Historian Jefferson Cowie spoke Thursday night at Indiana University about his 2023 Pulitzer winning book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power.
The Vanderbilt professor studies “freedom” as a concept in American politics. The term has been variously associated with the theft of native land and opposition to civil rights: in other words, freedom from federal authority.
“Freedom is the dominant value ideal of American history,” Cowie told WFIU/WTIU. “But what we tend not to really focus on is how dominant groups claim freedom as a way of oppressing or stealing.”
He argued that ideal relies on a contradiction.
“We see it in the state constitutions around 1900 when Jim Crow was established, basically saying we need to restore the Jeffersonian Republic, the anti-government republic,” Cowie said. “Meanwhile, we'll use a state to institute Jim Crow.”
As the IU Department of History’s annual Paul V. McNutt Lecturer, Cowie presented his study of Barbour County, Alabama, as a microcosm of the anti-government movement, from the 1830s through the 1960s.
The rural area of southeast Alabama was birthplace of famously pro-segregation governor George Wallace. But its history stretches back to the seizure of land belonging to the Creek Nation and the violent backlash to Reconstruction, both of which, Cowie said, were led under the aegis of freedom, and both of which were (temporarily) suppressed by the presence of federal troops.
Freedom’s Dominion examines the ideological challenge those movements create for their opponents.
“If you're taking away from us this idea of freedom, or freedom as a term, what are we supposed to do?” Cowie asked. “I mean, this is the dominant creed of the Republic.”
The response, he argued, is defending democratic norms, values and institutions.
“Democracy is work,” Cowie said. “It requires institutions, sacrifice, entering the public sphere. It requires laws to make sure the system works, and that's a very different kind of approach.”
Cowie’s previous work includes a book on RCA, a Bloomington-based television manufacturer which relocated to Juarez, Mexico during the 1990s.
