Deal Coalition Research Articles

Playing the Populist

Abstract From 2015 through 2020, Donald Trump used tackle football to perform the populist persona that allowed him to seize the American presidency. Trump's deployment of tackle football becomes apparent when considering his references to the game within the context of three vital historical elements: football's ideological origins, the Republican Party's Long Southern Strategy (LSS), and the gendered, racial, and religious debates that occurred in and through football just before and during Trump's time (perhaps first term) in office. The United States’ most popular spectator sport stemmed from white supremacist, patriarchal, and muscular Christian roots. In addition, from 1964 to recent years, to break up the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition in the South (and beyond), Republican Party (GOP or Grand Old Party) politicians tactically levied a tripartite of appeals to ameliorate anxieties born from parallel racial, gendered, and religious commitments. Then, in the twenty-first century, public controversies within the gridiron game pertaining to head trauma, celebrity players, and racial justice protests provided platforms for Trump to demonstrate his uniquely unapologetic and strident devotion to the LSS's main principles.

Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party by Marc Johnson

Reviewed by: Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party by Marc Johnson Mark Owens Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party. By Marc Johnson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. 237 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper. In the 48 years between 1933 and 1981, the Republican Party controlled the United States Senate for one Congress (1953–55). Marc Johnson offers a thorough description of the ideological influences that advanced a New Right coalition, one who aggressively sought to oppose liberal ideas in order to challenge the legacy of the Democratic Party's New Deal Coalition. The book includes specific accounts about the modernization of negative campaigning, opposition research, out-of-state fundraising, and use of sensational imagery to distort how the public sees elected officials. The scope of Tuesday Night Massacre focuses on the electoral defeats of senior Democratic incumbent senators in Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota in 1980. This pivotal moment sets up two important perspectives for the role of grassroots movements within the Republican Party. The New Right replaced Democratic senators who shaped national politics—Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), Senator Frank Church (D-ID), Senator John Culver (D-IA), and Senator George McGovern (D-SD)—with freshmen who were less inclined to seek consensus. The winners—Senator Jim Abdor (R-SD), Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Senator Dan Quayle (R-IN), and Senator Steve Symms (R-ID)—were members of the majority party during their entire first term and supported committee chairmen that wanted to reform government programs. Johnson tells the story of a coordinated effort to nationalize politics by identifying a common organization that implemented new campaign strategies. Extensive archival work and interviews tells how the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) reshaped the Senate five years after it was established. The book focuses on how NCPAC first recruited candidates to run in special elections in 1977. NCPAC then built its reputation by targeting incumbents with national profiles with tactics that elicited fear and resentment to distort the trust voters had for the incumbent. Johnson provides contemporary references that identify NCPAC's effectiveness and concerns about the degree NCPAC may have coordinated with candidates. The book tells the early political stories of a network who shaped Republican politics for 40 years, including Terry Dolan, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Richard Viguerie, and others. These operatives helped Newt Gingrich's early elections. NCAPC's approach to recruit candidates and offer resources proliferated when Newt Gingrich created GOPAC in the 1990s. These examples offer a benchmark to understand how Speaker Gingrich learned to embed national discussions locally. The New Right remains influential as the foundation of a national grassroots movement to fundraise, research, and craft messages in ways that "wage war against liberals" (59). The book consistently revisits themes in each chapter, as the candidates and state change. NCPAC strategically chose where to direct its resources. It targeted powerful senior legislators whose national ambition made them out of touch with their constituency. These actions were built on the belief that "populist anger would come to define politics" (119). The explanations of how media strategies and slogans evoked emotional responses from voters elevate the contribution of this book to the history of elections. Mark Owens Department of Political Science and History University of Texas at Tyler Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies

Frank C. Musser, the Coalition Party, and the Fight to End Machine Party Politics in Post–Progressive Era Lancaster, Pennsylvania

The politics of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, between 1921 and 1930 serve as a case study for national developments. Between the failure of the 1912 "Bull Moose" Party campaign for the White House and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the 1933 New Deal coalition, advocates for urban liberalization and social welfare progressivism built a political bridge in the Keystone state. Led in part by businessman Frank C. Musser, this new movement married some of the specific principles of the new alliance while also working to break the hold of the traditionalist Republican Party machine that had held Lancaster County in its grip since the 1860s. In this new era of Lancaster City and County politics, Musser and his allies discovered the efficacy, albeit limited, of employing new campaign tactics and engaging new voting blocs in the process of city and county politics while fashioning a legacy of municipal reform.

Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo

Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

Белый рабочий класс США как основа электората Трампа

In 2020, the white working class made almost half of all the votes for Donald Trump – about 37 million out of 73.5 million votes that he got. 67% of white Americans with less than four years degree cast their votes for Trump. 100 days after he lost the reelection, 29% of Republicans believed that Trump will come back to the White House before the month of August 2021. Who are they, these Trumps supporters and believers? How did Trump change their role in political life, and what will be their future after him? During the last 45 years, the white working class of America has transformed from the world’s most affluent and secure working class, the linchpin of the New Deal coalition, the protagonist of the American dream into one of the most vulnerable, disintegrated and declining in its number and power element of the American electorate. Trump used their anger and despair in his way to power, bringing them back to politics. Today both the Democratic and Republican Parties are fighting again for the white working class. Historically, this group was the base of the Democratic Party. But for the last two decades, the Party has become much more liberal in its values and focused more on different groups of minorities. These trends made whites without college degree to shift to the Republican Party, regardless its “party of white riches” image. The current shift occurred in the years of Obama presidency – for highly conservative, less educated, mostly South whites this President came as a challenge to their traditional views of America. By the end of the Obama era, the Republican Party almost filled the gap with the Democratic Party in white working class support. Trump became the high pick of this shift. Meanwhile, the Democrats got the trend and came back fighting for its past electorate who suddenly became the focus of a political game and interparty transformations, which makes it highly possible to change the face of the American party system as we know today. Acknowledgements. The article was prepared within the project “Post-Crisis World Order: Challenges and Technologies, Competition and Cooperation” supported by the grant from Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation program for research projects in priority areas of scientific and technological development (Agreement № 075-15-2020-783).

Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era

Remembering Reconstruction is a collection of ten essays, grouped into four parts, on the importance of Reconstruction in white-supremacist, black, imperial, and contemporary thought. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us, for all of its acknowledged importance to the course of American history, Reconstruction is still misunderstood. In the book's first part, E. Stephen Prince discusses the regional character of Jim Crow, and Jason Morgan Ward examines the importance of a conservative view of Reconstruction in resistance to the New Deal. Both make cogent points, though some essential acknowledgements would have provided better balance. The essence of what would be called Jim Crow had been and would remain part of the northern legal structure, from the antebellum era to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and beyond. In southern politics also, segregationists became more ubiquitous in the New Deal coalition than opposing it. Three individual case studies stand in for black memories. Shawn Leigh Alexander's use of the journalist and orator T. Thomas Fortune documents the deeply experienced reality of the memory of violent racial suppression. Justin Behrend on the former Louisiana slave John R. Lynch and Carole Emberton on the Works Progress Administration narrative of Hannah Irwin introduce complexities, yet their significance remains unexplored. The 1913 audience for Lynch's book The Facts of Reconstruction and his priorities shaped a history emphasizing interracial cooperation, while Irwin emphasized affection for whites and the hierarchy and the Ku Klux Klan (Kkk), asserting a process of “self-making” that challenged “historians' expectations.”

Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order by Jon Shelton

Reviewed by: Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order by Jon Shelton Ruby Oram Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order. By Jon Shelton. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 274 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $95; paper, $27.95.) Few subjects have garnered more attention from American historians in recent years than the nation's political realignment by 1980. Historians have shown how civil rights activists, feminists, student radicals, evangelicals, and southern suburbanites all pushed American politics to the right during the long 1970s. Public school teachers are rarely included in this roll call. But in Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, Jon Shelton argues that hostility toward striking teachers among white urban parents helped break the New Deal coalition in such northern cities as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and Chicago. Teacher Strike! examines a wave of teacher s1zntrikes between 1968 and 1981 that led white urban parents to abandon progressive and prolabor politics in favor of neoliberalism, which Shelton defines as a political ideology equating individual freedom with market freedom. Shelton asserts that as teachers' unions became more militant through illegal striking, white working- and middle-class parents in northern cities increasingly viewed public school teachers as drains on their hard-earned tax dollars. White parents came to associate public sector employees with the problems of the urban poor in general, deploying racialized language to chastise both for being "unproductive." Shelton argues that criticisms of teacher strikes were also gendered by reporters and parents who expressed discomfort with a primarily female workforce demonstrating political power in the streets rather than nurturing children in the classroom. Teacher Strike! is best read as a collection of local case studies highlighting how clashes over teachers' labor rights weakened the "labor-liberal coalition" in a handful of northern cities. Shelton combs through an impressive range of sources to follow shifts in public perceptions of striking teachers, including newspaper and television press, op-eds, political cartoons, letters to the editor, private correspondence, and community forums. The author pays close attention to how unique social and economic tensions in various cities—such as the rise of Black Power in Newark or the shrinking tax base of metropolitan Pittsburgh—helped shift local opinion of public sector unionization from supportive to hostile. Teacher Strike! makes a compelling argument for how economic fears worked with cultural ideas about race, gender, and productivity to push parents toward [End Page 228] privatized solutions for urban schools. However, what makes this "new American political order" distinctly neoliberal rather than conservative or neoconservative is not always clear in Shelton's analysis. Teacher Strike! demonstrates why historians should pay more attention to education in studies of American political economy. State funding for education increased dramatically in the postwar decades, which, as Shelton argues, led many Americans to directly relate their personal tax burdens with public school teachers. Both in the 1970s and in our current wave of teacher strikes, conflicts about education are inherently conflicts about policy, race, gender, family values, and individual rights. Shelton rightfully places teacher activism at the center of America's cultural and political realignment for these reasons, making Teacher Strike! a revealing read for any scholar of twentieth-century American history. Ruby Oram Loyola University Chicago Copyright © 2019 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber

Reviewed by: Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber Brian Greenberg (bio) Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era. By Brian Dolber. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xiv + 256 pp. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the consolidation of modern America as a consumer society. During these decades, the motion picture, the automobile, and consumer durables for the home such as the radio and [End Page 307] the washing machine were regularly advertised in a growing number of national journals and newspapers. What did the spread of mass consumption, mass media, and mass culture mean for democracy in America? The transformation of America into a consumer culture in the first decades of the twentieth century was the central question addressed by Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, their early 1920s field investigation of Muncie, Indiana. The Lynds viewed the authority achieved by consumer culture as a danger to democracy, because, as Robert Lynd warned, Americans were more important to their country as consumers than they were as citizens. Middletown was written as a secular jeremiad in which the Lynds called on Americans to repent and to renew their traditional nonpecuniary culture. Focusing on the Jewish radical groups and media institutions in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, Brian Dolber, in Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era, reaches conclusions far different from those of the Lynds. For Dolber, even as they adapted to the developing consumerism in America, those who identified with the Jewish left kept alive their traditions of community culture and social unionism. As Dolber relates, in the decade following the Red Scare after the First World War, the Jewish Daily Forward (or Der Forverts), which had been founded in 1897 as the first Yiddish socialist newspaper in New York, and other socialist newspapers found themselves in dire financial straits as a result, in part, of the rise in anti-immigrant nativism in America. In 1918 Baruch Charney Vladack became the business manager of the Forward. Over the next decade, as advertising became a fundamental component of commercial culture in the United States, Vladack saw national advertising as fulfilling two functions: as a source of necessary revenue for the Forward and as a way to demonstrate to political and corporate elites that the Forward and its readership were good Americans, thus protecting them from anti-immigrant political repression. Dolber concludes that the commercialization of the Forward during the 1920s marked the integration of the Jewish labor movement’s media with the broader advertising-driven national commercial communications system. Unlike the Lynds, who equated integration with elite cultural domination, Dolber does not see the working class as becoming the passive tools of an all-powerful cultural elite. Instead, he shows how the Jewish left was able to secure a place for itself within the liberal New Deal coalition that developed in the 1930s. Besides the Forward, the Jewish left included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union (ACWU) and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), industrial unions founded in New York City [End Page 308] during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As Dolber notes, the ACWU and the ILGWU, working with affiliated ethnic organizations and political parties, embraced what Daniel Katz’s book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (2013) called “social unionism” a radical expression of labor organization that embraced political engagement and integrated union culture with larger social movements. Social unionism was the ideal of unionism that coalesced in the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, as union leaders and members became key constituents in the New Deal coalition that emerged during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet neither Sidney Hillman nor David Dubinsky (the leaders of, respectively, the ACWU and the ILGWU) figure prominently in Dolber’s account of this change. Also largely absent from Dolber’s analysis is John L. Lewis, who personified the aggressive, CIO-led sit-down strikes of the...

‘Suppose They were to Do It in Mexico’: The Spanish Embargo and Its Influence on Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy

ABSTRACTThe US arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) can play a key role in our understanding of the transformation of American strategic thought in the late 1930s. The embargo's most well-documented causes are isolationist sentiment, the influence of the Catholic vote in the New Deal coalition and the forceful diplomatic leadership of Britain's Foreign Office in European affairs. Less well known is the importance of Latin America, which was considered throughout the conflict in the debates about lifting the Spanish embargo. This article examines the Spanish embargo and the reasons behind it. It also analyzes the Latin American dimension of Roosevelt's Spanish policy. By doing so it reveals how the perceived threat of Fascist penetration in Latin America influenced US diplomacy regarding Spain. Since that threat was first perceived, Washington began to fear the consequences of a Francoist military victory. It considered that the success of German and Italian military interventions in Spain could encourage similar initiatives in Latin America. The lessons learned in Spain reinforced Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America and, at the same time, also provided a subtle reasoning for abandoning continental isolationism.

Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics by James K. Libbey

Reviewed by: Alben Barkley: A Life in Politicsby James K. Libbey Clay Bailey Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics. By James K. Libbey. Topics in Kentucky History. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Pp. [viii], 347. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-6713-8.) This laudatory biography, part of the Topics in Kentucky History series, reflects decades of writing and research by James K. Libbey on Alben Barkley, Kentucky statesman, Senate majority leader, and vice president under Harry S. Truman. In this well-documented overview of Barkley's life, Libbey offers a window into Washington, D.C., politics from Woodrow Wilson's presidency through Truman's. In the process, this analysis of Barkley's career reveals threads connecting Progressive reform, the New Deal, and the Fair Deal, as well as the emergence of the New Deal coalition. Interspersed are fascinating anecdotes, from young Barkley's selling defective crockery door-to-door, to his 1948 "prop-stop" cross-country campaign by plane in tandem with Truman's whistle-stop campaign by train (p. 253). Libbey's admiration for Barkley is understandable. Like better-known Tennessee statesman Cordell Hull, Barkley came from humble agrarian circumstances, seized what educational opportunities he could, studied law, and became a dedicated and effective public servant. Cordell Hull Dam controls water on the Cumberland River, which flows into Lake Barkley. Both are appropriately utilitarian monuments to humble public servants who sought to make life better through activist government, not just for their rural constituents, but also for peoples far beyond, as the United States emerged as a superpower. During much of the time that Hull served as secretary of state (1933–1945), Barkley served as Senate majority leader (1937–1946). Born in the Jackson Purchase portion of Kentucky, Barkley was not far removed from frontier life and struggled to transcend a largely subsistence childhood. With a strong moral commitment kindled by circuit-riding Methodist preachers, Barkley developed as an orator by honing his skills at church and school, and he displayed his Protestant work ethic in the fields and the road crews of western Kentucky. Unlike many politicians in the Jacksonian tradition, Barkley never burnished or touted the fact that he was born in a log cabin. He did not need to. His homespun storytelling and self-deprecating humor gave him away. Barkley was beloved by the nation and provided a sense of reassurance and ethics in crisis-laden decades. Barkley was consistently on the right side of history. Invariably on the side of small farmers and workers (not the powerful coal, tobacco, or horse lobbies), Barkley was never a demagogic populist. Barkley's frustrations as Senate majority leader in the late 1930s over a Senate filibuster to thwart a federal antilynching bill's passage ring familiar. The reader is left yearning for public servants of character and courage like Barkley. The reader also is left wanting more analysis and clarification on what made Barkley a powerful orator. Libbey often notes Barkley's speaking ability and cites moments at which he rallied audiences, such as a House speech in favor of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act in 1913 or his farewell speech at the 1952 [End Page 470]Democratic National Convention, but Libbey does not provide analysis of content or delivery. One also senses that Barkley advanced so far by being loyal to Democratic presidents and the party, and through political shrewdness. Often it seems Barkley was more spectator and witness to key decisions and pivotal events than formulator of policy, but Libbey does not explore these realities. In the end, Libbey has offered a much-needed overview of Alben Barkley's life and career, as well as a window into the emergence of modern America. Clay Bailey Montgomery Bell Academy Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin

Reviewed by: Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin Keith D. Orejel Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia. By Lou Martin. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 239. Paper, $28.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08102-6; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03945-4.) Lou Martin’s Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia provides an in-depth study of rural working-class culture in Hancock County, West Virginia. An exhaustively researched book that draws on census records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and author interviews, Smokestacks in the Hills makes a significant scholarly contribution by placing rural people and places at the forefront of twentieth-century labor history. The time frame of Martin’s book is expansive, tracing the transformation of Hancock County from a nineteenth-century agricultural region, to an upand-coming industrial area in the first half of the twentieth century, and then finally into a struggling factory zone starting in the late 1960s. The book opens by surveying Hancock County’s agricultural origins in an attempt to show the cultural imprint left by farm families. Martin strongly suggests that nineteenth-century farmers bequeathed to later rural-industrial workers a lasting faith in local autonomy and community self-reliance. Although this is an intriguing claim, the book only vaguely explains how these traditions were transmitted over time as the county experienced population turnover and demographic shifts due to industrialization. Adding to the scholarly literature on corporate relocation, Martin shows how pottery and steel manufacturers responded to competition by moving factories to rural Hancock County in the early 1900s. Providing new insights into the nature of capital mobility, Martin argues that industrialists used the shift to the countryside to implement new technologies and to deskill their workforce. The book also depicts how industrial restructuring led to the formation of a distinct rural working class. The narrative heart of the book covers the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Martin’s central argument is that rural-industrial workers failed to be incorporated into either the national labor movement or the New Deal coalition. While urban workers flooded into national unions like the Congress of Industrial [End Page 204] Organizations (CIO) and voted for Democratic politicians, rural-industrial workers like those in Hancock County preferred to rely on their families, their communities, and even their employers to safeguard their welfare and resisted the allure of the CIO. Rural laborers also remained outside the New Deal order throughout the 1940s and 1950s, voting for “conservative politicians,” like the Republican Arch Moore, who favored placing “limits on union power” (p. 118). According to Martin, localism accounted for rural workers’ repudiation of the national labor movement and New Deal liberalism. He argues that “rural working-class culture privileged place and local community over class” (p. 2). Displaying values inherited from nineteenth-century agrarians, workers in Hancock County “voiced suspicions of national unions and powerful union officials,” fearing that control would shift from local communities to “distant, impersonal bureaucracies” (p. 10). Rural workers favored independent unions that maintained the “local nature of labor relations” through “face-to-face communication” with management (pp. 92, 10). Independent organizations were seen as more responsive to local demands and, therefore, as more conducive to community autonomy. Unlike urban laborers, who turned to the welfare state to provide a safety net, rural-industrial workers used their access to productive property to weather hard times. Drawing on the agrarian tradition of “making do,” working-class families supplemented their paychecks by growing produce in household gardens (p. 10). These rural “survival strategies tended to strengthen their localism and weaken their commitment to New Deal coalition goals such as a more robust welfare state and union protections” (p. 10). While Martin’s emphasis on localism is generally persuasive, there are other explanations that the author overlooks. For a book that focuses on capital mobility, it is interesting that the author does not give much credence to the idea that rural workers rejected national labor organizations out of fear of factory relocation. Perhaps not participating in the labor movement was the...

Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948

Why is there no labor party in the United States? This question has had deep implications for U.S. politics and social policy. Existing explanations use “reflection” models of parties, whereby parties reflect preexisting cleavages or institutional arrangements. But a comparison with Canada, whose political terrain was supposedly more favorable to labor parties, challenges reflection models. Newly compiled electoral data show that underlying social structures and institutions did not affect labor party support as expected: support was similar in both countries prior to the 1930s, then diverged. To explain this, I propose a modified “articulation” model of parties, emphasizing parties’ role in assembling and naturalizing political coalitions within structural constraints. In both cases, ruling party responses to labor and agrarian unrest during the Great Depression determined which among a range of possible political alliances actually emerged. In the United States, FDR used the crisis to mobilize new constituencies. Rhetorical appeals to the “forgotten man” and policy reforms absorbed some farmer and labor groups into the New Deal coalition and divided and excluded others, undermining labor party support. In Canada, mainstream parties excluded farmer and labor constituencies, leaving room for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to organize them into a third-party coalition.

South Carolina and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

ABSTRACTSouth Carolina has to date played a minor role in the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Greene's article revisits the history of civil rights with reference to the Palmetto State and, in the process, a fuller understanding of the complexities of the Civil Rights Movement begins to emerge. From the challenge of the Progressive Democratic Party over credentials in 1944 (preceding the better-known story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by twenty years) to the state's integral role in the rise of New Right conservatism in the late 1960s, Greene presents an alternative vision of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition in the middle of the twentieth century. He highlights figures crucial to the struggle for African American self-determination. Women such as Modjeska Simkins and men like John H. McCray stand centre stage and demonstrate the various strategies employed by black South Carolinians in the struggle for civil and human rights. Overall, Greene focuses attention on a state that is often neglected in the standard narratives of the Civil Rights Movement.

Economics Seminar: Gerald Friedman, “Economics and Policy in the Obama Era: The Return of Austerity Economics and the Final Collapse of the New Deal Coalition”

This seminar was co-hosted by the Institut des Ameriques, the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur les Ameriques (CREDA), and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Vie Economique des Pays Anglophones (CERVEPAS). It was part of a series of research seminars entitled Economies des Ameriques: Regards Nord-Sud, co-organized by Martine Azuelos (professor emeritus at Sorbonne Nouvelle University), Robert Boyer (economist at the Institut des Ameriques), and Carlos Quenan (professor at S...

Western Kentucky in the Twentieth Century: From the End of Isolation to the Collapse of the “Gibraltar of Democracy”

Western Kentucky in the Twentieth Century:From the End of Isolation to the Collapse of the “Gibraltar of Democracy” George G. Humphreys (bio) Kentuckians take pride in their home state, but that does not prevent them from expressing a strong allegiance to the counties—described as “little kingdoms” by historian Robert M. Ireland—or regions from which they hail. Political scientist Penny Miller has observed that the counties and regions of Kentucky are “centrifugal forces” that enrich and divide the state. Regions, Kentucky historian James Klotter pointed out in 1982, are vital to understanding the history of Kentucky, making it difficult at times to discuss its history without qualifying what is said to accurately capture the regional diversity of the state.1 This is certainly true in the case of western Kentucky, especially in the Jackson Purchase, the parcel of land west of the Cumberland River.2 Neither as fabled as the Bluegrass nor as [End Page 357] stigmatized as the mountains, western Kentucky has largely been overlooked by scholars. Yet the twentieth-century history of the region suggests many productive avenues for future scholarship on subjects vital to the recent historiography on the commonwealth, the South, and the United States. During the twentieth century, western Kentucky underwent profound changes, often with the federal government as the driving force behind them. Yet, at the time these changes occurred, and in the decades since, western Kentucky citizens and politicians have been torn about the mixed blessings and hardships that modernization, electrification, industrialization, and urbanization have brought—best expressed in a growing ambivalence about the activist government philosophy that brought these changes about. In the first two-thirds of the century, western Kentucky, with its reputation as the Kentucky “Gibraltar” of the Democratic Party, was positioned to take advantage of state and federal initiatives from the New Deal to the Great Society, advancing the well being of an area that modernization had largely bypassed.3 Thus, western Kentucky offers scholars an opportunity to assess the impact of the New Deal and other government reform efforts on one region within a conservative southern state. Amity Shlaes, a conservative economist, has questioned whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program of public remedies to fix the nation’s economic woes so crippled the ability of the private sector to restore the nation to prosperity that economic recovery was delayed until the Second World War. In the case of western Kentucky, it is arguable that federal initiatives, especially the New Deal, and the actions taken in Frankfort in the twentieth century were essential to spurring the region’s economy in the short term. Yet there is also evidence that progress faltered by the turn of the twenty-first century, leaving questions about the enduring impact of government reform and the ability of the region to sustain [End Page 358] progress in the face of significant threats to its economy, especially within the new global economy.4 Although Democratic leaders in the region were active in securing the political benefits of the New Deal and its legacy programs in the first half of the century, they were not spared from the remarkable surge that the Republican Party made throughout the South in later decades. Edward T. “Ned” Breathitt, a former governor from Hopkinsville, believed western Kentuckians voted for the Democratic Party and its programs, from the New Deal to the Great Society, to improve their lot in life. In western Kentucky and across the South, though, the social upheaval of the 1960s divided the New Deal coalition. Civil rights, women’s rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War were, Breathitt suggested, “totally different kinds of issues,” unrelated to the “old work ethic” issues cherished by conservative western Kentuckians. For many “legacy Democrats,” the change in their party loyalties could be summed up with the explanation, “I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” As the century progressed, Republican influence in the region grew, accelerated by a “southern strategy” aimed explicitly at wooing disaffected conservative Democrats. Social issues related to “God, guns, and gays,” along with policy disputes over environmental issues, rose to the top of the political agenda and favored Republican candidates in...

Crucible of Reaction: The Nullification Crisis and the Antebellum Roots of 'the Southern Strategy'

Much has been written about the so-called “Southern strategy” that has been the cornerstone of conservative and (mostly Republican) politics in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960’s (Phillips, 1969; Wilkerson, 1979; Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Smith, 1995; Fauntroy, 2006; Lopez, 2014). The Republican party have built their electoral coalitions at the national and state level largely by capitalizing on the racial anxieties of Southern whites (and working class whites generally) toward African Americans. These voters had traditionally formed one of the core constituencies in the Democratic party’s New Deal coalition which had dominated American politics since the Great Depression. Using so-called “second generation” racial appeals, this strategy has been remarkably effective in steering white working class voters into the welcoming arms of the Republican party. The Supreme Court has also played a starring role in this effort; in recent decades, it has rendered a plethora of decisions that have limited the reach and effectiveness of many of the landmark legislative, judicial, and administrative triumphs of the civil rights era. One of the most noteworthy examples of this is the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) striking a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A common theme emerges in the assaults on voting rights, affirmative action, school desegregation, fair housing, and employment discrimination laws: it is the notion that, because of the demonstrable progress the nation has made with respect to the rights of African Americans since the “Jim Crow” years, continued reliance on government intervention, especially at the federal level, in order to secure the rights of black Americans is no longer necessary or even desirable. Consequently, these policies need to be eliminated to prevent blacks from being “the special favorite of the laws” who are entitled to more legal protections than other citizens.This paper argues that the “Southern strategy” and the civil rights counterrevolution represents a vivid illustration of the doctrine of nullification – an ideology that asserts the prerogatives of states to resist the perceived unconstitutional encroachments of federal power. This doctrine traces its origins to the political controversy surrounding the Tariff Bills of 1828 and 1832. This crisis, as John C. Calhoun privately admits, is actually a thinly veiled subterfuge for South Carolina’s anxieties regarding the dangers to the survival of the institution of slavery. It has the effect of allowing constitutional amendments and federal statutes to remain on the books while rendering them “null and void” in terms of any practical benefit to African Americans. During this crisis, the Southern “fire-eaters” developed a hermeneutic which cloaked naked theories of white supremacy and naked economic self-interest behind the sacrosanct curtain of state sovereignty and the inherent virtue of limiting federal power. These arguments had particular salience in Southern states, who defended to the death their rights to hold black people as slaves. But these arguments did not die in the embers of the Civil War. I argue that the doctrine of nullification – far from being an historical artifact of the antebellum period, not only persists, but represents the “norm” when it comes to America’s treatment of black Americans. I argue that the Nullification Crisis represents the crucible for the development of a reactionary political tradition that endures to the present. Indeed, the doctrine of nullification has traditionally been the “tool of choice” for those who have resisted the ideal of full racial equality for black Americans. If my thesis is correct, the implications of this argument apply not just to “race-specific” legislation designed to remedy racial inequality, but extend to the general conservative critique of “big government” that is one of the fundamental features of American politics.

The Right and labor in America: politics, ideology, and imagination

The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination. Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 422. Notes, list of contributors, index, acknowledgments. $49.95.)The history of organized labor during the twentieth century is often presented as a tidy narrative of growth and decline. After struggling for existence during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, unions claimed a seat among the power brokers of modern America during the 1930s. Nearly one of three nonfarm workers belonged to a union by the 1950s, and a union job became a path to the middle class. By the 1980s, though, labor's fortunes had reversed. Ronald Reagan signaled the changing times when he crushed the air traffic controllers strike in 1981. By the end of the twentieth century, only about one in ten workers claimed union membership. A once-powerful social movement had been brought to its knees. What explains the dramatic decline of organized labor in the United States?This question has attracted much attention in the last two decades. Scholars have studied the fracturing of the New Deal coalition, the political suppression of the Cold War era, the racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s, deindustrialization, and the resurgence of conservatism. The Right and Labor in America makes a valuable contribution to the last interpretive category. Its fourteen essays focus on how conservative philosophies and activism after World War II challenged the existence of unions and workers' rights to organize. Four broad themes structure the volume: conservatives' ideological antipathy to class-based organizations; the role of region and race in shaping attitudes toward organized labor; conservatives' use of civil rights language through institutions such as the National Right to Work Committee; and conservatives' allegations that unions fostered corruption and posed threats to democracy.Two essays, in particular, should attract attention from readers interested in Arkansas history. Michael Pierce, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, shows how attitudes toward organized labor in Northwest Arkansas paralleled broader shifts in the country. During the early twentieth century, the region harbored large pockets of pro-union and anti-corporate ideas. By the end of the century, the same region championed corporate tycoons Sam Walton and Don Tyson. Pierce suggests that Orval Faubus provided the bridge that linked these two eras. Faubus had been raised in a socialist, pro-union family and won the 1954 gubernatorial race with support of the Arkansas labor movement and African Americans. …

RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF WHITE ETHNICITY IN 1970s AMERICA

ABSTRACTHistorians have tended to characterize the ‘white ethnic’ identity politics of the 1970s in the United States as a significant feature of the conservative counterrevolution, especially the rise of populist racial conservatism and its splintering of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Seeking to provide a broader, more representative portrait of white ethnic mobilization, activism, and institutionalization in government, with particular focus on the work of Rev. Geno Baroni, the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, and the Carter administration's Office of Ethnic Affairs, this article challenges that assumption. It posits that the politics of white ethnicity was a far more complex, diverse phenomenon, of appeal to liberals and conservatives in an era of considerable political flux. This reconsideration also reveals that the 1970s were not conservative in the United States, but a watershed decade of uncertainty, volatility, and experimentation, in which ethnic identities and affiliations were reshaped, political norms upended, and new forms of organization and mobilization trialled out, with great significance for today's ‘post-ethnic’ United States. White ethnic politics was of considerable importance to American political development in the late twentieth century, but not in the way usually thought.

Practical Considerations of the Democratic Party in the Post-War Period: Electoral Trends from 1932-1960

In the 1960s, a Democratic President turned away from his traditional southern base and decisively shifted the party to a racially liberal position. What drove the Democrats to make such a drastic shift in positions? Was this change a response to the moral dilemma posed by the civil rights movement or recognition of their precarious electoral situation and existing trends? This paper will examine trends from the 1930s to 1960 to argue that political context was changing for the Democrats as they recognized that they were losing the formerly dependable South and facing a precarious situation in the North. This paper will also argue that states with large Electoral College delegations, small margins of victory and growing Black populations became the focus of Democratic electoral strategy as the New Deal coalition deteriorated during the post-war era. Therefore, beyond the changes brought by the civil rights movement, the political context and strategic calculations of this period made the issues of Black voters important to the Democratic Party and shifted the direction of the party for decades to come.