The Southern Congresscritter in white three-piece suit and ribbon bowtie (or whatever it’s called) seems to be a cliche in some old political cartoons I’ve seen, and there was a senator dressed like that in No Way Out, but was it done in real life?
Mark Twain wore a white suit much like that for most of his later public life.
By ribbon bowtie, do you mean a bolo tie?
No, I don’t think he does. You’ve seen pictures of Col. Sanders, right? Thiskind of tie (cloth and with no metal buckle).
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
The Colonel Sanders type tie is sometimes called a “string tie” (“ribbon tie” is probably a better description, but you will find a lot of examples if you search for “string tie”). White linen suits used to be common attire during warm weather. Presumably, southerners would have more occasion to wear them.
Senator Claghorn wore one. Of course, he wasn’t a real senator either, so that doesn’t really answer the OP.
There’s a state senator here in SC that I see often on his way to lunch who dresses a lot like Colonel Sanders in the summer. (It is, of course, inappropriate attire in winter.)
In his article about the Kentucky Derby, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, written in the 1970, Hunter Thompson describes Kentucky Colonels to all be dressed this way. White linen suit, string tie, etc. He also said the way to distinguish real Colonels is the vomit on their shoes. And in an ironic twist, Hunter was himself named a Kentucky Colonel in 1996. No info on whether he had ever worn the suit.
However, knowing Thompson, it was more than likely he had vomit on his shoes.
Mark twain did wear a white suit in later life (although, according to Hal Holbrook – who should know – never at his public lectures, as Holbrookm does), but it’s not the Colnel Sanders type, with bolo tie and all. According to his biolgraphers, Twain did it to shock his neighbors (A proper gent would’ve worn black). He sometimes wore red socks, too, probably for the same reason. You wouldn’t call Twain typical of anything.
In the days before synthetic fabrics, there were only two choices for a summer-weight suit: linen or seersucker. Seersucker was considered to be lower class (or at least more casual) so linen was the choice of the Southern aristocracy.
As for real-life examples, here are Huey Long and his son Russell. I’ve tried googling a few others, but there aren’t a lot of photos of 1920’s-era southern Senators in white suits.
Heh. Huey Long was who I wound up searching for, too. You can find plenty of images of public officials from that era in white linen suits, but I didn’t find any wearing string ties with them - they are wearing regular ties. I suspect that wearing a string tie would have been considered a trifle eccentric, rather like the late Senator Paul Simon’s bow tie. Maybe there was a couple of them that did it, but probably not many.
I thought the cartoon stereotypical “uniform” of the old-time Dixiecrat senator was an old-fashioned black coat with tails and a broadbrimmed black hat. Usually with a string tie and some sort of satchel (carpetbag?)
Here’s a 1912 picture of Confederate veterans that includes one fellow wearing a string tie (top row, on the right end).
I think the problem may be you’re not going back far enough in time. String ties were out of fashion by the 1920s. String ties would have been more of a 1910s accessory. Here’s Union veteran (and one-time New York congressman) Daniel Edgar Sickles in a 1912 photograph.
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Holy schmoly, I beat Hunter S. himself to *something *by two years??
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And yes, the Sanders get-up used to be a fashionable summer ensemble for gentlemen in warmer climes up to about the WW1 era. By extension it became iconic for portrayal of old-school “Southern Gentlemen” for most of the rest of the 20th Century.