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This chapter summarizes the state of southern politics in the 1940s and describes the economic, social, and political tensions within the one-party South at this time, suggesting that by the end of World War II, one-party politics was no longer sustainable in the long term. It then describes the two major factions—Loyalists and Regulars—within the Georgia Democratic Party and gives an overview of their respective goals, defining in particular the Loyalist strategy of “progressive colorblindness.” Finally, the chapter outlines the status of the civil rights movement in Georgia at the end of World War II.

This chapter provides an overview of the historic, political environment from Florida’s territorial beginnings through statehood and the Civil War. It distinguishes Florida’s territorial beginnings from the original 13 Colonies; it focuses on the impacts of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era on the state’s political environment; and it discusses the origins of the population surges that began to reshape the state’s political arena. The chapter chronicles the foundation of Democratic one-party dominance that characterized the political environment in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and Florida’s allegiance to the “Democratic Solid South following Reconstruction. It also chronicles the split between conservative and liberal factions in the Democratic Party and the opportunity it provided for the emerging Republican network.

In the interwar period, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, segregationists in the Deep South, capitalized on their enfranchisement to mobilize voters to shape the system of Jim Crow at the polls. They encouraged women to uphold segregation through political parties, but their politics were as varied as the Jim Crow order they sought to serve. Ogden supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal for helping out Mississippians and for following the dictates of racial segregation. Cain opposed the Roosevelt’s expansion of social services and worked against the national party as a Jeffersonian Democrat. After Roosevelt’s proposal to re-organize the Supreme Court, Tucker organized a national anti–court-packing campaign, became a Republican, and lobbied for a secret ballot in South Carolina. These women criticized state-level officials for sacrificing conservative political principles for political gain and nourished the seeds of partisan dissent in the Solid South.

This chapter focuses on how race and war intersected in 1960s Tennessee to destroy the career of a relatively progressive southern senator. Postwar conservatives used coded racism to lure southerners from the Democratic column and to associate liberalism with African American special-interest-group politics. Al Gore failed to realize that his moderate position on civil rights alienated him from his white voters. No amount of Northern liberal support could save him as the Solid South began its defection to the GOP (Grand Old Party). Gore's defeat represented a generational shift in liberalism. Never again would it be acceptable to rely on an ethical reputation or class envy to secure reelection—liberals would have to find new ways of talking to their constituents and building trust.

This chapter narrates the 135 year debate over the facts and the meaning of the Jones County, Mississippi, uprising known as the Free State of Jones. It begins with Mississippi’s 1948 conviction of Davis Knight—the great-grandson of Civil War guerrilla leader Newt Knight and former slave Rachel Knight—for the crime of miscegenation. From there, “Sacred Wars” analyzes the effects of wartime family divisions, racism, and Lost Cause history on the subsequent folklore and histories that tell the story of the anti-Confederate uprising known as the “Free State of Jones.” The chapter emphasizes that the uprising was a community-wide insurrection against the Confederacy that reflected opposition to secession, class tensions over slavery, and escalating desertion rates reflective of anger over a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.

This chapter re-examines a signal moment in modern American politics: the collapse of the Solid Democratic South and the emergence of white southern conservatives as the core of a potent national Republican coalition. No event dramatized this historic transformation as vividly as the 1964 defection of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, the one time Dixiecrat presidential candidate and champion of states’ rights. At the time and for generations after, observers cast Thurmond’s decision to cross the aisle as evidence of a tectonic shift in American national politics—the harbinger of national realignment. But as momentous as Thurmond’s decision proved to be, his conversion owed more to shifts in South Carolina’s volatile political environment than to the broader national struggles over civil rights and federal power. Decisive shifts in the American political landscape, Crespino shows, derived from a complex interplay between national forces and peculiarly local ones.

For generations many assumed that Democratic hegemony in the South would last forever. Civil rights and the national Democratic Party’s move to the left reconfigured partisan competition in the South. By the 1970s, the South became a crucial battleground in the election of the president and Republican gains in the region started to trickle down to statewide elections and eventually to local offices. The realignment of the southern electorate looked complete by the 2000s with near GOP control of the region, but recent elections have shown some swing back to the Democrats in several Growth States.