Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
Southern Comfort
By David Brion Davis
The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism
by Eugene D. Genovese
Harvard University Press, 138 pp., $22.50
The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860
by Eugene D. Genovese
University of South Carolina Press, 116 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War
by Eugene D. Genovese
University of Missouri Press, 320 pp., $29.95
The easiest way to approach Eugene D. Genovese's fascinating recent work on Southern conservatism is to compare the two lost causes that he has long admired. For in his view the slaveholders' ideology, theology, and political theory, which culminated in the Southern Confederacy of 1861–1865, and the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which culminated in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, represented the only serious challenges in modern history to the domination of bourgeois values and finance capitalism. 'The fall of the Confederacy,' Genovese points out, 'drowned the hopes of southern conservatives for the construction of a viable noncapitalist social order, much as the disintegration of the Soviet Union—all pretenses and wishful thinking aside—has drowned the hopes of socialists.'
Review, 3528 words
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