Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In this age of ascendant Republicanism, carefully groomed politicians, and television advertising, it is often hard to remember just how different things were only three decades ago. Then, the South was the sole property of white Democrats who dominated an electorate chopped down to a minority through restrictive and oligarchical voting laws. Even those allowed to vote became apathetic; only about one of five eligible voters even bothered to cast a ballot. The region's representatives constituted a massive voting bloc in Congress, but no president—except the accidental one from Texas—was chosen from the South. Dewey Grantham, a leading historian of Southern politics, gives here a brief overview of the emergence and fading of that solid South. This work of synthesis and summary breaks no new ground, but it is a cogent and powerful reminder of what the South was not long ago." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
Southern-style politics was one of those peculiar institutions that differentiated the South from other American regions. This system -- long referred to as the Solid South -- embodied a distinctive regional culture and was perpetuated through an undemocratic distribution of power and a structure based on disfranchisement, malapportioned legislatures, and one-party politics. It was the mechanism that determined who would govern in the states and localities, and in national politics it was the means through which the South's politicians defended their region's special interests and political autonomy. The history of this remarkable institution can be traced in the gradual rise, long persistence, and ultimate decline of the Democratic Party dominance in the land below the Potomac and the Ohio.
This is the story that Dewey W. Grantham tells in his fresh and authoritative account of the South's modern political experience. The distillation of many years of research and reflection, is both a synthesis of the extensive literature on politics in the recent South and a challenging reinterpretation of the region's political history.