Freedom's dominion A saga of white resistance to federal power

Barbour County, AL, home of former Governor George Wallace, takes center stage in Freedom's Dominion, where a racialized, domineering version of American freedom evolved over 200 years through local battles with federal authorities. Cowie (Vanderbilt Univ.) traces the county's racial history from disputes over Creek Indian lands to white panic over preserving slavery after Lincoln's election, violent efforts to end Reconstruction, race-based lynching, the New Deal's effects on racial and class hierarchies, and white residents' efforts to maintain power during the Civil Rights Movement. White residents frequently complained that the federal government infringed upon their rights, but the freedom they desired was racially exclusive. Although the federal government occasionally intervened to protect minority rights in Barbour--e.g., when federal marshals pushed white squatters off Creek lands--the response was often timid at best. It is unsurprising that political demagogue George Wallace emerged from this context. As Cowie asserts, however, Barbour County was not unique--other counties in the US contended with similar struggles over rights for racial minorities. Although the book's emphasis on race largely misses the economic factor in the fight for freedom--a key motive for white resistance to civil rights for Black Alabamians was the continued desire for low-skilled Black labor--it is a great read informed by mountains of research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. --Jeremy Monroe Richards, Gordon State College

Vanderbilt University historian Cowie (The Great Exception) examines in this gripping and haunting study the centuries-long tradition of localism by which white Americans have sought to exert their dominance over groups they have designated as "others." He astutely grounds his study in one specific place--Barbour County, Ala.--and its struggles over land, citizenship, and democracy, from the violent theft by white settlers of land belonging by federal guarantee to Creek Indians in the 1830s and the eventual establishment on those lands of intensely profitable cotton plantations worked by enslaved people, through the rise of militant states' rights groups such as the Eufaula Regency in the 1850s and the century following the Civil War, when local whites did all that they could to prevent African Americans from utilizing the rights granted to them by the federal government. Cowie also tracks the ascension of Barbour County native and avowed segregationist George Wallace to the Alabama governor's office, detailing how his calls for freedom from federal oversight tapped into a deep vein of racialized politics running from the country's founding to the January 6 Capitol riot. Cowie's meticulous accumulation of detail and candid assessments (he calls out Lyndon Johnson for transforming the 1957 Civil Rights Act into the "weakest bill it could possibly be") make for distressing yet essential reading. This is history at its most vital. Illus. (Nov.)

A broad-ranging history of resistance to the federal government, especially in matters of civil rights reforms. "Federal power has proven itself, quite consistently, by design and by practice, to be inadequate to the basic claims of citizenship of its people," writes Cowie, a professor of history at Vanderbilt. The "design" aspect figures in the constant struggle between federal authority and states' rights. Before the passage of the 14th Amendment, for instance, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments, only to what Congress could or could not do. Even the powers of the 14th Amendment, Cowie notes, were trimmed by the Supreme Court--a fact that makes his book timely given current court decisions against past civil rights rulings--which required Congress to establish martial law in the South in order to effect even the small gains of Reconstruction. Provocatively, Cowie argues that resistance to federal authority, as exemplified by Alabama Gov. George Wallace and his "segregation forever" vow, is almost always cloaked in the language of tyranny and freedom--and the freedom demanded by those resisters is won at the loss of freedom of some citizens, almost always members of ethnic minorities. Cowie adds that federal officials have often acquiesced to the demands of the "freedom" crowd, as when Franklin Roosevelt overlooked Jim Crow racism in order to keep White Southern voters: "By successfully wrestling key exemptions for agricultural and domestic workers from federal regulation, much of the Southern racial and agricultural order remained relatively untouched by the long arm of the New Deal." Toward the end of a lucid narrative that spans three centuries, the author argues that the federal government has been an unreliable ally and sometimes an open enemy of the rights of non-White people. Even so, without federal power, as current events richly suggest, even those tenuous rights would almost certainly be diminished or eliminated. A powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.