I first read Cornbread and Caviar when I was in high school. Bob Jones Jr.’s love for fighting fire with fire and his willingness to say embarassing things about the yet living made it entertaining fare. Stories about Ma Sunday filching fried chicken? Check. Broadsides against Billy Graham? Check. As a teenager, a line like this was just fun: “What a tragedy to see him [Billy Graham] building the church of Antichrist, masking the wickedness of popery, and providing a sheep’s cloak of Christian recognition for the wolves of apostasy.” After receiving a new copy of the book from my uncle last week, I decided to reread it and see what caught my attention now that I’m a graduate student with an interest in twentieth century fundamentalism.

The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South. Read the rest of this entry »