Southern Cultures: The Politics Issue: Volume 18: Number 3 – Fall 2012 Issue

front porch

Who would have thought that Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida would all cast their votes for a Democrat in 2008, much less an African American? Timed to coincide with the upcoming elections, this issue of Southern Cultures looks over recent changes and reviews southern politics. Barack Obama, Oval Office, 2009, photographed by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House.

In school we learn that American democracy had a southern birthplace, when Virginia elected its first House of Burgesses in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims signed their celebrated Mayflower Compact. And Virginia also gave us Thomas Jefferson, America’s favorite political philosopher. When the United States was torn between two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both came from southern roots, born about a hundred miles from each other in Virginia’s offspring, the slave state of Kentucky. And twentieth-century American politics is layered with the names of southern officeholders: Wilson, Johnson, Wallace, Carter, Clinton, Helms, Bush II, and scores of others. Next to football and religion, politics might well be southerners’ favorite sport.

The South’s popular lore and history books are filled with raffish southern politicos, unforgettable characters who never failed to amuse, outrage, or scandalize their audiences. Just to stay within a single state, one North Carolina campaigner at the dawn of the Republic allegedly kept a Revolutionary hero out of Congress by claiming that his French china chamber pot made him an aristocrat. Over a century later, Robert Rice (Our Bob) Reynolds swept into the Senate by claiming that the incumbent Cameron Morrison preferred caviar, or fish eggs from Red Russia, to good old North Carolina hen eggs. And even when the old-fashioned clowns gave way to modern air-brushed slickos whose every quirk and flaw stay hidden behind a screen of high-priced image makers and consultants, the horse-race character of politics, the endless speculation of who’s up and who’s down, can be stripped away from questions about issues and lasting substance.

But like southern football, you could never say that southern politics is only a game. Underneath all the foolishness and the handicapping lurk serious questions of place and power. Whether the issues were slave codes in the nineteenth century, voting rights in the twentieth, or fracking in the twenty-first, southern elections have turned on enduring debates in public policy, the classic disputes over who gets what and when. Weaving in and out of the material questions, the issue of race is usually on the agenda as well. Despite all the claims for a post-racial America, race has been especially salient in politics this year, in controversies ranging from Alabama’s immigration laws to the presidency itself. To be sure, the South’s political landscape is always changing. Ten years ago, for example, who would have thought that Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida would all cast their votes for a Democrat in 2008, much less an African American? Timed to coincide with the upcoming elections of 2012, the essays in this issue of Southern Cultures look over these recent changes and also review southern politics over time, not only gauging the impact of perpetual questions like race and inequality, but also exploring the horse-trading and calculations that it takes to win.

Political journalist Ferrel Guillory, our guest editor for this issue, leads the way by pointing out five major trends in southern politics that will have an impact in 2012 and beyond. First of all, he reminds us that the South is no longer solid. Not only are both parties reasonably viable almost everywhere, but each state is an independent entity and will not follow lockstep in the paths of its neighbors. Second, he reminds us that the southern electorate is no longer rural, but mostly metropolitan in economic and political terms. His third point expands the first: Texas is the most unpredictable southern state of all, with white, black, and Hispanic minorities that keep prognosticators guessing. And finally, the recessions of the last decade have knocked the Sun Belt off its path of uninterrupted prosperity and a turn to the right has affected both major parties, limiting political options for governors and legislators in a time when creative responses are most needed. So who benefits? Will political diversity bring comparable diversity to public policy or will southern states find different paths to the same solutions? Will metropolitan lifestyles bring tolerance and sophistication or efforts to turn back the clock? Will new Hispanic voters break to the right or the left, in Texas and elsewhere? Will free market approaches to economic development prevail, or will southern leaders cling to the government programs of industry-hunting that they have practiced before now? Guillory gives us no firm answers, but he does give us a scorecard to know what to look for.

Last year Guillory interviewed his old friend and colleague Jack Bass for the Southern Oral History Program, and we publish part of that conversation in this issue. Like Guillory, Bass is an esteemed journalist who has devoted his career to exploring the ins and outs of southern politics, even exploring the other side of the game by once attempting his own (unsuccessful) run for Congress. Guillory asked Bass about his career, beginning with his boyhood in the unlikely-sounding town of North, South Carolina, and moving on to his early experience covering the nascent Civil Rights Movement. From there, Bass takes us to the stories behind his books, including an investigation of the Orangeburg Masssacre, a regional analysis of southern politics, an exploration of four key judges in civil rights cases, and two volumes on Strom Thurmond.

One of Bass’s most influential works was The Transformation of Southern Politics, written with political scientist Walter De Vries in 1976. The two authors interviewed almost every southern politician of note in those days to probe the politics of the entire region and update V. O. Key’s classic 1949 analysis, Southern Politics in State and Nation. One of the lesser known figures they spoke with was an obscure congressional candidate from the 3rd District of Arkansas named William Jefferson Clinton. All the interviews were later deposited in the archives of the Southern Oral History Program, and historian Seth Kotch has pulled out some key portions of the future president’s musings. Clinton tries to explain how a graduate of Yale and Oxford who managed the Texas McGovern campaign ever hoped to win election in the Ozarks. The secret was simple, he claimed: by having a better grasp of the issues than the people I’m running against. Taking voters seriously and explaining his stands without condescension or defensiveness was the key, Clinton insisted, but as it turned out, that was not enough. He lost the election to a man who may not have known the issues but definitely understood the voters of the 3rd district.

In many parts of the modern South, hostility to Hispanic immigration has taken up the space once occupied by overt black-white racial tensions. Alabama’s strict new laws became very controversial in 2011, especially the provision that requires police to demand identification from anyone they stop or question, if they have a reasonable suspicion that the person in question is an illegal immigrant. The law also takes stringent steps to be sure that illegal immigrants cannot work, rent property, attend a public college, or vote in Alabama. Intended to force illegal immigrants from the state, the new code is even stricter in some respects than the old Jim Crow codes, which were designed to discipline the black labor force without expelling it. After all, how could sharecropping have worked if blacks were forbidden to rent property?

Hispanic advocates have quickly spotted the analogy between legal racial profiling and legalized Jim Crow, and exploited the similarity to gain the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement for their protests. The tactic has aroused some opposition among African Americans who argue that no one has the right to their story and their movement but themselves. Besides, aren’t they born southerners with a right to stay, and can’t Hispanics just go home if they don’t like it here? This three-cornered tug of war has brought the South’s new demography into sharp relief in many localities. Historian Jennifer Brooks show us what it’s like in her photo essay, ‘No Juan Crow!’

Our final three essays look to the southern political past, especially illustrating the overt racial politics of the mid-twentieth century and offering significant points of comparison with current conditions. Veteran Southern Cultures author Stephen Whitfield goes back to World War II to explore the South’s reaction to Nazi racism. Perhaps surprisingly, he finds that white southerners did not hesitate to condemn German anti-Semitism. They judged Nazism by the liberal democratic values that Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal would call the American Creed in his later manifesto against segregation, An American Dilemma, but seemed utterly oblivious to its implications for African Americans. Many writers have pointed out how the war against Hitler undermined America’s defenses of its own racial practices and emboldened black veterans to fight against the same prejudice at home that they battled overseas. Is it possible that white southerners’ opposition to German racism somehow made their own attitudes less stable? Whitfield offers a sensitive and nuanced portrait of an important influence on a region facing drastic change.

Historian Dwana Waugh’s essay takes us to an extreme case of racism in southern politics: the decision by the whites of Prince Edward County, Virginia, to close their public schools rather than integrate them. Instead of dwelling on the initial decision to end public education altogether, Waugh explores the slow, painful process of undoing that decision years later. First the courts required Prince Edward to open a school system, even if it only supported African American pupils. And then white residents slowly faced up to the fact that their segregated school system disgraced their county’s reputation, hurt economic development, and poisoned community relations. The difficult trade-offs involved in replacing poor but black-controlled schools with a system that would attract the white middle class form the crux of Waugh’s story. It turns out that Prince Edward County has been a southern prototype in more ways than one.

Seth C. McKee concludes our articles with a review of southern political history. He reminds us how the Democratic Party long ruled as the all-white monitor of the Solid South, how national Democrats undermined that arrangement when they sought black votes that the Great Migration had delivered to northern cities, how southern whites turned Republican in response, starting in presidential elections as early as Truman’s and slowly filtering down to local contests, and how the redistricting cases of the 1980s and 1990s not only brought black politicians to public office but also strengthened the Republicans’ hold on southern statehouses and congressional delegations. The result, he predicts, is a future South that resembles Ferrel Guillory’s forecasts: fluid, unstable, and surprising.

We conclude with two poems by Tammy L. Brown. Raising Cane deals directly with enslavement by evoking the life of a sugar worker who steals the crop. How can a stolen body steal cane? the poem asks, as it paints the harsh contrast that sugar creates between the sweltering field and the dessert table, groaning with delicacies. The second piece strikes a lighter tone as it evokes the feelings of a black child reveling in multiple identities as she grows up, trying one after another as it suits her fancy, defying the compulsion that surrounds her. Do the poems also reflect the polarities of power and place in southern politics? You decide.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

The South in Red and Purple

Southernized Republicans, Diverse Democrats

by Ferrel Guillory

A Republican Southern Strategy emerged out of the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968, and then the 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin P. Phillips, who served in the Nixon campaign. However, President Obama’s 2008 wins in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida revealed enough political change to give a Democratic candidate a chance to pick up electoral votes in the South. Nixon on the ’68 campaign trail, courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Twenty-four years ago, both the Democratic and Republican parties held their national conventions in cities of the American South. Democrats gathered in Atlanta to nominate Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts for president, and Republicans assembled in New Orleans to nominate George H. W. Bush of Texas. To mark the arrival of Democrats in his city—and mindful that Republicans would subsequently meet way down yonder—Bill Kovach, then editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, commissioned a series of essays on the southern condition by seventeen eminent historians, novelists, and journalists. Their essays were collected after the 1988 election in The Prevailing South: Life & Politics in a Changing Culture.

It has been a long time since the South has enjoyed the feeling of being really wanted and needed in the national business of electing a president, historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in the opening of his essay for the book. But now, rather suddenly, and for the first time in history, both major political parties have held their presidential nominating conventions in the Deep South.

The 1988 conventions had the aura of a historic milestone, and their sites seemed ready-made for the every-four-year exercise in political liturgy. Atlanta had decisively emerged as primus inter pares as the Southeast’s major metropolis, with its international-hub airport, its tall towers standing sentinel along Peachtree, and its magnetic pull to in-migrants both black and white. New Orleans had long served as a conventioncity, with its Vieux Carré at a dramatic bend in the Mississippi, its splendid restaurants, and its landmark domed stadium.

Now, in preparing for the 2012 presidential election, both major political parties have again chosen cities in the American South for their national conventions. Republicans convene first in Tampa, and, a week later, Democrats meet in Charlotte. The 2012 conventions have a different feel—less about history, more about the politics of the moment. Until now, neither Tampa nor Charlotte would have readily come to mind as natural destinations