Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction [Book Review]

Abstract

Why have not urbanization, industrialization, and the removal of the institutions which V. O. Key saw inhibiting an organized system of electoral competition-disfranchisement, malapportionment, one-partyism, and Jim Crow-produced a New (Dealish) South? Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham approach this question through short, sprightly, and incisive narratives of every significant statewide election campaign in the South from 1945 to 1972, as well as analyses of election statistics that fill 36 tables and 46 figures of this 200-page work. They conclude that though a politics of economic self-interest would produce a biracial lower-class ("populist") coalition against the more affluent whites, this class division of the electorate has more often given way in recent Southern politics to an upper-class white/black alignment against rural and lower-class white racists, or, even more darkly, to a "Bourbon" pattern in which blacks had no white allies. (Such "New South moderates" as Jimmy Carter do not fit their binary scheme very neatly.)