You Can't Go Home Again: Democratic Presidents and Dixie

On March 7, 1937, as the nation debated Franklin D. Roosevelt's recently announced plan to expand the size of the Supreme Court from nine to fifteen, the New York Times reported that "fifty-one thousand Texans" were to "be the first to express themselves by ballot" on the merits of the proposal. The fifty-one thousand were all voters in Texas's 10^th congressional district, which was holding a special congressional election to fill the vacancy left by the recently deceased James P. Buchanan. As the eight candidates vied for the trip to Washington, FDR's bold Court-packing plan emerged as "a major issue" in the campaign. And only one of the candidates "stood squarely behind the Roosevelt proposal."¹ One of the more well-known members of the field campaigned on "a platform of 'no yes-man judges.'" When the votes were cast the following month—two weeks after the Court had reversed course by upholding state-minimum wage legislation and two days before it constitutionally validated Robert Wagner's National Labor Relations Act—the pro-Court-packing plan candidate sailed to an easy victory. His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. As Texas governor James V. "Jimmy" Allred told the twenty-eight-year-old newly elected congressman, President Roosevelt was "intensely interested in the details of your campaign."²

In a matter of months, FDR's Court-packing plan would be dead, but its reverberations were just beginning. In searching for a nominee to replace the retiring Justice Willis Van Devanter, FDR decided to strike at southern Democratic senators who helped defeat his Court plan by naming the senior senator from Alabama, Hugo L. Black. According to journalists Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, Black was "the most radical man in the Senate." And many of his southern colleagues were less than pleased with his nomination. For one, South Carolina senator "Cotton" Ed Smith was said to have "'God-damned' the nomination all over the place." A Georgia congressman labeled Black "an anarchist." According to Time, anti-administration senators saw FDR's selection of Black as a "trick to ram the furthest Left-winger available down the Senate's throat."³ Less than a year later, the president would strike again at southern conservatives, tempting fate by announcing his intention to participate in Democratic primaries in an attempt to bring more New Deal liberals like LBJ to Congress. To kick off his "purge" campaign, FDR traveled to his "adopted" state of Georgia to declare: "better schools, better health, better hospitals, better highways . . . will not come to us in the South if we oppose progress—if we believe in our hearts that the feudal system is still the best system . . . When you come down to it, there is little difference between the feudal system and the Fascist system. If you believe in the one, you lean to the other" (p. 87, emphasis mine).

In time, Lyndon Johnson would follow Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in challenging "southern democracy" from the White House. Their relationships with the South—and the distinctiveness of this "place"— are the focus of William E. Leuchtenburg's wonderful new book.

If Leuchtenburg had followed the currents of recent scholarship, he wouldn't have written such a book. Readers will be pleased that he followed his own course. As he explains, The White House Looks South rests on six "out of fashion" or "energetically contested" premises: "that, at a time when historians are preoccupied with race, class, and gender, not enough attention is given to place; that, in a period of increasing homogenization, section is still salient; that, in an era when social history is in vogue, political history is of abiding importance; that, in contrast to the assertion that the state is merely a superstructure, the state is capable of acting autonomously and affecting profoundly people's lives; that, though the impact of social...