The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism

by Glenn Feldman

Overview

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Audacious in its scope, subtle in its analysis, and persuasive in its arguments, The Great Melding is the second book in Glenn Feldman’s magisterial recounting of the South’s transformation from a Reconstruction-era citadel of Democratic Party inertia to a cauldron of GOP agitation. In this pioneering study, Feldman shows how the transitional years after World War II, the Dixiecrat episode, and the early 1950s formed a pivotal sequence of events that altered America’s political landscape in profound, fundamental, and unexpected ways.
 
Feldman’s landmark work The Irony of the Solid South dismantled the myth of the New Deal consensus, proving it to be only a fleeting alliance of fissiparous factions; The Great Melding further examines how the South broke away from that consensus. Exploring issues of race and white supremacy, Feldman documents and explains the roles of economics, religion, and emotive appeals to patriotism in southern voting patterns. His probing and original analysis includes a discussion of the limits of southern liberalism and a fresh examination of the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948.
 
Feldman convincingly argues that the Dixiecrats—often dismissed as a transitory footnote in American politics—served as a template for the modern conservative movement. Now a predictable Republican stronghold, Alabama at the time was viewed by national political strategists as a battleground and bellwether. Masterfully synthesizing a vast range of sources, Feldman shows that Alabama was then one of the few states where voters made unpredictable choices between the competing ideologies of the Democrats, Republicans, and Dixiecrats.
 
Writing in his lively and provocative style, Feldman demonstrates that the events he recounts in Alabama between 1942 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 election encapsulate a rare moment of fluidity in American politics, one in which the New Deal consensus shattered and the Democratic and Republican parties fought off a third-party revolt only to find themselves irrevocably altered by their success. The Great Melding will fascinate historians, political scientists, political strategists, and readers of political nonfiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817318666
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	08/31/2015
Series:	The Modern South
Edition description:	First Edition, First Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Glenn Feldman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 and Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949, and the editor of Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: "Sophistic Pruning" and Smoke-and-Mirrors Politics 1

1 "We Must Not Holler Till We Are Clean Out of the Woods" 11

2 Social Darwinism, Free-Market Fundamentalism, and "The Status Quo Society" 34

3 "We Must Wake Up the Roosevelt Worshippers to What the New Deal Is Doing to Torpedo White Supremacy" 54

4 Gathering Clouds 76

5 Grits and Circuses 86

6 The Laws of God and Alabama 105

7 Feeding the Monster: Volume I 125

8 The Inexorableness of Cultural Continuities 145

9 An Oasis of Liberalism? 166

10 Brewing Rebellion 188

11 They Crucified Us 208

12 The Conservative Revolt against Civil Rights and the National Democratic Party 230

13 The Dixiecrat Revolt in Perspective: Meanings and "The Southern Road" to America's New Conservatism 254

14 "Let Us Not Wince Any More When We Hear the Word Republican" 278

Conclusion 298

Editorial Reviews

" The Great Melding is, as one would expect from Feldman (who died tragically and unexpectedly in 2015), full of fascinating asides, stories, and arguments. The footnotes are a delight; one, spanning pages 316-319, could be published on its own as a brief (and characteristically provocative) essay on the southern roots of movement conservatism. The argument that economic liberalism was a spent force in Alabama by the mid-1940s will not convince everyone — why, if economic liberalism was dying by 1945, did Alabama continue to elect relatively economically liberal politicians like Carl Elliott for almost 20 more years? — but this book will prove valuable for anyone interested in mid-century southern politics."
—The Alabama Review

"A very acute and original interpretation of Alabama politics in the New Deal and immediate postwar period. Essential."
—CHOICE

"In his final contribution to the canon of southern political history, the late Glenn Feldman offers a deeply sourced and compelling argument for historians of white southern defiance, American conservatism, and the Republican ascendance. Feldman's work challenges scholars of southern politics to delve into the contours of white supremacy and its allies to reconsider the order in which they understand trends of white flight, anti-labor organizing, states' rights, and religious fundamentalism."
—The Journal of Southern History


“Feldman makes a powerful argument that race—first crudely and then subtly—has been an essential element in the development of southern conservative political developments from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the era of segregation and into the more recent past. Some critics may resist Feldman’s argument that racism has always been interwoven into economic ideas, but they will find it difficult to refute the persuasive evidence he has amassed and marshaled here.”
—Dan T. Carter, author of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, and From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994

“Feldman’s work is an impressive dissection of the southern break from the national Democratic Party, superbly delineating in exhaustive detail the origins of the 1948 Dixiecrat Movement as a precursor to the Republican Party’s dominance in the South. He clearly documents the hegemonic role of white supremacy in southern cultural, economic, and political identity and convincingly argues for the inextricable association between racism and economic advantage. The Great Melding makes a valuable contribution to southern political history as well as to the history of party alignment, American politics, and of course the role of race and politics.”
—Robert Bruno, author of Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown and Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches

From the Publisher