The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History by Dewey W. Grantham

Author:Dewey W. Grantham [Grantham, Dewey W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, American Government, United States, Political Science, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), History, State
ISBN: 9780813184227
Google: 5kooEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T10:41:35+00:00

SOURCE: Congressional Quarterly Almanac, vols. 13–41.

NOTE: Coalition support scores are based upon an analysis of all roll call votes on which a majority of Republicans and southern Democrats voted in opposition to a majority of nonsouthern Democrats and represent the proportion of such voes on which an individual congressman voted in agreement with the conservative coalition.

The presidential election year did bring threats of Democratic party defection in the South. Two interstate meetings of southern Democrats were held in the summer of 1956, presumably as a means of safeguarding sectional interests in the forthcoming election, and a National States’ Rights Conference was convened in Memphis. Independent campaigns were undertaken in several southern states, but they fared poorly even in South Carolina and Mississippi, whose voters cast 29.4 and 17.3 percent of their ballots, respectively, for Sen. Harry Byrd and Rep. John Bell Williams of Mississippi. But the Democrats carried both states, in addition to North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas. Nevertheless, the Republicans won Louisiana and the other six southern states. They clearly benefited from southern disaffection with the national Democratic party. And President Eisenhower was popular in his own right. He ran well in the cities, in the upper South hill country, and in such traditional Democratic strongholds as East Texas and the hill parishes of Louisiana. The Democratic ticket won 50 percent or more of the vote in only five of the former Confederate states, receiving only 47.6 percent of the total regional vote.

Federal intervention and the prospect of radical changes in “the southern way of life” encouraged “a sense of beleaguered solidarity” among white southerners in the 1950s. The advocates of massive resistance were quick to exploit this sensibility. They hoped to unite white southerners on the basis of state rights and the maintenance of segregation. They also sought to undermine their opponents and to discredit the black equal rights movement. Citizens’ Councils and other resistance groups disseminated a great mass of literature promoting segregation and the “southern” position. These zealous defenders of the traditional South set up speakers’ bureaus, sponsored radio and television programs, and tried in various other ways to create conformity in the outlook of white southerners. The Charleston News and Courier, the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, the Citizens’ Council, and numerous other newspapers spoke out in support of the segregationist cause. Although some of the region’s major newspapers opposed the politics of massive resistance, most of the southern press reflected the white South’s strong opposition to school desegregation. The crusade for conformity also resorted to political pressure: through lobbying, candidate questionnaires, the purging of “unqualified” black voters, and the election of outspoken segregationists.

State authority was, of course, the ultimate reliance of segregationist leaders in their quest for conformity. Legislation was one major objective. State legislatures in the eleven ex-Confederate states passed, by one count, no fewer then 450 prosegregation measures during the decade following the Brown decision. Since the burden of initiating litigation to force school desegregation fell on the National Association for the

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