The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave by Devin Caughey (review)

Although the mid-twentieth-century South was not a democracy, Devin Caughey writes, it did have competitive primary elections whose winners understood themselves as beholden to the majority share of their voting constituents. The resulting connection to these voters ensured that southern members of Congress pursued policies reflecting the preferences of those empowered to choose legislators. Scholars should therefore understand that the shift of southern politics in a more conservative direction reflected a shift in the feelings of white voters, who felt their racial status increasingly challenged by pro-labor New Dealers.

Caughey uses selectoral connection, a term more common among scholars of dictatorships than democracies, to describe the responsiveness of southern legislators to those who put them in office. A “selectorate” is a limited group, whose factions compete fiercely to put their preferred candidate in office. If an elected official owes his or her place to the triumphant faction, the official has a connection to the faction and is keen to please these constituents while in office. Thus, although the Jim Crow South was undemocratic, Democratic Party primaries were still competitive. Even stalwarts like Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman frequently had to fight primary challengers. They had no guarantee of remaining in office, and to retain power they felt obliged to reflect the will of the majority faction in their districts.

Caughey’s principal method is the analysis of public opinion data and congressional voting, and he finds that the former leads the latter. In a 1937 poll that asked whether Americans identified as liberals or conservatives, 63 percent of white southerners declared they were liberals, as against only 55 percent of respondents nationwide. By 1948 a similar poll showed that only 34 percent of white southerners thought of themselves as liberal, as against 51 percent nationwide. A majority of white southerners found that New Deal laws, particularly those empowering workers, posed a threat to Jim Crow. Southern members of Congress who sought to keep their seats responded by voting often against New Deal legislation.

Against the backdrop of these quantitative trends, Caughey stages occasional dramas that illustrate his point, including the tale of Representative Luther Patrick of Alabama. Patrick won nomination as a New Deal liberal against a business-friendly opponent in 1936 and became one of the few southern Democrats in Congress to support the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Increasing antiunion sentiment and a move to the right among his constituents, however, compelled Patrick to support antistrike legislation in 1941. But Patrick did not shift rapidly or far enough, and he lost a primary election to an antilabor Democrat in 1942. As Caughey notes, this story shows how Democratic primary elections could be competitive and force elected officials to change their behavior in response to shifting constituent opinion.

Caughey’s distinction between authoritarian regimes and undemocratic, if factionally competitive, ones may seem too nice, but it affords an indispensable understanding of southern elections, highlighting the centrality of widespread racism to the twentieth century’s changing partisan alignments. Such factional competition allowed Democratic administrations to hasten the end of Jim Crow. In 1941 the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department brought a lawsuit, U.S. v. Classic, that let the Supreme Court rule that the federal government could regulate primary elections. The case proceeded from factional competition within the Democratic Party and its resulting electoral criminality. The Court’s ruling brought the white primary a step closer to its demise.