The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968

The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 PDF Author: Kari Frederickson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1948, a group of conservative white southerners formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, soon nicknamed the "Dixiecrats," and chose Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Thrown on the defensive by federal civil rights initiatives and unprecedented grassroots political activity by African Americans, the Dixiecrats aimed to reclaim conservatives' former preeminent position within the national Democratic Party and upset President Harry Truman's bid for reelection. The Dixiecrats lost the battle in 1948, but, as Kari Frederickson reveals, the political repercussions of their revolt were significant. Frederickson situates the Dixiecrat movement within the tumultuous social and economic milieu of the 1930s and 1940s South, tracing the struggles between conservative and liberal Democrats over the future direction of the region. Enriching her sweeping political narrative with detailed coverage of local activity in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--the flashpoints of the Dixiecrat campaign--she shows that, even without upsetting Truman in 1948, the Dixiecrats forever altered politics in the South. By severing the traditional southern allegiance to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, the Dixiecrats helped forge the way for the rise of the Republican Party in the region.

The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968

The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 PDF Author: Kari Frederickson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1948, a group of conservative white southerners formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, soon nicknamed the "Dixiecrats," and chose Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Thrown on the defensive by federal civil rights initiatives and unprecedented grassroots political activity by African Americans, the Dixiecrats aimed to reclaim conservatives' former preeminent position within the national Democratic Party and upset President Harry Truman's bid for reelection. The Dixiecrats lost the battle in 1948, but, as Kari Frederickson reveals, the political repercussions of their revolt were significant. Frederickson situates the Dixiecrat movement within the tumultuous social and economic milieu of the 1930s and 1940s South, tracing the struggles between conservative and liberal Democrats over the future direction of the region. Enriching her sweeping political narrative with detailed coverage of local activity in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--the flashpoints of the Dixiecrat campaign--she shows that, even without upsetting Truman in 1948, the Dixiecrats forever altered politics in the South. By severing the traditional southern allegiance to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, the Dixiecrats helped forge the way for the rise of the Republican Party in the region.

Dixiecrats and Democrats

Dixiecrats and Democrats PDF Author: William D. Barnard
Publisher: University : University of Alabama Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description


Dixiegops

Dixiegops PDF Author: Michelle H. Davis
Publisher: Michelle H. Davis
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Get Book Here

Book Description
Published in December 1947, “To Secure These Rights” was a report from President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. One political commentator called it “the most mischievous document published since the Communist Manifesto.” Nevertheless, President Truman spent the subsequent years pushing Congress to pass civil rights legislation. However, Conservative Democrats from the once Confederate States saw Truman’s push for equality as a betrayal. In 1948, the Southern Democrats bolted from the Democratic Party and began a third party, the Dixiecrats. Their 1948 campaign was unsuccessful, but the Dixiecrats had an unyielding dedication to white supremacy. Northern Liberal Democrats sided with President Truman on civil rights, which drove a wedge between the Conservative and Liberal wings of the Democratic Party. Simultaneously, the Liberal and Conservative factions of the Republican Party experienced infighting and an ideological split over labor, specifically the Taft-Hartley Act. Initially driven by a hatred for President Truman, Conservative Democrats (Dixiecrats) and Conservative Republicans teamed up in Congress to pass or block legislation beneficial to each one. Conservative Republicans helped the Dixiecrats block civil rights bills, and in return, the Dixiecrats helped Conservative GOP members stop pro-union bills. The unholy union between the Conservatives of both parties became known as the Dixiecrat-Republican Coalition, sometimes called the “Dixiegops” in newspapers. The Coalition lasted for decades, through multiple presidents, and had long-lasting repercussions in American politics.

The Irony of the Solid South

The Irony of the Solid South PDF Author: Glenn Feldman
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817317937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Irony of the Solid South examines how the south became the “Solid South” for the Democratic Party and how that solidarity began to crack with the advent of American involvement in World War II. Relying on a sophisticated analysis of secondary research—as well as a wealth of deep research in primary sources such as letters, diaries, interviews, court cases, newspapers, and other archival materials—Glenn Feldman argues in The Irony of the Solid South that the history of the solid Democratic south is actually marked by several ironies that involve a concern with the fundamental nature of southern society and culture and the central place that race and allied types of cultural conservatism have played in ensuring regional distinctiveness and continuity across time and various partisan labels. Along the way, this account has much to say about the quality and nature of the New Deal in Dixie, southern liberalism, and its fatal shortcomings. Feldman focuses primarily on Alabama and race but also considers at length circumstances in the other southern states as well as insights into the uses of emotional issues other than race that have been used time and again to distract whites from their economic and material interests. Feldman explains how conservative political forces (Bourbon Democrats, Dixiecrats, Wallace, independents, and eventually the modern GOP) ingeniously fused white supremacy with economic conservatism based on the common glue of animus to the federal government. A second great melding is exposed, one that joined economic fundamentalism to the religious kind along the shared axis of antidemocratic impulses. Feldman’s study has much to say about southern and American conservatism, the enduring power of cultural and emotional issues, and the modern south’s path to becoming solidly Republican.

Why We're Polarized

Why We're Polarized PDF Author: Ezra Klein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476700397
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.

Hip Figures

Hip Figures PDF Author: Michael Szalay
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478261X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hip Figures dramatically alters our understanding of the postwar American novel by showing how it mobilized fantasies of black style on behalf of the Democratic Party. Fascinated by jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, novelists such as Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Joan Didion turned to hip culture to negotiate the voter realignments then reshaping national politics. Figuratively transporting white professionals and managers into the skins of African Americans, these novelists and many others insisted on their own importance to the ambitions of a party dependent on coalition-building but not fully committed to integration. Arbiters of hip for readers who weren't, they effectively branded and marketed the liberalism of their moment—and ours.

The Gifted Generation

The Gifted Generation PDF Author: David Goldfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 162040088X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book Here

Book Description
A sweeping and path-breaking history of the post–World War II decades, during which an activist federal government guided the country toward the first real flowering of the American Dream. In The Gifted Generation, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. This generation was led by presidents who believed in the commonwealth ideal: the belief that federal legislation, by encouraging individual opportunity, would result in the betterment of the entire nation. In the years after the war, these presidents created an outpouring of federal legislation that changed how and where people lived, their access to higher education, and their stewardship of the environment. They also spearheaded historic efforts to level the playing field for minorities, women and immigrants. But this dynamic did not last, and Goldfield shows how the shrinking of the federal government shut subsequent generations off from those gifts. David Goldfield brings this unprecedented surge in American legislative and cultural history to life as he explores the presidencies of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. He brilliantly shows how the nation's leaders persevered to create the conditions for the most gifted generation in U.S. history.

Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968

Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968 PDF Author: Boris Heersink
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107158435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Get Book Here

Book Description
Traces how the Republican Party in the South after Reconstruction transformed from a biracial organization to a mostly all-white one.

Deeply Divided

Deeply Divided PDF Author: Doug McAdam
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199394261
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
By many measures--commonsensical or statistical--the United States has not been more divided politically or economically in the last hundred years than it is now. How have we gone from the striking bipartisan cooperation and relative economic equality of the war years and post-war period to the extreme inequality and savage partisan divisions of today? In this sweeping look at American politics from the Depression to the present, Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos argue that party politics alone is not responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. Instead, it was the ongoing interaction of social movements and parties that, over time, pushed Democrats and Republicans toward their ideological margins, undermining the post-war consensus in the process. The Civil Rights struggle and the white backlash it provoked reintroduced the centrifugal force of social movements into American politics, ushering in an especially active and sustained period of movement/party dynamism, culminating in today's tug of war between the Tea Party and Republican establishment for control of the GOP. In Deeply Divided, McAdam and Kloos depart from established explanations of the conservative turn in the United States and trace the roots of political polarization and economic inequality back to the shifting racial geography of American politics in the 1960s. Angered by Lyndon Johnson's more aggressive embrace of civil rights reform in 1964, Southern Dixiecrats abandoned the Democrats for the first time in history, setting in motion a sustained regional realignment that would, in time, serve as the electoral foundation for a resurgent and increasingly more conservative Republican Party.

Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change

Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change PDF Author: Nadine Cohodas
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865544468
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 614

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reprint of the Simon & Schuster edition originally published in 1993. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.