From the New Deal to the Nixon administration, Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee played a critical role in the most important political developments of the era. Anthony J. Badger has brought his deft hand to Gore's political life and produced a first-rate biography that should be a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how American politics ended up where it is today.
Badger argues convincingly that the trajectory of Gore's political career foretold the emergence of “a white backlash against the federal government in which race was intimately involved as part of the defense of traditional local values, whether on prayers, guns, or busing” (pp. 255–56). The result “was the creation of a lily-white Republican Party that may not have been racist, but which had no electoral incentive to attend to the needs of African Americans” (p. 256).
Gore served fourteen years in the House of Representatives before winning election in 1952 to the first of three terms in the Senate. But it was his defeat while seeking a fourth term in 1970 that most potently illustrates Badger's argument that Gore's political life serves “to explain the dramatic changes that created the modern South” and reshaped modern American politics (p. 10).