REPUBLICAN PARTY POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1865-1968
(Cambridge university press, 2020)
This book (co-authored with Jeffery A. Jenkins) - the co-winner of the 2021 J. David Greenstone Prize from the American Political Science Association and the winner of the 2021 V.O. Key Award from the Southern Political Science Association - examines the history of Republican Party politics and the American South between the end of Reconstruction and the implementation of the “Southern strategy” under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the second half of the 20th century.
This book tells the story of the Republican Party in the South from Reconstruction through the late-1960s. The history of the Grand Old Party (GOP) in the South during Reconstruction is fairly well known, as is its reemergence in the region during the Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon presidential campaigns in 1964 and 1968. What is not well known, however, is the period in between: what did the GOP in the South look like between the end of Reconstruction and before the modern ‘Southern strategy’? A common assumption is that the Republican Party in the South all but disappeared after the demise of Reconstruction, and that it only reemerged when the national Democratic Party went “all in” on civil rights in the mid-1960s while the national Republican Party (led by Goldwater) largely rejected civil rights. Certainly, the Southern GOP achieved little electoral success in the region in this period. Yet, the Republican Party remained in existence in every state of the ex-Confederacy.
Why was this? The principal reason is that even while the South became largely a one-party, Democratic system, the eleven states of the ex-Confederacy still retained significant representation at the Republican National Convention every four years. Indeed, for much of the post-Reconstruction era, the South controlled around 25 percent of the GOP convention delegates. Thus, Southern states were in a position to wield influence at the convention, and have a meaningful hand in picking the Republican presidential nominee. Southern party representatives had such influence despite the fact that between 1880 and 1916 – or 10 consecutive presidential elections – Republican presidential nominees received exactly zero electoral-college votes from the eleven Southern states. It was this basic puzzle that got us interested in the topic of GOP politics in the South during this period: why would a party continue to provide sizeable convention representation – and thus, influence on crucial intra-party decisions – to a set of states that it knew were almost certain to provide no benefit on election day?
In answering this question – in the paper “Southern Delegates and Republican National Convention Politics, 1880-1928,” published in Studies in American Political Development in 2015 – we noted that Republican Party leaders struggled mightily for more than a decade to keep a Southern GOP electorally viable after Reconstruction. Only with the failed Federal Elections bill in 1890 – which was intended to protect suffrage in the ex-Confederacy – and the emergence of state laws to disenfranchise African Americans in the South in the 1890s did national Republican leaders largely give up on a serious Southern wing of the party. Thus, for a time, providing Southern states with GOP convention representation was reasonable – based on hopes of a Southern Republican comeback. Additionally, with the rise of Jim Crow, arguments were also made that eliminating Southern representation would grossly harm African Americans, as such representation was the only remaining political participation that they could enjoy.
By the 1890s, however, national Republicans began to conceive of the Southern states as a set of “rotten boroughs,” in which delegates could be bought and sold prior to (and during) the convention. Candidates for the Republican nomination could promise Southern party leaders a wealth of executive patronage (which they could then distribute or sell) in exchange for their delegations’ votes. While some Republicans railed against this naked vote-buying arrangement, enough national GOP politicians wanted to keep the Southern states and their considerable delegate totals in play, so that they might use them to build a base of nomination support. Thus, for decades, Republican leaders – including presidents and presidential candidates – prevented any real reforms from occurring.
But in laying out these politics, we discovered that we were only scratching the surface. The Republican Party’s activities in the post-Reconstruction South were not well known, and there was considerable variation in the GOP across the various states of the ex-Confederacy. Most importantly, factional battles defined the Southern Republican Party during the post-Reconstruction years, as the Black-and-Tans (black and white Republicans who represented the “party establishment”) faced off against the Lily-Whites (white-supremacist Republicans who sought to expel blacks from the party). These factional battles occurred in every state, with the promise of executive patronage as the prize. But little was known of them. For example, Michael K. Fauntroy argues that the Lily-White movement was “one of the darkest and under-examined eras” of Republican Party history. Indeed, with the notable exception of work by Hanes Walton Jr., almost no political science research has investigated the conflict between the Black-and-Tans and Lily-Whites. And no systematic data exists to determine which faction was winning or losing in a state at any given time. Thus, we determined that a book was necessary to fully explore these intra-GOP factional battles and data needed to be gathered to determine factional strength.
In Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968, we provide a detailed assessment of how Republican state party organizations in the South continued to play an important role in national party politics - both at national conventions and through attempts by presidents to reshape the state organizations. Additionally, we rely upon historical census information – and ancillary sources – to code the racial composition of a state’s GOP convention delegation in every presidential election year from 1868 through 1952. We explore how different states went Lily-White at different times, and incorporate these data in a statistical analysis to determine how the “whitening” of the Southern GOP by state affected the party’s electoral vote totals. We find that as a state Republican Party became whiter in the post-disenfranchisement period, its vote totals increased significantly. We ascribe this whitening as a necessary condition in keeping with the Lily-White argument at the time: that in the Jim Crow South, when the electorate was almost exclusively white, the Republican Party could only hope to become electorally viable by becoming a Lily-White party. That is, Southern whites would only vote for a “respectable” party – where respectability was directly connected to its whiteness. Much more had to happen before the GOP become electorally competitive – and then dominant – in the second half of the Twentieth Century. But becoming a Lily-White party was a crucial first step.
REVIEWS
How did Lincoln's Republican Party transform into today's modern party of white, conservative America? Heersink and Jenkins dig deep into the under-tilled politics of the post-Civil War Southern Republican Party, rewarding us with a robust and fascinating account of the South's partisan evolution. With impressive historical sweep and carefully crafted case studies, Republican Party Politics and the American South makes an essential contribution to our understanding of America's political development.
Sarah Binder, George Washington University, Washington DC
If a political party is repressed, what happens to its organization on the ground? How does its organizational and factional politics during its 'invisible' years shape resurgence? In this definitive account of the Southern Republican party, Heersink and Jenkins pose these questions and provide continually surprising answers. Every scholar of American parties and of the South's constitutive role in American history should read this utterly fascinating study.
Rick Valelly, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
Deeply researched, this riveting book reveals the ill-understood, complex, and conflictual story of the Republican Party in the South, from the close of the Civil War to the late 1960s. This rich analytical history illuminates many dimensions of intra-party and partisan politics, including matters of race and class, deepening our understanding of profound questions about motivations and preferences, strategies and impact.
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University, New York
If students of American political parties think of the history of the Republican Party at all, they focus on two bookends - its Reconstruction founding, with a core constituency of newly enfranchised Blacks, and its more recent manifestation, with a core constituency of conservative whites. Heersink and Jenkins show that the abandonment of southern Black voters was abetted by national party building strategies. The evidence brought to bear is a deft combination of quantitative analysis of the inclusion of Black delegates in national party conventions and insightful case studies of party development within each state of the former Confederacy.
Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Profs. Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins outstanding work Republican Party Politics and the American South 1865-1968 (Cambridge) explores the transformation of the Party of Lincoln into the predominant modern, white conservative political institution. The careful use of case studies of the American South from the end of the Civil War, through the simultaneous repression of the black vote, local organization, and black inclusion in state and national GOP party politics shed light on the politics of the GOP’s ‘phone booth party’ years. They carry us through to the fragmentation of the South in the 1968 election and the resurgence of the GOP as viable alternative to the Democrats. The work is a major contribution to understanding American political development and will need to sit on the desk in close reach of all of us who study Southern and American politics.
V.O. Key Award citation, Southern Political Science Association
Heersink and Jenkins should be commanded for asking big, important questions; marshalling an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative evidence; and conveying the larger patterns without neglecting historical detail.
J. David Greenstone Prize citation, American Political Science Association
The very best books connect seemingly isolated dots on the political landscape and recover nuanced and valuable data that have been overlooked. Such books often feel like they raise more questions than they answer, but that is because they have made the reader see the political landscape in a different light entirely. The desire for more answers is only a measure of the curiosity that a book ignites. Republican Party Politics in the American South, 1865–1968 should launch dozens of new studies by scholars of southern politics, should be taught in college classrooms, and should change the way we frame the history of the GOP in the region.
Perspectives on Politics
Republican Party Politics and the American South’s major contributions are empirical. Relying on census records Heersink and Jenkins have constructed an impressive database of the racial status of the vast majority of the region’s state delegations to the Republican National Conventions, which allows them to pinpoint the moment and extent to which lily whiteism came to dominate a given state’s party organization. They have paired this with detailed histories of each state’s trajectory and an account of how successive Republican administrations sought to shape southern politics to their own advantage. The result is a considerably revised understanding of both southern and national politics during this era.
The Journal of Politics
Heersink and Jenkins’ research […] helps us understand the origins of the modern Republican Party in a way that prior work has largely neglected. We can see from their work that the Republican Party’s efforts to exploit the racial anxieties and racial hierarchy of the American South began long before the modern Party’s well-documented racialized strategies of the post-Civil Rights Era. Indeed, it is clear from Republican Party Politics and The American South 1865–1968 that the success of the modern Republican Party is a function of its move toward becoming a “white” party much earlier than previous work has documented, in the first half of the twentieth century. […] Republican Party Politics and The American South 1865–1968 is an important book that not only masterfully shines light on the persistence of the Republican Party in the American South; it also provides new insights into the way in which the threads of race, power, and whiteness are deeply woven into the American political party system.
The Forum
Buy at: Amazon, Bookshop, Cambridge (discount code: RPPAS2020 at checkout)
Data set and Do-file available through Dataverse
Awards: J. David Greenstone Prize, American Political Science Association (2021); V.O. Key Award, Southern Political Science Association (2021)
Reviews: The Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, The Forum, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Southern History, Ohio Valley History
Media: Washington Post - Monkey Cage, USC Book Talk, Author Meets Critics panel (w. John Aldrich, Devin Caughey, Ashley Jardina, and Kimberley Johnson), Bedrosian Book Club Podcast, The Science of Politics Podcast, New Books in Political Science Podcast.