Abstract
For those outside the U.S. South, the practice of defining the region and its borders often involves differentiating (and distancing) the South from the greater nation. Sociologist Larry Griffin once wrote that such boundary work creates and imposes on us two monoliths: a South, and an America “artificially devoid of significant internal diversity and schism” (2000:62). Bryan D. Jones’s The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family’s History, then, with its clear emphasis on a differentiated southern political, economic, and cultural history, is a welcome and important addition to a revived sociology of the South (Griffin 2001; see also Reed 1980). Though his background is political science, Jones takes a different tack in his newest book, centering his family’s complicated but deeply compelling history and using it as a means of telling a larger story about southern democracy and the racial and class-based fault lines that have interrupted, stalled, and ultimately prevented it from taking root.
Following in the tradition of political scientist and Jones’s former teacher V. O. Key Jr.’s Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), Jones views the primary fault line as that between the more slave-dependent lower South and the yeomanry of the upper South and Appalachia region. Jones’s argument centers the competing visions for political rule. The slave-dependent South was more committed to an oligarchy of White planters who vigorously fought to maintain White supremacy. The uplanders, meanwhile, struggled for a more democratic social order that was at least willing to consider Black political inclusion, albeit reluctantly.
Tracing his family history, Jones narrates in rich detail the economic, political, and cultural fault lines between the lower and upper Souths, exploring the impact these fault lines had and continue to have on the region’s development. The use of Jones’s own family history to narrate these competing visions is primarily a strength of the text. Jones’s lineage, which includes both Alabama uplanders and Alabama planters, falls along those aforementioned fault lines. Jones does a fine job of connecting his family members’ lives and stories to the larger social and economic contexts in which their lives and stories unfolded.
Specifically, Jones focuses on four critical junctures that shaped the trajectory of the U.S. South, and the nation more broadly: Indian removal; the Civil War and Reconstruction; the Populist Revolt at the end of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the new Jim Crow regime; and the mid-twentieth-century freedom movement that led to the dismantling of that racial caste system. Jones’s situating of his family narratives against the backdrop of these four critical junctures allows the reader to see, through the eyes of Jones’s family members, the conflicts and tensions they confronted as they sought to make their own way while striving to either maintain or reimagine their larger social order.
At the same time, the records that comprise Jones’s family history are, as a matter of historical evidence, only ever partial. This is of course a problem for all archival work: we can only make use of the records available to us. Jones’s family history has certainly been well maintained, and Jones is quite good at setting his family members’ lives against the backdrop of the events and episodes unfolding around them as he narrates their stories.
Yet Jones’s narration sometimes leaves readers with the impression that the cleft between White yeomanry and White oligarchy was greater than it may have actually been—that the distinctions between competing or dueling “White mindsets” was quite clear, and that the White yeomanry ultimately only sided with the White oligarchy because they were especially susceptible to the planter elites’ pleas for maintaining White rule. In each instance, we ought to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism, if only because the historical record of participation among White southerners across the South’s class structure in maintaining White rule is vast. And ultimately, as Jones himself notes, efforts toward a multiracial democracy in the U.S. South were abandoned by White workers because the “wages of whiteness” were far more enticing and arguably better guaranteed than the promise of a more inclusive political and social order.
Though Jones is not a sociologist, he has written a text that sociologists will find interesting and enriching. Through its early years, American sociology took special interest in the U.S. South as a site where social conflicts, tensions, and divisions that defined our larger nation played out in sharp relief. Yet as the discipline’s tendencies shifted toward more abstract theorizing and, later, a global perspective, we seemed to lose interest in the South and how it might inform our newer interests. As Jones’s text, shows, however, the South remains as important for our understanding of America today as it was in the time of W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Odum, and other mid-twentieth-century sociologists. And Jones’s narrative approach reflects a tradition within the sociology of the South from which our discipline, as a whole, would greatly benefit (see Reed 1989).