Walter Dean Burnham - The Alabama U.S. Senate Race of 1962

The Alabama U.S. Senate Race of 1962

In 1964, Burnham published an article on the 1962 U.S. Senate election in Alabama, when Republicans made their first strong showing for federal office since Reconsruction in the state known as "The Heart of Dixie." The Republican James D. Martin of Gadsden, an oil products distributor, challenged veteran Democrat J. Lister Hill of Montgomery and fell only a few thousand votes short of victory. Burnham describes the Martin campaign as an aberration from the customary issueless, personalist southern primary elections. Martin's campaign was a pacesetter for subsequent southern elections in that it was waged over national issues—mobilizing the white backlash against civil rights, stressing free enterprise, local control, and individual freedom; decrying big-spending federal program which had not yet gained wide acceptance in Alabama, shifting emphasis from opposition to desegregation to the preservation of states rights, and claiming that the Republican candidates would safeguard liberty, freedom, and the state's social system. Burnham found it ironical that a Republican from the populist North Alabama ran strongly in the cities and Black Belt, while the Democratic senator from the capital city of Montgomery appealed to the northern hill country, where voters appreciated programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and were less racially-conscious because of the relatively small number of African Americans in their region. Martin fared best in those counties with non-voting blacks, prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All but one of the fifteen counties which showed a decline in the Republican vote between 1960 and 1962 were in the Appalachian section of North Alabama. Martin's showing along the Gulf Coast and the Florida Panhandle was paradoxical because southeast Alabama had been traditionally the most populist since the 1890s. Two years after the Hill-Martin race, Burnham correctly forecast that the inroads of presidential Republicanism would continue in the South, but competition at the state and local levels would take root slowly.