Origins of the New South, 1877–1913: A History of the South

XVII: The Return Of The South

C H A P T E R X V I I THE RETURN OF THE SOUTH THE end of the first decade of the twentieth century the South looked back upon fifty years of isolation and impotence in national politics. Southerners could boast of the recovery of agricultural, commercial, or industrial power, but not the recovery of political power and prestige. Politically the South remained humbled, and its half-century of abasement wasnowhere more evident than in its paltry share of place and power. Between 1861 and 1912 no Southerner, except Andrew Johnson, served as President or Vice-President, nor did one achieve somuch as the nomination of a major party for either office. Of the 133 cabinet members appointed during that period, only 14 were from che South, and of the 31 justices of the Supreme Court, only 7. The South furnished 2 of the 12 speakers of the House of Representatives during those years, and fewer than one tenth of the diplomatic representatives to the major powers. Whether because of the caliber of men chosen or the weakness of their party, the record of Southern delegations in Congress was lacking in distinction. "If for fifty years," wrote William Garrott Brown in 1910, "there has been a single great general law or policy initiated by Southerners or by a Southerner, or which goes or should go by any Southerner's name, the fact has escaped me." x In contrast with the power and glory of the ante-bellum South, the impotence and frustration of the post-bellum period is all the more striking. For almost fifty of the seventy-twoyears between the inauguration of Washington and that of Lincoln, Southern men i William Garrott Brown, "The South in National Politics." in South Atlantic Quarterly, IX (1910),106. 456 A THE RETURN OF THE SOUTH had held the presidency, and for sixty of those years a Southern chief justice presided over the Supreme Court. During the period, the South furnished 20 of the 35 justices of the Supreme Court, 56 of the 119 men of cabinet rank, 13 of the 23 speakers of the House of Representatives, and more than half of the diplomatic representatives to major powers.2 Never in the history of the country, and rarely in the history of any country, had there been a comparable shift in the geography of political power. The phenomenon fascinated Southern strategists, and they speculated endlessly as to its causes. Although the explanation was undoubtedly complex, and included, besides a lost war, some account of shifts in economic power and the balance of population , Southern thinkers were inclined to oversimplify the problem and to seek in the realm of political action an explanation and a solution. Debate over sectional diplomacy continued intermittently from the time the South turned its back on the Eastern alliance and embraced the West in 1896. The party revolution of that year, while resulting in the defeat of Bryan, had left his friends, the champions of a Western alliance, in command of the Southern wing of the party. Southern conservatives, friends of Cleveland and the East, remained discredited, for their desertion was remembered against them. The Bryanites found little difficulty in persuading their section to renew the alliance of 1896 in the next presidential election . The depression had left deep wounds upon the mind of the Southern people, and for years thereafter they nursed old scars and prescribed old remedies. The Democratic conventions of all the Southern states in 1900 either instructed their delegates to vote for Bryan at the national convention or heartily endorsed his candidacy . Imperialism, militarism, and expansion were favorite subjects for denunciation.8 The weakness of the strategy of a Western alliance was made apparent by the election of 1900. In all the West, so recently aflame with agrarian discontent, only Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada—four mountain states representing thirteen electoral votes 2 Maryland is included in the ante-bellum South. s Summaries of the conventions will be found under the names of the states, in Apple tons' Annual Cyclopaedia . . . /poo, passim. 457 ORIGINS OF THE NEW SOUTH —joined the South in supporting Bryan. The South was left in greater isolation than it had been since 1872. As in 1878,when the "Left-Forkers," advocates of a Western alliance , were silenced by the collapse of their experiment, the Bryanites of 1900 were overwhelmed by an outburst of abuse calling for...