Cutting across the Bourbon Era, the Populist Revolt, and the Progressive Movement, Hoke Smith’s career gave expression to the Southern politics of his generation. In Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South, Dewey Grantham examines in detail the central role of this leader as a key to the better understanding of the political mind of the New South. A vital force in Georgia politics for almost forty years, Hoke Smith was a powerful politician, a brilliant lawyer, a successful newspaper publisher, and a leading educational reformer. He was a member of President Cleveland’s second cabinet, was twice governor of Georgia, and served for ten years in the United States Senate. His career touched virtually all of the important developments in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the cross-currents of national and sectional events emerges Hoke Smith the individual. For the first time, in this full-length biography, Smith is seen in the perspective of the times in which he so emphatically participated. In its careful examination of his acts and motivations, the book captures at once the essence of a man and a political type, as well as of an important period.

The history of the Rio Grande since the late nineteenth century reflects the evolution of water-resource management in the West. It was here that the earliest interstate and international water-allocation problems pitted irrigators in southern New Mexico against farmers downstream in El Paso and Juarez, with the voluntary resolution of that conflict setting important precedents for national and international water law. In this first scholarly treatment of the politics of water law along the Rio Grande, Douglas R. Littlefield describes those early interstate and international water- apportionment conflicts and explains how they relate to the development of western water law and policy and to international relations with Mexico. Littlefield embraces environmental, legal, and social history to offer clear analyses of appropriation and riparian water rights doctrines, along with lucid accounts of court cases and laws. Examining events that led up to the 1904 settlement among U.S. and Mexican communities and the formation of the Rio Grande Compact in 1938, Littlefield describes how communities grappled over water issues as much with one another as with governmental authorities. Conflict on the Rio Grande reveals the transformation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century law, traces changing attitudes about the role of government, and examines the ways these changes affected the use and eventual protection of natural resources. Rio Grande water policy, Littlefield shows, represents federalism at work—and shows the West, in one locale at least, coming to grips with its unique problems through negotiation and compromise.