Solid South - Democratic Factionalization Over The Civil Rights Movement

Democratic Factionalization Over The Civil Rights Movement

The "Solid South" is today usually defined as the eleven states of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Missouri was also included in the original Solid South although since the early 1900s Missouri has been seen as a Midwestern bellwether state mostly because Missouri is classified as a Midwestern State by the U.S. Census. West Virginia experienced wide voter disfranchisement after the Civil War and Republicans controlled the state until 1872, when ex-Confederate proscription was lifted. The Democrats carried the state for a generation and wrote a new constitution, and by the 1930s West Virginia was completely identified with the South. Oklahoma was not included originally with the Solid South as it has only voted in Presidential elections since 1908 but Oklahoma's voting history mirrors the Solid South only going Republican after the Civil Rights era began in the 1940s. Maryland and Delaware are classified by the U.S. Census as Southern States however only Maryland was occasionally classified with the Solid South.

The Solid South had already begun to erode in the 1890s. William Jennings Bryan's western populist movement had split the Democratic Party between the old guard Bourbon Democrats and the Progressives. The split allowed McKinley to win Kentucky by 277 votes out of 445,928 votes cast. Maryland went for William McKinley by a margin of 32,809 votes out of 250,249 votes cast. In 1904, Missouri would bolt the Solid South to support Roosevelt while Maryland in a controversial election reminscient of the 2000 Florida election would award the state to Alton Parker. The 1920 election was a referrendum on President Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations. Pro-isolation sentiment in the South would benefit Republican Warren G.Harding who would go on to win Tennessee and Missouri. In 1924, Coolidge would win Kentucky and Missouri. In 1928, Hoover, perhaps benefiting from bias against his Roman Catholic Anti-Prohibition opponent Al Smith, won not only Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, but also Florida, North Carolina, Texas,and Virginia. Maryland defected to the Republicans in the 1920s and would not vote Democratic again until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 Presidential landslide over Republican President Herbert Hoover.

The South appeared "solid" again during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt's political dominance, but cracks began to appear in the following administration. Democratic President Harry S. Truman's support of the civil rights movement, combined with the adoption of a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform, prompted many Southerners to walk out of the Democratic National Convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. This splinter party played a significant role in the 1948 election; the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In the elections of 1952 and 1956, the popular Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried several southern states, with especially strong showings in the new suburbs. In 1956, Eisenhower also carried Louisiana, becoming the first Republican to win the state since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, but the rest of the Deep South was still a bastion for Eisenhower's Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. The 1948 election also marked Maryland's permanent defection from the Solid South as the expansion of the federal government led to a population explosion in the state that changed Maryland politically into a Northeastern State.

In the 1960 election, the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy, continued his party's tradition of selecting a Southerner as the vice presidential candidate (in this case, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas). Kennedy and Johnson, however, supported civil rights. In October 1960, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a peaceful sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia, Kennedy placed a sympathetic phone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King's release. King expressed his appreciation for these calls. Although King himself made no endorsement, his father, who had previously endorsed Republican Richard Nixon, switched his support to Kennedy.

Because of these and other events, the Democrats lost ground with white voters in the South, as those same voters increasingly lost control over what was once a whites-only Democratic Party in much of the South. The 1960 election was the first in which a Republican presidential candidate received electoral votes in the South while losing nationally. Nixon carried Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida. Though Kennedy also won Alabama and Mississippi. slates of unpledged electors, representing Democratic segregationists, would award the states' electoral votes to Harry Byrd.

The parties' positions on civil rights continued to evolve in the run up to the 1964 election. The Democratic candidate, Johnson, who had become president after Kennedy's assassination, spared no effort to win passage of a strong Civil Rights Act. After signing the landmark legislation, Johnson said to his aide, Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." In contrast, Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing it gave too much power to the federal government (Goldwater did in fact support civil rights in general; for example the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts as well as the 24th Amendment banning the poll tax. Additionally he was a member of the NAACP).

That November, Johnson won a landslide electoral victory, and the Republicans suffered significant losses in Congress. Goldwater, however, besides carrying his home state of Arizona, carried the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina had switched parties for the first time since Reconstruction. Goldwater notably won only in southern states that had voted against Republican Richard Nixon in 1960, while not winning a single state that Nixon had carried, a complete inversion of the electoral pattern of just four years earlier. Prior to 1956, the region had almost always provided the only victories for Democratic challengers to popular Republican incumbent presidents. Now, however, the South had provided a Republican challenger with electoral victories against a popular Democratic incumbent.