The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944–1948

Robert W. Mickey

doi:10.1017/S0898588X08000096

The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944–1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2008

Robert W. Mickey

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Abstract

In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright shocked the southern body politic by invalidating the white-only Democratic primary. Interpreting the eleven states of the old Confederacy as enclaves of authoritarian rule, this article views Smith as beginning a long process that culminated in the early 1970s with the consolidation of democratic rule in America. Smith v. Allwright transformed the politics of all eleven enclaves, challenging rulers in their roles both as party officials and as lawmakers. Filtered through various configurations of intraparty conflict, political institutions, and black insurgency, however, the ruling shaped the politics of each enclave differently. This article compares the ruling's effects on three similarly-situated enclaves—Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It suggests how Smith v. Allwright positioned these enclaves differently as they faced several other democratization challenges over the next three decades. The article closes with a discussion of how southern enclaves ultimately took divergent paths out of Dixie, why these different modes of democratization matter today, and how the reframing of southern political history developed here engages with recent research on America's distinctive democratic development.

Type: Research Article
Information: Studies in American Political Development , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Fall 2008 , pp. 143 - 182

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X08000096 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1. Kousser, J. Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 8Google Scholar.

2. Key, Valdimer Orlando Jr . with Alexander Heard, Southern Politics in State and Nation (hereafter SP) (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 661Google Scholar.

3. U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearings Before the Special Committee to Investigate Senatorial Campaign Expenditures, 79^th Cong., 1st sess., 2–5 December 1946, 90.

4. The dean of historians of the South, Vann Woodward, C., did not mention the ruling in his important essay, “The ‘New Reconstruction’ in the South,” Commentary 21 (1956): 501–508Google Scholar. Since 1963, the American Political Science Review (hereafter APSR) has not referred to it. Eight articles in the Journal of American History since 1968 have mentioned Smith; the American Historical Review has yet to do so.

5. Hine, Darlene Clark, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (New York: Kraus-Thomson, 1979)Google Scholar; Charles L. Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Klarman, Michael J., From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chaps. 4–5Google Scholar; McMahon, Kevin J., Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 150–156Google Scholar; Valelly, Richard M., The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Empowerment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159–161Google Scholar. Key state-specific works are cited below.

6. Some surmised as much. W. E. B. Du Bois called it as “an extraordinary victory, not only for black America but for white democracy in the United States and in the world.” In the eyes of Time magazine, the decision activated a “ticking time bomb” for the South. Du Bois, “A Chronicle of Race Relations,” Phylon 5 (1944): 166; Time, “The South: Time Bomb,” 17 Apr. 1944, 20–21.

7. Following Key, I define the political South as the eleven states that joined the Confederacy. I defend this decision in Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

8. These consequences are reviewed in more detail in Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie.

9. Mississippi and South Carolina remained majority-black into the 1920s. “Peripheral South” refers to Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; the “Deep South” covers Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. This case selection is discussed further in Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, chap. 1.

10. My goal in this article is to explore variation in rulers' responses to Smith. Detailed analyses of black insurgencies are excluded, partly due to space limitations, but also for substantive reasons. I pursue this issue in the conclusion. Several excellent state-level accounts have appeared recently, including: Dittmer, John, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994)Google Scholar; Fairclough, Adam, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Tuck, Stephen G. N., Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Lau, Peter F., Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006Google Scholar).

11. I draw on transcripts of more than one hundred interviews conducted from 1947 to 1948 by Alexander Heard. These and other research materials gathered for the writing of Southern Politics are housed in the Alexander Heard Papers, Special Collections, The Jane and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University (hereafter “Heard Papers”). Also invaluable are scores of confidential interviews with Georgia politicians conducted from 1946 to 1947. Kytle, Calvin and Mackay, James A., Who Runs Georgia? (hereafter WRG) (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1998 [1947])Google Scholar.

12. Fuller argumentation, evidence, and citations appear in Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, chaps. 2–4 and 11.

13. Collier, David and Levitsky, Steven, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49 (1997): 434CrossRef Google Scholar, and passim.

14. They are prevalent today in Latin America. The most important analysis of the phenomenon is Gibson, Edward L., “Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries,” World Politics 58 (2005): 101–132Google Scholar; Gibson, “The Populist Road to Market Reform,” World Politics 49 (1997): 339–370Google Scholar; and chapters by Cornelius, Wayne A. and Snyder, Richard in Subnational Politics and Democratization in Mexico, ed. Eisenstadt, Todd A., Cornelius, Wayne, and Hindley, Jane (La Jolla: UCSD Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1999), 3–16 and 295–341Google Scholar.

15. Universal suffrage is now normative worldwide, and authoritarians often hold something like “elections.” Way, Lucan and Levitsky, Steven, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 51–65Google Scholar.

16. Federal politicians, from Perón to Roosevelt, have long turned to enclave rulers for votes they control in the national legislature or their help within the national party. In exchange, they offer warrants of autonomy over province-level politics, greater party influence, and other goods. Gibson, “The Populist Road to Reform.”

17. I owe the term “party-state” to Richard F. Bensel who used it to describe the Republican Party's control of the central state apparatus during Reconstruction in his book, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

18. By 1876, fewer than 1,000 federal troops remained in the South (excluding those garrisoned in West Texas to suppress Indian threats). Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 388; Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 91–96.

19. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 11, 39, 246. White Populists and other anti-Democrats differed on how best to counter planters and nascent industrialists. Some backed black disenfranchisement as the only way to remove the “race issue” from electoral politics and thus structure conflict along class and cultural lines.

20. All states adopted the poll tax, which dampened poor whites' political participation, as well as that of blacks. Eight adopted literacy requirements, and four used property qualifications.

21. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 40; quotation from Woodward, Origins, 22.

22. Kalk, Bruce H., The Origins of the Southern Strategy: Two-Party Competition in South Carolina, 1950–1972 (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2001), xixGoogle Scholar; SP, 646 and 666.

23. This coercion “entails gross violations” of fundamental rights. Wood, Elisabeth Jean, Forging Democracy From Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–8Google Scholar.

24. Tindall, George B., The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967), 106Google Scholar. Rural elites secured manufacturing plants in non-farm rural areas and small towns. Cobb, James C., “Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South,” Journal of Southern History (JSH) 54 (1988): 56–59, 64–65.Google Scholar

25. Forbath, William, “Constitutional Change and the Politics of History,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998–1999): 1924Google Scholar; Brandwein, Pamela, “The Civil Rights Cases and the Lost Language of State Neglect,” in The Supreme Court and American Political Development, ed. Kahn, Ronald and Kersch, Ken I. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 275–325Google Scholar; Valelly, Two Reconstructions, chaps. 5–6.

26. See, e.g., SP, chaps. 16–17; Farhang, Sean and Katznelson, Ira, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 19 (2005): 1–30CrossRef Google Scholar.

27. Aldrich, John H., Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 4CrossRef Google Scholar.

28. The rule required that the presidential nominee win the support of two-thirds of national convention delegates.

29. Enclaves were certainly sustained by much more than the institutions described below. Many cultural and social resources were important, both on their own accord and to the degree that they helped actors self-consciously construct these institutions (which themselves transformed culture and society). See, e.g., Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998)Google Scholar.

30. Literacy and residential requirements and the surprisingly burdensome poll tax were only some of the tools crafted by southern rulers. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 238–265.

31. See, e.g., Redding, Kent and James, David R., “Estimating Levels and Modeling Determinants of Black and White Voter Turnout in the South, 1880 to 1912,” Historical Methods 34 (2001): 141–158CrossRef Google Scholar.

32. SP, 20. By 1903, most southern states used the primary; by 1915, all did. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 72–82; James, Scott C. and Lawson, Brian L., “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America's Gilded Age: Electoral College Competition, Partisan Commitment, and the Federal Election Law,” APSR 93 (1999): 115–31CrossRef Google Scholar; Valelly, Two Reconstructions, chap. 6; Woodward, Origins, chap. 12.

33. Without it, malapportionment could transform the Black Belt from the heart of enclave rule to its greatest threat.

34. The fact that Democratic politicians themselves codified interracial contact in municipal ordinances and state statutes belied their claim that “you can't legislate morality,” which they invoked for generations to rationalize their opposition to anti-discrimination statutes.

35. See Fields, Barbara Jeanne, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118Google Scholar. Jim Crow came to be strongly rooted in mass white attitudes, but was in part a contingent outcome of the establishment of enclave rule, not something emerging organically from southern soil. Its rapid collapse in the 1960s was peaceful in part because preferences for white supremacy ranked below those for life, limb, and treasure.

36. In contrast to the interpretation developed here, some have termed the South a “herrenvolk democracy.” Pierre van den Berghe developed the idea with reference to South Africa to capture the coexistence of an egalitarian, democratic polity for a master race with the exclusion of another group from the civic and political spheres. See, e.g., Frederickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 43–64, 90–96Google Scholar. Similarly, Robert Dahl saw the South as a “kind of polyarchy for whites and hegemony for blacks.” Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 28.

37. Of course, white voters' loyalty greatly advantaged Democrats, but hatred of the “Republican” label was itself the outcome of political conflict and a related victory in the battle over historical memory. Woodward, Origins.

38. In three southern states, the state paid only for the Democrats' primary. SP, 432, 438–442, 446; Heard, Alexander, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 76Google Scholar. Republican politicians traded convention votes for federal patronage; they rarely attempted to win offices. McMillen, Neil R., “Perry Howard, Boss of Black-and-Tan Republicanism in Mississippi, 1924–1960,” JSH 48 (1982): 205–224Google Scholar.

39. As in other authoritarian polities, ruling party control of electoral administration made other techniques available.

40. The leftist Southern Conference for Human Welfare did support the attack on the white primary. Krueger, Thomas A., And Promises to Keep (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 128Google Scholar.

41. See Kimberley Johnson's forthcoming book, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown. She argues that many white reformers sought to make what I call enclave rule more effective.

42. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part Two (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), Series Y 27–28, 1072.

43. Populists called for free textbooks, a less expensive auto license fee, and pensions for state employees.

44. Only in those states where there was a durable Republican Party did Democratic Parties acknowledge, and reduce, the electoral costs of factionalism. SP, 298–311, 387, 16, 4, chap. 19.

45. The 1940s Fred Allen radio show gave voice to this perspective in the form of folksy, “unreconstructed” Senator Claghorn (who once complained that “I had a cold last week ruin mah filibuster”). The caricature reflected the white North's sense of superiority toward, naiveté about, and indifference to southern politics. Claghorn metamorphosed into a rooster as the beloved Warner Bros. cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn.

46. In the enclaves under study, several standoffs among governors, legislators, and highway departments in the 1930s featured troopers with Tommy guns, the deployment of National Guards, the imposition of martial law, and even the beatings of political opponents by governors' plainclothes thugs. Further afield, see Boulard, Garry, Huey Long Invades New Orleans: The Siege of a City, 1934–36 (Gretna, L.A.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1998)Google Scholar. Key likened the behavior of these politicians to the “erraticism of Mexican generals of an earlier day.” SP, 305.

47. SP, 4.

48. The “party” might respond by making a clear, collective choice, whether through established procedures or by granting authority to particular actors. Alternatively, its response might be the aggregation of many individuals' choices, such as an uncoordinated mass exodus from the party. Finally, the party's response may be an utter cacophony of conflicting behaviors by numerous individuals acting in the name of the party.

49. Generally, the shape of party institutions may affect a party's flexibility to plan, act quickly and decisively, and discipline those who wield its label as officeholders, officeseekers, and activists.

50. State authorities may be unable to wrest necessary authority from empowered officials at lower levels.

51. My forthcoming book, Paths Out of Dixie, examines Truman's 1947–48 commitment of the national party to racial equality; Brown v. Board of Education and college desegregation crises; Supreme Court rulings invalidating malapportionment; black direct action; the Civil and Voting Rights Acts; and national Democratic Party reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

52. In Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, Kevin McMahon has argued that a sharp contrast marked the administration's acquiescence in its dealings with Congress compared to its increasingly assertive use of the Justice Department and judicial nominations to challenge enclave rulers' prerogatives.

53. This change, while seemingly weakening the South's hold on the party's presidential nominations, did not constitute a frontal assault on southern prerogatives. Rather, the repeal codified a new reality: the declining importance of the region's share of the party's Electoral College totals. Roosevelt would have won reelection in 1936 without winning any southern states. The loss of the two-thirds rule would gain significance only when combined with delegate hostility to the pillars of enclave rule. The convention did feature one troubling portent; for the first time, a black minister delivered the invocation. Sen. “Cotton” Ed Smith (D-SC) was shocked. Before marching out of the convention, he muttered, “I'm sick and tired of the whole damn thing. That ain't my kind of democracy.” Edgar, Walter B., South Carolina in the Modern Age (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 148Google Scholar.

54. These were the highly esteemed, conservative Walter George (Georgia) and the not-so-esteemed, unreconstructed “Cotton Ed” Smith (South Carolina). Roosevelt's active campaigning against them violated a long-held taboo, and his highly critical rhetoric about the South's politics and economics was consistent with a report written by white liberals with ties to the administration, many of them southern. David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).

55. See Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: African American Military Service and the Contestation of White Supremacy in the Postwar South (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). For the partisan and statist consequences of racial division—including racial violence and social unrest—during the war, see Kryder, Daniel T., Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Also see Klinkner, Philip A. with Smith, Rogers M., The Unsteady March (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

56. Southern influence in the Senate had to be used to block attacks on the poll tax, which was increasingly unpopular with whites. Additionally, Congress passed legislation meant to facilitate voting by armed services personnel—of any race—in federal and state elections. Southern lawmakers designed highly cumbersome procedures by which soldiers could apply for, receive, and file ballots. The law resulted in so little voting that an embarrassed Roosevelt sought to reform it. While southern members gutted further legislative efforts, southern solons were both outraged and worried. See Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, chap. 5.

57. Also, in 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began “Operation Dixie,” a large drive to unionize southern workers. Zieger, Robert H., The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 227–241Google Scholar.

58. Some courthouse elites allowed “their” blacks to vote occasionally when this very small black vote posed no threat to outcomes or when an election was thought to be particularly close.

59. SP, 620; David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 6–7. In the early 1930s, federal district courts in Florida and Virginia struck down these states' white primaries because the states financed them. But the rulings were often ignored, and black voter registration hardly rose. A few times, the Justice Department investigated election boards for refusing to register black voters. Klarman, Michael J., “The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decisionmaking,” Florida State University Law Review 29 (2001): 60Google Scholar.

60. In 1921, Houston blacks had sued the local party's white primary on Fifteenth Amendment grounds. They lost on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in Love v. Griffith, 266 U.S. 32 (1924); Strong, Donald S., “The Rise of Negro Voting in Texas,” APSR 42 (1948): 511CrossRef Google Scholar; Lawson, Black Ballots, 25; Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 (1927).

61. Klarman, “The White Primary Rulings,” 58. Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932).

62. 295 U.S. 45 (1935); SP, 290. The Court approved the statute even though the state's regulation of the primary clearly implicated state action. While the state mandated Texas' primaries, the party financed them privately and furnished and counted ballots, thus remaining, in the Court's view, private affairs.

63. Newberry v. United States, 256 U.S. 232 (1921); U.S. v. Classic 313 U.S. 299 (1941). The case considered whether the federal government was authorized to punish fraud committed in a Louisiana congressional election.

64. Klarman, “The White Primary Rulings,” 63, quoting U.S. v. Classic (1941), 318. Others disagreed, or surmised that even if jurists employed Classic to overturn Grovey, it would apply only to Texas' white primary. After all, while the Justice Department supported the plaintiffs in Classic, its brief argued that the case did not implicate Grovey. Justice Owen Roberts would make this point in his angry, lone dissent just nine years later in Smith, 321 U.S. 670 (1944).

65. Staffers in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sympathized with the NAACP's position, but the perceived political costs of supporting it were too high. Lawson, Black Ballots, 42–43 and 363, fn. 81; Folsom, Fred G. Jr., “Federal Elections and the ‘White Primary’,” Columbia Law Review 43 (1943): 1026–1035CrossRef Google Scholar.

66. U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle asked his staff to explore the ruling's implications, and NAACP attorneys prompted him to consider a federal role in enforcing it. Justice Department staffers concluded that the ruling would apply to any cases of racial discrimination in any primary. Washington Post (WP), 5 Apr. 1944. However, Jonathan Daniels, Roosevelt's point man on race relations, concluded that doing so “would translate impotent rumblings against the New Deal into actual revolt at the polls.” Lawson, Black Ballots, 47; Garson, Robert A., The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941–1948 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 127Google Scholar.

67. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia lacked statewide white primaries. NYT, 4 and 9 Apr. 1944; and 13 June 1944.

68. WP, 5 Apr. 1944; NYT, 5 Apr. 1944, and 25 July 1944; James O. Farmer, Jr., “The End of the White Primary in South Carolina” (master's thesis, University of South Carolina, 1969), 10; SP, 644; Valelly, Two Reconstructions, chaps. 5–6.

69. Liberal Sen. Claude Pepper (D-FL) expressed anger and dismay at the ruling during his renomination campaign.

70. Generally, see Kryder, Divided Arsenal. Also see Hill, Robert A., ed., The FBI's RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States During World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Odum, Howard W., Race and Rumors of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943)Google Scholar.

71. In Texas, factional conflict foundered on efforts to maneuver around the ruling; party officials decided that they were out of legal options and relented to the influx of black and Hispanic voters. Some Peripheral South states chose to acquiesce to the ruling. SP, 669; Strong, “The Rise of Negro Voting in Texas,” 512, 521. In Virginia, the statewide white primary had already been invalidated by federal courts, and the party did not officially forbid black participation. By 1948, black candidates competed for several state legislative seats, and captured a city council position in the predominantly black city of Richmond.

72. Together, the three enclaves were home to one-quarter of America's black citizens.

73. On one estimate, black voter registration in the early 1930s ranged from .4 percent (MS) to .8 percent (SC) to 3 percent (GA). Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, & Party (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963 [1932]), 218–221.

74. Scholars working from a social movement perspective have flagged a number of variables as important for explaining differences in black insurgencies, such as: the degree of coercion of black agricultural labor, the share of economically independent black professionals, black urbanization, the size and dispersion of communication and organizational networks, and the existence of recognized leadership. E.g., McAdam, Doug, Political Process and Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 45–47Google Scholar. Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, chaps. 1–3, reviews alternative accounts and the democratization literature.

75. Governors—usually barred from serving consecutive terms—had few chances to distribute patronage in order to enhance their power. Legislatures also dominated poorly insulated state judiciaries. Counties managed road work, education, law enforcement, and poor relief.

76. These included South Carolina's James F. “Jimmy” Byrnes—then Roosevelt's “Assistant President”—and Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison (D), chair of the powerful Finance Committee. Others included U.S. Senators “Cotton Ed” Smith (D-SC) (chair of the Agriculture Committee), Oscar Johnston (D-MS), and Richard B. Russell (D-GA) (who later led the famed Southern Caucus). These officeholders and administrators played key roles as bulwarks against unwanted interventions and as procurers of patronage, but not in quantities large enough to restructure intraparty factions. The papers of federal officeholders are notable for the absence of discussions of intraparty politics.

77. Framers at the enclave's founding moment, the 1895 constitutional convention, still faced a majority-black state and remembered with horror black-controlled county governments during Reconstruction. Holt, Thomas C., Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Cooper, William J. Jr., The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877–1890 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 [1968])Google Scholar.

78. Underwood, James L., The Constitution of South Carolina, Vol. II: The Journey Toward Local Self-Government (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 93–98Google Scholar; Andrews, Columbus, Administrative County Government in South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 40–41Google Scholar.

79. Edgar, Walter B., A History of Santee-Cooper, 1934–1984 (Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1984)Google Scholar. State employees were beholden to Brown who profited from several kickback schemes. Heard interviews with Edgar Brown, Gedney Howe, Harry Ashmore, and William Workman, Heard Papers.

80. Carlton, David L., Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1982)Google Scholar; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd et al. , Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Simon, Bryant, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

81. David L. Carlton, “The State and the Worker in the South: A Lesson From South Carolina,” and Terrill, Thomas E., “‘No Union For Me:’ Southern Textile Workers and Organized Labor,” both in The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr., ed. Chesnutt, David R. and Wilson, Clyde N., (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 202–213 and 186–201, respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

82. William L. Suttles, “The Struggle for State Control of Highways in South Carolina, 1908–1930” (master's thesis, University of South Carolina, 1971); Edgar, Walter B., South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 491Google Scholar; Anthony B. Miller, “Palmetto Politician: The Early Political Career of Olin D. Johnston, 1896–1945” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1976), 26–29.

83. The national ridicule that followed such events greatly embarrassed leading state politicians. NYT, 29 Oct. 1935, 3 Nov. 1935, and 8 Dec. 1935; Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 223.

84. Edgar, South Carolina, 103, 123–124. Moore, John H., The South Carolina Highway Department, 1917–1987 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Robertson, David, Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York: Norton, 1994)Google Scholar. Carlton, David L., “Unbalanced Growth and Industrialization: The Case of South Carolina,” in Moore, Winfred B. et al. , eds., Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 122Google Scholar.

85. Key agreed, ranking the state tenth among the eleven-state South. CS, 13 Jan. 1937; Cauthen, John K., Speaker Blatt: His Challenges Were Greater (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1965), 104Google Scholar. For the rest of Johnston's career, the Barnwell Ring supported him. As a U.S. Senator, however, he was always a loyal New Dealer. Workman, Bishop From Barnwell, 46–47; NYT, 2 June 1944; Huss, John E, Senator For the South: A Biography of Olin D. Johnston (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961)Google Scholar.

86. Cooper, Conservative Regime, 98–103; Aptheker, Herbert, “South Carolina Poll Tax, 1737–1895,” JNH 31 (1946): 131–139Google Scholar; Tindall, George B., “The Campaign for the Disfranchisement of Negroes in South Carolina,” JSH 15 (1949): 212–234Google Scholar; McDonald, Laughlin, “An Aristocracy of Voters: The Disfranchisement of Blacks in South Carolina,” South Carolina Law Review 37 (1986): 557–582Google Scholar; Heard interview with E. C. Rhodes, Heard Papers.

87. Whites, guided by a progressive social reform ethos and a paternalistic racist ideology, viewed blacks as generally unfit for the exercise of suffrage. Only a few upcountry labor unions supported black registration drives. Hoffman, “The Genesis of the Modern Movement,” 346–359; Heard interview with Modjeska Simkins, Heard Papers.

88. Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 360–361; CS, 23 Apr. 1942; and 18 and 21 May 1942. Seeking to tamp down growing black unrest and political restiveness, many well-to-do whites evinced a centuries-old mistrust of universal white male suffrage. The lowcountry laid claim to the South's most sophisticated anti-democratic sentiment.

89. Some blacks in Columbia and in upcountry towns registered and voted for Roosevelt in the 1936 general election, increasing their typical vote in Columbia seven-fold (up to about seven hundred). Heard interview with James Hinton, Heard Papers; NYT, 23 Aug. 1936. The party postponed consideration of limited suffrage until 1944 because of the war. Farmer, “The End of the White Primary,” 16; Christian Science Monitor (CSM), 22 Sept. 1942.

90. The state's judges—chosen by the General Assembly, not by popular election—rarely challenged the General Assembly. Indeed, the judges were often former legislators.

91. The Senate chose to table the bills and take note of further challenges to the primary; when none occurred, they postponed privatization indefinitely. Charleston News and Courier (CNC), 3 Apr. 1935.

92. Voters had to “produce written statements from ‘ten reputable white men’ who swore that the would-be voter had … voted the Democratic ticket continuously” since 1876. Farmer, “The End of the White Primary,” 20; Lewinson, Race, Class & Party, 154; CS, 12 June 1938.

93. Demonstrating his bona fides, he later remarked, “Did you know that a nigger can't vote in our primary? One stroke of your Governor's pen made white supremacy safe forever.” Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 293, 302–303.

94. Smith was by then the Senate's most senior member, having served since 1909.

95. Contrary to scholars' expectations, leadership in this effort had rural, not urban, roots. Lau, Peter F., Democracy Rising; Lau, “Freedom Road Territory: The Politics of Civil Rights Struggle in South Carolina During the Jim Crow Era,” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2001), 97–98, 160, 173Google Scholar; Hoffman, Ervin D., “The Genesis of the Modern Movement for Equal Rights in South Carolina, 1930–1939,” Journal of Negro History (JNH) 44 (1959): 346–359Google Scholar.

96. After all, almost all of the state's low-skilled non-agricultural employment before the war—in the textile mills of the upcountry (by statute) and the shipping jobs around Charleston—were safely racially segregated.

97. In 1943, Governor Johnston used plain-clothes constabularies, the FBI, and the Home Guard to investigate reports of weapons caches hidden by blacks throughout the state. Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 400.

98. Concerns about the long-term viability of securing policy goals through the national party emerged earlier. As one lowcountry conservative lamented to an ally in 1936, “nothing is clearer than that the northern Democrats cannot get the northern negroes without courting the negroes in their efforts to get the ballot for southern negroes.” Smith backed the SDP idea. Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 272; Anderson Independent, 10 Dec. 1943.

99. Lau, Democracy Rising, 135–138. Nationally, NAACP membership grew 700 percent during World War II.

100. Many NAACP leaders remained affiliated with (and often leaders of) the state's Republican Party, and the NAACP had to remain non-partisan. Thus, it could not organize these clubs. In 1942, Charleston NAACP leader Arthur J. Clement called for the formation of a black political party, but others considered this impractical. Instead, the black community would focus on voter registration and a lawsuit against the white primary. The Negro Citizens Committee was formed to raise money and agitate against it. Richards, “Osceola E. McKaine,” 162.

101. Thus, the view that Smith “stunned the South” needs qualification. Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 158. The state party studied the issue and in September 1942, recommended the repeal of the state primary laws. Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 411–412. House Journal (1943), 38; CS, 13 and 20 Jan. 1943.

102. CS, 10 Feb. 1943; Miller “Palmetto Politician,” 414. Because this legislation was developed before the Court had granted certiorari for Smith, debate was limited and low-key. The legislature interpreted Classic as holding that the statement of the two criteria triggering the state action doctrine was mere obiter dicta, and thus privatization would survive judicial scrutiny. This interpretation was a reasonable one, but Smith proved it mistaken. SP, 620.

103. One thought that the end of the white primary “would make South Carolina uninhabitable by decent white people.” Senator Smith backed the convention idea. In contrast, the Columbia State suggested that there was now “A Party for Everybody,” given the presence of Democrats, Republicans, “Negro Republicans,” Progressive Democrats, Southern Democrats, etc. CNC, 4 Apr. 1944; CS, 4 and 6–7 Apr. 1944; Miller, “Palmetto Politician,” 419.

104. At this session, Johnston said that if the proposed new laws and repeals should fail, “we South Carolinians will use the necessary methods to retain white supremacy in our primaries and to safeguard the homes and happiness of our people. White supremacy will be maintained in our primaries. Let the chips fall where they may.” WP, 14 Apr. 1944; NYT, 15 Apr. 1944.

105. Activist Osceola McKaine considered Johnston's closing lines “a threat of violence upon Negroes—an open invitation to the Klan to get busy.” Richards, “Osceola E. McKaine,” 165.

106. In Ball's words, unless the state “conduct[s] primaries as gentlemen conduct elections in the colleges, the white man's party as a voluntary association similar to literary societies or congregations of churches … will be afflicted with internal combustion and blow up.” Yarbrough, Tinsley E., A Passion For Justice: J. Waties Waring and Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 62Google Scholar. There were time constraints, too. As some complained, the legislature had less than three weeks to consider a plan of action before precinct meetings; then the state party convention would convene and new party rules would have to be adopted. Heard interview with Beverly Herbert, Heard Papers; Farmer, “The End of the White Primary,” 40.

107. James McBride Dabbs (CS, 21 Apr. 1944); Howard Odum (CS, 30 Apr. 1944); Newsweek (1 May 1944), 33.

108. Heard interview with Modjeska Simkins, Heard Papers; Woods, Barbara A., “Modjeska Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, 1939–1957,” in Crawford, Vicki L., Rouse, Jacqueline Anne, and Woods, Barbara A., eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85–97Google Scholar.

109. McKaine is profiled in Sullivan, Days of Hope, chaps. 5–6.

110. CS, 10–24 Sept. 1944. Much chicanery ensued. State election officials denied poll-watcher positions to Republicans and PDP members; with the non-secret ballot still in place, precinct managers could easily destroy ballots of minor parties. Some six thousand may have voted for McKaine, almost double the number allotted to him.

111. Heard interview with George Buchanan, Heard Papers; Elmore v. Rice, 72 F. Supp. 528 (S.C., I947).

112. CSM, 3 June 1947; NYT, 13 and 20 July 1947, and 31 Dec. 1947; NYT, 20 Apr. 1948.

113. One-party politics “disfranchised for every practical purpose everybody who didn't go along with the national … party,” and suppressed intrawhite “disagreements … concerning … state affairs.” CR, 26 Apr. 1948.

114. One of them was prominent Charleston House member T. Allen Legare, who endorsed Thurmond's Dixiecrat bid. CS, 21 Jan. 1948; Yarbrough, A Passion for Justice, 81. However, in Columbia's municipal elections, with a black voting-age population of at least 10,000, only 47 voted. CR, 15 May 1948; SP, 628–629.

115. CNC, 25 July 1948; WP, 21 May 1948.

116. The oath required party voters to back party principles, including social and educational segregation, “states' rights,” opposition to the FEPC, and so on. Party leaders threatened to disallow votes from counties that kept open their enrollment books past the executive committee's deadline. NYT, 13 and 28 June 1948. Under Thurmond, the state's Department of Education hired a black educator. WP, 18 July 1948 and 22 Dec. 1948; CSM, 13 Jan. 1949, 29 Mar. 1949, and 28 May 1949; CSM, 4 Jan. 1950; NYT, 5 Mar. 1950.

117. In other southern states, the poll tax applied to primary voting and often had a large effect in dampening white turnout. In South Carolina, it only applied to general elections, and thus was unimportant for one-party politics, but did affect whites and blacks seeking to vote in presidential elections.

118. In the 1946 general election, voters—as usual, in plain sight of all those at the polling precinct—chose one of six different ballots, one for each of six parties and factions, for federal elections.

119. South Carolina Preparedness for Peace Commission, Report to the Governor and Members of the General Assembly (Columbia: 1945).

120. Local officials remained basically uninterested in state politics, except insofar as state budgets affected them. Heard interview with Howerton, Heard Papers. Institute for Government Research, Report on a Survey of the Organization and Administration of State and County Government in Mississippi (Washington: Brookings, 1932), 622, 627, 720, 739. The Brookings study recommended a sharp centralization of political authority in the executive branch. Heard interviews with Allen Bridgforth and Sam Anderson, Heard Papers.

121. Although unable to serve consecutive terms, sheriffs had significant power through the office's dual functions of law enforcement and tax collection. Paid a percentage of taxes collected, sheriffs often made small fortunes.

122. As in South Carolina and Georgia, governors could not serve consecutive terms. Because voters separately elected several agency administrators, gubernatorial control of the executive branch and patronage powers were weak. The constitution offered the governor a limited role in state budgeting. By tradition, the governor hailed from outside the Delta. Still, Deltan campaign donations proved critical for candidates elsewhere and helped make for pliant governors. Highsaw, Robert B. and Fortenberry, Charles N., The Government and Administration of Mississippi (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1954), 69Google Scholar; Heard interviews with Howerton, Walter Sillers, Hardy, Friend, Swango, Gore, Toler, and Buckley, Heard Papers.

123. The Delta-controlled legislature avoided for several decades its required reapportionment. Walter Sillers, the son of a prominent Deltan planter, served in the House for forty-nine years (including twenty-one as speaker). Melton, Thomas R., “Walter Sillers and National Politics, 1948–1964,” Journal of Mississippi History (JMH) 39 (1977): 213Google Scholar; Roger D. Tate, “Easing the Burden: The Era of Depression and New Deal in Mississippi” (PhD diss., Univ. of Tennessee, 1982), 23; Hilliard, Elbert R., “The Legislative Career of Fielding Wright,” JMH 41 (1979): 13Google Scholar; Heard interviews with Weaver Gore, Heard Papers. Fortenberry and Abney, “Mississippi,” 520.

124. Kynerd, Thomas E., Administrative Reorganization of Mississippi Government: A Study in Politics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 45–60, 98–99, 123Google Scholar; Tate, “Easing the Burden,” 48; Vogt, Daniel C., “Government Reform, the 1890 Constitution, and Mike Conner,” JMH (1986): 54Google Scholar; Jackson Daily News (JDN), 1 Feb. 1934; Glenn K. Brown, “Walter Sillers, Jr., and Martin S. Conner: A Study in Mississippi Political Relationships” (master's thesis, Mississippi State University, 1984), 58.

125. Delta politicians were most likely to oppose high spending and statewide prohibition. On the 1903 primary statute, see Kirwan, Albert D., Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951), 122–135Google Scholar. Key ranked Mississippi eighth in the degree of factional conflict in the eleven-state South. SP, 17.

126. Miss. Code 1930, Sec. 5866; Heard interview with W. H. Anderson, Heard Papers. State law required all parties to use primaries to nominate candidates; the state paid for the Democrats' primaries. Heard, A Two-Party South?, 106–107.

127. Delta politicians dominated precinct meetings that selected county convention delegates. Heard interviews with Weaver Gore, Allen Bridgforth, Walter Sillers, Leroy Percy, Heard Papers.

128. Delta counties financed one-third of the council's operating budget. Woodruff, “Mississippi Delta Planters and Debates over Mechanization, Labor and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” 273, 264, fn. 2, 279; Woodruff, American Congo; Cobb, Most Southern Place On Earth, 200; Heard interview with T. W. Hill, Heard Papers; Woods, Clyde, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998), chap. 6Google Scholar.

129. BAWI and related efforts targeted Hills and Piney Woods counties, leaving Delta labor markets undisturbed.

130. Francis Glenn Abney, “The Mississippi Voter: A Study of Voting Behavior in a One-Party, Multifactional System” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1969); SP, chap. 11; Heard interviews with Gore and Buckley, Heard Papers.

131. Heard interviews with R. W. Starnes and George McLean, Heard Papers. Willson Whitman, “Tupelo: Feudalism and TVA,” Nation 148 (31 Dec. 1938): 12–14; Woods, Jeff, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; John R. Skates, “A Southern Editor Views the National Scene: Frederick Sullens and the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News” (PhD diss., Mississippi State University, 1965).

132. Brown, “Walter Sillers, Jr.,” 32; Robert L. Brown, “A Revival of Conservatism in Mississippi Politics: The Administration of Henry L. Whitfield, 1924–1927” (master's thesis, University of Mississippi, 1962).

133. Launched in the early 1920s, the Jackson branch lay dormant for several years. Despite the relative physical safety the city offered, the branch rarely met in the same location in consecutive meetings. Klan members and others similarly intimidated and shut down branches in South Carolina's upcountry.

134. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 35, 13; Andrew A. Workman, “The Rejection of Accommodation by Mississippi's Black Public Elite, 1946–1954” (master's thesis, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1988), chap. 1; McMillen, Neil R., “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” in Black Exodus, ed. Harrison, Alferdteen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 83–99Google Scholar.

135. Morgan, Chester M., Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985), 226, 228Google Scholar; Tate, “Easing the Burden,” 191–192; “Text Books in Mississippi,” Opportunity 18 (1940): 99–100; Erle Johnston, Politics: Mississippi Style, 58; JDN, 23 May 1940.

136. Black publisher Percy Greene estimated 78,000 in his June 1947 interview with Heard, Heard Papers; Heard interview with McLean, Heard Papers. Workman, “The Rejection of Accommodation,” 26 and 51.

137. Martha Swain, “The Mississippi Delta Goes to War, 1941–1942,” 67 JMH (1995); Woodruff, Nan E., “Pick or Fight: The Emergency Farm Labor Programs in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas during World War II,” Agricultural History 64 (1990): 74–80Google Scholar.

138. The best analysis is Kryder, Divided Arsenal; Dittmer, Local People, 17; WP, 19 Oct. 1942.

139. Remarkably, after complaints by black groups, Jackson's mayor dismissed two white officers. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 43, 46.

140. The only significant reform occurred in 1935, when the Corrupt Practices Act required that the poll tax be paid each year, rather than once for two years' tax. Heard interview with Buckley, Heard Papers.

141. WP, 6 Apr. 1944; Kennedy, Stetson, Southern Exposure (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1946), 115Google Scholar; Dittmer, Local People, 26.

142. Blacks had no access to the polls in the July municipal elections in Jackson. Political observers considered municipal elections highly unimportant, especially relative to elections for county offices. Heard interviews with Wilbur Buckley and Harty, Heard Papers.

143. Acting Governor Fielding Wright professed surprise when he heard of Department of Justice plans to investigate the Klan in Mississippi; he claimed he thought it had long been dormant. Black leaders concurred. MCA, 2 Aug. 1946; Heard interviews with Wilson and Hill, Heard Papers.

144. Workman, “The Rejection of Accommodation,” 32. Difficulties finding an attorney from outside Mississippi who had passed the state bar stymied the national NAACP's efforts to support indigenous activism. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 63–64; Klarman, “White Primary Rulings,” 75.

145. Workman, “The Rejection of Accommodation,” 33–34.

146. Williams, , “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 66; Chicago Defender, 9 Mar. 1946Google Scholar.

147. JDN, 18–19 and 30 May 1946; WP, 6 Dec. 1946; NYT, 8 Dec. 1946.

148. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 71–73; Harry Wright, “A Survey of Veterans Services for Negro Voters in Mississippi,” New South 2 (Mar. 1947). Black veterans capitalized on their campus presence, especially at (black) Jackson State University, which featured a chapter of the liberal American Veterans Committee.

149. He warned that “if we don't change these laws some day when they address the gentleman from Sharkey [his hometown] and he rises from his seat he'll be black as coal.” JDN, 23 Feb. 1946; MCA, 9 Apr. 1946.

150. On other occasions, Wright argued that reliably hostile circuit clerks would ensure that black veterans would fail registrars' constitutional interpretation tests. JCL, 9 Apr. 1946; MCA, 21 Apr. 1946 and 9 June 1946.

151. Heard interview with Sam Anderson, Percy Greene, Heard Papers; JCL, 11 Apr. 1946; JDN, 8 Dec. 1946. “You and I know what's the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election … Red-blooded men know what I mean.” He also suggested that the PVL be “atomically bombed and exterminated from the face of the earth.” Whites who helped it “should be horse-whipped, tarred and feathered and chased out of the state.” Dittmer, Local People, 2; Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 75. Rep. John Rankin told “law-abiding blacks” not to vote in his district. WP, 2 July 1946. Earlier, he warned that black votes helped defeat right-wing U.S. Reps. Martin Dies (D-TX) and Joe Starnes (D-AL). WP, 10 Apr. 1946.

152. Bilbo's comments, as well as a flogging incident in Rankin County, prompted the Justice Department to announce an investigation to ascertain whether federal laws had been violated, but it dispatched no investigators to the state. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 78–79; NYT, 25 June 1946; WP, 25 June 1946.

153. The Jackson Daily News also reminded black readers that participants in party primaries were required by state law to vow to support the party's nominee in the general election and to have been in accord with the party over the prior two years. JDN, 23 June 1946 and 19 Apr. 1946; Erle Johnston, Politics: Mississippi Style, 80.

154. Newspaperman Erle Johnston worried that “Bilbo is not a champion of white supremacy. He is a menace to it. His wild remarks, and their effects, tend to offset the good work being done by those who understand the situation and seek to do something about it intelligently.” Johnston, Politics: Mississippi Style, 81.

155. Johnston, Politics: Mississippi Style, 83. The relatively tolerant Gulf Coast town of Pass Christian, lobbied by white and black veterans, ruled that blacks be allowed to vote. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 76; NYT, 9 June 1946; JDN, 5 June 1946.

156. These included elite negotiations between conservative whites and “accommodationist” blacks that resulted in agreements (later broken) to allow some blacks to vote (in Natchez); blacks' choosing not to vote (in Greenwood); and a party leader's (fulfilled) agreement with black activists to employ county law enforcement to protect black voters (in Clarksdale). Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 83, citing New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3 July 1946; Heard interview with T. W. Hill, Heard Papers; NYT, 25 June 1946; WP, 25 June 1946 and 5 Dec. 1946.

157. For many Delta counties, groups of planters decided legislative nominations.

158. William D. McCain, “Theodore Gilmore Bilbo and the Mississippi Delta,” JMH 31 (1969): 23. Investigators gathered data in 22 (of 82) counties from some 450 individuals. They noted the key role of circuit clerks in disqualifying blacks and of many other authorities in intimidating blacks from voting. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 93, citing “Preliminary Survey and Report of Investigators Henry Patrick Kiley, Francis T. Kelley, and Roy A. Moon of Complaint of Mr. T. B. Wilson, Pres., Miss. Progressive Voters League,” 2.

159. Bilbo Hearings. Blacks attempting to vote were beaten—in and out of police custody—in Gulfport; white men stood guard around the Western Union office to prevent their informing outside allies. In Canton, authorities deputized “a popular white farmer … for the sole purpose of harassing and beating blacks with a huge club if they tried to vote.” Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 84, 86. WP, 6 Dec. 1946; NYT, 8 Dec. 1946; JDN, 10 Dec. 1946.

160. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 66–67; NYT, 22 Dec. 1946. All officeholders and party functionaries interviewed by Heard in the summer of 1947 made this clear.

161. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 107; Workman, “The Rejection of Accommodation,” 53; NYT, 4–5 Mar. 1947; JDN, 8 Jan. 1947.

162. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks.

163. One legislator opposed an earlier call for such a constitution because he feared changing what was then still a “Yankee-proof constitution;” another “warned that changes in the franchise sections of the constitution could lead to ‘negro police officers’ in Jackson again.” Vogt, “Government Reform,” 54; JDN, 31 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1934.

164. The senate amended the oath bill by a slim margin; records feature only ‘yea’ votes and do not distinguish among those absent, abstaining, or opposing. Two senators criticized black disenfranchisement, and one denounced segregation—dissent not present in South Carolina's deliberations.

165. Those who had voted in the past three primaries were exempted. Lying was punishable as perjury. NYT, 15 Mar. 1947; Chicago Defender, 19 Apr. 1947.

166. Judge Herbert Holmes, Address Delivered Before State Democratic Executive Committee, Jackson, 14 May 1947, Heard Papers. Loyal party voters would also oppose the establishment of a permanent FEPC, anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, and violence and disorder, and would support the party's nominees in the general election. After the unwelcome intrusion of the Bilbo hearings, state politicians avoided discussions of white supremacy in deliberations over party principles. Besides seeking to avoid handing legal adversaries ammunition about white supremacist motives, harsher rhetoric, as Bilbo showed, brought greater attention to the enclave. CSM, 15 May 1947; JDN, 14 May 1947.

167. Heard interview with Sam Anderson, Secretary of the SDEC, Heard Papers.

168. Heard, transcript of notes taken during public meeting of the American Veterans Committee, 23 June 1947, Central Methodist Church (Jackson), Heard Papers.

169. Jackson Advocate, 24 May 1947; Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 114–117; Heard interviews with T. B. Wilson, Hill, and Greene, Heard Papers. Holmes concurred; JDN, 4 Aug. 1947.

170. Black leader T. B. Wilson also noted that “our members are being advised to create no disturbance if their vote is challenged and they are turned away.” U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Mississippi's new primary statutes violated federal law. JDN, 4–6 Aug. 1947. Williams, “Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 120–127.

171. Party officials and candidates agreed to disenfranchise black voters while avoiding white supremacist rhetoric. MCA, 20 Sept. 1947; JDN, 21 Sept. 1947 and 4 Nov. 1947; NYT, 6 Nov. 1947.

172. SP, 642. Key also interprets this outcome as reflecting the moderate streak of Mississippi's voters, but observers attribute its failure to the decision by leading politicians to withhold their support. Moreover, a constitutional amendment's ratification required a majority of those voting for any election on a ballot, not a majority of those voting on the amendment. Voters often did not vote on amendments unless there was campaigning focused on them.

173. Bartley, Creation of Modern Georgia, 68–70, 74, 154; Albert B. Saye, A Constitutional History of Georgia, 1732–1968 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 286–287 and 304–307; Melvin C. Hughes, County Government in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1944), 39. Amended more than three hundred times, mostly for local matters, the constitution provided substantial local autonomy. The constitution required that the 54 senate districts rotate among their counties every two years. Thus, urban representation diminished further.

174. Bartley, Creation of Modern Georgia, 152–153. One politician remarked proudly that “whatever divisions are yet to come, whatever issues are yet to be met, we will … settle them on a white basis.” McDonald, Laughlin, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42Google Scholar.

175. Hughes, County Government in Georgia, 20–24, 40–43, 166–167. Even by late 1940s, “sixty per cent of the bills introduced” dealt with local issues. Collier, “Georgia: Paradise of Oligarchy,” 155.

176. By the 1940s, state law allowed counties to choose among three ballot types. Ballots were often numbered so that a voter's name could be matched with her ballot. Those failing to vote as instructed would find that the roads around their farms would remain unpaved. Bernd, “Georgia,” 299–300. Anderson, William, The Wild Man From Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Talmadge (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 16Google Scholar; Bernd, Joseph L., Grass Roots Politics in Georgia: The County Unit System and the Importance of the Individual Voting Community in Bi-factional Elections, 1942–1954 (Atlanta: Emory University, 1960)Google Scholar; Atlanta Constitution (AC), 15 Dec. 1947; Atlanta Journal (AJ), 4 Mar. 1948; 4, 11, 16 Apr. 1948; Bunche, Ralph J., The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1940]), 162Google Scholar; Bernd, Joseph L., “Georgia: Static and Dynamic,” in The Changing Politics of the South, ed. Havard, William C. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 299–300Google Scholar.

177. In the 1940s, a legislator noted, “We've never had an honest vote in Georgia.” Key men often controlled which candidate won a county, as well as its election procedures. WRG, 112, 17, 82, 4.

178. Bernd, “Georgia: Static and Dynamic,” 321.

179. Holland, Lynwood, The Direct Primary in Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949)Google Scholar; Saye, Albert B., “Georgia's County Unit System of Elections,” Journal of Politics 12 (1950): 93–106Google Scholar. First used in 1876 to apportion delegates to party conventions, the system became law in 1917; all statewide offices and some legislative nominations were based on it.

180. The population of rural Georgia peaked in 1920, after which urbanization increased. Thus, over time the political impact of the system grew. Hughes, County Government in Georgia, 170. SP, 106.

181. Bernd, Grass Roots Politics; WRG, chap. 1. Estimates of “buyable” counties were from 20 to 50. Heard interviews with Ralph McGill and Ben Fortson, Heard Papers; WRG, 76–84. Georgia out-corrupted all enclaves but Louisiana. Heard interview with Robert Elliott, Heard Papers.

182. The party's victorious gubernatorial nominee controlled a majority of seats of the Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC). Because the county-unit system bred high levels of electoral fraud, control of party machinery was very significant.

183. SP, 393; Holland, Direct Primary, 37. The nominee, through the party chair, could appoint sixty at-large members of the SDEC. WRG, 76–77.

184. Heard interview with Roy Harris, Heard Papers; Anderson, Wild Man, 17–18, 60, 75, 110; Tuck, Beyond Atlanta, 18; NYT, 18, 22, and 25 Sept. 1934; Citizens' Fact-Finding Movement of Georgia, Georgia Facts in Figures: A Source Book (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1946), 105.

185. During a 1931 embezzlement inquiry, he pleaded, “Yeah, it's true. I stole, but I stole for you, the dirt farmers!” Anderson, Wild Man, 60.

186. In 1947, the LWV had 13 branches and 3,700 members; only 2 branches were in two-unit counties. WRG, 54.

187. Henderson, The Politics of Change in Georgia. In the 1940s, Atlanta progressives began filing suit in state and federal courts that challenged the constitutional validity of the county-unit system.

188. Evidence from more than one dozen elite interviews conducted in the 1940s suggests that the vast majority preferred the maintenance of one-party rule, the white primary, and Jim Crow laws and norms. Heard Papers; WRG.

189. Given how the county-unit system disadvantaged urban politicians and voters, without such coordination, the anti-Talmadge vote without exception would be divided and Talmadgeites would win.

190. Holland, The Direct Primary in Georgia, 54. After various changes, it was restored in 1908 in party rules.

191. Its “whole purpose … was … to flatter white labor to accept public testimony of its superiority instead of higher wages and social legislation[,] to bribe white labor by giving it a public badge of superiority.” Bois, Du, “Georgia: Invisible Empire State,” The Nation 120 (21 Jan. 1925): 63–67Google Scholar.

192. NYT, 18 and 21–28 Feb. 1936, 1–2 and 15 Mar. 1936. During Talmadge's “dictatorship,” a suit alleged that, among other things, the “National Guard … is in physical control of the State Capitol.” Rumor had it that he employed more than one hundred plain-clothes National Guardsmen at campaign events. Anderson, Wild Man, 160–164; On other episodes, AJ, 12 Dec. 1940; Sullivan, Days of Hope, 156; Heard interview with Lon Sullivan, Heard Papers.

193. Lewinson, Race, Class & Party; Ralph Wardlaw, “Negro Suffrage in Georgia, 1867–1930,” Bulletin of the University of Georgia 33 (1932).

194. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta, 29 and 44; Heard interview with A. T. Walden, Heard Papers.

195. Black Atlanta could boast of six black colleges that enrolled almost 3,000 students, the South's major black-owned daily newspaper (the Atlanta Daily World), and by 1949 the country's first black-owned radio station. Bond referenda were not part of Democratic primaries and thus lay outside the catches of the white primary. See Bayor, Ronald H., Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Karen J., Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

196. In the 1940s, Savannah led the South in per capita black voter registration and turnout, and NAACP membership. These efforts helped secure black police officers and improvements in parks and other black spaces. Tuck, Black Atlanta, 46–49.

197. Talmadge called himself “the champion of white supremacy in Georgia.” AJ, 18 Aug. 1942. During the campaign, he instructed Highway Patrol officers to stop and search all blacks on roads after 9 pm. On the stump, Arnall stated that the “sun would not set” on blacks who tried to enroll in a white school in his native Coweta County. Sullivan, Days of Hope, 156; Henderson, The Politics of Change in Georgia, 139.

198. Pittsburgh Courier, Sep. 19, 1942, and Chicago Defender, Sep. 19, 1942; National media echoed this enthusiasm (e.g., Time Magazine, 21 Sept. 1942).

199. The law provided for voter registration, voting by mail, and a poll tax exemption for members of the armed services. An estimated 250,000 Georgians in military service, black and white, were eligible. Outside observers gave Arnall credit for many reforms, such as the repeal of the poll tax, which he refused to back publicly before sufficient votes appeared. Heard interview with Josephine Wilkins, Heard Papers; Henderson, Politics of Change, 85.

200. At one point he may have been on a short-list for vice president in 1944, and he embarked on national speaking tours after publication of each of his books in the late 1940s. He tied himself to Roosevelt and Henry Wallace, one of the party's leading race progressives, and offered a seconding speech for Wallace at the 1944 national convention.

201. Legislation implementing the Soldiers' Voting Act passed unanimously during a special session in January 1944, and with little expression of racial fears by Talmadgeites. Garson, The Democratic Party, 44. In 1941, the party's executive committee (SDEC) encouraged counties to use secret ballots.

202. The commission focused mainly on furthering home rule for counties and state governmental reform (for example, civil service reform and reapportionment). Most commissioners, including Arnall, preferred to delete any constitutional or statutory regulations concerning primaries, leaving them unregulated and thus flirting with even greater levels of electoral corruption. In its April and December meetings, the commission also retained the poll tax and failed to require the use of a secret ballot. “Good government” advocates had lost again. Saye, Albert B., ed., Records of the Commission of 1943–1944 to Revise the Constitution of Georgia (Atlanta: State of Georgia, 1946)Google Scholar, in two volumes; AJ, 29 May 1944.

203. WP, 30 June 1946. Arnall also opposed the FEPC as “an irritant to harmonious relations.”

204. Black barber Primus E. King sued the Muscogee County party in federal court for his exclusion from the polls. NYT, 11 May 1944; and 8 and 10 June 1944. CSM, 24 June 1944 and 25 Aug. 1944; McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey.

205. In 1940, Talmadge warned against electoral fraud in primaries committed by local officials and soon signed the law, declaring that if “you don't contest a few elections, it gives unscrupulous people a chance to get in control.” Proceedings of the Georgia Democratic State Party Convention, Macon (2 Oct. 1940), Vol. 1, Box 1, Papers of the Georgia State Democratic Party Executive Committee, RBRL, 73–74. Georgia Laws, 1941, 432 and passim.

206. Governor Ellis Arnall, “Message of the Governor to the General Assembly of Georgia,” 9 Jan. 1945, Executive Minutes, Arnall Papers, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta. Arnall, protecting his racial right flank, asserted that the party—a voluntary association—could exclude blacks from its primary. AJ, 27 June 1945.

207. In January 1946, Harris (with help from Talmadge and Rivers forces) again killed the constitutional amendment. Collier, Tarleton, “Georgia: Paradise of Oligarchy,” in Allen, Robert S., ed., Our Sovereign State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1949), 136Google Scholar; WRG, 164. Later, he became president of the Citizens' Councils of America.

208. E.g., WP, 17 June 1946. The Klan was not the only white supremacist mobilization. Immediately after the war, brown shirts marched through Atlanta. Weisenburger, Steven, “The Columbians, Inc.: A Chapter of Racial Hatred from the Post-World War II South,” JSH 69 (2003): 821–860Google Scholar; Kruse, Kevin M., White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

209. While Georgia law did not require the holding of a primary, the court ruled that “whenever a political party holds a primary in the State, it is by law an integral part of the election machinery.” Chapman v. King, 154 F.2d 460 (6 Mar. 1946). The U.S. Supreme Court quickly denied certiorari, leaving the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court's ruling as law.

210. The Atlanta Journal and Macon Telegraph backed it; AJ, 13 Oct. 1945. The committee's counterparts in Alabama ruled similarly, but they also adopted a resolution backing a constitutional amendment requiring that registrants be able to “understand and explain” parts of the federal Constitution (the “Alabama Plan”). NYT, 13 Jan. 1946.

211. Harris boasted that the state's cat-and-mouse game with the courts would “go on ad infinitum!” Kennedy, Southern Exposure, 123. Senate President Frank Gross spoke out against such a special session, partly because he claimed that the county-unit system might be endangered if not fixed in statute. Arnall signaled his agreement with Gross' speech. AC, 29 Mar. 1946. Typically cautious, U.S. Senator Richard Russell—soon to become the South's key congressional strategist—announced that the decision whether to protect the white primary was best left to the state party and the legislature. NYT, 2 Apr. 1946.

212. Arnall was rumored to become the next solicitor general; pundit Drew Pearson reported that the forty-year-old Arnall was considered by “a number of political observers” to have “a good chance to be the next Democratic candidate for president.” “Let's not be afraid of the demagogues,” Arnall pleaded. Arnall, Shore Dimly Seen, 59–60; CSM, 4 May 1946; AC, 5 Apr. 1946. WP, 16 and 30 June 1946.

213. In 1949, the bipartisan Atlanta Negro Voters League was established. It allowed its members to support any presidential candidates but agreed to back Democratic candidates in statewide primaries.

214. Heard interviews with A. T. Walden and D. F. Watson, Heard Papers; Walker, Jack, “Negro Voting in Atlanta: 1953–1961,” Phylon 24 (1963), 380Google Scholar, table 1. Heavy turnout in effectively all-black precincts helped white liberal Helen Mankin win a congressional seat in a 1946 special election. Bacote, C. A., “The Negro in Atlanta Politics,” Phylon 16 (1955): 344–349Google Scholar. Heard interview with Margaret Fisher, Heard Papers; Ferguson, Karen J., Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

215. Bernd, Joseph L., “White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 64 (1982): 492–513Google Scholar, and Grass Roots Politics; Tuck, Beyond Atlanta, 66. The lowest estimate of black registration, 85,000, appeared in the Atlanta Constitution (18–20 July 1946).

216. The Statesman, 11 July 1946 (the official Talmadge organ). The “issue” meant campaigning against Arnall, not Carmichael, and against the “Atlanta papers,” which attempted to dictate their political preferences to the voters.

217. AC, 16 June 1946; McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey; James C. Cobb, “Politics in a New South City: Augusta, Georgia, 1946–1971” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1975); Brooks, Jennifer E., “Winning the Peace: Georgia Veterans and the Struggle to Define the Political Legacy of World War II,” JSH 68 (2000): 571–576Google Scholar. Augusta's black vote would have split between independents and the Cracker party were it not for Harris' race baiting. About 4,000 blacks voted, 90 percent of them for independent candidates. WRG, 172–173.

218. Carmichael was general manager of Marietta's 28,000-employee Bell Aircraft plant, a former legislator, a fiscal conservative and a “good-government” Atlantan. WRG, 256–57; Scranton, Philip, ed., The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)Google Scholar;WP, 14 July 1946.

219. 18 and 25 Apr. 1946. Common grounds for challenges included failure to meet state or county residency requirements (one year, and six months, respectively); lacking “good character,” failure to “understand the duties and obligations of citizens,” illiteracy, and inability to “understand and give a reasonable interpretation” of the state or federal constitutions. Bernd, “White Supremacy,” 495–497.

220. Blacks sought help from local federal attorneys, but these attorneys did not investigate registration or voting processes.

221. Bernd, Joseph L. and Holland, Lynwood M., “Recent Restrictions Upon Negro Suffrage: The Case of Georgia,” Journal of Politics 21 (1959): 489Google Scholar; Belvin, William L. Jr., “The Georgia Gubernatorial Primary of 1946,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 50 (1966): 37–53Google Scholar.

222. In Savannah, Talmadge supporters blocked more than 5,000 blacks from the polls, a margin that easily decided the county's vote. Other tactics included outright refusal to allow blacks to vote (in at least five counties), slowdowns at black polling places, and ballot stuffing. A.T. Walden's organization in Fulton County and the Committee for Georgia in several other counties successfully challenged purges through a “slow down” of litigation. Heard interview with Margaret Fisher, Heard Papers. On Savannah, Bernd, “White Supremacy,” 502, 503, 500.

223. Garson, The Democratic Party, 199. Carmichael also accused Talmadge of trying to bribe sheriffs for their election-day support by promising to place all 159 of them on the payroll of the Bureau of Investigation. AC, 7 June 1946.

224. Using declassified FBI affidavits, Bernd concluded that this suppression was pivotal. “White Supremacy,” 502.

225. Georgia's factional conflict during this period did not map directly onto sectional differences; by one count, 116 newspapers—almost all of them in two-unit counties—opposed Talmadge and 9 supported him. Columbus Ledger, 18 July 1946. Famed national columnist Drew Pearson called the election “the most alarming political development in the Nation” and termed Talmadge “the most Hitlerian Governor since Huey Long.” WP, 24 July 1946.

226. Talmadge argued that black “bloc voting” indicated their incapacity for full citizenship. He also claimed that the purge efforts were only partly successful and must continue. 1946 Convention minutes, 35 and 113–115, SDEC Papers, Russell Library, UGA-Athens. CSM, 30 July 1946 and 2 Aug. 1946.

227. As Gene Talmadge's health worsened after the primary, his backers launched a write-in campaign for his son Herman in the general election. Technically, Talmadge was an independent in the general election challenging the party nominee, his father. By law, the legislature would choose one of the top two vote-getters, but Herman Talmadge finished third. Later, the Talmadges' home county of Telfair discovered fifty-eight votes that had been placed in the “wrong envelope,” and Herman Talmadge was selected. Henderson, The Politics of Change, 178.

228. WRG, 61. Thompson legislators proposed to maintain state regulation of primaries but require applicants with less than a high-school degree to pass an education test based on interpreting the U.S. Constitution. The state NAACP announced it would challenge any such law in court. NYT, 29 Jan. and 22 Feb. 1947.

229. NYT, 27 Feb. 27 1947.

230. All legislation passed during Talmadge's tenure would have to be re-submitted for Thompson's signature or vetoed.

231. CSM, 25 Mar. 1947. He also claimed to have helped draft the white primary bill.

232. Some counties already segregated ballots by race. Heard interview with Rep. Robert Elliott, Heard Papers. If those with no schooling whatsoever were barred from voting, less than 11 percent of the black voting-age population (VAP) would be disenfranchised, compared to only about 2.5 percent of whites. If the requirement were set at six years' schooling, about 60 percent of the black VAP and one-quarter of the white VAP would be barred. AJ, 17 and 30 Apr. 1947.

233. Many house members from two-unit counties who were opposed by black voters voted against the white primary bill and against the constitutional amendment to extend the county-unit system to general elections because of their allegiance to Thompson. Heard interviews with Rep. Jack Williams and Robert Elliott, Heard Papers.

234. They sought to lock in their control of party machinery by transferring the power to appoint the 60 at-large members of the SDEC (one-half of its total membership) from the governor to the party chair, a Talmadge ally.

235. Meanwhile, the Thompson party met and set rules for its primary. It did not develop a new educational requirement but merely noted the constitutional provision that all registrants must be able to read and write.

236. Also, all primary candidates would be required to pledge their support to the party's nominees in the general election, and all primary polling places would be segregated by race. WP, 9 Aug. 1947; CNC, 21 Sept. 1947; NYT, 23 Sept. 1947; Jacksonville Times-Union, 18 Dec. 1947; The Statesman, 8 Jan. 1948; Morris v. Peters (203 Ga. 350), 23 Feb. 1948; AJ, 11 Jan. 1948. Some thought the Court gauged popular support for Talmadge and ruled accordingly. Candler to Peters, 25 Feb. 1948, Box 3, SDEC Papers, Russell Library; Bernd, “Georgia,” 314.

237. House Speaker Fred Hand did “not dismiss the possibility of a second party.” WRG, 234–237. He advised Talmadge to advocate the white primary through the 1948 election regardless of a court ruling on the South Carolina plan. By arguing that the ruling had no immediate effect on Georgia, the faction could buy time until the next election. Interview with House Speaker Fred Hand, WRG, 234–237.

238. State Rep. Bob Elliott said he wished “the niggers and the unions and those white folks you talk about would start another party.” Interviews with Rep. Robert Elliott and Roy Harris, WRG, 242–245, 259–264.

239. See Walton, Hanes Jr., Black Political Parties: A Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972)Google Scholar, and “The National Democratic Party of Alabama and Party Failure in America,” in Kay Lawson and Peter H. Merkl, eds., When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

240. Chhibber, Pradeep K. and Kollman, Ken, The Formation of National Party Systems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

241. Paths Out of Dixie, chaps. 9–11.

242. Of course, the democratization of enclaves in the Peripheral South awaits analysis as well.

243. Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic, 2001)Google Scholar. Keyssar notes many moments when lawmakers “tightened the belt of democracy.” The Right to Vote, 316–324. Shefter, Martin, Political Parties and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, chap. 6.

244. Manza, Jeff and Uggen, Christopher, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Dinan, John, “The Adoption of Criminal Disenfranchisement Provisions in the United States,” Journal of Policy History 19 (2007): 282–312Google Scholar.

245. Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On the legal canon's blindspots, Richard H. Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” Constitutional Commentary 17 (2000). Morone, James, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

246. New efforts to periodize U.S. political history with race at the foreground include King, Desmond S. and Smith, Rogers M., “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 75–92Google Scholar. Gonzalez and King argue that the U.S. did not become fully democratic until the Voting Rights Act, but they make this argument only with reference to black suffrage, not by reckoning with the features of southern enclaves ensnaring whites and blacks alike. Gonzalez, Francisco E. and King, Desmond, “The State and Democratization: The United States in Comparative Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 34 (2004): 193–210Google Scholar.

247. Two Reconstructions, chap. 1. Also, King and co-authors have gone further and placed American democratization in cross-national perspective. Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman, Gretchen Ritter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Democratization in America: The United States as a Democratizing Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).

248. Bensel, Richard F., The Political Economy of American Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Of course, on Bensel's view, the maintenance of democratic rule outside the South remains puzzling.

249. Some scholars have made the leap. E.g., Scott, Rebecca J., Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Kolchin, Peter, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Marx, Anthony W., Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

250. I thank a reviewer for suggesting this phrasing.

251. The current moral panic over—and calls for policy responses to—“voter fraud” is unsurprising given the hyper-competitive partisan landscape, and raises parallels to fierce fights over contested elections during Redemption. Levitt, Justin, The Truth About Voter Fraud (NY: Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, 2007)Google Scholar; James and Lawson, “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America's Gilded Age.”

252. For Riker, William H., “federalism is an impediment to the freedom of everybody except segregationist whites in the South.” Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 144.Google Scholar On the view outlined here, federalism is anything but an engine of the South's democratization. For a different view, see Young, Richard P. and Burstein, Jerome S., “Federalism and the Demise of Prescriptive Racism in the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 9 (1995): 1–54Google Scholar.

253. Bryce, , Modern Democracies, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1921), 602Google Scholar.

254. C.f., Kousser, J. Morgan, “Progressivism for Middle-Class Whites Only: The Distribution of Taxation and Expenditures for Education in North Carolina, 1880–1910,” JSH 46 (1980): 146–194Google Scholar.

255. Oral History Interview with Hodding Carter, 1 Apr. 1974, conducted by Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, Interview A-0100, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina): 30–31.

256. Dahl, Polyarchy, 54; Robinson, James A., “Economic Development and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 508–511Google Scholar. For a complementary explanation, see Alexander, Gerard, The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. The structural dependence of democratic states on capital reinforces this result. Przeworski, Adam and Wallerstein, Michael, “Structural Dependence of the State on Capital,” APSR 82 (1988): 11–29Google Scholar. This dependence is only stronger for subnational polities unable to restrict capital flows to the extent that sovereign nation-states can.

257. The suggestion that national Democrats halt presidential campaigning in the South is particularly ironic. Here, the response to one consequence of the South's democratization—the rise of southern Republicanism—is to cease crafting electoral appeals aimed in part at southern blacks, the very people who democratized the region as they fought for suffrage and other democratic institutions. In the context of the Electoral College, Key's “have nots” argument is turned on its head in a perverse corollary to Paul Frymer's “capture” argument. Schaller, Thomas F., Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006)Google Scholar; Frymer, Paul, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

258. Bendix, Reinhard, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1996 [1964])Google Scholar.

259. For consonant views, see Reed, Adolph L. Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Goluboff, Risa L., The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233–63Google Scholar; Payne, Charles M., “‘The Whole United States is Southern!’ Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race,” Journal of American History 91 (2004): 83–91Google Scholar.

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The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944–1948

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