Smart Segregationists: Southern Senators and Racial Politics from the 1930s to the 1960s

In a 1977 New Yorker essay, journalist Calvin Trillin labeled whites in positions of power in the South not as moderates or extremists but as “‘smart segs’” or ‘dumb segs.’” Trillin’s jaded view was that, at the highest levels of government, the South’s sagacious political leaders had successfully finessed outcomes to hinder the cause of racial justice despite the collapse of the New Deal coalition. The once-mighty Southern Senate caucus may have disappeared along with the chimerical liberal consensus and the Southern way of life, but academic interest in segregationist politics has never been more active. In the past four years, two books have appeared on white Southern opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, particularly in the Senate. Jason Morgan Ward’s Defending White Democracy joins Keith M. Finley’s award-winning Delaying the Dream in the contemporary historical literature about Southern white politics since the New Deal. Neither work is a comprehensive account of the battle against civil rights, but they are unusually Senate-centric and welcome corollaries that deviate from much recent scholarship’s emphasis on civil rights as a local affair. Though each author focuses on Southern attempts to inhibit federal civil rights legislation in the middle third of the twentieth century, each historian charts a different trajectory for the political life of segregation and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. In both studies, acute Southern politicians manipulated legislation to impede civil rights and proved to be anything but dumb segregationists.

The Southern senators and high-ranking politicians make sensible targets for historical inquiry. Over the last twenty years, the grassroots reaction and populist hostility to civil rights and desegregation has replaced the elite perspective pioneered by historian Numan V. Bartley in The Rise of Massive Resistance (1969). Though many newer studies suggest an important correction to Bartley’s classic, they tend to mothball historical actors on the national stage in favor of local, lesser-known people. As the study of segregationists became democratized, the stratification within the tiers of leadership and the political system for imparting strategies of opposition diminished. Before suburban Southerners colonized massive resistance in their New South fight against integration and for regional economic development, the original resisters in the Senate organized themselves into a powerful caucus. The South appeared solid in its party affiliation and secure in the ideology of white supremacy. Finley and Ward are interested in who held power in the South’s segregationist faction within the Democratic Party, how they used it, and what they sought to do with it. Though historians such as Jason Sokol, Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and Joseph Crespino have enhanced historical understanding of Southern and suburban whites during the civil rights era, Finley and Ward address the view from the top and the senatorial side of the story. Ordinary Southerners would have been disoriented and out of place in the byzantine corridors of the Senate, where complicated legal exercises involving postponement, filibustering, and compromise could not have been easily handled by non-initiates. Such maneuvering papered over the Southern senators’ and governors’ commitment to segregation and the sometimes un-democratic infrastructure of American political life.

Following Robert Mann’s The Walls of Jericho (1996), a study of the promotion of black civil rights in the Senate from 1949 to 1965, Keith Finley explores a counter-narrative and the legislative efforts to restrict political equality for blacks that began before 1948. He seeks the racial basis for the Southern political coalition, and he starts by drawing on the debate about anti-lynching legislation during the 1930s. Though initially successful in raising constitutional challenges to the anti-lynching bill and quieting the...