The Emerging Republican Majority by Wilentz Sean Phillips Kevin P. Phillips Kevin P

Author:Wilentz, Sean, Phillips, Kevin P., Phillips, Kevin P.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Map 27. The Genesis of Southern Mountain Republicanism

The War and Tennessee Party Lines: Distribution of Republican Popular Strength, 1861–1944

Chart 76. Comparative Size of the Mountain Vote, 1916–24

Note: These counties are banner Republican areas in their several states.

In 1920, the mountain vote soared as highlanders throughout the South left their cabins to trek to the polls and vote for Harding, Prohibition and isolationism. Resentment of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism rankled the mountaineers. The 1920 vote was huge, vastly exceeding that which had been cast in 1916. In Tennessee, it was not matched again until World War II. No other state is so swayed by the mountain vote as Tennessee, and the GOP won the state’s presidential electors in 1920—the first Republican victory in the Confederacy since Reconstruction—and also elected a governor and five congressmen. Half a dozen mountain and Piedmont districts in North Carolina and even Alabama almost fell to Republican congressional challengers. Chart 76 shows the size of the 1920 mountain vote compared with 1916 and 1924 totals in a few selected Southern highland counties. When the mountaineer turnout fell off sharply in 1924, Tennessee voted Democratic in the presidential election.

In 1928, the mountain vote increased in comparison with 1924 but it did not reach 1920 levels. Evidently anti-Catholicism—the chance to vote against Al Smith—did not interest the mountaineers as much as the isolationist cause of 1920. As firmly set in their politics as the Black Belts, the highland GOP counties gave Hoover little more than the usual Republican share of the vote. Chart 77 illustrates the behavior of the leading Ozark and Appalachian counties in the Hoover-Smith contest.

Given their cultural apartheid and normally near-subsistence-level standards of living, the highlands were not greatly affected by the Depression, with the exception of coal-mining and urbanized areas. Aside from the labor- and industrial policy-conscious mining counties—largely situated beyond the old Confederacy in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia—most of the high redoubts of Southern mountain Republicanism paid little attention to the New Deal and were among the nation’s top GOP counties in 1936. In two of the banner counties—Avery, North Carolina and Sevier, Tennessee—Roosevelt won only 22 per cent and 21 per cent of their ballots respectively; and there were several Kentucky backwaters where FDR never cracked a fifth of the vote! Even the Tennessee Valley Authority, which could have been expected to exert a strong pro-New Deal influence on the areas it so greatly benefitted, produced substantial 1932–40 Democratic gains only in a handful of counties immediately surrounding TVA headquarters in Knoxville. Chart 77 sets forth the persisting Republicanism of the high Ozarks and Appalachians during the New Deal.

World War II brought out Southern mountain isolationism for a second time. In the United States Senate, some of the leading isolationists came from Appalachian and Ozark states. Among them were Rush Holt and Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia, Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee and Robert Reynolds of North Carolina. Partly in resentment of United States overseas involvement, many mountain counties gave the GOP a higher vote share in 1944 than in any other election between 1928 and 1952.

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