Some Things Y'all Need to Know: Teaching Southern Politics at Home and Abroad

Abstract

The modern South is a thriving region that is increasingly like the rest of the United States; however, that has not always been the case. Indeed, the political history of the American South is one that has been focused on the integration of this historically underdeveloped region into the remainder of American society, economically (especially in terms of labor markets), politically, judicially, and socially. And, even as the South has become increasingly similar to the rest of the country, it remains an especially important region for the balance of national political power. In this essay, I describe a class I teach on Southern Politics, explaining how I have organized it around topics critical to an understanding of American political development, and I describe the innovative pedagogical perspective I bring to the class (rooting the course in the labor economics of slavery and the “peculiar institution's” long-term consequences). I also discuss in some detail the importance of this class for American students as they try to understand America's development as a nation and the lessons that can be learned by international students from the South's experiences, providing some qualitative evidence of the course's impact.

Keywords:

• American political development
• international education
• Southern politics

Notes

From 1993–2002, I was on the faculty at the University of Mississippi. In 1997–98 and again in 2005–06, I was a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University–Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, PRC. During 2000A–01, I was visiting Fulbright professor in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University off Szeged in Hungary.

Recent discussions of this theme may be found in Shafer and Johnson (2006) and in the various papers presented at the conference “The End of Southern History?: Integrating the Modern South and the Nation” hosted by Emory University in March 2006. A sample of 37 prominent public and private universities and colleges in the region found that half (n = 18) continue to offer courses focused on Southern politics.

Since I believe in the importance of understanding word histories, I begin by telling students that the word “South” derives from the Anglo-Saxon word “suth” for sun. I stress this as a way to highlight that settlement patterns in the United States were driven by early agricultural dynamics and tended to be in latitudinal, east-to-west bands, contributing to early north-south regional differences that also reflected different emigration patterns from England (see Fisher 1991) and that would be exacerbated by the distinctive labor market created by slavery.

This perspective is often shared even by those who should know better: “The slaves were then shipped to the American South and British West Indies colonies, where they were forced to provide the free labor to produce more raw cotton … .” (Yafa 2005, 124, emphasis added).

At the outbreak of the Civil War, it is estimated that 44% of total Southern wealth was held in slaves, while only 25% was in real property. This helps explain the economic devastation of the war, in which “at least two-thirds of assessed Southern wealth vanished,” making it one of the most crippling economic reversals in history (Winik 2001, 352).

Unlike non-slave states in the North, which encouraged immigration to feed early, low-wage industrialization efforts, Southern states actively discouraged immigration, fearing that this would devalue the worth of existing slave labor. Southern states even prohibited the importation of new slaves from Africa (see, e.g., the Mississippi constitution of 1832, which prohibited the importation of slaves into the state, and the constitution of the Confederate States of America, which outlawed the international slave trade). For more, see Wright (1978).

For an excellent overview of the growth of the cotton industry in the United States see Yafa (2005).

This point was made by Thomas Jefferson, among others: “it is cheaper for Americans to buy new land than to manure the old” (quoted in Yafa 2005, 130). As I am fond of pointing out to my students, the scene early in Gone with the Wind where Gerald O'Hara tells his daughter Scarlett that “land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts” displays considerable literary license (actually, I generally use blunter language), since the much vaunted Southern attachment to the soil is a distinctively post-Civil War sentiment. In general, during the antebellum period, it cost only roughly one-third as much to buy new land as it did to rehabilitate land with fertilizer, meaning that what mattered were moveable slave assets, not immobile real estate assets.

By the end of the Civil War, the prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia, had the fifth largest urban concentration in the Confederacy.

It is important to note and I stress to my students that the South's cotton economy and the slave-based labor system that supported it could also be highly profitable, at least for the upper echelons of Southern society (although the extent of profits varied wildly and were almost entirely dependent on volatile international demand). The South's exports of raw cotton far outdistanced total Northern exports before the Civil War and in 1850, Natchez, Mississippi, boasted more millionaires per capita than any place on earth (Yafa 2005, chapters 6 and 7). Southern cotton was such an important element of the world economy that South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond seemed quite justified in saying in 1858: “What would happen if no cotton were furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South…. No power on earth dares make war on cotton” (quoted in Yafa 2005, 145; for figures outlining Britain's dependence on Southern cotton, see also page 165).

This is another place where I emphasize the innovative political economy focus of the course. Most treatments of sharecropping concentrate on its inarguably negative consequences. What I show students is that it developed because it had features that made it highly attractive to both “croppers” and land owners. As a family-based system, it allowed poor families to stay together in ways that are not always possible in developing economies while simultaneously “tying labor to the land” and minimizing “monitoring costs” for landowners, who could rely on family economic needs to encourage diligent work (see Wright, 84ff).

By 1900, only 35 years after Appomatox, the United States had become the leading manufacturing power in the world, responsible for fully one-quarter of total world industrial output. In Wright's words, the South “emerged in the 1870s as a low-wage region in a high-wage country, a consideration that shaped its economic future for another century” (1986, 50).

I again pick on Gone with the Wind, contrasting Scarlett O'Hara's famous exhortation “as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again” with the reality that the South's treatment was extraordinarily mild by historical standards.

I relate for students my own experiences growing up in the South during the 1960s. Although my family was definitely in the lower range of the lower middle class, my parents were always able to hire black maids and yard workers.

This is often something of a revelation to the Southern white students I teach. Accustomed to looking at regional history through the roseate lenses of Southern myth-making, they struggle with the realization that many of their recent forbears were denied a right they take for granted.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors out of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

A recent PBS documentary on “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War” summarizes well the attitude of abolitionists to Lincoln by quoting Wendell Phillips: “a first rate second-rate man.”

For example, consider Senator Lyman Trumbell of Illinois (“We the Republican Party are the white man's party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor respectable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it”), Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward (who considered blacks “a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation”), Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson (“This is a white man's country. And as long as I'm president, it will be a white man's government”), Theodore Roosevelt (the 15th amendment was “a mistake,” “very unjust and bad policy”; and blacks were “altogether inferior to whites,” “two hundred thousand years behind”), and Calvin Coolidge (“Biological laws show us that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races”).

“As the London Spectator mocked: ‘The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States’” (Winik 2001, 248).

In this regard, I remind students that Brown v. Board was a case from Kansas.

A number of Northern states also severely constricted the voting rights of other racial and ethnic minorities, most notably Asian immigrants in California.

I also remind students that North-South relations after the Civil War were much influenced by other developments both domestically and internationally. It is not coincidental that the “Compromise of 1877” that ended Reconstruction (and which was known as the “Great Betrayal” among Southern blacks) came during the depression of the mid-1870s, when thousands of businesses went bankrupt, a million people became unemployed, and Northern citizens and politicians had more immediate concerns than race relations in the South. Similarly, efforts to legally disfranchise black and poor whites in the South during the 1890s were overshadowed by calls for national unity leading up to the Spanish-American War and the beginning of the American empire.

See Wright (1986), chapter seven.

Although many of my conservative students resist acknowledging this, I try to show them that the modern South is, in many ways, a creation of federal economic development programs that began in the New Deal and that resuscitated the moribund Southern economy. In addition to the minimum wage, we discuss the regional impact of Social Security, military spending during and after WWII, and crop subsidies for farmers that began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).

Other factors I stress include ratification of the 16th Amendment (which eventually gave the federal government considerably more tax revenues with which to pressure state compliance), the adoption of the Budget Act of 1920 (which expanded White House control of budgetary matters, making it easier for future Presidents to focus national resources on problems they identified), and the inexorable growth of interstate commerce (which, since Gibbons v. Ogden, had been broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court to be subject to federal regulation).

The fourth “generation,” black Southern officials elected in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I cover later in the course.

For example, the SCLC's shift from “non-violent persuasion” to “non-violent confrontation” as it faced the necessity to generate more media coverage, to raise funds, and to respond to the emergence of more aggressive groups such as SNCC and CORE.

For example, the LDF's initial willingness to accept separate educational facilities at the elementary and secondary levels, and its focus on “equalization suits” to raise the standards of these segregated schools.

The successes I stress include the LDF's legal victories in Smith v. Allwright (a 1944 case that ruled the Southern practice of “whites-only” primary elections to be unconstitutional), the graduate school desegregation cases from the 1930s through 1950, and Brown v. Board I; the SCLC campaigns in Birmingham and Selma; the sit-ins organized by SNCC; and CORE's “freedom rides” to enforce integration of interstate transportation facilities.

The failures I stress include the Supreme Court's decision in Brown II (which permitted the South to delay full desegregation for almost two decades) and the SCLC's 1961 “Albany campaign” (which led to its shift from “non-violent persuasion” to “non-violent confrontation”).

I draw largely upon Taylor Branch's excellent trilogy on the civil rights era (Branch 1989 1999 2006) as I try to de-mythologize the movement, stressing that these groups reflected the diversity of the black population … that their leaders had egos, that they drew their memberships from different age groups and professions, that there were significant internal disputes about the best strategies and tactics.

For instance, I stress to students that the CRA cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of both the growth of interstate commerce in the United States and the judiciary's shift away from the doctrine of substantive due process, both of which permitted greater government regulation of what had been considered private contractual matters.

For instance, I stress to students that as originally written, the VRA outlawed vote denial and would have to be amended and interpreted to deal with vote dilution.

To provide students with human faces to put on this issue, I describe how my own parents' attitudes evolved from the late 1940s (when they would have described themselves as liberal on racial matters) to the early 1970s when (faced with busing, perceptions of a deterioration in their standard of living, higher taxes, affirmative actions, and the like) they supported the third-party insurgency of George Wallace.

This involved changes in the regional Republican Party in the South as well. Previously the “party of Lincoln” had held strong appeal for Southern blacks, even after the New Deal. By 1964, however, for the first time since the Civil War, there was not a single Southern black delegate at the GOP convention. As importantly, the limited Southern Republican Party had been, principally, a patronage organization whose members were intent on keeping its rolls limited to ensure less competition for those positions. This had to change for the GOP to become electorally competitive in the region.

I usually assign all or parts of Davidson and Grofman's (1994) excellent work Quiet Revolution in the South.

Consider, among other things, the number of Southern universities that have programs devoted to regional studies, including the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, the Blair D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. Consider also that of all the regional political science associations in the United States, only the Southern Political Science Association devotes a section to the politics of its home region. For an insightful and humorous treatment of Southerners' self-consciousness of their regional identity, see Reed (1994).

With a population of roughly 84 million people, the South is home to some 30% of total U. S. population. Any candidate who sweeps the South picks up 57% of the Electoral College votes needed to win the Presidency, meaning the candidate needs less than one third of the Electoral College votes from the remainder of the country.

For Southern students, I emphasize that the opposite is also true, that the development of the modern South cannot be comprehended without understanding the fact that the region is part of a larger, stronger federal system in which the national government has played a more dynamic role in last 70 years.

If you included so-called “hyphenated” Southerners, the list could also include Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

It is largely forgotten in this era of increasingly global free trade, but in the 1800s American tariffs were substantial: cotton products from India were taxed at a rate of 83.5% when they were imported into the United States (Yafa 2005, 107).

Walter Lippmann termed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the first national minimum wage, as “in truth a sectional bill disguised as humanitarian reform” (quoted in Wright 1986, 222–223). On efforts to curb “nightwork” in the South and AAA policies to limit the cotton surplus, see Wright (1986, chapter seven).

Five of the 11 states with highest divorce rates are Southern; only two Southern states (South Carolina and Louisiana) are below the national average.

This is Confederate President Jefferson Davis referring to the North in a speech in Jackson, Mississippi, in late 1862: “They have destroyed the freedom of the press; they have seized upon and imprisoned members of state legislatures and of municipal councils, who are suspected of sympathy with the South; men have been carried off into captivity in distant states without indictment, without a knowledge of the accusations brought against them, in utter defiance of all rights guaranteed by the institutions under which they live. These people, when separated from the South, and left entirely to themselves, have in six months demonstrated their utter incapacity for self government.”

Among Southern states, only Tennessee and Texas ratified the ERA, and Tennessee later voted to rescind its action.

Half in seriousness and half in jest, I call my students' attention to Chandler's (1977) interesting book The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians.

It is also worth noting that early in the class I disabuse students of the notion—often still expressed by many Southern whites—that the Civil War was about states rights rather than slavery. If that were true, I ask them, how can they explain the fact that the Confederate constitution explicitly made the protection of slavery a national issue and forbade the states from outlawing it?

Ironically, the very features that have made the Southern experience so exceptional relative to the rest of the United States make it much more relevant to the rest of the world.

The political economy focus of the course also appeals to many international students, who come to the course with better backgrounds in economic principles than in American history or culture. The economic perspective makes the course different from many of the other American Studies courses they encounter in their programs of study, too. Indeed, a perusal of American Studies syllabi (see, e.g., those provided in Rowe 2000) demonstrates that the pedagogy in the American Studies field is almost completely uninformed by the literature, perspectives, and methods of economists.

This is the 1915 case in which the Supreme Court first struck down a Southern “device” intended to limit voting rights to blacks. The Court ruled unconstitutional use of the “grandfather clause” (in the case at bar in Oklahoma), which exempted any male whose father or grandfather had been eligible to vote as of 1866 from having to meet other qualifications or being subject to any further “devices” (such as reading and writing tests). Of course, although racially neutral on its face, since no blacks had been eligible to vote in region before the adoption of the 15th amendment, this effectively applied only to whites.

These are the two Supreme Court decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, respectively.

Shaw is one of the exemplary cases addressing the constitutionality of “majority minority districts” designed to increase the election of minority legislative officeholders.

Indeed, I try to impress upon my students in both the United States and abroad the complicated nature of the federal judicial system and how the appointment process (especially at the lower levels, where matters of senatorial courtesy can weigh heavily) can result in judges who are quite sympathetic to the current political majority.

For instance, on the increasing Chinese interest in judicial independence, see Hung (2004) and Yardley (2005).

One former international student quipped to me that, as an avid fan of The West Wing, after taking my class she can now understand the jokes on the show about Southern politics and politicians.