White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)

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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8009758231 EAN: 9780691133867 ISBN: 0691133867 Label: Princeton University Press Manufacturer: Princeton University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 352 Publication Date: 2007-07-09 Publisher: Princeton University Press Studio: Princeton University Press
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Editorial Reviews: During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate." In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms. Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Right on time Comment: Got here on time, haven't read it yet, but I have to say I was very pleased with Amazon's service. Customer Rating: Summary: a simple-minded political book pretending to be more Comment: This book presents the old conspiratorial arguments of the left about their opponents. The basic argument here is that the entire basis of republican and conservative politics is racism. Its a simple-minded argument dressed up as "research" when in fact it is anything but. The starting premise is that the life ideal of any good person is high density housing downtown in a city. Such is the greatness of that life that there could not possibly be a "good" motive for people not to want to live in high-density housing in the core of a city. And with the lack of good motives, the obvious conclusion is that anyone who didn't want to live in downtown atlanta was motivated by racism. For good measure, the book dresses up its simple-minded thinking with the history of segregationist thought with the goal of saying that the one is equal to the other. The book is also overty regionally biased against the south. All the same trends the author observes in "segregationist" "republican" Georgia could be found in "liberal" "democratic" places like New York and Boston. The author for all his "insight" into the minds of conservatives never quite gets around to explaining why those places are not segregationist or dominated by conservative ideas. The author also seems to misunderstand the nature of southern democratic ideology. Before "white flight" and before "the suburbs", the democratic parties in the south were not markedly different in idealogy than the republicans of today. The author doesn't seem to catch the fact that the democratic party left those people rather than those people leaving the democratic party. The "research" involved in this book is incredibly bad. Reducing the entirty of conservative ideology to racism will certainly be well accepted by many on the left but its not an argument that has appeal beyond that audience. The funny thing is that wnile many people (like the author) are willing to point accusatory fingers at "the suburbs" as segregationist enclaves, they are far from willing to look at the same seregationism that secures their academic "bubble" worlds. Nobody at Colombia wants to talk about it being a fortress within the community that surrounds it. Nobody asks why the general public is banned from entering the library at the University of Chicago. And nobody ever asks about campus security or what they really do. Academics simply don't want to know. What they want to do is point the accusatory finger at someone else (Atlanta) far away. The other more relivant thing the author may have taken a look at is the flight into the cities by rich white liberals who have resegregated and transformed entire neighborhoods. Its called gentrification and for any complete study of the subject of the book, it needs to be considered as do new seregationist institutions like magnet schools where rich whites are given a private school education at public expense in exchange for attending school with a picked nonwhite elite kept at a "safe" percentage of total enrollment while the rest of the city's population is given a distinctly seperate and unequal education. But nobody is going to write about that. Better to simply write screeds saying republicans are all racists. America and American political writing need to move past the stupid accusatory politics of this book. Postscript: The feedback for this review is rather obviously being faked. As of October, this review has received as much feedback as a spotlight review written in 2005 has and has received more feedback than a spotlight review written in March 2007 all over a couple months. Customer Rating: Summary: Important History of United States Comment: This book is first, well written and then well researched. As someone who grew up in Atlanta during a good part of the time period covered by the book I'm impressed by the amount of detail and the level of accuracy that the writer provides. His analysis of not only what happen in and around the south but how it ties into the rise of the new conservatism is spot on. This should be required reading for all high school seniors as well as most politicians. To learn from the past we need more writers and researchers like Kevin M. Kruse to help illuminate the way. Please, please, please buy this book and read it. Customer Rating: Summary: Fascinating Read Comment: I'm not from Georgia and I'm not a history guy, but I found this book fascinating. The "editorial review" provided by Amazon does a fine job describing the book, so I'll just give a few of my impressions. The book is well written and easy to read (which don't always go hand in hand - see James, Henry). I found myself not only learning about Atlanta but also better understanding the phenomenon of white flight in general. This book has really opened my eyes to the issues of the city versus the suburbs; I can see now that many of the struggles of the '50s and '60s are still continuing today, if in slightly different forms. Don't let the title of this book mislead you; this is not a 350-page rant about how evil conservatives are. In fact, I was surprised at how often the "good guys" in the integration struggle, such as Mayor Hartsfield and his coalition of business elites, were motivated not by a sense of social justice but by capitalism: many of the so-called city fathers were just as loathe to integrate as the segregationists, but the image of Atlanta as a fully integrated city was just too lucrative for their businesses and the city's economy. The book is blessedly free of sermonizing, as the author simply recounts what took place and shows how those events have influenced the world we live in, both political and physical. Value judgments are largely left to the reader. One last thing. When I think of all the material covered in this book, from violent flashpoints to school board meetings to segregationist poetry to newspaper advertisements, I can't believe I wasn't bored out of my mind - this stuff usually isn't my cup of tea. But instead of bogging it down, the author used the excruciating level of detail to breath life into the story, animating the people and events in a way that made me feel connected to them. Regardless of your ideology, I think you will find yourself entertained and enlightened by this book. Customer Rating: Summary: Specific details from Atlanta provide a better understanding of the many sides of the process that reshaped the South Comment: Like many people, I was familiar with the big highlights of the civil rights movement and the phenomenon of white flight, but to see the detail Kevin Kruse provides on the era in Atlanta is eye opening. You get the stories about sit-ins and the first African American to go to this or that school, but the smaller things like neighborhoods and public parks becoming "black" really gives the reader a good idea of the glacial pace that change was taking place. The "freedom of association" idea presented by the author captures the strategy of segregationists to maintain their exclusive use of public places by shifting from outright racism to a broad appeal for individual rights. The latter idea is what the author presents as the basis for the recent success of the Republican party not only in the South but suburban areas throughout the country. More Reviews