Gasconade County, Missouri

[Hope For A New Era]

It doesn't stick out at all right now:



But have a look at 1964:



It was the most-Republican county in the state in 12 of 14 elections from 1936 to 1988 (all except 1952, when it was 3rd-most, and 1960, when it was 5th-most). It has the longest streak of voting for a single party of any county in the country: Republican since 1860.

Yet, it seems to not be any different from its neighbors? It doesn't have any unique history of its own, as far as I can tell. I can find no distinct local issues that would push it toward the Republicans, no differences in ancestry or demographics (it's all heavily German-American, it's the Missouri Rheinland), no unusual religious groups present, no big migrations or population shifts over time...it really does seem like a county that decided to be Republican when Lincoln appeared and then just never stopped. A Republican Elliott County.

Anyone have any insight into what's going on here?

[Abner Beech]

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/stampedes/the-1862-loutre-island-stampede/

It appears to have been a strongly Unionist and anti-slavery county.

[YPestis25]

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/stampedes/the-1862-loutre-island-stampede/

It appears to have been a strongly Unionist and anti-slavery county.

Yes, this seems to be a key factor. In 1860, only 0.9% of Gasconade's population was enslaved, the lowest in the local region. It is also just outside of the Missouri Lead Belt, which left it without any mitigating factors to its Republicanism since the Civil War.

I have to wonder if its proximity to Missouri's "Little Dixie" also had the effect of strengthening the Republican share of the vote there, particularly in the immediate post Civil War era.

[kcguy]

I don't think this is relevant, but I'll mention that the town of Hermann really plays up its German heritage--wineries, Oktoberfest, etc.

[Hope For A New Era]

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/stampedes/the-1862-loutre-island-stampede/

It appears to have been a strongly Unionist and anti-slavery county.

Yes, this seems to be a key factor. In 1860, only 0.9% of Gasconade's population was enslaved, the lowest in the local region. It is also just outside of the Missouri Lead Belt, which left it without any mitigating factors to its Republicanism since the Civil War.

I have to wonder if its proximity to Missouri's "Little Dixie" also had the effect of strengthening the Republican share of the vote there, particularly in the immediate post Civil War era.

If it was so unionist and anti-slavery, why did it vote so strongly for Goldwater the uber-segregationist?

[YPestis25]

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/stampedes/the-1862-loutre-island-stampede/

It appears to have been a strongly Unionist and anti-slavery county.

Yes, this seems to be a key factor. In 1860, only 0.9% of Gasconade's population was enslaved, the lowest in the local region. It is also just outside of the Missouri Lead Belt, which left it without any mitigating factors to its Republicanism since the Civil War.

I have to wonder if its proximity to Missouri's "Little Dixie" also had the effect of strengthening the Republican share of the vote there, particularly in the immediate post Civil War era.

If it was so unionist and anti-slavery, why did it vote so strongly for Goldwater the uber-segregationist?

I don't think that Goldwater's victory Gasconade in 1964 can be understood as a vote in favor of Goldwater's vote against the 1964 CRA, which can't really be understood as segregationist in the same way that the Southern Democrats' votes against the CRA were anyhow.

Gasconade swung in 1964 almost squarely with the national swing against the GOP that year, which to me indicates that Goldwater's vote against the CRA was not really relevant to him holding the county, rather his victory in Gasconade can be understood as Goldwater holding (weakly) onto the GOP base in Missouri on account of the R next to his name alone.

On the Unionist angle of this, we see what happened in Gasconade play out across Unionist strongholds across the Upper South, such as Eastern Tennessee and South Eastern Kentucky. They stuck with the Republican, though their reasons were I think very different from those of voters across the Deep South who cast a ballot for the GOP for the first time in their lives.

[they don't love you like i love you]

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/stampedes/the-1862-loutre-island-stampede/

It appears to have been a strongly Unionist and anti-slavery county.

Yes, this seems to be a key factor. In 1860, only 0.9% of Gasconade's population was enslaved, the lowest in the local region. It is also just outside of the Missouri Lead Belt, which left it without any mitigating factors to its Republicanism since the Civil War.

I have to wonder if its proximity to Missouri's "Little Dixie" also had the effect of strengthening the Republican share of the vote there, particularly in the immediate post Civil War era.

If it was so unionist and anti-slavery, why did it vote so strongly for Goldwater the uber-segregationist?

It was a full century after the Civil War but the context is a bit more complicated.

All of these Unionist counties (you also see them in parts of Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, the area in Texas between Austin and San Antonio and some scattering in Georgia and Alabama) were very remote and isolated places even by the standards of the rural south. They had virtually no economic reliance on slavery and thus didn't care about the national debate and just wanted to be left alone. Their state governments dragging them out of the union and into war over something they didn't care about was not popular. Once the war ended and former Confederate and sympathizers took over the local Democratic parties they turned hardcore Republican in response and this continued after Reconstruction ended and the Republicans quit giving a sh!t about blacks in the south because these people didn't really either. Basically they weren't so much anti-slavery as anti-seceeding and going to war over slavery. These strong local political machines dominated politics in these counties onward just as the Democratic machines did in the rest of the south (not so much Missouri because it didn't secede and wasn't under Reconstruction but this happened in some counties elsewhere in Missouri.)

Eventually the influence of these machines faded just as they did in the Democratic counties but by then these places were demographically strong for the Republicans anyway, being almost all white, rural and socially conservative, so their voting patterns remained.