The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 by Glenn Feldman (review)

In an expansive meditation on the ironic nature of politics in the Solid South, this richly documented survey of white supremacist politics in Alabama argues that the state’s reaction against the Democratic Party’s New Deal policies has had continuing reverberations for American politics ever since.

In passionate prose, Feldman writes that the racial inclusiveness of Democrat-led federal programs in the 1930s overturned decades of party loyalty for what Alabama voters called the Democratic and Conservative Party, particularly as the necessity of federal relief programs lessened after the Great Depression. In addition to persuasively refuting historians that argue Alabama politicians never seriously flirted with liberalism, he argues that the exodus from the party by Alabama conservatives inaugurated the crucial twentieth-century shift of white voters to the Republican party, a move associated with Richard Nixon’s 1968 “southern strategy.”

For Feldman, it’s ironic that the South rejected the Democratic party because of the same principles that first made it solid. He contextualizes this and related ironies by explaining how the religious, economic, and sexual politics of Alabama slowly became inseparable from cultural anxieties surrounding racial segregation. This nexus of prejudice emerged from a “Reconstruction Syndrome” tied to the humiliation of defeat. Feldman argues this humiliation eventually contaminated the entire history of American politics.

His early chapters on Alabama’s conservative evolution cover the triumph of white supremacy in the state’s 1901 Progressive-era constitution, 1920s political figures like KKK member and Senator Tom Heflin, cultural revulsion with 1928 Democratic candidate Al Smith, Horace Wilkinson’s New Deal–era race-baiting, and 1930s crusades against union-organizing by the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). Feldman is particularly insightful on why Alabama elites fanned popular racism: they promoted the “Myth of the Lost Cause” to sustain a “virulently pro-business, anti-union climate” (19). The convict-leasing program, for example, provided a “plentiful and cheap source of literally captive labor” (57). Indeed, in later chapters, Feldman cites cheap labor as the true motive sponsoring the holy culture of white supremacy. In 1936, for example, the New Deal coalition “was broken apart on the anvil of race by the hammer of wealth” (124). Other chapters detail the region’s vehement reaction to the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and Governor Frank Dixon’s infamous 1942 defense of “Southland” against the War Manpower Board (178).

Each chapter reinforces how subsequent generations of southern elites recharged Alabama’s white voters with the same stories of victimization—by the elites in Washington, that is. For Feldman, the “South’s Reconstruction-based politics of emotion” was the affective fire that fused white patriarchal capitalism with hatred for the federal government (255). Any opposition to white patriarchal capitalism flamed out in “Reconstruction lore of racial apocalypse and federal invasion” (53). Feldman calls this emotional fusion one of the “great meldings” that produced a national identity for conservatives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Feldman’s “melding” theories argue that the identity of today’s political parties formed in Alabama during the years spanning Reconstruction to the New Deal. Though his impressive references at times overwhelm the reader with unfamiliar names and events, Feldman’s encyclopedic notes referencing numerous archives and primary sources provide his claims with serious merit and originality.