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Reviews of Books
members throughout the region-particularly those at
the Las Vegas Paiute Reservation-have taken advantage of the area's postwar economic shift toward
tourism.
This excellent work describes how the flexible
Southern Paiutes have maintained boundaries between
themselves and various groups of outsiders for more
than two centuries, while at the same time crossing
these boundaries to take advantage of the possibilities
afforded by the newcomers.
F. TODD SMITH
University of North Texas
RANDY J. SPARKS. Religion in Mississippi. (Heritage of
Mississippi Series, number 2.) Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, for the Mississippi Historical
Society, Jackson. 2001. Pp. xiv, 374. $40.00.
Historical generalizations always fall short of accuracy
and usually turn out to be unfair. Even so, the state of
Mississippi seems to keep on inviting such treatment.
This study of the history of the religious life of its
people convincingly demonstrates the necessity of
letting the evidence speak for itself.
Randy J. Sparks, native, member of a long-resident
family, and veteran student of religion in the Magnolia
State, calls attention to the vagaries of this phenomenon. To cite a few instances: in addition to its situation
on the old Southwest frontier, the state bestrides
boundaries and borders. Its beginnings suggested that
the population would be Roman Catholic, which
turned out to be far from true. Mississippi has always
differed from the Deep South states to the east and
from the adjacent southwestern states of Louisiana
and Arkansas. Surprises abound, and diversity is
greater than most are willing to grasp. Even so, the
evangelical Protestantism that dominates the South
generally is pervasive here too, within both European
and Mrican-American populations.
Sparks has organized the material as befits the
creative scholar that he is. We do not have in this book
a tight, relentless chronological narrative. Instead, the
approach is topical and thematic with gaps and overlaps sprinkled through a broad historical outline. This
study is linear, for the most part, but it is also selective
in the issues and data addressed. I admire especially
the chapters on the post-Civil War developments and
the period of the state's most tortuous struggles, the
post-World War II years. (Wars do have a way of
generating social revision, sometimes to the point of
revolution.)
Best of all, his achievement is not denominational
history, either in series or as aggregate. Sparks recounts the story of most of the major religious traditions but does so by telling of key periods in their
respective careers and the parts they have played in the
state's ongoing life through many seasons of change.
Thus the book is less the history of multiple institutions than a treatment of religion in culture, religion as
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
social force. In a word, the genre is closer to "religious
history" than to "church history."
Consistent with that decision, the text shows no
sense of bothering to afford "equal time" or fretting
over leaving anybody out. The story of religion in
Mississippi is an element in the story of Mississippi.
Surely that is the way a population's spiritual life
operates, just as its economic, demographic, and political aspects do. It follows that parts of Baptist history
or Methodist or Catholic or Jewish history that the
reader may know something about or want to learn
about are missing. Mildly frustrating is the omission of
any reference to bodies and personalities that have
played significant roles in state life. The Churches of
Christ and the Presbyterian Church in America (whose
original seminary is in Jackson) come to mind. Also
the religious themes and perspectives of writers, from
William Faulkner, Walker Percy, and Eudora Welty to
Ellen Douglas and Charles Marsh, might have been
noted.
Every state is many states. Sparks assists us in
observing the applicability of that truism to Mississippi. Geographically manageable, it invites a (long)
single day's tour from the Delta, where the Old South
persists, blacks and whites together, in the "most
southern place on earth" to the Gulf Coast, a spillover
of Louisiana hedonism (or is it southern escapism?), to
small towns such as Port Gibson, where grand religious
houses, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, sit hospitably
as neighbors, and Tupelo, home to liberal press and
political leadership and, at the same time, Donald
Wildmon's American Family Association.
The "Heritage of Mississippi" series has done well to
designate religion as the subject of this volume; its
significance is immeasurable. And the editors could
not have done better than to ask Sparks to tell the
story.
SAMUEL S. HILL
University of Florida
JosEPH A. FRY. Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and
U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 334. $39.95.
This insightful study traces southern attitudes about
and influence on U.S. foreign affairs. Capitalizing on
the prior spadework of Tennant S. McWilliams,
Charles 0. Lerche, Jr., Alfred 0. Hero, Jr. and an
army of other scholars, Fry weaves their findings (and
fresh research of his own on the Cold War years) into
a cogent synthesis that in many ways reminds me of the
"New American Nation" series. Fry argues that southerners approached world affairs from a "self-conscious" (p. 11) sectionalist perspective as far back as
George Washington's administration and that the region's position has been less singular recently only
because many nonsoutherners have internalized southern values. Fry illuminates many traits that have
molded the region's response to world affairs, among
the most important of which have been an agrarian
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Canada and the United States
republicanism (especially a suspicion of centralized
national power), Anglophobia and later Anglophilia, a
colonial economy that sought military spending and
markets for cotton, a quest to protect slavery first and
later segregation, a code of honor, Jeffersonian Republican and later Democratic partisanship, and memories of invasion and occupation during the Civil War
and Reconstruction. Partisanship and economics generally trumped other factors, especially during the
Jefferson-Madison, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D.
Roosevelt presidencies. But southern perspectives on
race, honor, and the American past were always part of
the mix. Republican fears of dependency, in fact, help
to explain why Confederate leaders in the Civil War
failed, until it was too late, to pursue formal alliances
with foreign powers.
Avoiding simplistic reductionism, Fry concedes that
different groups of southerners reached competing
foreign policy positions. For instance, he observes,
although many southerners looked upon war with
Spain in 1898 as an opportunity to reaffirm their Civil
War-blemished patriotism and demonstrate their manhood, southern proponents of the gold standard feared
that campaign expenses would trigger an increasing
reliance on silver coinage, while Populists such as Tom
Watson feared that intervention abroad would distract
Americans from economic reform back home.
Throughout the last half of the book, Fry especially
references southern black attitudes on foreign affairs
as a counterpoint to mainstream southern policies.
Thus although a majority of twentieth-century southern whites allowed their identification with regional
and Democratic icon Woodrow Wilson to lead them
into support of internationalist programs that went
against their unitateralist instincts, southern blacks
maintained skepticism about the same programs,
partly in reaction to Wilson's segregationist policies at
home. Later, southern blacks were less likely than
southern whites to rally behind foreign aid to European countries (e.g. the Marshall Plan) but more likely
to support anticolonial struggles overseas: Martin
Luther King, Jr., damned America's intervention in
Vietnam as being on "the wrong side of a world
revolution" (p. 282). Fry also illuminates conflicted
views among African Americans, as when southern
black newspapers highlighted the bravery of black
soldiers in Vietnam and took issue with Julian Bond
and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) for "appearing to endorse draft resistance" (p.
282). Still, the important point is less that southerners
disagreed among themselves than that Dixie's mouthpieces of whatever stripe conceptualized foreign affairs from a sectional perspective and that their influence was often "decisive" (p. 4). While war raged in
Vietnam, southerners Lyndon B. Johnson and Dean
Rusk made U.S. policy, southern general William C.
Westmoreland directed the troops, and southern senators like Richard Russell and John C. Stennis secured
the requisite funding from Congress and played key
advisory roles.
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513
This book will stand for years, I believe, as the
standard treatment of southerners and U.S. foreign
policy. Fry's conclusions are measured, and he uses
quantitative data from congressional votes and Gallup
polls to reinforce more impressionistic evidence. He so
clearly contextualizes his narrative regarding matters
that might be unfamiliar to nonspecialists (e.g. the
Genet mission and the Washington Naval Conference)
that the book could serve as a refresher in U.S.
diplomacy for graduate students or as a primer for
general readers. As an interpretive rather than encyclopedic synthesis, this work by no means covers
southern responses to every diplomatic issue. To give
two examples, Fry neglects the response of antebellum
slaveholders to American neutrality during the
Crimean War and to the Marcy-Elgin reciprocity
treaty of 1854 with Great Britain. Some Americans
believed the latter might facilitate the eventual annexation of Canada. My only substantive concern, however, is that Fry never provides a sustained analysis of
the role that evangelical Christianity played in molding
regional attitudes about the world scene, though he
alludes to it when he references "Protestant fundamentalism" influencing the South's disproportionate
support for immigration restriction in the 1920s.
Gracefully written, convincingly argued, and sensitive
to historiographical discourse this book reaffirms the
salience of sectional distinctiveness in the nation's
past. All serious students of the region would be well
advised to give it a thorough read.
ROBERT E. MAy
Purdue University
MAITHEW DENNIS. Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An
American Calendar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2002. Pp. xii, 338. $35.00.
This book is the most recent entry in a growing list of
works analyzing the origins and meaning of American
holidays. Eschewing Christmas, Easter, and the other
greeting-card holidays, Matthew Dennis concerns himself with celebrations and/or observances of patriotic,
political fetes, including the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Columbus
Day, Labor Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.
Some of these are simply Monday holidays-long
weekends for the weary, or days on which no mail is
delivered. But those of us who can remember back
wistfully to the 1940s and 1950s are sometimes, I think,
a little saddened by the disappearance of the quaint
and curious ways in which these occasions were once
observed. Libraries used to be filled with kiddie biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,
each entitled to his own special day marked by cardboard hatchets, cherries, stovepipe hats, and costumed
pageantry at school. Grandpas marched proudly in
Labor Day parades that went on for hours. The
Memorial Day parade was a great Cold War spectacle,
with tanks rumbling along, Gold Star mothers resplen-
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