Idealism and materialism in antebellum southern political history : a review essay

Although the mainstream "new political historians" have largely ignored the South, historians of the antebellum South have produced some of the most interesting recent works in political history. These scholars fall into two groups: one finds a white consensus, emphasizes ideology, and concentrates on evidence from "literary" sources; the other discovers evidence of conflict, stresses the material basis of political alignments, and combines quantitative with traditional evidence. In a brief review of books by Channing and Johnson, I point out that by concentrating on the immediate pre-war years, the authors cannot answer even the questions they themselves pose. Cooper's 1978 ideological interpretation finesses the question of the connection between opinions on slavery and Unionism and fails to explain why the southerners' responses to the crises of 1850 and 1860 were so different. The central work of the last two decades, Thornton's, presents the bold and complex thesis that the South was born libertarian and avoids many of the problems of the other works reviewed. His treatment of politics-as largely symbolic-expressive, rather than rational instrumental, and his lack of statistical sophistication, however, invite criticism. The most valuable facet of these works for American political history generally is that they restore politicians, policy, and political thought -- topics often shunted aside by the social history approach of the past generation -- to the study of politics

Reform and Representation: A New Method Applied to Recent Electoral Changes

Can electoral reforms such as an independent redistricting commission and the top-two primary create conditions that lead to better legislative representation? We explore this question by presenting a new method for measuring a key indicator of representation - the congruence between a legislator's ideological position and the average position of her district's voters. Our novel approach combines two methods: the joint classification of voters and political candidates on the same ideological scale, along with multilevel regression and post-stratification to estimate the position of the average voter across many districts in multiple elections. After validating our approach, we use it to study the recent impact of reforms in California, showing that they did not bring their hoped-for effects

Cumming and Giles, Meet Jenkins and Shaw: Voting Rights and Education in the Two Reconstructions

Historical explanations are inherently comparative. That is, they involve either an explicit or an implicit comparison with a particular or idealized condition or train of events. The phrase “Second Reconstruction” is based, of course, on a recognition of this logic of explanation, and the natural comparison is with the First Reconstruction, that beginning in the 1860s. Perhaps because lately so many historians seem to have lost faith in the possibility of generalization or even explanation, there have been almost no efforts to make rigorous comparisons between the First and Second American Reconstructions by those whose discipline would naturally lend itself to the comparative analysis of change over time. I offer a tentative comparison focusing on two issues: voting rights and racial discrimination in schools

Separate but not Equal: The Supreme Court's First Decision on Racial Discrimination in Schools

In 1899, three years after the “separate but equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U. S. Supreme Court for the first time confronted the problem of racial discrimination in education. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose recently refurbished reputation rests chiefly on his liberal opinions in Negro rights cases, decided in effect that the judiciary would do no more to guarantee equality in public services than it had to stop legalized segregation. " ... the education of the people in schools maintained by state taxation is a matter belonging to the respective States," the justice, who was rarely a protector of states' rights, concluded, "and any interference on the part of Federal authority with the management of such schools cannot be justified except in the case of a clear and unmistakable disregard of rights secured by the supreme law of the land. We have here no such case to be determined …. " Attracting even less attention at the time than Plessy did, the case of Joseph W. Cumming, James S. Harper, and John C. Ladeveze v. School Board of Richmond County, Ga. has never received the attention Plessy gained in the wake of the outlawing of segregation in the 1954 Brown decision

An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South [Book Review]

Comparisons across time or space are merely incomplete casual explanations, small descriptive steps on the path to analysis, historians’ conventional rhetorical substitutes for more comprehensive empirical generalizations. If the South has had a legal "legacy of ambivalence,” if its "spokesmen frequently sought to be in the federal order without being of it" (p. 6), as Kermit Hall and James Ely assert in their introduction to this collection of essays from a 1987 symposium, just what produced that ambivalence, assuming, as the editors do implicitly, that the South was more mentally divided than the North was? If courts in colonial Virginia were clerk-dominated, locally-oriented, and concerned overwhelmingly with procedures, not substance, as David Konig contends in the chronologically earliest essay in this volume, how, precisely, does that colony's experience compare to that of others, or of Virginia later, and what factors explain the variations? If eleven of the fifteen states that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment were southern, as Mary Bonsteel Tachau points out in a stimulating, if necessarily skeletal essay on the largely unexplored topic of southern women's legal history, what accounts for the greater degree of opposition to women's rights in the South? How, if at all, do the causes of these contrasts relate to slavery, segregation, fundamentalist Protestantism, climate, modes of production, "culture," or whatever

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy [Book Review]

When I worked in my first criminal disfranchisement case in 1979, I thought it was a mere tidying up operation, an effort to overturn the last vestiges of the openly racist 1901 “disfranchisement convention” in darkest Alabama. I never imagined that the issue would become much more critical in the ensuing decades and that in 2006, I would be employed as an expert witness against felon disfranchisement in what claims to be the enlightened state of Washington. In many respects, the world has not moved forward

Shaw vs. Reno and the World of Redistricting and Representation

Justice O ' Connor's majority opinion in the 1993U.S. Supreme Court case of Shaw v. Reno has widely been seen as withdrawing judicial protection of minority voting rights -- a welcome development to those who believe as a matter of faith that discriminatory electoral rules, racist appeals in elections, and racially polarized voting are things of the distant past, but less hopeful to close students of redistricting and election campaigns of the last two decades. Deeply ambiguous, the opinion has spawned a wide range of interpretations, from assertions that it bans redistricters from taking the race of voters into account at all, even when they place them in majority-white districts, to contentions that it merely asks for further information about the basis for establishing certain "ugly" districts that have majorities of African Americans or Latinos. In this paper, which is based on research that I carried out for Shaw v. Hunt, the remand version of Shaw v. Reno, and Vera v. Richards, its Texas counterpart, I try to restore a sense of reality to the often factually incorrect assertions or implications of Justice O'Connor's opinion, not only by a close textual reading of the briefs and opinions in the Supreme Court case, but also by looking in considerable detail at the actual redistricting processes in North Carolina and Texas during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Were race, partisanship, and individual politicians' interests taken into account in redrawing districts before 1991, or were all previous reapportionments pristine exercises in civic virtue? Might the states in the 1990s have had compelling interests in redressing past racially discriminatory practices? Were the motives of the 1991-92redistrictings so uncomplicated that they can be easily and unambiguously determined by a quick glance at a map? For North Carolina, I also examine whether white and black public opinion and the voting records of white and black members of Congress differ systematically from each other. Do black voters need black faces to represent them? Shaw's vagueness affords the Supreme Court the possibility of gracefully backing away from its separate but unequal standards, standards that allow whites standing to sue without having to prove that the electoral rules at issue have a racially discriminatory effect and without having to show in detail that they were adopted with a racially discriminatory intent. In the final section, I outline five escape routes from Shaw, all of which are based on its factual inadequacies

Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act [Book Review]

As key provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 were being considered for renewal in 2005-06, supporters and critics competed to eulogize the law. "The statute accomplished what it was beautifully designed to do: ending black disfranchisement in the Jim Crow South," cooed Abigail Thernstrom, a critic (Thernstrom 2005). It was "the twentieth century's noblest and most transformative law," George Will, a skeptic, chimed in (Will 2005). "[P]erhaps the most significant piece of legislation ever passed," enthused Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican supporter (Arnold 2005)