Authors: Ira Katznelson
45
A measured account of Wilson’s racism and his “failure of moral conscience” can be found in John Milton Cooper,
Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). For further discussions, see Henry Blumenthal, “Woodrow Wilson and the Race Question,”
Journal of Negro History
48 (1963): 1–21; Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,”
Political Science Quarterly
84 (1969): 61–79; Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner,”
Journal of Southern History
36 (1970): 3–17; Stephen Skowronek, “The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition,”
American Political Science Review
100 (2006): 385–401.
46
This point is underscored persuasively in Skowronek, “The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes,” pp. 309–10.
47
Arthur S. Link, “The South and the ‘New Freedom’: An Interpretation,”
American Scholar
20 (1951): 316. An article with reservations about this claim, usefully showing internal tensions within the southern wing of the Democratic Party about the degree of Wilsonian radicalism, is Richard M. Abrams, “Woodrow Wilson and the Southern Congressmen,”
Journal of Southern History
4 (1956): 417–37. In all, Abrams showed that Link may have exaggerated southern radicalism but that he did not contradict the homologous relationship between southern and Wilsonian progressivism. A thoughtful adjudication of this dispute is offered by Morton Sosna, “The South in the Saddle: Racial Politics during the Wilson Years,”
Wisconsin Magazine of History
54 (1970): 35. See also George Brown Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South, 1915–1945
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), whose discussion of the character of southern representation stresses the often central role played by the region in crafting and enacting key legislation (pp. 4–18).
48
Michael Perman,
Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 215.
49
Still, this consideration was not neglected. A comprehensive overview of southern congressional voting patterns during World War I concluded that, in addition to religious questions, “even more limiting to the southern vision was the racial question. . . . The outcome of roll calls on woman suffrage, prohibition, and perhaps selective service might well have been different had the racial issue been ignored.” See Richard L. Watson, “A Testing Time for Southern Congressional Leadership: The War Crisis of 1917–1918,”
Journal of Southern History
44 (1978): 37.
50
W. Elliot Brownlee,
Federal Taxation in America: A Short History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 62.
51
This discussion relies on the report in Sosna, “The South in the Saddle,” pp. 42–45. See also Philip A. Grant Jr., “Senator Hoke Smith, Southern Congressmen, and Agricultural Education, 1914–1917,”
Agricultural History
60 (1986): 111–22.
52
New York Tribune,
February 6, 1914;
Washington Post,
February 8, 1914.
53
Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska and Atlee Pomerene of Ohio.
54
New York Times,
February 8, 1914.
55
“Soak-the-rich remained,” but at the behest of the Harding and Coolidge administrations, “with progressiveness reduced, major loopholes added, and its sharp anticorporate edge dulled” despite the best efforts of the southern progressives. See Brownlee,
Federal Taxation in America,
p. 65.
56
Battles over taxation took place as “the nation found itself in the midst of a great transition from customs and excises to the income tax as a major source of federal revenue for peacetime as well as for war.” See Kenyon E. Poole, “The Problem of Simplicity in the Enactment of Tax Legislation, 1920–1940,”
Journal of Political Economy
49 (1941): 900. On Sheppard-Tower and race, see the superb study by Deborah E. Ward,
The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
57
Lodge is best known, of course, for his successful leadership three decades later, when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in defeating participation by the United States in the fledgling League of Nations.
58
Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler,
Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 76–87. For a superb account of how debate about the federal elections bill intertwined with fundamental changes to the rules of the House, see Richard M. Valelly, “The Reed Rules and Republican Party Building: A New Look,”
Studies in American Political Development
23 (2009): 115–42.
59
These included John Townsend Jr., Philips Lee Goldsborough, Roscoe Patterson, and Henry Hatfield, largely forgotten Republican names, oddities in an overwhelmingly Democratic region, who represented Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia, respectively, in the U.S. Senate at the start of the New Deal. Each had been elected in 1928, when much of the South recoiled from the presidential candidacy of New York governor Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic and an opponent of Prohibition. A fifth southern Republican, Daniel Hastings of Delaware, was appointed to his seat in December 1928 to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Senator T. Coleman du Pont. Hastings was elected to a full term in November 1930, but he lost his seat in 1936 to the Democrat James Hughes. During the 1930s, Smith emerged as a leading critic of the New Deal. He criticized Roosevelt’s program for opportunism, constitutional transgressions, and class discord, among other sins, in a series of speeches in the winter and fall of 1936. See Charles W. Calhoun,
Concerning a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Vincent DeSantis,
Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877–1897
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962); Richard M. Valelly, “Partisan Entrepreneurship and Policy Windows: George Frisbie Hoar and the 1890 Federal Elections Bill,” in
Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making
, ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 126–52.
60
Robert L. Zangando,
The NAACP’s Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 69. See also Ira Katznelson,
Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900–1930, and Britain, 1948–1968
(London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 55–60; Jeffrey A. Jenkins, Justin Peck, and Vesla M. Weaver, “Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891–1940,”
Studies in American Political Development
24 (2010): 61–63, 66–77. These authors treat the 7–6 vote favoring the bill by northern Democrats as a harbinger of the influence of black northern voters on the party’s later turn to civil rights. But at this moment, the final passage roll call in the House on the Dyer antilynching bill was a party-line and sectional vote. “The anti-lynching measure was finally taken up in the Senate when it reconvened (after the Congressional elections) in late November. The Southerners, as predicted, filibustered. The filibuster, led by Senator Underwood of Alabama, was unexpectedly brief. On Saturday night, 2 December, a caucus of Republicans decided to implement the agreement reached by the leadership in July to have the Senate abandon the Bill and move on to other pending business” (Katznelson,
Black Men, White Cities,
p. 59).
61
In the early New Deal, the Finance Committee was particularly important. That committee, guided by Harrison, nurtured and reported the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, the Reciprocal Trade Act in 1934, and the Social Security Act of 1935—together, the very heart of the New Deal.
62
Irish, “The Southern One-Party System and National Politics,” pp. 84–85. For a discussion and relevant data on the role of southern Democrats in Congress, see David W. Brady,
Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Sinclair,
Congressional Realignment,
especially the useful table on regional composition on p. 19. See also the discussion on the advantages that accrued to the South over the long term in Richard L. Watson Jr., “From Populism through the New Deal: Southern Political History,” in
Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham,
ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
63
Republicans tended to be more competitive in Senate races than in House ones, yet even in that chamber victorious Democratic Party candidates secured 86.4 percent of the vote from 1912 to 1930, dipping below 85 percent only in 1920. The mean percentage of the two-party vote for all candidates in this period outside the South was 58 percent. See Donald Gross and David Breaux, “Historical Trends in U.S. Senate Elections, 1912–1988,”
American Politics Quarterly
19 (1991): 295, 300.
64
In the Senate, 70 percent in the 67th Congress; 66 in the 68th; 63 in the 69th; 65 in the 70th; 67 in the 71st; and 64 in the 72nd. The percentages for the House were 86, 66, 71, 69, 72, and 63. These proportions were calculated from data drawn from Kenneth C. Martis,
The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989
(New York: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 174–85.
65
There were five Farmer-Labor Party members, as well. This was the composition of the House on March 4, 1933.
66
There was also one Farmer-Labor Party member. This was the composition of the Senate on March 4, 1933.
67
Milton Plesur, “The Republican Congressional Comeback of 1938,”
Review of Politics
24 (1962): 525–62; Clyde P. Weed,
The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party during the New Deal
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
68
The pre–New Deal situation is summarized in Theodore J. Lowi, “The Roosevelt Revolution and the New American State,” in
Comparative Theory and Political Experience: Mario Einaudi and the Liberal Tradition
, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, Theodore J. Lowi, and Sidney Tarrow (Ithaca,
NY
: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 192–95. This essay stands on the shoulders of Mario Einaudi,
The Roosevelt Revolution
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
69
Southern congressional power peaked during the New Deal era’s second decade, from 1943 to 1952. Republicans averaged 43 members (45 percent) in the Senate, compared with 30 (31 percent) for southern Democrats and just 23 (24 percent) for nonsouthern Democrats. In the House, on average, the Republicans held 203 seats (47 percent), while southern Democrats had 133 (31 percent), and nonsouthern Democrats only 97 (23 percent). As a result, the region’s representatives became a good deal more than a veto group. Commanding the Democratic Party, the South effectively controlled what Congress would, and would not, accomplish. More than once in his landmark treatment of the growth of congressional conservatism during the New Deal, James Patterson stressed that “too much can be made of the fact” that much of the emergent opposition to the New Deal within the Democratic Party was southern, and he cautioned that “it is easy to simplify the southern role in the conservative bloc” and said that “this factor should not be overemphasized.” He rightly noted that outside of explicit race issues or those that elicited racial fears, the South hardly was solid, and, most often, continued to back the New Deal. But that is just the point I wish to stress. The South moved from a core initiator and supporter of the New Deal in the early years to a voting bloc that had to manage to find its way within a two-dimensional map with both party and regional coordinates. I fully agree with Patterson that the South was not the center of a sure and predictable conservative coalition. See James T. Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 132, 278, 322–23. Patterson first put forth his arguments in the following two articles: “The Failure of Party Realignment in the South, 1937–1939,”
Journal of Politics
27 (1965): 602–617; “A Conservative Coalition Forms in Congress, 1933–1939,”
Journal of American History
52 (1966): 757–72.
70
The simple measure of “likeness” to gauge the behavior of legislative groups was first introduced by Stuart A. Rice in 1925, then widely adopted by congressional scholars. As summarized by David Mayhew, the “likeness index gauges the similarity of outlook among two voting blocs. For a given motion, an index of likeness is calculated by subtracting from 100 the difference between the percentages of ‘aye’ votes cast by two blocs. Thus, if blocs of Republican ‘farm’ and ‘nonfarm’ congressmen both unanimously support a motion, their index of likeness is 100. If each bloc unanimously opposes the other, their index of likeness is zero. If one bloc divides 90–10 and the other 70–30, their likeness index is 80.” Conventionally, the cutoff dividing high from low likeness is a score of 70. See Stuart A. Rice, “The Behavior of Legislative Groups: A Method of Measurement,”
Political Science Quarterly
40 (1925): 63–64; David R. Mayhew,
Party Loyalty among Congressmen: The Difference between Democrats and Republicans, 1947–1962
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 9.
71
This count includes procedural roll calls that clearly were linked to a substantive policy issue. After a review of the
Congressional Record
for each procedural roll call, a determination was made as to whether a roll call was purely procedural, as in a vote to elect the Speaker of the House, or was clearly linked to a particular public policy area that was under discussion, as in a vote to adjourn during fierce debate about a substantive bill.