The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[1][2] During this period, the Democratic Party controlled southern state legislatures and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. During the late 19th century and early 20th century, Southern Democrats disenfranchised nearly all blacks in all the former Confederate states. This resulted in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting.[3]
The "Solid South" included all 11 former Confederate states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. It also included to a lesser extent Oklahoma, which became a state in 1907, as well as Kentucky.[4] Maryland and Delaware were rarely identified with the Solid South. West Virginia became allied with the Solid South in the last quarter of the 19th Century when the state was "redeemed" from its Civil War era Republican government.[5] It was one of the first states to elect former Confederates to state and Federal offices.
The Solid South can also refer to the "Southern strategy" that has been employed by Republicans since the 1960s to increase their electoral power in the South. Republicans have been in dominant, almost total, control of political offices in the South since 2010.[6] The main exception to this trend has been the state of Virginia.[7]
At the start of the American Civil War, there were 34 states in the United States, 15 of which were slave states. Slavery was also legal in the District of Columbia. Eleven of these slave states seceded from the United States to form the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.[8]
The southern slave states that stayed in the Union were Maryland, Missouri,[a] Delaware, and Kentucky, and they were referred to as the border states. Kentucky and Missouri both had dual competing Confederate governments, the Confederate government of Kentucky and the Confederate government of Missouri. The Confederacy controlled more than half of Kentucky and the southern portion of Missouri early in the war but largely lost control in both states after 1862.[10] West Virginia, created in 1863 from Unionist and Confederate counties of Virginia, was represented in both Union and Confederate legislatures, and was the only border state to have civilian voting in the 1863 Confederate elections.[11][12]
By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863, Tennessee was already under Union control. Accordingly, the Proclamation applied only to the 10 remaining Confederate states. Some of the border states abolished slavery before the end of the Civil War—Maryland in 1864,[13] Missouri in 1865,[14] one of the Confederate states, Tennessee in 1865,[15] West Virginia in 1865,[16] and the District of Columbia in 1862. However, slavery persisted in Delaware,[17] Kentucky,[18] and 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States on December 18, 1865.[19]
Democratic dominance of the South originated in the struggle of white Southerners during and after Reconstruction (1865–1877) to reestablish white supremacy and disenfranchise black people. The U.S. government under the Republican Party had defeated the Confederacy, abolished slavery, and enfranchised black people. In several states, black voters were a majority or close to it. Republicans supported by black people controlled state governments in these states. Thus the Democratic Party became the vehicle for the white supremacist "Redeemers".[20] The Ku Klux Klan, as well as other insurgent paramilitary groups such as the White League and Red Shirts from 1874, acted as "the military arm of the Democratic party" to disrupt Republican organizing, and intimidate and suppress black voters.[21]
By 1876, "Redeemer" Democrats had taken control of all state governments in the South. From then until the 1960s, state and local government in the South was almost entirely monopolized by Democrats. The Democrats elected all but a handful of U.S. Representatives and Senators, and Democratic presidential candidates regularly swept the region – from 1880 through 1944, winning a cumulative total of 182 of 187 states. The Democrats reinforced the loyalty of white voters by emphasizing the suffering of the South during the war at the hands of "Yankee invaders" under Republican leadership, and the noble service of their white forefathers in "the Lost Cause". This rhetoric was effective with many Southerners. However, this propaganda was totally ineffective in areas that had been loyal to the Union during the war, such as eastern Tennessee. Most of East Tennessee welcomed U.S. troops as liberators, and voted Republican even in the Solid South period.[22]
Even after white Democrats regained control of state legislatures, some black candidates were elected to local offices and state legislatures in the South. Black U.S. Representatives were elected from the South as late as the 1890s, usually from overwhelmingly black areas. Also in the 1890s, the Populists developed a following in the South, among poor white people who resented the Democratic Party establishment. Populists formed alliances with Republicans (including black Republicans) and challenged the Democratic bosses, even defeating them in some cases.[23]
To prevent such coalitions in the future and to end the violence associated with suppressing the black vote during elections, Southern Democrats acted to disfranchise both black people and poor white people.[24] From 1890 to 1910, beginning with Mississippi, Southern states adopted new constitutions and other laws including various devices to restrict voter registration, disfranchising virtually all black and many poor white residents.[25] These devices applied to all citizens; in practice they disfranchised most black citizens and also "would remove [from voter registration rolls] the less educated, less organized, more impoverished whites as well – and that would ensure one-party Democratic rules through most of the 20th century in the South".[26][27] All the Southern states adopted provisions that restricted voter registration and suffrage, including new requirements for poll taxes, longer residency, and subjective literacy tests. Some also used the device of grandfather clauses, exempting voters who had a grandfather voting by a particular year (usually before the Civil War, when black people could not vote.)[28]
U.S. Senator Benjamin Tillman explained how African Americans were disenfranchised in his state of South Carolina in a white supremacist speech:
In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters.... Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task.
We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights"—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.... I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.[29]
White Democrats also opposed Republican economic policies such as the high tariff and the gold standard, both of which were seen as benefiting Northern industrial interests at the expense of the agrarian South in the 19th century. Nevertheless, holding all political power was at the heart of their resistance. From 1876 through 1944, the national Democratic party opposed any calls for civil rights for black people. In Congress Southern Democrats blocked such efforts whenever Republicans targeted the issue.[30][31]
White Democrats passed "Jim Crow" laws which reinforced white supremacy through racial segregation.[32] The Fourteenth Amendment provided for apportionment of representation in Congress to be reduced if a state disenfranchised part of its population. However, this clause was never applied to Southern states that disenfranchised black residents. No black candidate was elected to any office in the South for decades after the turn of the century; and they were also excluded from juries and other participation in civil life.[25]
Democratic candidates won by large margins in a majority of Southern states in every presidential election from 1876 to 1948, except for 1928, when the Democratic candidate was Al Smith, a Catholic New Yorker. Even in that election, the divided South provided Smith with nearly three-fourths of his electoral votes. Scholar Richard Valelly credited Woodrow Wilson's 1912 election to the disfranchisement of black people in the South, and also noted far-reaching effects in Congress, where the Democratic South gained "about 25 extra seats in Congress for each decade between 1903 and 1953".[b][25] Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:
The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.[33]
In the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), Democratic dominance was overwhelming, with Democrats routinely receiving 80%–90% of the vote, and only a tiny number of Republicans holding state legislative seats or local offices.[34] Mississippi and South Carolina were the most extreme cases – between 1900 and 1944, only in 1928, when the three subcoastal Mississippi counties of Pearl River, Stone and George went for Hoover, did the Democrats lose even one of these two states' counties in any presidential election.[35]
The German-American Texas counties of Gillespie and Kendall, and a number of counties in Appalachian parts of Alabama and Georgia would vote Republican in presidential elections through this period.[36] Arkansas consistently voted Democratic from 1876 to 1964, though Democratic margins were lower than in the Deep South.[36] Even in 1939, Florida was described as "still very largely an empty State," with only North Florida largely settled until after World War II.[37] In Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, Republicans retained a significant presence mainly in remote Appalachian regions which supported the Union during the Civil War, winning occasional U.S. House seats and often drawing over 40% in presidential votes.[38]
In 1900, as the 56th Congress considered proposals for apportioning its seats among the 45 states following the 1900 Federal Census, Representative Edgar D. Crumpacker (R-IN) filed an independent report urging that the Southern states be stripped of seats due to the large numbers of voters they had disfranchised. He noted this was provided for in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided for stripping representation from states that reduced suffrage due to race. From 1896 until 1900, the House of Representatives with a Republican majority had acted in more than thirty cases to set aside election results from Southern states where the House Elections Committee had concluded that "[B]lack voters had been excluded due to fraud, violence, or intimidation".[39] However, in the early 1900s, it began to back off, after Democrats won a majority, which included Southern delegations that were solidly in Democratic hands. However, concerted opposition by the Southern Democratic bloc was aroused, and the effort failed.[40]
By the 1920s, as memories of the Civil War faded, the Solid South cracked slightly. For instance, a Republican was elected U.S. Representative from Texas in 1920, serving until 1932. The Republican national landslides in 1920 and 1928 had some effects.[41] In the 1920 elections, Tennessee elected a Republican governor and five out of 10 Republican U.S. Representatives, and became the first former Confederate state to vote for a Republican candidate for U.S. President since Reconstruction.[42]
In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic in the largely Protestant South in 1928. Smith only managed to hold Arkansas, the home state of his running mate Joseph T. Robinson, and the Deep South.[43] However, with the Democratic national landslide of 1932, the South again became solidly Democratic.[44]
In the 1930s, black voters outside the South largely switched to the Democrats,[45] and other groups with an interest in civil rights (notably Jews, Catholics, and academic intellectuals) became more powerful in the party.[46] A number of conservative Southern Democrats felt chagrin at the national party's growing friendliness to organized labor during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, forming the conservative coalition with conservative Republicans in 1937 to stymie further New Deal legislation.[47] Roosevelt was unsuccessful in attempting to purge some of these conservative Southern Democrats in white primaries in the 1938 elections, such as Senator Walter George of Georgia and Senator Ellison Smith of South Carolina, in contrast to successfully ousting representative and chair of the House Rules Committee John J. O'Connor of New York.[48]
Southern demography also began to change.[49] From 1910 through 1970, about 6.5 million black Southerners moved to urban areas in other parts of the country in the Great Migration, and demographics began to change Southern states in other ways.[50] Florida began to expand rapidly, with retirees and other migrants in Central and South Florida becoming a majority of the state's population. Many of these new residents brought their Republican voting habits with them, diluting traditional Southern hostility to the Republicans.[51]
In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Smith v. Allwright against white primary systems, and most Southern states ended their racially discriminatory primary elections.[52] They retained other techniques of disenfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which in theory applied to all potential voters, but in practice were administered in a discriminatory manner by white officials.[53] The Republican Party began to make gains in the South after World War II, as the South industrialized and urbanized.[54]
Oklahoma was considered part of the Solid South, but did not become a state until 1907, and shared characteristics of both the border states and the former Confederate states. During the Civil War, it was designated as Indian Territory and permitted slavery, with most tribal leaders aligning with the Confederacy.[56] However, some tribes and bands sided with the Union, resulting in bloody conflict in the territory, with severe hardships for all residents.[57][58] The Oklahoma Territory was settled through a series of land runs from 1889 to 1895, which included significant numbers of settlers from the Republican Great Plains.[59]
Oklahoma did not have a Republican governor until Henry Bellmon was elected in 1962.[60] Democrats were strongest in Southeast Oklahoma, known as "Little Dixie", whose white settlers were Southerners seeking a start in new lands following the American Civil War.[61] Oklahoma disenfranchised its black population, which comprised less than 10% of the state's population from 1870 to 1960.[62] In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court invalidated the Oklahoma Constitution's "old soldier" and "grandfather clause" exemptions from literacy tests. Oklahoma and other states quickly reacted by passing laws that created other rules for voter registration that worked against blacks and minorities.[63]
However, Oklahoma did not enact a poll tax, unlike the former Confederate states.[64] As a result, Oklahoma was still competitive at the federal level, voting for Warren G. Harding in 1920 and Herbert Hoover in 1928. The state had a Republican presence in Northwestern Oklahoma, which had ties to neighboring Kansas, a Republican stronghold.[65] The state also elected three Republican U.S. Senators before 1964: John W. Harreld (1921-1927), William B. Pine (1925-1931), and Edward H. Moore (19