Check out the first two charts on this page from the VoteView Blog. They chart the liberal/conservative behavior of congresscritters going back to 1879. While I’m not convinced their methodology is completely sound I do find it odd that it shows that in both the House and Senate Southern Democrats were more liberal than Northern Democrats before the Great Depression. I’ve never heard anything like this. Is this true and if so, why?
I’d say it’s impossible to evaluate without knowing what issues are being tracked and how the authors are mapping them onto our current liberal-conservative divide.
It depends how you’re looking at liberal/conservative. There was a strong streak of economic populism in the South at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. I’d also think that is’ possible that after World War II, civil rights issues started getting counted more heavily, and Southern Democrats’ opposition to equal rights for blacks started getting them counted as more conservative, whereas, say, in 1920, that issue wasn’t really on the political radar and wouldn’t have counted to help rank them.
According to Paul Krugman part of the political shift that led to southern whites going from democrats to republicans was the fact that the south industrialized and had a higher GDP. As a result they didn’t need the welfare state programs they needed in the past.
But the northeast of the US seems like it has always been a source of progressivism. So I don’t know how the south would ever be more progressive on economic issues than the northeast (which makes up a big part of the north). But I’m not a history major.
When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, he famously declared, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.” When Nixon won with his “Southern Strategy” in 1972, picking up a lot of states and voters who had gone for George Wallace’ independent bid in 1968, he started a migration of white Southern conservative Dems to the GOP, and they now dominate the party; while liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” migrated to the Dems or were marginalized entirely. We now, for the first time in our history, have a party system that roughly maps onto the left-right ideological divide.
Well, the northeast was everything the Populist movement was fighting against…Wall Street, the big banks and the big corporations,
Right. Populism and (the old meaning of) Progressivism were entirely different movements, ideologically and demographically as well as regionally.
That being said, there was a Progressive movement in the South and some pretty famous southern Progressive leaders; Hoke Smith of Georgia and the two sponsors of the Glass-Steagal Act, Carter Glass (from Virginia) and Henry Steagal (of Alabama) come to mind, as does Robert Latham Owen of Oklahoma.
I put this here in GD because I thought it would be controversial but I don’t see anything to argue about. Some thought provoking stuff though. Thanks for the replies.
Part of the issue is the demise of the small farmer. Rural America, not just the south, used to be far more left-leaning on economic issues back when 160 acre farms were the rule. The small-time farmers were at the mercy of big corporations (banks, railroads, farm suppliers) every bit as much as an urban factory worker was to his employer, if not more. After the depression and after the war, the farms consolidated into larger-scale agribusiness concerns and the progressive economic causes became a lot less relevant to the rural Americans who hadn’t hightailed it to the cities.
Totally agree. How did the authors define support for low tariffs in the 1880’s? Southern Democrats were usually anti-tariff. Was this a left-wing or right-wing position? What about civil service reform? What about prohibition? As late as the 1890’s, there were attempts to overturn election results from Southern states on grounds of black disenfranchisement, and pass voting rights laws. Were these included in the tabulation, with pro-voting rights being the “liberal” position? (Even though in that era it usually coincided with hard-money, small-government conservatism.) Without knowing these things one cannot make an intelligent assessment.
And Huey Long.
I think people were less liberal before the depression. But really if you read any history you will see that discrimination, crime, sexual abuse, drugs were all there before. It kills me when I read about people legalizing drugs, and most of them don’t realize there was a time when things like marijuana, heroin, and such were in fact legal. And it was the problems associated with them that made them reclassified as illegal.
Look at old magazines and newspapers and you can see, it’s mostly times that change not people.
Most of which were highly exaggerated to prey on the public’s paranoia, see here for example: http://www.adrugwarcarol.com/
Who took on the Standard Oil men
And whipped their ass
Just like he promised he’d do?
Ain’t no Standard Oil men gonna run this state
Gonna be run by little folks like me and you
Kingfish, Kingfish
Friend of the working man
Kingfish, Kingfish
The Kingfish gonna save this land
– Randy Newman
That’s kinda like a Jack Chick pro-legalization comic.
Interesting for sure, but freakin’ me out a little that you posted it Qin. I didn’t expect that.
Try this one, then!