John Whitson Cell (1935–2001)

Chapters 1-2, 4-7, and 9.

John Cell's book is a work in comparative historiography. His task is to examine how historians have understood the origins of racial segregation in the American South and in South Africa. With regard to the American case, he is interested in addressing the Woodward thesis on the origins of segregation as well as the critics of the Woodward thesis. In this sense his is an excellent example of historiography well done. In addressing the Woodward thesis and its critics, he has gone through the y tradition to get beyond it. By repairing Woodward, he has arrived at his own synthetic interpretation. [If this were a published document, credit would go here to J. Livingston, since this is his formulation. For a review which stresses the value of this work as a synthesis see Heribert Adam, review of The Highest Stage of White Supremacy by John W. Cell, In American Historical Review 88 (October 1983): 965-6.)]

Cell, in contrast to Goodwyn, would not cast segregation as the brain child of the White Man's Union. His provocative proposition is that segregation was a moderate solution to race and class conflict which attended the industrialization of the American South in the post-Civil War decades. Significantly, he is at pains to apply modernization theory (building on B. Moore) to the case of industrialization at the South.

Cell sets out the parameters of his inquiry in Chapter 1, "The Problem of Segregation." He argues that segregation must be understood as part of a complex set of relationships evolving as part of the development of "capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and modern state formation" (p. 15). Responding to those Marxist historians who have tended to argue that segregation was a simple instrumentalization of race in the interest of class, Cell believes that segregation cannot be explained in purely economic terms. Relying on E. P. Thompsonconception of class formation, he believes that the complexity of relations between class and race defies such a linear relationship. Segregation was not, in other words, merely .an epiphenomenon extruded by the base relations of bourgeois economic domination over and exploitation of the proletarian class. The causes of segregation were also political (p. 17).

Segregation was a political ideology. In Cell's view:

Far from being the crude, irrational prejudice of rednecks, segregation must be recognized as one of the most successful political ideologies of the past century. It was, indeed, the highest stage of white supremacy (p. 18) .

Playing on Lenin's description of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, Cell portrays segregation as both a stage in the development of capitalism and the highest stage of exploitative race relations.

In Chapter 2, "Contemporary Perspectives," Cell employs .the paradigm developed by Eugene Genovese of examining an exploitative relationship from the perspective of the subject people's participation in and molding of the system of exploitation. Following Genovese, this is Cell's consideration of "the segregation black people made." It was in this post- Civil War period that the black dialogue" emerged (p. 22). This was the time in which black nationalism was born. Men like AME Bishop Henry M. Turner came to believe that "only by raising a strong, modern black nation could the Afro-American become a force in the world" (p. 35). As a migrationist, Turner believed that "only in Africa could that conceivably be achieved." Though not accepting his call for a return to Africa other black nationalists accepted and encouraged the need for black separateness. As wide as differences were between black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, they agreed on the need for black consciousness (p. 26). This necessitated a separate space for blacks. Segregation was, then, at least in part engendered by the black nationalist pursuit of separateness. Not only were white liberals of the period convinced that segregation represented the solution to race tension, but blacks themselves sought to migrate or build a "nation within a nation."

If it can be said that C. Vann Woodward stood on few shoulders in writing Origins, it must also be said that John Cell has stood on many shoulders in writing The Highest Stage. He make clear in Chapter 4, "The Origins of Segregation in the American South," that he is building on and modifying the Woodward thesis. Cell acknowledges that Woodward's critics have rightly pointed out that there are major difference between Origins and The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The latter work centered on "a problem of chronology." The strangeness of Jim Crow's career is that his emergence was so long delayed. Why did segregation not appear with "Redemption?" Woodward stresses the openness of race relations before the 18905. Critics, says Cell, were right to point out that a system of de facto segregation which preceded de jure segregation. Why then did everything come to a head in the 1890s? To answer this question, Cell addresses Woodward and his critics in two different areas, the economic and the social origins of segregation.

In Chapter 5, "The South Makes Segregation: The Economic Interpretation," Cell points out that Woodward had made the key error of separating the interests of politicians and busines:3men in the establishment of segregation. Especially in Strange Career, Woodward blamed segregation on a conspiracy of radical politicians. "The conspirators were the 'new men, , a group of racist demagogues, representing primarily lower class whites, who seized control of the Democratic Party from the Conservatives during the 1890s" (pp. 103-4).

Woodward's idea of a "revolt of the rednecks" has been contradicted by a large amount of evidence. Instead, historians have found that "the leaders of the disfranchisement campaigns were usually well educated, they were often wealthy, and they were frequently from the black belt" (p. 120). What the critics have not undermined is the essential political nature of segregation as a device by which the prominent white men of the Southern Democratic party asserted their economic as well as political control (p. 122). Segregation was the means by which the Democratic party defeated the Populist insurgency. Recognizing this, it is incorrect to separate politicians and businessmen. Segregation at the workplace also helped to keep white wages low in the new Southern cotton mills (p. 130). Destroying the Populists, Democrats used the ideology of segregation to keep the laboring people of both races in their place politically and economically, and thereby ensured the continued viability of the Southern economy.

In Chapter 6, "The South Makes Segregation: The Social Interpretation," Cell addresses questions raised by modernization theory. Building especially on the modernization theory of B. Moore, historians have recently agued against Woodward's notion of a successful bourgeois revolution at the South in the decades after the Civil War. The "new revisionists" argue that a Planter aristocracy persisted in its control over the Southern political economy well into the 20th century (p. 153). Because there was no bourgeois revolution in the late 19th century at the South, this region followed the "Prussian road .to modernization" (p. 156-7) Contrasting this development with the bourgeois model at the North, it becomes evident that Cell believes along with the "new revisionists" that segregation had its social origins the persistence of a pre-industrial elite. It is here that Cell's argument is at its weakest.

[The Southern planter aristocracy thus occupies the same place in Cell's historiography as the Junkers of East Elbia do in the historiography of a German peculiar path to modernity, or Sonderweg. According to this reading of German history, one could trace a rather direct line from Bismarck to Hitler. Modernization which takes place from above, in the modernization theory of B. Moore, leads to dictatorship --either that of a Nazi sort or, in this case, the dictatorship of the planter elites enforced through the ideology of segregation. The difficulty with this model may be that it is based upon a reading of German development which is hotly contested today. Since Cell wrote his book in 1981, an entire literature has arisen which contests the notion of a "Prussian road to modernization. " An important work in this regard is David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's . The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford UP, 1984). ]

In Chapter 7, "A Note on Southern Moderates and Segregation," Cell is at his best. Recapitulating much of what he has said thus far about segregation being a relatively moderate response to the tensions created in a racist society by urbanization, industrialization, and modernization, he issues a call to deal with this period on its own terms as opposed from the perspective of post-Civil Rights Movement America. If we are to avoid the tyranny of hindsight when judging the origins of segregation, we must keep in mind that

Segregation was by no means the harshest of the solutions to the Negro Question that Southern whites were considering. For instance, there was simple exclusion. ..Inadequate and inferior though they were, however, some facilities and services were provided. .At least-under segregation not ~ the doors were closed (p. 175).

In Chapter 9, "Conclusion: Reactions to Segregation," Cell is at pains to reemphasize the horrors of segregation and to reaffirm the dignity of black struggle against this form of oppression. Perhaps sensing that the reader may brand him an apologist for segregation, he reinstates the cruelty of the highest: stage of white supremacy. This narrative tension between segregation as moderate and simultaneously cruel is just one example of the many tensions of a book divided against itself.… (mehr)