70 The two-party system
structure of Southern society? The reaction of the white community was to
create a political system that would deny the exercise of political power to
the black population of the South. This was achieved through the establish-
ment of the Democratic Party as the only effective political organisation in
these states, an organisation that would dominate the governments of those
states, and which would ensure the election of Senators and Representatives
to the federal government in Washington who would defend the South from
attack.
Before the Civil War the Democratic Party had had both a southern wing
and a northern wing, but during the war the North, eventually to be victori-
ous, was led by Abraham Lincoln, the Republican President. After the end of
the war, therefore, in the defeated South no Republican would be acceptable
to the white population, although in the ‘reconstruction’ period after the Civil
War Republicans were elected as a result of the regime that was imposed on
the South by the North. The Republicans became the dominant party in the
North, and inevitably the white South turned to the Democrats to oppose
the regime in Washington, which was seen as oppressive and determined
to destroy all that Southern whites held dear. Thus a sectional party system
was established; the Republicans dominated the North, but in the states of
the Old Confederacy the Democratic Party effectively established one-party
systems, where Republicans had little chance of election and consequently
rarely attempted to contest elections. Elective offices at local, state and
federal levels were filled by the nominees of the Democratic Party bosses,
and the elections became merely a rubber stamp, confirming these choices.
Politics became an inter-factional battle within the Democratic Party, rather
than a battle between political parties. Take the representation of the South in
the Senate of the United States; from the 1870s in seven states of the Deep
South only Democrats were elected to the Senate until the 1950s and 1960s,
and in Arkansas no Republican has been elected to the Senate since 1877.
The first post-reconstruction Republican to be elected from Georgia was in
- The Democrat-dominated legislatures in the Southern states passed
laws enforcing racial segregation in education, transport and other areas of
society, and also limited the participation of black citizens in the political
process through laws imposing literacy requirements and other restrictions
on registering for the vote.
The grip of the Democratic Party on Southern politics began to change
after the Second World War. The role of black soldiers during the war and the
sense that the United States was operating a social system which was inde-
fensible in the second half of the twentieth century led to the growth of a civil
rights movement with the aim of removing the discrimination against black
Americans. In 1948, campaigning for election, President Harry Truman ran
on a civil rights platform, which was anathema to Southern whites. When
John F. Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960 on a civil rights platform and
his successor Lyndon Johnson presided over the passage of the Civil Rights
Act and the Voting Rights Act, the traditional, automatic support for the