Glenn Feldman,The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats,Republicans,and Race,1865–1944,Reviewed by: Charles S Bullock III

The most quoted line from Key’s (1949) classic Southern Politics asserts that, ‘Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro’ (p. 5). Feldman fully embraces Key’s observation as he goes about offering an explanation for the White partisan realignment that transformed the South from the foundation of the Democratic Party to the most secure Republican region. In addition to its more blatant form, Feldman sees racism behind Republican opposition to labour unions, environmental protection and higher taxes, all of which attracted White voters.

Accounting for the South’s partisan change after almost a century of Democratic loyalty has attracted numerous efforts. Feldman joins scholars like Edward Carmines and Stimson (1990) who see race as the driving force in contrast to Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston (2009) who stress economic causes or M. V. Hood and his colleagues (2012) who argue that Whites shifted to the Grand Old Party (GOP) once Blacks and liberals threatened White control of the Democratic Party. Whilst Feldman is interested in the realignment of the South, the vast majority of the materials that he relies on, and the context to which he devotes most of his attention, is Alabama.

The author is a historian and approaches realignment, which he refers to as melding, as members of his discipline do, drawing heavily on letters and newspaper reports. He does not venture into the realm of political science or sociology to examine election returns or congressional roll call votes as markers for changing party loyalties.

Immediately after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson mused that he had just delivered the South to the GOP for a generation. Feldman sees the roots for today’s GOP South extending long before LBJ’s action.

The intellectual and ideological linkage … can be traced – quite clearly – from the Reconstruction redeemers to ‘New South’ boosters to the leading exponents of southern disfranchisement to the most rabid opponents of the New Deal to the Dixiecrats and, finally to the modern Republican Party and its Frankensteinian Tea Party. (pp. 235–236)

Feldman suggests that the South was on the verge of breaking with the Democratic Party as early as the 1930s. However, the 1930s marked the onset of the era when the South had its greatest influence in Congress during the 20th century. The New Deal realignment made the South a minority in the Democratic Party, but it also enabled Southerners to chair multiple, powerful Congressional committees. During this period – when Eleanor Roosevelt challenged White supremacy, FDR created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and Northern Democrats sponsored anti-lynching and anti-poll tax proposals that according to Feldman – the Democratic Party consigned itself to minority status in the South. However, despite dissonance with the majority of their fellow partisans, the power derived from being part of the national partisan majority dissuaded the vast majority of Southerners from defecting.

Feldman’s diligent review of Alabama materials uncovers evidence of dissatisfaction with the national Democratic Party along with threats to decamp to the GOP. However, the sources Feldman relies on, including the state’s GOP leaders during FDR’s presidency, obviously did not speak for the Alabama electorate that gave more than 80% of the vote to FDR onwards through 1944.

Since Feldman’s interest is in Southern realignment, it is surprising that the volume’s subtitle stops at 1944, the last time that a Democratic presidential nominee carried the region’s 11 states. The author devotes an epilogue to the period during which many believe realignment occurred with Southern Whites undergoing what Key labelled a secular (gradual) realignment to the GOP, a shift that begins in the Rim South with Dwight Eisenhower’s campaigns before spreading to Alabama and the rest of the Deep South with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid. The region’s African Americans experienced a critical realignment to the Democratic Party in 1964.

Feldman sees Alabama’s support for the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 as a significant step in White realignment. However, it may have been disproportionately the elites who broke with the national party that year. The states won by Strom Thurmond were ones in which he was listed as the Democratic nominee; in Alabama, Harry Truman’s name did not appear on the ballot. Georgia, which listed Truman as the Democratic nominee, remained loyal. Shafer and Johnston provide evidence that Thurmond supporters returned to the Democratic fold in 1952 rather than using the Dixiecrats as a halfway house to the GOP. Even in 1960, John Kennedy won 56.7% of the vote in Alabama, his fourth best showing and this was when less than a fifth of the state’s adult Blacks had registered to vote.

Feldman’s interest focuses almost exclusively on presidential elections. The state at the heart of his study, Alabama, was one of the last gathered into the GOP fold with Republicans not consolidating control of the legislature until 2010.

Feldman differs from scholars like Barbara Sinclair whose study of roll call voting in the US House shows that until the mid-1940s Southern Democrats had records as liberal as Democrats from other regions on all major policy dimensions except for civil liberties. Feldman dismisses what others identify as a strain of Southern liberalism because of the unwavering commitment to White supremacy. One of the Alabama professor’s objectives is to debunk the idea that in the 1940s and 1950s Alabama had a relatively liberal congressional delegation. To the extent that Southerners took progressive stands, it was nothing more than in return for programmes bringing federal dollars into the region.

Feldman is not a dispassionate analyst but instead readily identifies villains, a large group that includes most Alabama politicians of the last century and a half. Differences between those who have been viewed as progressives and Theodore Bilbo or Bull Connor, Feldman claims are merely cosmetic. This volume, which sees economic conservativism as a new racism and characterizes Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman as a ‘fringe figure’, will get liberals on their feet stomping and cheering.