Hold that engine, let sweet mama get on board, cause my home
ain't here, it's a long way down the road;
... Come back, choo-choo, mama’s gonna find a berth, goin' to
Dixieland, it's the grandest place on earth; ... Dixie Flyer, come on and let
your drivers roll, wouldn't stay up North to save nobody's doggone soul; ... Here's my ticket, take it, please,
conductorman, goin’ to my mammy way down in Dixieland. - Bessie
Smith, "Dixie Flyer Blues"
The South may not be the nation's number one political
problem ... but politics is the
South's number one problem. -V. 0. Key
Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation
….sustaining leftist movements involves a difficult and
delicate balancing act. The traditional left/ Marxist project has historically
been an economically oriented affair, focused on using the modern state as a
means of transforming and transcending class differences. Beyond contesting the
attractiveness of the market's appeals to individual consumers, it is now clear
that the left must be as concerned with cultural issues (e.g., religious and
moral attachments, different ethnic experiences) as it has been with the
bread-and-butter issues associated with life in the material realm. The events
of the last seventy years have provided sufficient evidence that the attempt to
mobilize peoples to address their economic alienation while ignoring or even
encouraging their cultural alienation (as it can be argued many orthodox
Marxists have) is ultimately bound to produce tension and a dissipation of
support.
This problem was evident in Europe
between the world wars, when the left found itself under attack from
constituencies that felt alienated by the cultural aspects of Marxism (and
liberalism for that matter), a disaffection that was often energized by
anti-Semitism. It was in this context that leftist ideals were easily absorbed
and co-opted by movements of the so-called right, especially as many
early-twentieth-century Marxist movements had struck Faustian deals with the
state and nationalist ideologies. Accordingly, Italy's left gave birth to
Benito Mussolini and the Fascist Party; the founder of the British Union of
Fascists, Oswald Mosley, was a former Labourite, and France's Georges Sorel,
with his characteristic attachments to the nation as primary subject and to
violence as a necessary means to change, made the leap from orthodox Marxism to
voluntarism and anti- Semitism. In a similar manner, German-born Roberto
Michels, Belgian Hendrik DeMan, and France's Marcel Deat moved from the
socialist camp toward the right. It was also against this backdrop that Adolf
Hitler nationalized socialism in Germany.
Although clear
distinctions existed between the left and the "far right" in this
era, particularly regarding the significance of cultural traditions, their
economic orientations were similar. An emphasis on the nation (volk) provided a
foundation for most of the various leftist movements after the First World War
and the different corporatist experiments (which, at their extreme, include
Mussolini's Italy, France's Vichy administration, and Hitler's Germany). These
movements were not supporters of unrestricted property rights, and along with
their counterparts on the conventional left, they sought to resist the
institutionalization of free-market capitalism and liberal individualism. In
Canada during the same period, the uncertainties unleashed by the depression
produced the corporatist (and occasionally anti-Semitic) Social Credit Party
and the socialist Co- operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor
of the contemporary New Democratic Party. Both movements emerged in opposition
to liberalism and the free market and were suffused with Christian ideals.
While potential leftist constituencies were splitting in the Canadian West-
where both Social Credit and the CCF were rooted -the overall strength of the
national left was reduced by the inability of Protestant anglophone socialists
to make their movements attractive to francophone voters in the largely
Catholic province of Quebec. The weakness of the left in Canada was also
connected to the CCF’s clear preference for a strong federal government,
whereas Quebecers had traditionally been wary of a strong central state (Quebec
itself presents an interesting example of the ongoing nationalization of
potentially socialist support and the conflation of class and nationalist
interests). Overall, the conventional left has been hampered in its competition
with individualism and the free market by the tendency of its natural
constituencies to divide over the significance and treatment of cultural issues
(and the perception that there is a necessary conflict between cultural
tradition and modernity), as well as the problems involved in making a singular
political community out of di- verse ethnic groups. Over the last three
decades, this last issue has become serious in Europe and Canada, as concern
over (non-European) immigration has again depressed support for the left and
energized parties such as the National Front in France (where the
anti-immigration issue was first put into play by the Communist Party),
Belgium's Vlaams Blok, Austria's Freedom Party, the German Republican Party,
the Italian Social Movement, and, to some extent, Canada's Reform Party. Thus
the left, clearly weakened and on the defensive, faces the twenty-first century
aware that it cannot phrase its goals in purely materialistic terms.
Nevertheless, in Western Europe and in Canada, it can point to certain
achievements in the area of public policy, and at the least, the conventional
left may not be thriving, but it still survives.
….The weakness
of leftist organizations in the United States can be understood, to a large
extent, as a reflection and result of the nation's ongoing decisions to
prioritize racial and ethnic identities and difference. Racial conflicts and
factors have affected or been reflected in leftist outcomes in the United
States in three ways. First has been the consistent division of leftist
activists over the issue of whether organizations should be interracial,
segregated, or separate but coordinated. ..;.The second means by which the race
issue has prevented the left from remaking society in a collectivist mold is
through the popular rejection of those movements which have pursued interracial
alliances (and the related tendency to associate interracialism with
"communism’)….Beyond divisive tensions within the left, extramural
pressures and attacks have held back movements that have sought to organize
across races. This stigmatization has extended, at times, to all leftist
movements regardless of their orientation on racial issues (i.e., leftism
itself has been seen as an implicit threat to the racial status quo and
accordingly rejected). Third, for some leftists the race issue has just been a
problem to be solved at some future date or a matter of numbers - of
accepting or neglecting 10 percent of the population (e.g., AFL’s belief that trying to force its
affiliates to drop their color bars would lead to an overall weakening rather
than strengthening of the union movement). While nonwhite peoples constitute a
numerical minority within the context of United States, they have been
distributed in such a way that their numbers had a crucial impact on American
politics. Given the various psychocultural understandings and misunderstandings
that have governed the relationship among races in the United States, the
symbolic role of nonwhites-especially African Americans-in American politics
also should not be underestimated. Furthermore, nonwhites have been
concentrated in those socioeconomic classes that one would naturally expect to
support leftist activity. Finally, the South has played a key role in weakening
leftist efforts. Consequently, the decisions by labor unions and other related
institutions to dismiss the importance of challenging the racial mores that
underpin southern conservative power have had significant implications. This is
not to suggest that the outcomes would have been any rent if, somehow, American
leftists had paid more attention to the issue of race. They did not, and that
choice reflected the extent to which leftists did not consider the
ramifications of not challenging the racial status quo and the degree which
race and the South, as presences in American life, had become natural- and
unremarkable commonplaces.
These three factors
-- the division of the left on race, the popular pressures to reproduce or
reinforce society's racial codes, and the tendency of the left to overlook
racial and cultural factors -- help explain the weakness of the conventional n
the United States. . . .[I]n this chapter I focus on the political parties that
have been identified with the left in the United States -the Populists, the
Socialists, and the Communists -and their attempts to reconcile the issues of
race and class.
The primary dividing line in American politics for much of
the nation’s history has been that which separates the North and the South.
While it is common to speak of the resilience of the two-party system in
American politics, the reality has more resembled a series of regional
one-party systems (e.g., the Democratic Solid South) with the main axis running
from east to west. From the Compromise Of 1877 that marked the end of
Reconstruction to the civil rights era, there was very little true competition
between the Democrats and the Republicans.
This
sectionalism was based on the disparity between those states and regions
dependent on slave labor and those dependent on free labor and was directly
related to the distribution of Africans in America? One of the first movements
to experience the difficulties associated with sectionalism was the American or
Know-Nothing Party. Nativism and its publications (such as the various Native
American newspapers) drew support in both the North and the South,
especially in those cities and states where immigrant populations were
relatively high, such as New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and
Kentucky, Virginia, Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas.' The nativists saw these
new immigrants, primarily Irish and German, as paupers, criminals, and
radicals, threatening to overload or overturn the already-established American
way. Although nativist sentiment and violence had been a constant presence
since the beginning of the century, the Know-Nothing Party was not formed until
1854 (incidentally the same year the Republican Party was established). Given
the timing of its emergence and the general rush toward fragmentation that had
been fed by Andrew Jackson’s unique combination of personality and pork-barrel
politics, it is not altogether surprising that the Know-Nothing Party was
fractured by the same tensions that were soon to rupture the Union itself. At a
time when sectional issues were predominant, few voters in the North or the
South felt they could afford to support a party that was not committed in terms
of its regional affiliations. Of course, the narrowness of the Know-Nothing
platform - essentially the reduction or elimination of immigration -also
restricted its potential popularity.
The Civil War, its establishment of the
Republican Party as the dominant national party, and Reconstruction and
Redemption in the South led to a slightly adjusted status quo in American
national politics. The 1877 compromise gave Rutherford B. Hayes and the
Republicans the electoral college votes necessary to maintain the presidency
and left the fate of Africans in the South to be decided by local custom. As
mentioned in the previous chapter, the deal is also significant in that it
effectively marginalized labor and its interests. As the Republican coalition
abandoned blacks, the remade Democratic Party was dominated by southern
conservatives who had little interest in the concerns of the party's northern
and western working-class constituencies. After the end of Reconstruction,
then, the country was left with what was to become the foundation of
"Southern Politics." In the North, the Republicans were firmly
established as the representatives of industry, whereas most labor and
immigrant interests and votes remained within the Democratic camp. In the
South, the Republican Party was gradually reduced to the party of southern
blacks after the "scalawags" (poor southern whites),
"carpetbaggers" (transplanted northern whites), and those whites
seeking elected office were gradually drawn away. As the party lost its voting
constituency with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, it became an alienated
body that focused on the election of national officers at the party's
conventions.
Following the
end of Reconstruction and the rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, partisan
competition virtually disappeared in the South. Given its distribution of land
and power, one would have expected the South to produce politicians and
movements that questioned the economic status quo. V. 0. Key Jr. argued in Southern
Politics that "the
South ought, by all the rules of political behavior, to be radical. A poor,
agrarian area, pressed down by the colonial policies of the financial and
industrial North and Northeast, it offers fertile ground for political
agitation." But radical politics rarely took root. Instead, southern
politics has characteristically sacrificed class politics to racial politics.
While there have always been grounds for class conflict, these tensions have never
managed to overcome the impact of race and the politics of black and white. As
Key noted, "In its grand outlines the politics of the South revolves
around the position of the Negro. It is at times interpreted as a politics of
cotton, as a politics of free trade, as a politics of agrarian poverty, or as a
politics of planter and plutocrat. Although such interpretations have a
superficial validity, in the last analysis the major peculiarities of southern
politics go back to the Negro. Whatever phase of the southern political process
one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the
Negro."
The mechanics of
the process by which southern politics shaped national politics until the civil
rights era was rather simple. The South was usually divided into two camps, one
populated by whites, usually small or tenant farmers and their descendants (the
hill counties), and a second populated by blacks, wealthier whites, and their
descendants (the delta). Under "normal" circumstances the voting
power of each individual would be roughly equal, but after Reconstruction and
certainly by the turn of the century, the elimination of the black vote through
violence, trickery, and various legal manipulations gave those whites in
"black-belt" counties disproportionate influence. The elite
manipulation of electoral boundaries further increased the disproportionate
voting influence of the whites in the black-belt counties. Simple and effective
appeals to white solidarity and supremacy helped prevent remaining poorer
whites from pursuing their class interests. In other words, once black voters
were removed from the electorate, a small number of relatively wealthy and
increasingly business-oriented whites could control state politics. The actions
of this class across the South could then present a united front - in the shape
of the Solid South - to the nation and hold up any legislation or proposals
that might threaten the interests of the southern upper class, especially
because southern incumbents were rarely challenged and seniority,
pre-Watergate, meant guaranteed access to the exercise of power in Congress
This arrangement (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 4) lasted well into
the 1960s.
National
movements seeking to challenge this political status quo have either been
solidly rejected in the South, have seen their programs compromised to comply
with southern mores, or have accepted truncation (i.e., written off the South),
mistakenly believing that national politics could be significantly reoriented
without challenging southern cultural relations and understandings. But the key
to the Solid South was the relative willingness of economically disadvantaged
whites to trade economic and political gains for racial solidarity. Thus
non-status quo politics have had to be attractive enough to challenge the
racial attachments of these individuals. The story of the first significant
post-Civil War movement to test those ties is ultimately one of failure.
After Reconstruction, pressure on whites to preserve
southern unity resulted in the gradual elimination of all but the Democratic
Party. As one individual moving from the Republicans to the Democrats in this
period explained, "No white man can live in the South in the future and
act with any other than the Democratic party unless he is willing and prepared
to live a life of social isolation and remain in political oblivion." Many
whites did not have the luxury of philosophizing about the reasons for their
actions, which were a response to the threat of violence on top of "social
isolation and ... political oblivion."'
Throughout the
early years of Reconstruction and until the 1890s, a series of movements
sought to shake the prevailing political alignments in the South with little or
no success. Among these, the Granger movement, the Greenbackers, and the
National Labor Union all failed to make any significant impact on the status
quo. The first movement to have some success was the National Farmers' Alliance
and Industrial Union (or Southern Farmers' Alliance), founded in Texas in 1877.
There were actually two separate Farmers' Alliances: the larger and more
aggressive Southern Alliance and, north of the Ohio River, the more moderate
Northern Farmers' Alliance. The Farmers' Alliance reportedly had 3 million
members at one point, but it is more significant as a precursor of the People's
Party, or Populists. Although the southern wing was more radical in its pursuit
of banking, monetary, and railroad reform, it rejected attempts by its northern
counterpart to draw it into third-party politics because it was content with
the Democrats and believed it could achieve its goals inside the larger party
without challenging white supremacy.
Accordingly, the Southern Alliance refused to organize and involve
blacks directly, although blacks and whites alike were faced with the same
fiscal constraints and economic circumstances and even though blacks
represented roughly half the individuals involved in agriculture in the South.
Alliance members actually went so far as to harass and threaten Knights of
Labor organizers looking to include black farmers in their movement.
Eventually, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union was
formed in December 1886. Like the Southern Alliance, the Colored Alliance had
its roots in Texas and was overseen by a white missionary and former
Confederate soldier named R. M. Humphrey. While some of the state Colored
Alliances had white leaders (e.g., Texas, Alabama, and Kentucky), in other states
the head organizers were blacks (e.g., Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana). By
1891 Humphrey was claiming 1.2 million members, a number thought
to be grossly overinflated." The numbers involved are nonetheless
remarkable, because the Colored Alliance had to withstand the threats of
violence by Democratic forces, on the one hand, and the arguments of black
Republicans, on the other, who contended that the Farmers' Alliance was too
risky a venture to consider dividing black energies. Consequently, black
participation in the alliance had to be covert, resulting in a dearth of
records of its activities and ambitions.
Overall, few
white members saw the contradiction between the Southern Alliance's goals and
its continued refusal to question seriously American racial etiquette.
Ironically, in a Farmer's Alliance publication it was solemnly stated
that 'the materialism of to-day does a)] the time seggregate [sic] human
lives.... The tendency of the competitive system is to antagonize and
disassociate men." These same conflicts and contradictions were to mark
the Populist movement. The year 1892 represented
the high tide of independent Populist politics. Standing on the shoulders of
the Farmers' Alliance movements, the People's
Party, which had been officially launched the year before in
Cincinnati, drew support away from the Democrats in the South and the
Republicans in the North. The voting returns that year resulted in Populist
administrations in Kansas, North Dakota, and Colorado and elected at least
eight members to the House of Representatives. The leader of the party's
ticket, former Greenbacker James B. Weaver, attracted over a million voters,
making the Populists the first third party since the Civil War to gain
electoral college votes."
The rise of the Populists certainly did not
signify the emergence of traditional Marxist politics in the American context.
Populist philosophy was never as rigorous or as pointed in its analysis of the
development of American capitalism. Nevertheless, some similarities exist
between the two critiques in that they both emphasized the alienating effects
of industrialization, as well as the tendency of modern capitalism to
concentrate power in the hands of the few. On the whole, no one could mistake
the attack by the People's Party on the banking, railroad, and monetary systems
as Marxist in the European sense or even in the American sense, but Populism
-like its Canadian counterpart that was to lay the foundation for the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and subsequently the New Democratic Party
-did represent a preleftist formation of sorts. The party's 1892 platform
called for free silver at a ratio of sixteen to one, a graduated income tax,
government ownership of the railroads, the direct election of the Senate, and
an end to banks of issue.” As one
North Carolinian Populist contended, "Both the cannibal and the grinding
employer are living on human flesh, the ignorant one devouring it outright and
the intelligent one wearing it out for his benefit."' The Populists also
adopted women's suffrage as an issue, and Barton C. Shaw suggests that
"Populism seems to have softened some men's ideas about women. If a man's
wife worked in the fields alongside her husband, it was difficult to argue that
she was too delicate for politics."
This greater sensitivity could also be politically risky given the
common linkages between gender, race, and class. One southern paper described
"the sight of a woman travelling around the country making political
speeches ... [as) simply disgusting" and warned that "Southern
manhood revolts at the idea of degrading womanhood to the level of
politics."
On the issue of
race, Populist attitudes predictably varied according to region. While the
northern and border state Populists were generally in favor of including blacks
- there were fewer blacks in their states - black political participation was
an explosive subject in the states with larger black constituencies and where
the Democratic Party and its supporters equated voting the ticket with
maintaining the race. Dismissing the economic issues in the Populist platform,
the Richmond Dispatch made clear the need for whites to support the
Democrats, stating "the present Democratic party in Virginia was formed
... for self-protection against
sectional misrule -and without any reference to economic questions.""
Similarly, the Atlanta Constitution offered this analysis: "The old
issue of sectionalism is confronting the South and White Supremacy is more
important than all the financial reform in the world." Claiming to
speak for southern farmers, the Raleigh News and Observer argued that
the appeals of the Populists would prove fruitless in the South: "Are the
honest, manly White Southern farmers ready to receive their lessons in political
science from such sources? Can they acknowledge as their leader a foreign-born
fanatic like [William Alfred] Peffer [a Populist senator from Kansas], or any
Southern White man who hears his degrading race principles and still associates
with him? We answer no. The farmers of the South will not follow such men. The
chivalry of Anglo-Saxon manhood, reverence for the virtue of Southern women,
and respect for ancestral and race pride, all condemn and repudiate such
self-confessed demagogues."" The Greensboro Daily Record chimed
in on August 19, 1892: "The Democratic Party of the South is something
more than a mere political organization striving to enforce an administrative
policy. It is a white man's party, organized to maintain white supremacy and
prevent a repetition of the destructive rule of ignorant negroes and
unscrupulous whites.... The safety of the South ... as well as the conservation
of free institutions on these shores, depend upon the strength, unity and
perpetuity of the Democratic Party." " It was not merely with words
that Democratic unity and white supremacy were maintained. While the
nineteenth-century western frontier is often taken as the epitome of American
lawlessness, it surely is rivaled if not surpassed by the unrestrained violence
that marked southern politics and life in this period. Violence was used to
terrorize blacks and dissuade them from voting, as well as to keep whites
within the Democratic Party."
For southern
Populists the situation was clear. Anticipating V. 0. Key's analysis of the
essence of southern politics, in August 1892 Georgian Populist leader Tom Watson editorialized in the People's
Party Paper.- "The argument against the independent political movement
in the South may be boiled down into one word – NIGGER! Fatal word! Why, for
thirty years before our war, did the North and South hate each other? NIGGER.
What brought disunion and war? NIGGER.
With what did Abraham Lincoln break the backbone of the Confederacy? NIGGER.
What impeded Reconstruction? NIGGER. How did the Republicans
rule the South for years after Appomattox? NIGGER. What has kept the South in
a cast iron straight jacket? NIGGER.
What will be the slogan of our old politicians until Gabriel calls them home?
NIGGER. Pious Southern people never dreaded death as much as they do
now. They fear that when they knock at the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem
St. Peter will peep through the key-hole and say: 'You can't
come in.’Why?’ ‘NIGGER!"' The Populists, then, were quite aware that to question the
political status quo, to test the power of the white upper class, was to
encounter directly the issues of race and white supremacy. Referring to those
white Southerners who joined the Populist cause, John Hicks suggests that perhaps only a Southerner can realize how
keenly these converts ... must have felt their grievances.""' Indeed,
evidence shows that white southern Populists were, at times, as race obsessed
as their fellow countrymen. In a July 4 speech, Tom Watson made it clear that
he did not seek to undermine white supremacy: "I yield to no man in my
pride of race. I believe the Anglo-Saxon is stronger, in the glorious strength
of conception and achievement, than any race of created men.... Socially, I
want no mixing of the races." '
In the same speech he went on to question the faith of those whites who
believed that blacks could threaten white supremacy: "I despise the
Anglo-Saxon who is such an infernal coward as to deny legal rights to any man
on account of his color for fear of 'Negro domination.' 'Dominate' what?
'Dominate' how? 'Dominate who? It takes intellect to dominate; haven't we got
it? It takes majorities to dominate; haven't we got them? It takes wealth to
dominate; haven't we got it? It takes social, financial, legislative, military,
naval, ecclesiastical and educational establishments to dominate; haven't we
got them?""' Yet in 1896 the Georgian Populist platform did
take a stand against lynching at a time when the state was leading the nation
in terms of victims of vigilante "justice"; Watson, who saw the party
as "offering to white and black a rallying point which is free from the
odium of former discords and strifes," in one instance personally offered
refuge to a black Populist who had been threatened with lynching.
From the
black viewpoint, while the franchise was gradually being taken away by means of
fraud, violence, and, starting in Mississippi in 1890 law, the logic of
supporting the Populists against the Democrats collided with the lingering
appeal of Republicanism and the hope that soon Redemption might be reversed.
Blacks in this period had trouble distinguishing white Populists from other
whites. They could not easily forget the violent nature of their past
interactions with the poorer whites who supported the Populist cause and were
not reassured of the party's good intentions given its rejection of federal
supervision of the voting process. The testimony of William Oxford, a white
Populist, at an 1896 congressional committee hearing helps explain this
distrust: "Q. Who whipped Calvin joiner [a black Democrat]? A. I did. Q.
Did you ever whip any Negro before you did Calvin? A. Yes, sir, I have whipped
a heap of them. I whipped them before I be- came a Populist and since
too."211 in some areas, though, the Republicans and Populists coordinated
their efforts successfully (North Carolina being the preeminent
example). The downside of these alliances was that Democrats could then paint
the Populists as threats to local customs and puppets of the northern
carpet-baggers. While the nomination of William Jennings Bryan to head the
Democratic ticket in 1896 is often seen as the high tide of Populist influence
on national politics, by that point Populism had been reduced to little more
than silverism (that is, monetary reform that would involve moving from the
gold standard to silver)." Fusionism - the movement to bring together the
Democratic Party and the Populists - symbolized the deradicalization of the
People's Party potential and its pursuit of electability over program. By this
time, the South was well on its way to institutionalizing Jim Crow: South
Carolina followed Mississippi's example in 1895, Louisiana introduced
the grandfather clause three years later, and by 1901, Alabama and North
Carolina had contrived legal means of restricting the black vote. Indeed the
Populist experiment seems to have had two consequences in the South: it
accelerated the drive to find permanent means of excluding blacks from formal
politics, and it forced the Democratic Party to become more responsive to
disgruntled whites." In somewhat the same manner that pro-union
legislation was to freeze blacks out of the skilled ranks and benefit white
workers, the replacement of the convention system with the "progressive'
open primary system was of little benefit to disenfranchised southern blacks,
but it did increase the access of lower-class whites to the political system to
some extent. Nevertheless, the benefits poorer whites gained were constrained
and compromised by their adherence to and continued promotion of white
supremacist politics. As Key writes, the primaries did not go a long way toward
lessening the objective material and political "cleavage between the
planters of the Delta and the rednecks of the hill."" During the first
decade after the election of 1896, the populist agenda was transformed
into a white progressivism and ultimately no progressivism at all. It was the
politics of race, as practiced by the likes of future anti-New Dealer Carter
Glass in Virginia, that were to represent the Populist legacy in the South
despite the primary innovation. Watson came to believe that Populism's success
in the South depended on the elimination of blacks from the region's political
life and lent hi support to the negrophobic politics of such individuals as
Georgia's Hoke Smith.
Why did
Populism fail? In Revolt of the Rednecks, Albert Kirwan offers a number
of reasons: "mismanagement, lack of enlightened leadership, the
comparative conservatism of its program, returning prosperity, and the national
split resulting from the nomination of Bryan." But he concludes that
"most important was probably the race question."" John Hicks
argues that the "unexpected and disastrous defeats in Alabama and Georgia
and the generally poor showing of populism in the South can be fully understood
only by taking into consideration what happened to the negro vote."
Given the unwillingness of southern whites to risk negro domination" by
abandoning the Democratic Party -an attachment that prompted one black Texan
Populist to remark that "the South loves the Democratic Party more than it
does God" - the ability of the People's Party to challenge the national
status quo successfully was seriously reduced. As former Populists returned to
the Republican Party in the North and the Democratic Party in the South, it was
not clear that much had changed."