Andrew S.

Terrell
Spring 2010

Précis: Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Modern Civil Rights Movement historian, Joseph Crespino, surveyed the transition of

Mississippi democrats to GOP loyalists from the Brown decision through the 1980s in his

monograph In Search of Another Country. Crespino showed how white supremacy and

conservative religious, political, and societal ideologies urged the shift in party allegiance. He

argued that despite the appearance of anti-civil rights extremism, even this conservative

movement allowed for incremental steps to accommodate the demands of civil rights activists

and federal legislation. His book sought to recover how white Mississippians saw themselves

not as outcasts, but rather as central players in a conservative counterrevolution that reshaped

American politics culminating in Reagan’s administration. He focused on Mississippi because of

the popular conception that the state was the icon of southern intransigence. In doing so,

Crespino was able to bring dramatic social and economic factors into the traditional “Dixiecrat

interpretation” scholarship. Additionally, his work counters the thesis of southern political

continuity by showing how racial elements in the conservative movement are misconstrued

through oversimplification and profiling. Finally Crespino’s study reveals how incomplete

scholarship is over the South vs. North thesis; by generalizing Mississippi, in particular, as a

closed society, one infers the rest of America--especially the north--was open, which he proves to

be an incomplete conclusion at best.

Crespino admits there were differences between segregationist politics in Mississippi and

other regions of the country, so how much does this detract from his assertion that Mississippi

whites were not exceptional in post WWII America? Did he fail to take his own advice on

avoiding oversimplified conclusions when he stated modern conservative activists dismiss white

racism as a factor in the movement’s success?