In Search of the New South: Southern Politics after Reconstruction

Abstract

Only recently has the study of southern politics begun to emerge from the shadows cast by C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South and V. 0. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation. I These two brilliant and intimidating volumes appeared at mid-century-Origins in 1951 and Southern Politics in 1949-and for a generation have largely dominated the writing of post-Reconstruction southern political history. New works continued to be published, and a considerable number of them were quite good; but rarely did they stray much beyond the parameters established by Woodward and Key. The main features of the Woodward-Key synthesis are well-known. Although the two authors differed in emphasis and conflicted on specific points, they both advanced Beardian interpretations that emphasized economic conflict between the haves and have-nots of southern society. Both regarded race as something of an artificial issue that disrupted the natural alliance of have-nots across color lines. In Woodward's analysis, the Civil War and Emancipation broke planter domination of southern politics and transferred power to modernizing bourgeois elites composed of merchants, businessmen, and industrialists. The Populist movement was an assault by agrarian have-nots on the exploitive Redeemer policies at home and the shortsighted Redeemer Right Fork alliance with northeastern capitalism nationally. With the failure of the Populist revolt, town and business oriented middle class Progressives led the South back into national politics, albeit not before shackling the region with disfranchisement, the one-party system, and de jure segregation. Key's study focused on the debilitating results of these institutions. For more than half a century they stunted southern political development and undermined the formation of a biracial New Deal coalition of havenots. A Woodward-Key synthesis structured the teaching and writing of New South politics for three decades. Much of this analysis remains valid today, of course-indeed, Key's Southern Politics is still largely unchallenged-but in recent years vague outlines of a different synthesis have begun to emerge. Comparative history, especially comparative studies of slavery, has par