "saving the public schools" eventually won the day
by attracting the allegiance of moderate whites opposed to school closings, but the narrowness of the
group's vision did little, in Lewis's view, to prepare
white parents for the eventuality of integration. Chapter four, by James H. Hershman, Jr., continues in a
similar vein, describing how various groups helped
organize moderate whites in opposing school closings
in Norfolk and elsewhere.
Chapter five, by Amy E. Murrell, is perhaps the most
interenting; it deals with the difficult case of Prince
Edward County. Located in Virginia's black belt with a
near black majority population (forty-five percent) in
the late 1950s, the county's board of supervisors was
the only one to take massive resistance to its (unfortunate) logical conclusion when faced with courtordered desegregation in 1959: it abolished its public
schools. A makeshift system of private schools (complete with private funding) was cobbled together for
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250
Reviews of Books
whites and appears to have worked tolerably well; but
black children were largely left out in the Gold, their
parents unable to muster the same level of financial
support as their white counterparts. The public schools
remained closed until May of 1964, when the Supreme
Court declared that the board of supervisors' decision
had violated the Fourteenth Amendment and ordered
the county to open desegregated public schools in the
fall of 1964. Chapter six, by Lassiter, concludes the
book with an appraisal of the efforts by the journalist
Benjamin Muse to convince his fellow southern whites
of the inevitability of desegregation and to encourage
what he believed was a "silent majority" of moderates
to speak out against school closings.
This volume has a few faults. As a group, the essays
have a tendency to see the empirical trees at the
expense of the theoretical forest; that is, the authors
do not situate their work in the context of a model (or
models) of strategie behavior, and therefore, the rich
interplay among different strategies and how they
might have interacted to form a counterfactual sequence of historical events is only occasionally revealed. This is not idle, ahistorical criticism. As recent
works by Avner Grief, Barry R. Weingast, and others
have shown, it is entirely possible to use techniques of
modern game theory to illuminate why different actors—in the current context, moderate whites, the
Byrd organization, and so on—might choose certain
tactics at certain points in time so as to produce a
particular sequence of events (observed or unobserved). The overriding sense one gets from reading
these essays is that moderate whites were acutely
aware of the tradeoff between maintaining a commitment to racial segregation in public schools and not
having public schools at all. Where and when they were
successful depended partly on luck, partly on timing,
and partly on factors not in their control (e.g. racial
composition, the federal courts), but the precise links
among these different factors are not altogether clear
in different settings. In fairness to the authors, the fact
that only Prince Edward County chose to abolish
public schools makes it very difficult, if not impossible,
to draw general conclusions along these lines. Specialists in the economics of education who happen upon
Murrell's fascinating chapter on the Prince Edward
County case will almost certainly crave more information on the effects of the school shutdown. Murrell
suggests at various points that these effects were
severe, but she does not provide direct evidence. For
example, were the black children subjected to the
Prince Edward shutdown permanently harmed in
terras of furthering their education and, ultimately,
their incomes? Answering such questions, however,
would have necessitated considerable additional research and a rather different research strategy than a
recounting of historical events.
These criticisms are minor ones. Well-written and
thoroughly researched, these essays are required reading for specialists in the civil rights movement, and a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
fitting tribute to the man whose life and work inspired
them.
ROBERT A. MARGO
Vanderbilt University and
National Bureau of Economic Research
R. HOWARD. The Shifting Wind: The Supreme
Court and Civil Rights from Reconstruction to Brown.
JOHN
(SUNY Series in Afro-American Studies.) Albany:
State University of New York Press. 1999. Pp. vii, 393.
$23.95.
This book offers an excellent introduction to the
Supreme Court's role in the development of civil rights
for African Americans. John R. Howard packs a lot of
detail into his compact chronological analysis of civil
rights cases from Reconstruction to post-Brown affirmative action decisions. Individual court cases are
carefully grounded in the political and racial climate of
their times. The issues at stake are clear; plaintiffs and
defendants emerge as real people. The legal analysis is
a model of clarity, which any upper-level undergraduate can understand. Howard chronicles the more important and familiar cases— Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896),
the Scottsboro cases (1931), Sweatt, Brown vs. the
Board of Education (1954)—in depth and covers numerous others that are not so easily recognized. Although he covers familiar ground already well-plowed
by Loren Miller's The Petitioners: The Story of the
Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro
(1966); Donald G. Nieman's Promises to Keep: African
Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the
Present (1991); Charles Lofgren's The Plessy Case: A
Legal-Historical Interpretation (1987); and Richard
Kluger's Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board
of Education (1976), among many others, Howard's
emphasis on the racial views of individual justices
makes this book compelling reading for the specialist
as well as the generalist.
Howard employs small-group theory to demonstrate
his main point: the racial assumptions of one justice
may affect the dynamics of the entire court and thus
determine—for good or ill—how cases are decided.
Joseph Bradley's domination of Chief Justice Morrison Waite, Howard argues, for example, imposed
Bradley's racist, formalistic interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments and Enforcement Acts on
the court, even though Waite was personally committed to expanded opportunities for African Americans.
Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly influenced Chief
Justice G. Edward White, but the addition of Charles
Evans Hughes to the Supreme Court bench provided
the counterweight that enabled the court to decide
favorably for blacks in McCabe v. Atchison (1914) and
again in the grandfather clause case, Guinn v. U.S.
(1915). While it is no surprise that judicial prejudices
shape constitutional law, Howard's sweeping chronological analysis makes the point dramatically. The
author piles on the evidence to demonstrate that
Supreme Court holdings on race and rights were
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