Abstract
Bill Moyers wrote in Moyers on America that that with his signature on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson lamented, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come” (p. 167). He may have understated the transformation. In 1968 segregationist Alabama Governor and third-party Presidential candidate George Wallace captured forty-six electoral votes in winning five “old Dixie” states. Since that campaign of Wallace’s “backlash politics,” only Democratic sons of the South Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, riding an historically high turnout of African-American and young voters, have managed to win a single presidential electoral vote from the South (we may never really know about Al Gore and Florida in 2000).
As Glenn Feldman forthrightly states in the introduction of Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why and How the South Became Republican, “It is about race.” For more three decades no subject better explains the “South’s partisan realignment from Democratic to Republican” than the color of a voter’s skin.
But while race is the dominant cause of partisanship, Feldman also tells us it is not a sufficient explanation. “To a great extent, the South has consistently gravitated toward the political party that best reflects and represents its—if not indigenous, then at least deep-seated, ingrained, and stubbornly inculcated—conservative personality and culture” (p. 3). In other words, race is only one trigger that engages the region’s “reactionary spirit.” That politics of emotion defines this book’s purpose, organizational structure and its worthwhile contribution to our understanding of white working-class political thinking.
Painting Dixie Red is divided into three sections, each one focusing on a different partisan driver. Section one examines the role of religion and partisan realignment. The strongest of the three offerings zeroes in on the impact that evangelical voters have made on southern voting. The South is home to “approximately half of the nation’s evangelicals,” and across the region “white evangelicals were more likely than non-evangelical whites to vote Republican” (p. 21). Religious affiliation and church attendance have become strong predictors of voting behavior.
While the phenomenon is not a strictly southern relationship (for example, 18 percent of Ohio voters are evangelicals), evangelical religion “has served as a principal transmitter of the Republican message in the South” (p. 22). Home to Baptist pastors, 66 percent of whom were registered Republican, the seat of the Christian Coalition, the religious right’s flagship organization, by the 1988 Presidential election the South had become the epicenter of the national Republican Party.
Section two includes five local contributions that examine the rise of Republican influence in different states and during time periods ranging from 1948 until 1974. Each case reveals declining Democratic sway, but none of them alone makes a particularly compelling argument about southern Republicanism. However, a discussion about a suburban Republican strategy in Georgia does reveal where partisan realignment was built. Between WWII and 1964 no Republican candidate “came close to winning a statewide or congressional election” in Georgia (p. 82). By 1990 it was the white, more prosperous suburban enclaves around Atlanta that provided the GOP troops and “necessary platform to dominate the state’s politics” (p. 94).
The book’s final section is a compilation of contributions organized around diverse themes. One theme is economics, and the strongest contribution tells a little-known story of how southern Republicans came to embrace protectionism precisely at the point when trade politics was becoming more important to foreign policy. Southern cotton-producing industrialists coalesced against free trade policies in the 1950s. Opposition to the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act and participation in GATT “broke down regional political barriers and helped move southern political arguments in new directions” (p. 206). New political spaces ultimately blossomed into Republican electoral gains in the decades that followed. Another chapter that recounts the GOP split between Taft and Eisenhower factions in 1952 helps the reader to understand the party’s current tensions between its Tea Party base and its more mainstream Republican leadership.
While there are a few insightful contributions in Painting Dixie Red, the work includes too many pieces that are of more limited value. There are chapters which primarily focus on topics that describe a kernel of the South but are too parochial to offer a convincing explanation about southern Republicanism. The emphasis on non-racial factors for Dixie’s love affair with the Republican Party was a smart and informative choice and does provide some answers to “why” and “how” the South became Republican.
Surprisingly, none of the contributions addresses the conversion of once loyal, southern Democratic white working-class voters or mentions the near absence of unionization. Feldman has written about race and unionization elsewhere, and his conclusion in this work is a very strong essay that not only warns against a “proto-fascist” abyss brought on by southern conservatism. He goes on to raise the possibility that the New Deal and its efforts at equality, community and inclusion were an aberration and that in reality the South was “more squarely within the dominant narrative of American history than it is comfortable to think about” (p. 318).
It’s that kind of thought that makes Painting Dixie Red enticing. Unfortunately for labor educators, it will have only spotty value in a labor education credit or extension class.