It is now clear that the 1970s were pivotal years for the balance between major regions of the United States. Recent developments in patterns of population movement and economic growth have been altering historically-established spatial relationships and hierarchies and contributing to a transformation in the status of American regions that, in one assessment, “has quite simply shifted the balance of power in America away from the Northeast and toward the Southern Rim.” This paper examines that shift insofar as it affects “North” and “South.” Recent events have served to sharpen the rivalry and deepen the suspicions that have long existed between these regions. Within both there has been an increase of regional consciousness and a growing awareness of common problems and needs which have been reflected politically in the formation of new coalitions to identify and protect regional interests. More popularly, there has been open discussion of the economic struggle as a “second war between the states.”

It is important at the outset to emphasize that there has been no sudden reversal in the 1970s of pre-existing patterns and trends.

After years of comparative neglect John Taylor of Caroline has recently begun to receive again a degree of attention more in keeping with his true importance. That his impact upon both his own generation and upon subsequent generations of historians has always been less than it might have been is due largely to his tortured style of writing and the tortuous thought processes it reflected. John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that Taylor needed only a translator to make an impact, and Thomas Jefferson, replying to a communication from John Adams in 1814, wrote that a book received by Adams must have been Taylor's An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States: “neither the style nor the stuff of the author of Arator can ever be mistaken. [I]n the latter work, as you observe, there are some good things, but so involved in quaint, in far-fetched, affected, mystical conceipts [sic], and flimsy theories, that who can take the trouble of getting at them?” Taylor himself appeared to hold a fluent style in contempt, commenting that “A talent for fine writing is often a great misfortune to politicians.”

Although Taylor's style renders study of his writings far from congenial, the consistency of his purpose and thought make it relatively easy to extract the main thrusts of his arguments. Far from a rigorous theorist he provides a running commentary upon the politics of his times. In that capacity, however, he never felt compelled to define clearly, even to himself perhaps, some of the central premises from which his arguments derived.

Over the past two decades Jacksonian historiography has been enriched by the publication of a large number of scholarly articles and monographs. Legislative voting in the states and in Congress has been analysed, the social composition of the two major parties has been studied, the mechanics of the political system have been scrutinized and political ideas have been reexamined. The present article will be concerned with ideology, the belief system of the Jacksonian Democratic party. It will deal specifically with the Jacksonian conception of equality. Surprisingly, this is a facet of Democratic ideology to which relatively little attention has been paid.

In The American Political Tradition, published in 1948, Richard Hofstadter presented what is perhaps the standard view of Jacksonian equality. He cited Andrew Jackson's Bank Veto Message of 1832. Jackson here affirmed that

Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law.

Hofstadter concluded that this was “certainly … not the philosophy of a radical leveling movement that proposes to uproot property or to reconstruct society along drastically different lines.”

When the “hard-boiled” private eye of American detective fiction hit the streets in the late 1920s it was not altogether surprising that he should take his complicated path down Californian streets. Not because they were notably meaner than those of big-city crime in New York or Chicago but rather because his essentially private quest for the unravelling of an individual's tortuous truth would find more quarry in the Southern Californian mixingbowl. Each fresh start or re-made life came trailing the spoor of the past. The private eye became expert at detecting the tarnished metal beneath the glittering paint, at offering a wry sympathy to those cheated at the edge of the last frontier. However this “new” society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew. In the hands of one or two writers the mystery was then deepened in ways that replaced the discovery of facts by the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society. The private eye then required a writer with a public gaze to give him vision.

In 1888 an Irish-American boy of Quaker parentage was born in Chicago. After boyhood summers in sleepy Plattsmouth, Nebraska, and the tortured adolescence of a public-school education in Edwardian England the twentyfour-year-old Raymond Chandler, trekking slowly through the Mid-West, arrived in Los Angeles.

Following the example of Steven Marcus, we may point to a number of features or incidents in Dashiell Hammett's novels which seem to break sharply with previous conventions of the detective story. I do not refer to the important changes of direction brought about by the “hard-boiled” school and instanced by such matters as the professional detective, organized crime, dark urban streets and a spare, colloquial, “tough” style. Rather, I wish to concentrate on features which are unexpected even in the context of “toughguy” writing and which occur unexpectedly in order deliberately and provocatively to remind the reader, in the midst of an easily-identifiable style, of other styles and methods of enquiry into human behaviour and, ultimately, of another and very different world-view which must be placed against the world-view of the rest of the novel. By adopting this technique, Hammett succeeds in drawing attention not only to the limitations of his particular kind of popular fiction but also to ways in which these very limitations can be used. The aspects of Hammett's novels to which I began by referring are not separated stylistically from the rest of the novel. But they nonetheless suggest to the reader that the first-person narrator might have to be viewed in a context other than that in which he normally presents himself for the reader's judgement (and, frequently, approval).