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By Kay Craig
Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment vision of a virtuous agrarian republic was transformed by later Southern thinkers into one of the most sustained critiques of industrial capitalism in American history. From Jefferson through John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh’s “Black Mass” of socialist-slavery, to the Southern Populists, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, and George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, the South waged a 150-year war against its economic colonization by Northern banks, tariffs, and factories. In Rebels, Kay Craig reframes this history and raises uncomfortable questions for class politics from the Left today. What if your critique of American imperialism is identical to that of Southern reaction?
