Kevin M. Kruse
Kevin M. Kruse
Kevin Michael Kruse is an American historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modern conservatism. Outside of academia, Kruse attracted substantial attention and following in the mid-2010s for his Twitter threads where he provided his
"The intricate dynamics of personal and group interaction -- and their interplay with structural forces -- are most visible only at the local level. I chose to conduct a case study precisely because it allows for a rich description and analysis of the processes that are all too often left in the realm of broad generalizations - racism, discrimination, backlash, "white flight"...Atlanta struck me as a logical site for such an analysis."
"The story of business leaders enlisting clergymen in their war against the New Deal is one that has been largely obscured by the very ideology that resulted from it."
"Atlanta...holds a singular place as the political and economic leader of the New South; it served as the headquarters for a number of civil rights organizations; it has been a center of black higher education. Furthermore, Atlanta has hailed itself as the city too busy to hate -- one of progressive race relations...Central figures in civil rights history - such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Martin Luther King, Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Ralph Abernathy, and Julian Bond - have lived inside its limits at one time or another...While Atlanta, like any other city, is unique in certain ways, I do not believe it is unique in regard to its struggles over race and rights."
"Conservative clergymen now used their ministerial authority to argue, quite explicitly, that New Dealers were the ones violating the Ten Commandments. ... They insisted that the welfare state was not a means to implement Christs teaching about caring for the poor and the needy, but rather a perversion of Christian doctrine. In a forceful rejection of the public service themes of the Social Gospel, they argued that the central tenet of Christianity remained the salvation of the individual. If any political and economic system fit with the religious teachings of Christ, it would have to be rooted in a similarly individualistic ethos. Nothing better exemplified such values, they insisted, than the capitalist system of free enterprise."
