“Caution in predicting the southern political weather might seem to be in order.” The young W. J. Cash penned these words after Herbert Hoover’s conquest of North Carolina, as well as three other southern states, in his 1928 presidential victory over New York’s Democratic Governor Al Smith. Cash was not the only observer foreseeing a »
If the truth be known, many southern Republicans are pinching themselves as the 1998 election approaches, amazed at and wondering about the extent of their success. Consider recent Republican accomplishments in the formerly Democratic “Solid South.” Republicans hold eighty-two of the U.S. House seats in the thirteen-state South, up from forty-four in 1990. The Democrats »
“But, whoever suggests that the political southernization of America has come to pass must also reckon with what has come to pass in southern politics.” The elections of 1992, 1994, and 1996 have given commentators plenty of evidence to assert that American politics has been thoroughly “southernized.” President Clinton is from Arkansas, Vice President Gore »
“Pat Conroy, a 1967 Citadel graduate, recounts the horrors of his freshman year in gruesome detail. In My Losing Season, Conroy describes the plebe system he endured as ‘mind-numbing, savage, unrelenting, and base.’” In the spring of 1970, a few hours before dawn, a car passed through Lesesne Gate and entered The Citadel, the Military »
“Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the genuine heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, one said, ‘So this ain’t just Mississippi’s problem. It’s America’s problem.’” The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the United States. After decades of struggle and sacrifice, it prodded the federal government to ban racial discrimination in public facilities, »
“In December 1912, Mississippi representative Pat Harrison stood before Congress and delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of the Choctaw Indians living in his district. “Mr. Chairman,’ Harrison announced, ‘the Choctaw Indians have always stood with the white men of the South.’” In December 1912, Mississippi representative Pat Harrison stood before Congress and delivered an »
“We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,’ ‘pretty darn southern,’ and ‘sorta southern.’” Some states just don’t feel all that southern anymore. Take Virginia as an example. Virginia is the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and the capital of the Confederacy. Two hundred years ago there was little doubt that »
“The apparent partisan stability of contemporary southern politics belies a complex and dynamic process that makes it doubtful one party can persist as the dominant force in the most diverse region of the United States . . . This truly ain’t your daddy’s Dixie.” For decades, political scientists conducted election studies in which they singled »
“You can’t be defensive about it. You don’t apologize for it.” In June of 1974, just four days after winning a runoff election in the Democratic primary, the newly minted candidate for Congress in Arkansas’s 3rd District, Bill Clinton, sat down with Jack Bass and Walter De Vries to discuss the campaign. In this interview, »
“Of all the women ever romantically linked to Strom Thurmond, none was as deadly as Sue Logue. The judge who sentenced her to the electric chair for murder called her crime ‘the most cold-blooded in the history of the state.’” In 2011, Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life, sat down with his »
“Politically, the South is not an assembly of states, acting in unison, in the grip of one party. The region is not one South, undivided.” Twenty-four years ago, both the Democratic and Republican parties held their national conventions in cities of the American South. Democrats gathered in Atlanta to nominate Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts for »
“Simmons, Aycock, and Daniels used their influence, oratorial skills, and the press to create a rape scare, demonize and humiliate black men and women, spread a violent white supremacist ideology, and reclaim the North Carolina Legislature for the Democratic Party.” In the 1890s, the economic fortunes of farmers were dashed when the cotton market collapsed. »