FREEDOM'S DOMINION

A broad-ranging history of resistance to the federal government, especially in matters of civil rights reforms.

“Federal power has proven itself, quite consistently, by design and by practice, to be inadequate to the basic claims of citizenship of its people,” writes Cowie, a professor of history at Vanderbilt. The “design” aspect figures in the constant struggle between federal authority and states’ rights. Before the passage of the 14th Amendment, for instance, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments, only to what Congress could or could not do. Even the powers of the 14th Amendment, Cowie notes, were trimmed by the Supreme Court—a fact that makes his book timely given current court decisions against past civil rights rulings—which required Congress to establish martial law in the South in order to effect even the small gains of Reconstruction. Provocatively, Cowie argues that resistance to federal authority, as exemplified by Alabama Gov. George Wallace and his “segregation forever” vow, is almost always cloaked in the language of tyranny and freedom—and the freedom demanded by those resisters is won at the loss of freedom of some citizens, almost always members of ethnic minorities. Cowie adds that federal officials have often acquiesced to the demands of the “freedom” crowd, as when Franklin Roosevelt overlooked Jim Crow racism in order to keep White Southern voters: “By successfully wrestling key exemptions for agricultural and domestic workers from federal regulation, much of the Southern racial and agricultural order remained relatively untouched by the long arm of the New Deal.” Toward the end of a lucid narrative that spans three centuries, the author argues that the federal government has been an unreliable ally and sometimes an open enemy of the rights of non-White people. Even so, without federal power, as current events richly suggest, even those tenuous rights would almost certainly be diminished or eliminated.

A powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics.