Southern Democrats ... I still don’t get it (user search)
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  Southern Democrats ... I still don’t get it (search mode)
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Author Topic: Southern Democrats ... I still don’t get it  (Read 4355 times)
🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸
shua
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Posts: 25,663
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Political Matrix
E: 1.29, S: -0.70

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« on: July 01, 2020, 05:34:03 PM »
« edited: July 01, 2020, 05:45:36 PM by 🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸 »

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First, voting alignments depended upon the issue. The labor bill, by proposing to destroy southern competitive wage advantages, upset southerners of all persuasions. Walter Lippmann, in fact, called the bill "sectional legislation disguised as humanitarian reform. " On other crucial votes in the House, however, such as those which recommitted reorganization in 1938 and defeated the death sentence provision of the utility holding company bill in 1935, representatives from the South divided as did Democrats from other sections. Secondly, southerners were seldom united. As V. 0. Key put it, "while individual southern Senators may frequently vote with the Republicans, a majority rarely does; and when it does, the group as a whole is badly split more than half the time." The New Deal Congresses had their Glasses and Baileys*, but they also had their Blacks and Rayburns.**  Except on race legislation, southern congressmen were never "solid."
*reliably conservative Southern Dem Senators
**mostly progressive Southern Dem Senators

"A Conservative Coalition Forms in Congress, 1933-1939", James T. Patterson 1966 www.jstor.org/stable/1894345

Patterson goes on to say that the divide among Democrats on New Deal legislation was often more one of urban vs rural than between North and South, but that even among northern Democrats from more urban areas there were conservatives such as Sen Gerry of RI.
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🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸
shua
Atlas Star
*****
Posts: 25,663
Nepal


Political Matrix
E: 1.29, S: -0.70

WWW
« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2020, 09:27:04 PM »

^ I don't think the assertion that the slave power in the South was fundamentally right wing in any way necessitates that the Republicans opposing them in the North, and therefore looking to curb slavery's expansion and existence, were therefore in any way left wing (or that the Democrats in the North that apologized for said Southerners weren't left-of-center, themselves).  Which is kind of the broader point.  I think there is plenty of historical evidence from primary sources that suggest the basic dynamic of the Nineteenth Century North was a pro-immigration, more-pro-separation-of-church-and-state and economically left-leaning Democratic Party and a rather xenophobic, moralist and pro-business Republican Party ... then you had the Southern planters, who happened to be in the same party as the Northern Democrats, effectively making division over slavery a "Democrats problem."

And I do appreciate that being "Puritanical" has a more complicated history than a direct line back from modern day Evangelicals screaming about the culture wars, but I think that from what I have read about this period, the Democrats did in fact see these moralist Republicans as fundamentally "right wing" in this sense (which I again maintain is more important than our analysis with modern lens).

A lot of times politics is defined by the opposition in one form or another. Perceptions therefore internally may well have been positive, but externally, there would be more criticism hence why the South would tend to view Puritanical New England in a certain lens. It is no accident that Jefferson, the champion of separation of Church and state is from he South and meanwhile Connecticut is one of the few people taxing people to support a state church. Likewise, the immigrants and thus challengers to this "established" puritan/calvinist political dynamic end up in a political alliance with the South. These same general patterns hold up for a good long while too.

That may have been true for Jefferson and his cohort, but Fitzhugh's criticism of the Puritans is very, very different, and I think is more indicative of the post-Jeffersonian South's view on New England. In this revealing chapter on the Reformation from his notorious book Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh savages the Puritans for believing in "Liberty of the press, liberty of speech, freedom of religion, or rather freedom from religion, and the unlimited right of private judgment." Ironically, Jefferson must have found these Puritan principles to be virtues rather than vices, and if alive would’ve rushed to their defense against Fitzhugh.
Fitzhugh is an interesting character. As you'll know if you've read Cannibals All!, he contends that 19/20 men are unfit to govern themselves and flirts with a race-blind version of slavery in which poor whites would also be enslaved. But to your point with regard to Jefferson: there was, in fact, a theme among some slavery appologists of denouncing Jefferson, or at least disavowing his ideas concerning the equality of all men. Alexander Stephens in his Cornerstone Speech portrays Jefferson as a sort of John the Baptist to John C. Calhoun's Christ, an enlightened teacher who fell short of realizing the "great truth" that slavery is a "positive good." Indiana's John Petit went still further, declaring the famous sentence from the Declaration of Independence to be a "self-evident lie." So there's certainly some merit to the contention that the most extreme defenders of slavery understood themselves to be at odds with the more radical parts of Jefferson's legacy.

Stephens disagreed with Jefferson in that he would insert a "white" into the phrase "all men are created equal.."    He believed a society that subjugated the black man to the white man was more moral than one which subjugated one white man to another. 

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its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

In that sense for Stephens the Confederacy was a fundamentally radical project, even while conserving Southern civilization.
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