OUR CHANGING SOUTH
John, M. L. St.
Our Changing South SOUTHERN POLITICS, by V. O. Key, Jr. Alfred A. Knopf. 675 pp. $6. Reviewed by M. L. St. John THE SOUTH, which once held the Negro in physical slavery, is today slowly breaking...
...The book is no sensational report by an "outsider" lambasting a South with which he is unfamiliar...
...Claude Pepper of Florida, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Lister Hill of Alabama, and Frank Graham of North Carolina and such conservatives as Sens...
...This is a fact-studded state-by-state analysis by a Texas-born Yale professor, who backs up his statements with numerous charts...
...It isn't bothered with bloc voting and Negro court suits, unlike those states which try to circumvent the U. S. Supreme Court's outlawing of the "white primary...
...The beginning and end of Mississippi politics is the Negro, though the Negro has no voice whatever in Mississippi politics...
...This is the thesis of V. O. Key, Jr., in Southern Politics...
...It is no demagoguery from an aroused Southerner trying to justify Southern politics...
...Increased activity of unions, liberals, and Negroes is encouraging to a second party movement...
...However, the Republican Party is in bad repute...
...the large number of Republicans keep the Democrats united in North Carolina and Tennessee...
...on other legislation they split widely...
...So is the leftward trend of the Democratic Party and the industrialization of the South...
...Its wealth of statistics make it slow-reading, however...
...Harry Byrd thoroughly disciplines Virginia with his machine...
...The conservatives raised the racial issue to smash this second party...
...Harry Byrd of Virginia, Walter George of Georgia, and "Pappy" Lee O'Daniel of Texas...
...The book is valuable as a reference...
...Texas is developing a contest between liberals and conservatives...
...There is no "Solid South...
...The failure of the Dixiecratic movement may have been the "dying gasp of the Old South...
...Political factions, without responsibility or permanency, run the states...
...Its Southern leaders have been more interested in patronage than in developing the party...
...Instead of "one political party" the South allegedly possesses, in reality it has no political party...
...Georgia has had a dual factionalism between Talmadges and anti-Talmadgeism...
...The Populist revolt of 1890 united poorer farmers and urban dwellers in a political movement against the conservatives...
...Key finds that: The Northerner regards the South as "one large Mississippi," instead of one large North Carolina...
...Key finds this and plenty more in his 675-page book...
...Today, the South is slowly winning its political freedom and is headed toward a significant place in national politics...
...Noting that demagogues use their power shrewdly, Key says: "Southern politics is no comic opera...
...Under the common label of the "Democratic Party" are liberal Sens...
...North Carolina, with a smaller Negro population and more industries, provides an example in political racial relations...
...Mississippi accentuates the darker political strains that run through the South...
...He comments on Boss Ed Crump, Huey Long, Gene Talmadge, Theodore Bilbo, the Fergusons, and others...
...In 1948, conservatives, embittered by the New Deal, revolted themselves...
...There are many factions in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina...
...John THE SOUTH, which once held the Negro in physical slavery, is today slowly breaking loose from its own political slavery...
...Southern Congressmen maintain a somewhat solid front only on radical issues...
...Political development of Dixie has been stagnant because the South's actions have been based on a fear of the Negro—a fear engendered by a minority of wealthy conservatives in the "Black Belt" bent on imposing their will upon the more radical "hill-country" whites—and by continuation of the so-called "one party system...
...On-the-scenes political observers like "myself find that Key and his experts did an amazingly accurate analysis of Southern politics on the state level as well as the national...
...It is a deadly serious business that is sometimes carried on behind a droll facade...
Vol. 14 • January 1950 • No. 1
