An analysis of Joseph Crespinos In Search of Another Country - Book Report/Review Example

Your Your Repeating the Past: An Analysis of Joseph Crespino’s In Search of Another Country We have all heard the saying, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” This truism is one of the most important reasons to study history; an ignorance of history can be a dangerous thing. Perhaps even more dangerous is having a simplistic view of history. Joseph Crespino, in his important book about the civil rights movement and the South’s response to it, In Search of Another County: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, seeks to present a more complex view of history. Crespin, like all good history teachers, wants his readers have a fuller, more developed understanding so that they are not doomed to make incorrect interpretations and make similar mistakes of those who have gone before. According to Crespino, a simplistic view of the civil rights movement of the 1960s is that it could be put in, as reviewer Charles Payne put it, “triumphalist terms” (qutd. in Crespino 368). Payne feels that In Search of Another Country is the best retort to those who still see the civil rights movement that way. This simplistic view of civil rights sees the South, and especially the state of Mississippi, as an “icon of Southern intransigence, the key setting for what has become the modern American melodrama in which the nation finally dealt with anomalous Deep South racists and made good on its promise of equality for all its citizens” (Crespino 4). This view of history, Crespino maintains, reduces the story of the struggle for civil rights into a morality tale, ignores the ongoing struggle for racial justice, and oversimplifies the reactions of whites to civil rights both inside and outside of the South. Most importantly to Crespino is how this viewpoint of history obscures the connection of white and white conservative responses to civil rights and to their participation in the conservative counterrevolution of the Reagan era and the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of course, the reason for this simplistic viewpoint of the civil rights movement is that many of the most outrageous and virulent reactions to civil rights occurred in Mississippi. Crespino recounts several of these incidences, but recognizes that not all Mississippians were as racist as these individuals. Crespino examines Mississippi as a center of the modern conservative movement because it was atypical of the South. This period marked the creation of a powerful metaphor about Mississippi, by author James Silver in 1964—“the closed society.” By the end of the 1960s, however, racism in Mississippi became “a metaphor for all that was wrong in the nation” (Crespino 6). Perhaps the violent reaction against civil rights in Mississippi was preferable to “the quiet hypocrisy of the rest of America” (Crespino 5). Crespino’s major point in his book, while not discounting the horrible racism in Mississippi, is that racism in America was not limited to one state or even to one region of the country. Another simplistic interpretation of history is the belief of many that the modern conservative movement is connected to white supremacy in Mississippi. According to this view, modern conservatives co-opted the language of Southern white supremacy and “re-packaged” the message to appeal to the white Southern voter. Phrases like “states-rights” are codes that have sinister, racist underpinnings. Crespino presents the logic behind this viewpoint, and begins his book by making a connection between the 1964 grisly murders of three civil rights workers in Neshobo County, Mississippi and Ronald Reagan’s announcement that he was running for president just sixteen years later, at the Neshobo County Fair in 1980. This explains why many liberals insist that today, in the age of Obama, that disagreeing with our current president’s policies is tantamount to racism. At times, in Crespino’s book, it is difficult to figure out his position. In an opinion piece he wrote for Politico (2010), well after the publication of In Search of Another Country, Crespino makes the connection between civil rights opponents’ use of states’ rights to alleviate the effects of civil rights legislation with the use of the same justification to fight health care reform. To be fair, however, Crespino uses the connection to demonstrate that the opponents of Obamacare are fighting a losing battle, just as the opponents of civil rights legislation did in the 1960s. The use of fighting policies with the states’ rights argument, and how it was done to try and combat civil rights, makes it possible to understand why so many people bristle at the mere mention of states’ rights, even though as Crespino states in Politico, it was used for other issues as well. Crespino rejects the connection between white supremacy and modern conservatism, in spite of Reagan’s appearance at the Neshobo County Fair in 1980. Crespino’s logic for rejecting the connection seems to be rooted in two facts: the big change in the voting demographics of Mississippi and the increase of black representation in the Mississippi legislature. Mississippi changed from a mostly rural, farm-based economy that supported white supremacy to a more business-centered economy that was not as dependent upon the status quo. Voters in Mississippi, the South, and throughout the country became alarmed at the effects of liberalism, and conservatives simply used old concepts and language centering on states’ rights and individual freedom to attract them to their ideologies. The issues voters became interested in changed—the effect of liberalism on society, fear of Communism, and the desire to educate their children, but the language used to support them did not. One of the most dangerous things about holding a simplistic view of history is that it simplifies the complexity of both Southern society and racism in America. It places the responsibility for racism on a few stereotyped Mississippian, and not where it belongs—throughout our entire society. Crespino recognizes that both Mississippi and racism is more complicated than that. He would probably disagree with President Obama’s dismissal of his political opponents—that they are angry, religious gun owners. The danger in this kind of view is that it does not address the core causes of racism. As a result, addressing racism and combating it is impossible. It also addresses the danger in obscuring the issues that conservatives are concerned about. It is certain that many conservatives understand the connection between the South’s resistance to civil rights and the way their issues are supported. Crespino understands this, and is able to see why using these old arguments will ultimately work against the conservatives who insist upon using them. At the same time, however, Crespino insists that the modern conservative movement has roots in Southern politics. If conservatives fail to understand this, they run into the danger of discounting equality in this country’s political life and of oversimplifying its historical place in the civil rights movement. Crespino sees white Mississippi and by extension, white Southern society as a whole, as more complex than the typical assessment of this period of American history. He finds this necessary because by presenting a more complicated explanation, he presents a fuller picture of the latter half of the twentieth century. He is also able to present a fuller, more complex picture of the conservative counterrevolution. There are strong implications to our country’s current political life. Crespino may even maintain that it is this attempt to over-simplify history that is at the root of the divisiveness that is a powerful aspect of the current American political scene. By doing so, we are certain to be doomed to repeat the past—to make American society as closed as Southern society was prior to the civil rights movement. In the meantime, it discourages people from coming together to work on important issues, and to ensure the freedom of all our citizens. Works Cited Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print. ---. “Lessons on States Rights.” Politico. 25 March 2010. Web. 12 April 12, 2011. Read More