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The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)

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William E. Leuchtenburg is the preeminent historian of America in the twentieth century. Based on research in 400 manuscript collections, together with 200 oral histories, his The White House Looks South is both highly original and beautifully written. It ranks with the very best of Leuchtenburg's previous works, yet is different from any of them.
Through incisive biographies, the book establishes the relationship of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson to the South of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Leuchtenburg argues that politics, together with the influence of individual politicians, remains central to an understanding of the broader sweep of American history, and that place and section are central to an understanding of politics. Certain presidents take the helm of change, altering through governmental action the individual lives of millions. Judging from the remarkable popularity of presidential biography, most Americans seem to comprehend at least some of these points, but they have been unfashionable among professional historians for a long generation. The White House Looks South is, in effect, a timely invitation to the historical profession to return to once-established precepts. As if to nail down the point, the book takes as its central theme the three presidents' transformation of civil rights from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Like all of Leuchtenburg's books, The White House Looks South makes splendid reading. Its pages sparkle with anecdotes as well as pithy (and often astonishingly revealing) quotes. Both a master political analyst and a master storyteller, never has Leuchtenburg produced a work so richly combining both.

Essentially, this book is a history of the political relationship between three presidents and the South (FDR, Truman, and LBJ). The book also focuses a great deal of attention on the attitude of each president on civil rights and the plight of black people in the South. Leuchtenburg does a good job of pointing out the ambivalence of each of these presidents towards civil rights juxtaposed against bold actions they took (mostly for political reasons) that ended up helping black people in Southern states and advancing the cause of civil rights. The book is full of fascinating aspects of each president's regional identity, including FDR's second "home" in Warm Springs and the struggle of both Truman and LBJ to truly identify with a particular section of the country (whether it be West, Midwest, or South). The book also serves as a fascinating history of the shift of strength within the Democratic Party away from the Solid South and towards liberals in the North. In all, this is fantastic historical research and writing that I would highly recommend.

In the White House Looks South, William Leuchtenburg looks at three Democratic presidents, FDR, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson and their policies toward the south. Leuchtenburg notes that all three presidents had southern roots. Johnson was from Texas, Truman was from southwestern Missouri and his grandfather had served in the Confederate army,and even FDR was long accepted by many southerners as an honorary southerner because of his residence in Warm Springs, Georgia.

All three of these men held, to one degree or another, racially prejudiced views, which they tended to overcome as they worked to improve the lot of blacks. While all three presidents were intially popular in the south, they ultimately lost southern support because of their civil rights policies. By the time of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, leading Democrats had concluded that the support of nothern blacks was more important to the future of their party than the support of southern whites. Consequently, Democratic support in the once solidly Democratic south quickly dissipated. In 1964,Johnson lost 5 southern states to Republican Barry Goldwater and was able to hold the rest of the south only with black support. The majority of southern whites voted Republican. In 1968, the Democrats lost every southern state except Texas. Apart from Jimmy Carter's sweep of the south in 1976, no other Democrat has carried a majority of southern states and the south is now a heavily Republican region.

Leuchtenburg's well researched book vividly recreates the careers of three major presidents and their attitudes toward civil rights and the south. My only reservation about this books is the author's decision to skip from Truman to Johnson, bypassing Eisenhower and Kennedy. Leuchtenburg argues that neither of those presidents did much to advance the civil rights agenda. That's unfortunate, given that Eisenhower was the first president to use federal troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock. While Kennedy was cautious about pushing an aggessive civil rights agenda, there's no doubt about his strong sympathy for the civil rights movement. I was especially disappointed that Leuchtenburg had so little sympathy for Ike. At the very time in which the Democrats were willing to jeopardize southern support, the Republicans were trying to build support in Dixie. Both Eisenhower and the GOP national committee chairman, Meade Alcorn, wanted to build a southern GOP. Yet Ike ultimately sent the army to Little Rock to integrate the schools. A study of the dilemma faced by Eisenhower and the GOP would have made an interesting contrast to the Democrats' dilemma.