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"History recalls Wallace\u2019s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about something even more profound, more enduring, even more virulent than segregation. Aside from his infamous \u201cSegregation Forever\u201d slogan, Wallace mentioned \u201csegregation\u201d only one other time that afternoon. In contrast, he invoked \u201cfreedom\u201d twenty-five times in his speech\u2014more than Martin Luther King Jr. would use the term later that year in his \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d address at the March on Washington. \u201cLet us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,\u201d Wallace told his audience, \u201cand send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.\u201d Those rattling shackles of oppression were forged by the enemy of the people of his beloved Barbour County: the federal government."\n\u2013 Jefferson Cowie,\xa0Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power\xa0(Basic Books, 2022).\nProfessor Cowie titles his latest book\u2019s introduction \u2018George Wallace and American Freedom\u2019, which frames part of the historical narrative within which he reexamines one of our most celebrated values within the purview of local history. But as\xa0The New York Times\xa0review of the book in December by author Jeff Shesol articulately summarized:\n\u2018Freedom\u2019s Dominion\xa0is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.\u2019\nThis book is an engrossing read and check this from Shesol\u2019s review about Wallace and his attraction:\n\u2018Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. \u201cBeing a Southerner is no longer geographic,\u201d he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. \u201cIt\u2019s a philosophy and an attitude.\u201d That attitude, we know, is pervasive now \u2014 a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the \u201cdeep state\u201d; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning \u2014 in the name of \u201cindividual freedom\u201d \u2014 classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.\u2019\nSome of Professor Cowie\u2019s other books mentioned in this interview:\n\n\nCapital Moves: RCA\u2019s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor\xa0(1999) received the 2000 Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History in 2000\n\n\nStayin\u2019 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class\xa0(2010) awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History in 2011\n\n\nThe Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics\xa0(2016)\n\n\nProfessor Cowie\u2019s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. Formerly at Cornell, he is currently the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.\n\ufeffSydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law