Speak Now Against the Day.

• Author: Applebome, Peter

A new book about the South between the thirties and the sixties makes the case in these anti-government times that without Washington, Jim Crow would still be king

From the Civil War through the civil rights movement, it took only one look at the South to make everyone else feel prosperous and virtuous by comparison. In the twenties, H.L. Mencken famously depicted the region as a "Holy Land for imbeciles," a place "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara desert." What is less well known is that even natives poured on the invective from time to time. Witherspoon Dodge, a South Carolina clergyman, proclaimed in 1939 that the South is isolated from the rest of the United States "by mountains of pride and rivers of prejudice and valleys of ignorance and swamps of reactionary stupidity, and every now and then washed out with floods of lawlessness."

In this exhaustive and passionate examination of the years between Franklin Roosevelt's first election in 1932 and the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, John Egerton, like Dodge, hardly lets his native region off the hook. Egerton, however, tells this story from a point of view that is frequently overlooked. He chronicles the efforts of Southern progressives to deal constructively with race and the ways those efforts were routinely swatted aside like gnats by the Bilbos, Talmadges, Rankins, and Eastlands who were elected by Southern whites to uphold the old order.

It's a depressing story, powerfully told, and it shoots bullets through whatever case anyone could ever hope to make that the South might have dealt with its racial ills on its own had the meddlesome courts not thrown the region into turmoil in 1954. The federal intervention to force integration is one of the great accomplishments of the federal government in this century, a reminder in these reflexively anti-government days of the good that can be done from Washington.

Egerton, from his perch in Nashville, has spent most of his career writing about the two eternal verities of Southern life--race and home cooking--and is one of the great spirits of the doomed and dwindling tribe of Southern liberals. Like the best of his brethren, he simultaneously loves a place that has so often been morally repulsive and hates a place that has so often been a rich wellspring of faith, community, history, and grace. His book is animated by both emotions. On one level it is a belated homage to the generation of...