Customer Reviews

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This decidedly non-entertaining volume will be of value to those who like their history dissected and pinned back so that every blood vessel and nerve can be traced. Reading it was a real slog, but I labored on because I'm a Graham biographer myself and was looking for some new insights. Steven Miller definitely did his homework and tracked down references between layers of correspondence and in the autobiographical works of third string players that a less dogged reporter could easily have missed.

The principal factual shortcoming I found in the work was Miller's tendency (all too common among Graham's mostly fawning biographers) to take Graham's word for otherwise undocumented events and report it as fact. The most clearly spurious is Graham's assertion that he took down ropes between black and white seating in Chatanooga in 1953. There are no extant newspaper reports of that alleged act, and, Graham changed the city in subsequent retellings, which casts serious doubt on the supposedly pivotal event. In a similar vein, Graham repeatedly charged that Citizen's Councils were threatening to block his crusades in various cities and that he stood up to them by threatening to expose their threats. But, in point of fact, he didn't "threaten to expose" them, he went straight to the press with his tale, playing the persecuted preacher role to the hilt. Miller reports these events as straight-forward news. He also gives Graham a great deal more credit for sincere anti-segregationist views than I was able to glean in five years of research. Contrary to Miller's version, I came away convinced that most of Graham's posturing on matters racial was self-serving and that he did a great deal to stall the movement toward racial justice in this country.

My reason for giving Miller's book this high a rating is that he has definitely done some serious research and is somewhat less gushingly generous to his subject than most of Graham's hagiographers. The book is extremely repetitious and dull, however, and if you don't have a very keen interest in Grahamology, I would steer a wide berth.

Repetitious, ponderous, and just plain dull this book does provide interesting insights into Billy Graham's role in moderating violence in the South during the Civil Rights movement and even more information about his role in bringing the South into the Republican Party. I am no fan of this bloviating redneck evangelist but he has had the ear of many presidents eager for his help, usually out of political considerations. But he supported Richard Nixon more openly than any other president he knew and consorted with, certainly not a mark of wisdom or insight. It would appear that Graham helped the South into the post-segregation era largely by convincing it to become Republican. Republican racists evidently seem more respectable than Democratic ones. The end result has been a Republican South in which the Democratic Party, largely black, cannot win elections on any level above the merely local. The South has overcome racism by becoming Republican. What an easy way out!