Here is a spoiler alert. If you have read the late Barbara Sinclair’s Congressional Realignment, 1925–1978 (1982), then you know how southern Democrats’ roll-call voting changed from being more liberal than that of many northern Democrats to frequently aligning with Republicans. Early in the New Deal, southern Democrats were among the most liberal members of the House except when it came to Civil Rights. Over time, growing numbers of Southerners shifted rightward. The Unsolid South covers some of the same ground as Sinclair’s book but is limited to economic policy, which Devin Caughey defines as two of the five policy areas she examines: government management and social welfare.
While the two works reach the same conclusion, Caughey provides richer detail than Sinclair when documenting the dramatic shift in southern Democrats’ policy preferences. Caughey parallels Sinclair at points, but goes beyond her work in several ways. He analyzes both chambers of Congress whereas Sinclair focused exclusively on the House. A more significance difference, however, is that Caughey links the changing roll-call behavior of southern members of Congress to shifts in the policy preferences of their constituents. By examining the linkage between the public and its representatives, he ventures deeply into unexplored territory guided by a heretofore unexploited resource: extensive polling data.
In the course of explaining the bases for shifting legislator preferences, Caughey weighs in on the debate over the identity of those to whom southern members of Congress were responsive. He meticulously documents that southern legislators were not pawns of the elite but instead faithfully represented the changing preferences of their voters, that is, the white electorate that the author dubs the “selectorate.” Contrary to what some have assumed, the South’s one-party politics experienced a level of responsiveness among members of Congress comparable to that in the two-party North. The often dismissed Democratic primary system promoted southern legislator responsiveness by pitting supporters against opponents of progressive policies, thereby creating choices similar to those offered by partisan competition elsewhere in the country.
In the early days of the New Deal, southern Democrats, in part motivated by their region’s desperate economic conditions and in part displaying partisan loyalty encouraged by the first taste of unified Democratic government in more than a decade, compiled some of the most liberal voting records in Congress. But as northern urban and pro-labor legislators challenged the dominance that rural Southerners had enjoyed, legislators from the South swerved rightward on economic policy. Challenges to the region’s segregationist practices mounted by the Congress of Industrial Organizations provided an accelerant to existing southern anti-union bias. As perceived threats to segregation came to outweigh economic benefits, increasing numbers of Southerners voted more conservatively.
In the North, changes in the policy preferences Caughey studies resulted from partisan replacement. In the South, where Republicans had made no gains during the 1930s and 1940s, the change in median legislator position resulted more often from the adoption by sitting legislators of more conservative stands than due to member replacement. There were, however, multiple instances that Caughey documents where Southerners, like Rep. Maury Maverick (D-TX), ignored the growing conservativism in their primary constituency and paid the price at the ballot box. Early in the New Deal, Southerners who were more conservative than their constituents fell to candidates who embraced Franklin D. Roosevelt with the same ardor as today’s Republicans pledge fealty to Donald Trump.
Although his primary interest is economic policy, Caughey frequently notes that Southerners’ growing conservativism did not extend to all policies, and that provides the basis for the book’s title. However, Sinclair documented in greater detail than Caughey the areas in which Southerners’ liberal leanings persisted longer. Using the policy classification scheme from Aage Clausen’s How Congressmen Decide (1973), Sinclair showed that southern Democrats continued to be generally liberal on two of five policy dimensions throughout the 1950s.
It may surprise readers that despite the lack of partisan competition, southern members of Congress represented their electors as faithfully as did their northern colleagues. After first doing a cross-sectional analysis, Caughey examines linkages over time to show that Southerners in Congress were held in check and guided by those who voted in the Democratic primary. He then concludes “that dynamic responsiveness was, if anything more robust among House and Senate delegations in the South than in the non-South. . . . Thus, overall, these analyses support the hypothesis that in the case of congressional politics, lack of partisan competition did not inhibit Southern MCs’ representation of the white selectorate” (p. 160; emphasis in the original). In denying that partisan competition is a prerequisite for responsiveness, the author challenges the gospel of V. O. Key (Southern Politics, 1949), which contended that partisan competition was a prerequisite for democracy. However, in the recently published Why Parties Matter (2018), party specialist John Aldrich and coauthor John Griffin challenge Caughey’s reliance on factions as adequate for democracy. Among the problems they note are that factions, unlike parties, lack continuity, and the absence of continuity means that while a legislator may be held responsible, that is not the same as holding a party responsible; it is the latter that shapes an agenda.
Much of the previous research on Southerners’ roll-call voting has used Conservative Coalition support scores. Caughey criticizes this measure, which focuses on the group rather than on individuals. In place of the Conservative Coalition support scores that Congressional Quarterly calculated for decades, Caughey determines pivot points and examines the distribution of legislators around them. As New Deal fervor flagged, first on labor bills and then on economic programs more broadly, Southerners often occupied the middle ground. Even as they became more conservative as a group, a minority of Southerners would at times join their northern fellow partisans to forestall Republicans’ more extreme alternatives. Whether Southerners provided the margin for a liberal or conservative outcome, beginning in the late 1930s the path to making economic policy ran through Dixie.
During my tenure as a Congressional Fellow for the American Political Science Association roughly a generation after the end point of Caughey’s research, I witnessed the tension he describes between constituent pressures and a partisan magnetism that pulled southern Democrats leftward even as their constituents drifted farther to the right. Members of the Georgia delegation frequently voted against their party, but on issues being whipped, partisan apostasy triggered soul searching and fretting about the inability to be loyal to their party and win reelection. Defecting, while not uncommon, was not taken lightly. To the extent that they felt they could, Georgia Democrats voted with the party, thereby increasing their scores on measures of liberalism more than if they had responded exclusively to constituent preferences, much in keeping with Caughey’s analysis.
The Unsolid South makes multiple contributions. First, it demonstrates a linkage between white public opinion and southern Democrats’ roll-call voting during the heyday of one-party politics, thus challenging the notion that these members of Congress responded just to wealthy plantation owners. Second, Democratic primaries offered voters choices, at least on the dominant economic issues, and the actuality of defeat was sufficient to encourage responsiveness. Third, southern Democrats tended to be more liberal than Northerners with similar constituencies. This book will be prized by those who study congressional politics, southern politics, and American political development.
