It is hard to imagine that one state could elect governors as different as Kerr Scott and Pat McCrory. The “Squire of Haw River” and “Mayor Pat” hailed from different political parties, different communities, and diametrically opposed ideological traditions. True, many decades separated the two administrations, but the threads running through their political careers remained relatively constant through three quarters of a century of North Carolina politics. ECU professor Tom Eamon attempts in his book “The Making of a Southern Democracy” to elucidate the complexity of a political unit that produced wildly divergent personalities and outcomes.
The subtitle of his book , “North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory,” hints at the structure of Eamon’s story. This book is less a full bodied historical narrative than a catalog of elections and politicians. Beginning with the populist Scott’s narrow 1948 victory over a conservative, Eamon gives a similar treatment to every major election until the Republican sweep of 2012. The laundry-list nature of this narrative is buttressed by extraordinarily detailed statistics, which add an imprimatur of scholarly rigor to Eamon’s work, but in the end the story is colorless.
Unlike, for example, Rob Christensen’s classic “The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics,” Eamon’s book does not contain memorable character sketches or illustrative vignettes. Nor is there much policy analysis. Instead, Eamon lists the candidates and final outcomes of each election and then pauses to summarize, briefly, the impact of what transpired. To the extent he delves into the substance of state governance at all, it is mostly comprised of familiar stories like Terry Sanford’s food tax and Jesse Helms’s racist hell raising.
For a book that claims such an ambitious mission, “The Making of a Southern Democracy” is remarkably light on interpretation. Other similar books have examined left-wing versus right-wing themes, the conflict of “traditionalists” and “modernizers” in North Carolina, or the changing patterns of population and voting outcomes. Eamon barely expounds upon any of these debates, nor does he proffer any new take on the meaning of North Carolina political history. His book is simply a record of events–take it or leave it.
Alas, I’ll leave it.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
0 Comments