Keys to the South

...Lester Maddox in Georgia), all were able to build administrations without regard to entrenched interests...

...Yet for all their similarities, Askew and Bumpers, like Sanford and Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, are among the latest and least enthusiastic passengers on the Jimmy Carter Bandwagon and Campaign Special...

...The only other thing I recall about our interview was that Sanford mentioned that, across the quadrangle at Duke's Policy Sciences Institute, Jack Bass and Walter De Vries were at work on a new book on the subject of Southern politics...

...By background, all spring from modest, rural, religious origins...

...When Key used terms like "plutocracy" and "racist," they sounded neither like rhetoric nor cant — they fit then as they fit now...

...Southern justice, and Southern music...

...Never having resorted to racism as campaigners, each consistently prefers the "high road," eschewing the more raucous, rough-and-tumble tradition...

...Mark Pinsky is a free-lance writer based in Durham, North Carolina, where he specializes in Southern politics...

...Despite 360 interviews, 100 pages of maps, tables, and graphs, and 40,000 miles of travel in eleven states, there is nowhere the observation in this book that in much of the South, opposition to organized labor is still as vicious, mean-spirited, and intractable as it was when Key wrote about it in 1949 and that, unlike racism, it is still socially acceptable and thus far more likely to endure as a drag on political development...

...And, as leaders, each was possessed with a certain amount of moral rectitude which occasionally bordered on self-righteousness...

...In many ways, Jimmy Carter is a prototype of the new breed of Southern politician...

...He smiled, almost apologetically, and said, "You know, I have this feeling, it is almost a certainty, that the nominee won't be coming from Washington this time...

...Because their immediate predecessors as governor represented a radical break with years of establishment Democratic rule (Republicans in the case of Bumpers and Askew...

...Cowboy/Southern Rim/Sunbelt theories first advanced by Carl Oglesby and later expanded by Kirkpatrick Sale...

...However, it is more than punchy prose which makes Southern Politics endure, regardless of the politicians who have come and gone...

...That book, The Transformation of Southern Politics, was published recently and is riding the Carter wave to critical and commercial success...

...True, Key (writing in the repressive, Cold War late 1940s) is biting and sardonic where Bass (writing in the age of the "New Journalism") is bland and tentative, and Key is analytical where Bass and De Vries are simply descriptive...

...Perhaps it is only the hostility of small differences, or jealousy, or merely sour grapes over the suspicion that the only palpable difference between any of them and Carter was the economic muscle and incessant, insistent boosterism of Atlanta...

...Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, after which it is patterned, and as a complement to Kirkpatrick Sale's Power Shift on a bookshelf of Southern classics, between major works like W. J. Cash's Mind of the South, T. Harry Williams's Huey Long and C. Vann Woodward's Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Origins of the New South, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and minor classics like A. J. Liebling's Earl of Louisiana, Robert Sherrill's Gothic Politics and the Old South, and Marshall Frady's biography of George Wallace...

...The genius of V. O. Key was neither in his research nor in his prose style, as some reviewers of this newer book have implied...

...What V. O. Key emphasizes is that what always underlies politics is economics, and thus any book about Southern politics is a book about the growth and development of capitalism in what then was, and still is, an essentially underdeveloped region...

...The former is understandable, but the latter is unfortunate...

...Bass, a former journalist, Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and author (The Orangeburg Massacre), and De Vries, a political pollster and author (The Ticket Splitters), have done a creditable job...

...The Transformation of Southern Politics does not dwell unduly on Jimmy Carter, nor does it linger on the Yankee vs...

...I think the people want somebody from out in the country...

...The only occasion where the term "ruling class" is used in The Transformation of Southern Politics is in the chapter on Mississippi, certainly not the only state in the region where one exists...

...Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, the former chairman of the Democratic Charter Commission, and the present president of Duke University, had the right idea but the wrong candidate...

...In this connection it should be noted that in preparation of this book the authors received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation...

...MARK PINSKY At the time — it was early 1974, as I recall— the question seemed logical: I asked the- former one-term Southern governor if he seriously thought he had a shot at the Democratic Presidential nomination...

...As Bass and De Vries point out in separate profiles, there is an eerie similarity between the former Georgia governor and Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers and Florida Governor Reubin Askew...

...Still, The Transformation of Southern Politics is a valuable addition to literature about the South...

...I listened absently as he went on to explain how his temporary position with the Democratic National Committee would enable him to travel around the country, attracting national publicity and building up a network of local supporters...

...Their book should serve as a valuable supplement to V.O...