From the New Freedom to the New Deal : southern politics, 1900-1932

Abstract

This study of electoral voting patterns in the eleven ex-Confederate states between 1900 and 1932 sheds new light on political behavior in the post-disfranchisement South. It relies on computer-generated multiple regressions to estimate voter behavior from one election to subsequent contests. This study thus includes both active and inactive voters. Although the majority of southerners fell into the inactive category, certain issues stimulated them to enter or reenter the active electorate, but most electoral contests attracted few voters. Low voter turnout was a consequence of disfranchising legislation enacted by southern lawmakers between 1890 and 1910. Legislators aimed to deny suffrage lawmakers between 1890 and 1910. Legislators aimed to deny suffrage to black men, who presumably voted Republican, but significant numbers of Democrats also lost their right to the suffrage. In addition, the effects of disfranchisement varied dramatically from state to state. Thus, the alleged "Solid South" was in a region rent with fissures. These rifts, together with disfranchisement, failed to excite potential voters' interest in most Progressive reform issues brought before southerners in the new century's second decade. Only the prohibition question prompted large numbers of previously inactive voters to cast ballots. In the early 1920s the specter of government control by the Ku Klux Klan generated equally high passions. The 1928 presidential contest also generated increased voter interest in issues of Al Smith's Roman Catholicism and his anti-prohibition stand. As a result, the Republican party won its first large-scale southern triumphs since Reconstruction. This study demonstrates that in several states voters rejected Smith for his religious affiliation rather than for his stand on the liquor question. The outcome of the 1928 election underlined the fractured nature of the alleged "Solid South." Estimates of voter behavior reveal that in some states large numbers of Democrats abstained from voting, while many previous nonvoters cast Republican presidential ballots. In other states Democrats voted for Hoover, thus allowing him to win, or at least run a close second to the Democrat, a heretofore unheard of result. However, in states that Smith won, large of numbers of previous nonvoters cast Democratic ballots. But the Great Depression destroyed the 1928 Hoover-led electoral bloc. Thus normality, that is, loyalty to the Democratic party returned to southern politics...