Dixie Looks Abroad

Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U. S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973. By Joseph A. Fry. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University: 2002. Pp. 334.)

Joseph Fry effectively demonstrates how Southerners “quickly developed a self-conscious sectionalism and, acting from a perceived sense of regional interest, exercised a vast and often decisive influence on U. S. foreign policy” from the birth of the nation until 1973 (p. 4).” Defining the region as those states primarily dependent on staple agriculture that maintained strict racial discrimination, an elevated sense of personal and national honor, and sustained interest in both territorial and economic expansion, Fry constructs a comprehensive argument for sustained sectionalism. He selects his time period based upon the fundamental contributions of influential southern political personalities such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison to the creation of the American foreign relations. He concludes his study with the end of U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War because, he argues, significant changes in civil rights, the passing of the solid Democratic South, and the growth of the Sunbelt economy diluted southern authority in Washington as those values became accepted nationwide.

The author organizes his analysis chronologically over eight concise chapters focused on Southern desire to separate from Britain, to extend political power and the peculiar institution through territorial expansion, to establish independent Confederate foreign policy, to reintegrate into American government, to rally around southerner Woodrow Wilson’s international program following World War I, to promote U. S. dominance and anticommunism, and to control American participation in Vietnam. He cites several common denominators of Southern political philosophy including protection of slavery—and later white supremacy—along with support of military spending, advantages for agricultural markets, aversion to centralized power, and dedication to concepts of honor and patriotism. When applied to the independent Confederacy, those traits contributed to utter failure of foreign policy, but as part of a larger nation sectional influence often resulted in positive outcomes for the South.

In spite of these strong patterns that appear over time, Fry’s study is anything but monolithic. Party allegiance ebbs and flows with the passage of time. Meanwhile, early attitudes of southern Anglophobia turned to Anglophilia in the twentieth century. He embraces dissent as an essential part of his chronicle, particularly as Southerners argued the policies surrounding engagement in Vietnam, but insists that “they consistently viewed the world through a distinctly southern lens (p. 5).”

African Americans voiced disagreement with foreign policy for decidedly different reasons than the white southern males who represented the region in Washington. Highlighting sentiment during the Spanish American War, Fry shows the contention between blacks who seized upon the opportunity to join the war effort as a route to more complete citizenship and those who saw no need to fight for the freedom of others when America had yet to assure their equality. The problem continued as black troops stationed throughout the South encountered poor treatment and violence during the World War I years generating increased calls of hypocrisy concerning foreign and domestic policies that persisted during World War II. Pressure mounted on the South during the Cold War as desegregation violence brought unflattering international attention to the United States and opened the door for communist criticism. Moreover, the whole country suffered embarrassment when visiting nonwhite foreign dignitaries became victims of southern discrimination. Into the Vietnam period, the dichotomy remained between African Americans who supported military service, and those, like Martin Luther King, who believed the fight for domestic justice took precedence.

Dixie Looks Abroad offers an insightful behind-the-scenes view of sectional pressures place on American foreign policy. Fry supplements his thorough synthesis with an equally encyclopedic bibliographic essay which reveals the depth and breadth of his secondary sources. Students of Southern politics and economics will find it a useful tool and should take note of his suggestions for future study. Ultimately, the author converts a complex story into a clear narrative that illuminates almost two hundred years of Southern international identity.

Texas Christian University LeAnna Schooley

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Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973. By Joseph A. Fry. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

Since the signing of the Constitution in 1789, the Southern portion of the United States has played a unique and dynamic role in the development of U.S. foreign policy. So argues Joseph Fry in Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations. According to Fry the unique economy, cultural, and political imperatives of the South dictated a foreign policy direction often incongruous to trends preferred by the northern portion of the country. This dichotomy lead to a careful balancing act from 1789, when the Constitution went into effect, until 1973 when U.S. military forces left Vietnam following U.S. defeat in that conflict. By 1973, Fry argues that the South had finally become “Americanized” following the Civil Rights movement and the increased economic development throughout the region. The intervening years form the basis for Fry’s monograph.

From the start, the economy of the South lead to vastly different foreign policy imperatives than the North. As a largely agricultural region with simplistic export needs the South stood in stark differentiation to the North with it’s industrial manufacturing economy that relied on a delicate trade balance between it and other nations. This lead to continued southern opposition to protective tariffs and other economic measures that might limit the export of southern agricultural goods. In addition the labor force that southern agricultural based itself on generated radical foreign policy differences between the North and the South. Southern advocacy for the continuation and, if possible, the expansion of slavery put the South not only in direct conflict with the northern United States, but a growing portion of the developed world throughout the nineteenth century. Accordingly the South advocated expansionist ventures to increase the size of the United States, whether backed by the U.S. government as a whole or not. The greatest of the enterprises resulted in the Texas Revolution and, as a result, the U.S.-Mexican War.

The regional conflict over foreign policy reached its zenith in 1860 when the southern states attempted to strike out and form their own foreign policy under a new national banner. Even at this point though, the issue of slavery proved to greatest limiting factor to the newly dubbed Confederate States of America. The South was slow to realize just how much its primary economic engine alienated it from any possible foreign political support and respond appropriately if it legitimately intended only freedom from the U.S. government.

For the three decades following the Civil War, the South sat out of U.S. foreign policy as a minority section of the government. According to Fry, the region came back with the vengeance though in the form of personalities like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt who advocated patriotic and pragmatic foreign policy that the South could support in keeping with the regions masculine and martial traditions. These attitudes found even greater root during the interwar and cold war years when southern politicians regularly sought to support military policy in the U.S. through the construction of bases in the South as well as seeing to fledgling space programs establishment in the region also.

Fry’s work is thought provoking and controversial, especially as it relates to events after the Civil War when Fry relies in ever increasing amounts on secondary sources and other historian’s interpretations of the events in question. The work is certainly worth examination and is a call for increased research on the topic.

Joseph Stoltz Texas Christian University

Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973. By Joseph A. Fry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

In this eminently utilitarian text, Joseph A. Fry considers the role of Southern sectionalism over the longue durée of U.S. foreign policy. Via historiographical synthesis, Fry identifies eight broad periods categorized by particular – and particularly – Southern characteristics. White southerners typically “viewed the world through a distinctly southern lens,” and having “developed a self-conscious sectionalism” they “exercised a vast and often decisive influence on U.S. foreign policy” (5, 4). For the purposes of this course, this review focuses on the epochs to and through the Civil War.

By their positions on the Federal Constitution and by their role in the development of early American foreign policy, Southerners “resisted dependence.” During this era (1789-1815), the South hardened an already unique definition of “liberty,” one deeply rooted in their colonial experience. It ultimately developed into a distrust of too-strong central authority, which substituted in an almost Freudian sense for Southern dependence on the capricious international markets. If they could not control those market forces, southerners were determined to control – as much as possible – the ways in which the United States engaged the international market. This led to war with Great Britain in 1812, because unfettered access to European markets “was crucial to the maintenance of the viable agricultural policy for which [Southern leaders like] Jefferson and Madison had been working since the Revolution” (35).

Fry’s next analyzes the drift toward civil war, or, “Lurching toward the Abyss.” A peculiarly Southern penchant for violence manifested itself in Indian affairs – defined loosely as foreign affairs because of the production of various treaties. This violence is, of course, typified by the person of Andrew Jackson, whose presidency also exhibited the centrality of “honor” to southerners. Each of these predicted the expulsion of Indians in favor of an expansion of slave territory in the Old Southwest. Yet, these same traits also combined to mean that the South viewed territorial expansion with trepidation in the wake of the Missouri Compromise; while most southerners supported expansion in general, in the federal government they expended every bit of their sectional influence toward the expansion of that peculiar Southern institution of slavery. Thus, the annexation of Texas – perhaps a matter of some interest for northerners – was truly a deep concern for the South. When war came with Mexico, the Wilmot Proviso seemed to prove true Southern fears of Northern domination of the organs of the federal government. Feeling increasingly marginalized and alienated – especially with the fall of the cross-sectional Whig party and the subsequent rise of the exclusively Northern party of the Republicans – southerners believed themselves under virtual foreign rule. Their decreased influence on foreign policy in the post-Jackson world ultimately generated the conclusion “that their political, economic, and…material interests, and their personal and sectional honor were no longer safe within the Union” (73).

Secession appeared the logical conclusion to the odd algebra generated by Southern perceptions of honor, liberty, and fear of dependence upon foreign powers. Yet, only one uniquely Southern element, which also contributed greatly to the seeming logic of secession, became the cornerstone of its diplomacy: the unfailing belief in the power of “King Cotton.” In a sense, the diplomatic lesson of the Civil War was that the world was not so utterly dependent on Southern cotton as secessionists erroneously believed. Despite the failings of fellow-southerners Jefferson and Madison to this effect, Confederate leaders attempted to deploy “economic means to secure political ends” (76). Neither France nor Great Britain extended diplomatic recognition of the CSA, primarily because the South never adequately proved its viability. Operating under traditional realist paradigms, France considered extending recognition following Lee’s invasion of Maryland, but with his defeat at Antietam demurred. Fundamentally, the South’s unswerving commitment to slavery made them incompatible with Western European sensibilities – a nuance surely missed by the woefully inept diplomats generally employed by the CSA. Although “southerners could not have treated slavery differently and remained southern” (105), they nevertheless viewed this as dishonorable and inequitable – and thus failed Confederate diplomacy fell neatly into the developing Lost Cause mentality.

The South confronted “colonial” (107) status after the war – devastated and dependent. A solidly Democratic foundation developed during Reconstruction, and remained characteristic into the early Civil Rights era. This solidarity predicted Southern support for fellow-Southerner Woodrow Wilson’s interventionism. Southern militancy combined with this interventionist penchant to make the South the strongest base of support for American anticommunism. In conclusion, the South remains a unique section despite ever-changing circumstances. Fry demonstrates this conclusively by explicating the Vietnam War’s Lost Cause myth – Lyndon Johnson’s sense of honor demanded US intervention, wherein American troops fought bravely in spite of the limitations placed on them by the “foreign” (civilian) powers in Washington, D.C.