By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable
after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly
perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In
this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three
key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense
public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern
of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural
conservatism.
Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority
confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial
in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the
publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the
Southern Agrarians; and Virginia's campaign of Massive Resistance and
Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that
characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals
the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with
anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.