In the last post, we saw how the Democratic Party created a Southern stronghold after the Civil War that was built on white supremacy and essentially unrivaled. Democrats were also successful in the North, particularly in the burgeoning cities, where they catered to immigrants and workers. Together, the Northern and Southern wings formed a powerful though perilous national coalition. So long as Civil Rights did not intrude upon the national party’s agenda, Northern Democrats could rely on pulling every Southern state in national elections, thereby creating a formidable electoral bloc.
For the most part, the Northern Democratic wing played along. It abandoned Southern African Americans to brutal, racialized oppression, just as the Republican Party had in the 1870s. Those few Southern blacks who could vote, overwhelmingly continued to check the Republican box, supporting the party of Lincoln, and underscoring that truism that in the South, Democrats were the party of white supremacy.
The Democrats’ unified regional coalition was perhaps best represented by two term president Woodrow Wilson. On one hand, the former Princeton University president and New Jersey governor was a typical Northern politician who promoted the era’s progressive policies. On the other hand, he was a Virginia native and a Southern apologist regarding the Civil War. He even used the White House to debut the most successful piece of racist film propaganda in American history: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Wilson personified the unified regionalism that drove the Democratic Party from the end of the Civil War until well into the 20th century. But that does not mean there weren’t bumps in the road and divi
sions among the two wings. In an era when political candidates were chosen by party leaders instead of primaries, the 1924 Democratic national convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City was arguably the most divisive in American history.
Delegates deadlocked between New York’s Irish Catholic Governor Al Smith, and Georgia’s William Gibbs McAdoo, whose candidacy was championed by the Ku Klux Klan; the KKK, and indeed most Southerners, simply could not abide a Roman Catholic candidate. It took over two weeks and no less than 103 ballots before the party finally settled on compromise candidate John W. Davis, who was promptly dismembered by Republican Calvin Coolidge in the general election.
The 1924 convention was the most obvious and wrenching example of competition between the two regions at the national level. But for the most part, the coalition held all the way through World War II. Southern Democrats thoroughly dominated their region by developing a system of apartheid, while Northern Democrats rode the rising tide of urbanization, staking their lot with the cities that increasingly dominated much of the Northeast and Midwest. Meanwhile, the party’s presidential nominees were typically Northerners who stood a better chance of winning the more hotly contested states in their own region, and could then ride the Solid South to victory.
The lynchpin holding this alliance together was Northern willingness to do next to nothing about the South’s stark and brutal racial oppression. And indeed, nothing was done for decades. Why? Because on the whole, American culture was intensely racist, in the North as well as the South. After all, the North was also highly segregated. It’s jus
t that Northern segregation typically functioned on a system of de facto racism instead of the South’s highly codified de jure system. Few Northern politicians sympathized with black Southerners, and those who did refrained from pushing the issue if they had national ambitions. An example is the Democrats’ master politician of the 20th century: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A native New Yorker, Roosevelt cleverly trod the line. He welcomed black Northern voters to the Democratic Party by helping them with various New Deal programs. However, he did absolutely nothing to challenge Jim Crow in the South; Indeed, it wasn’t until the powerful African American labor leader A. Phillip Randolph threatened a general strike during World War II that FDR even agreed to ban racial discrimination on government contract jobs.
The first real challenge to Democratic Party unity and the Solid South would finally arrive with Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman. After inheriting the White House in 1945 and overseeing the conclusion of World War II, “Give Em Hell Harry” would do what had always been unthinkable for a Democratic president. He made civil rights part of his agenda. And in so doing, he would not only begin to unravel the Democrats’ regional coalition, but would also set in motion forces that would eventually reshape the Solid South completely.
Tomorrow, Part III: Decline and Rebirth of the Solid South