Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction

485 Pages·2018·104.71 MB·English

by  David A Bateman

SOUTHERN NATION
Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical,
International, and Comparative Perspectives
Ira Katznelson, Eric Schickler, Martin Shefter,
and Theda Skocpol, series editors
A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.
Southern Nation
Congress and White
Supremacy after
Reconstruction
David A. Bateman
Ira Katznelson
John S. Lapinski
RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
NEW YORK
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2018 by Russell Sage Foundation
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to
Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
and the Russell Sage Foundation
112 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10021
press.princeton.edu
russellsage.org
Jacket art courtesy of Shutterstock
All Rights Reserved
LCCN 2017959010
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 12649- 4
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Gotham
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
PART I. INTRODUCTION
1 Southern Politics 3
2 Southern Lawmaking 28
PART II. UNION RESTORED
3 Uncertain Combinations 73
4 Tests of Priority 102
5 Racial Rule 158
PART III. EGALITARIAN WHITENESS
6 Limited Progressivism 219
7 Ascendancy 264
8 Minority Power 323
PART IV. SOUTHERN NATION
9 At the Edge of Democracy 381
Notes 405
Index 453
v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is a sense in which this project was born in a classroom on American
Political Development at Columbia University. During a discussion of state-
building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John asked Ira
about the absence of Congress, not only in that seminar but in APD more
broadly. Much collaboration ensued, including the formation of the American
Institutions Project at Columbia that, among other matters, housed a multi-
year effort to substantively code congressional roll calls and statutes that was
generously supported by the National Science Foundation (award #0318280).
After graduating at Columbia, John moved to Yale, then to the University
of Pennsylvania. At Penn, John worked closely with his student, David, who
since has gone on to teach at Cornell. This book’s history thus spans three
scholarly generations. Each author has been concerned to build analytical his-
tory with Congress at the center, and to illuminate patterns of political repre-
sentation within a wider ambit, including the place of the South as a region
for which congressional power, from the Founding, has been vital.
Southern Nation first was conceptualized as a set of questions about post-
Reconstruction America in intellectual partnership with Rose Razaghian as
she, too, was concluding her graduate studies at Columbia and soon began to
teach at Yale before moving back to Columbia in an administrative role. In
early days, Ira, John, and Rose shared a year as visiting scholars at the Russell
Sage Foundation, an invaluable institution that has proved more than patient
in its wait for this book. The three authors remain indebted to Rose for her
formative contributions.
More broadly, the sheer quantity as well as depth of our debt to an incred-
ible community of scholars who work on Congress are reminders that scholar-
ship is a collective enterprise. We are especially grateful to Frances Lee, David
Mayhew, Charles Stewart, and Richard Valelly who selflessly joined us for an
uncommonly productive day- long book workshop where they were con-
fronted with a not-f ully-b aked penultimate draft. That intensive colloquy truly
was pivotal in shaping our extensive final revisions. We suspect that we have
not been able to satisfy all of their critiques, but hope they will see in the book
a genuine appreciation for their insights and perspectives, and our deep grati-
tude for their comradely efforts and keen intellectual support.
vii
viii Acknowledgments
David Mayhew, to whom we dedicate this book, deserves particular
thanks. As John’s colleague at Yale for six years, he was instrumental from the
beginning. As our collective colleague, he deserves credit for helping with
various components of the book, and for providing no-h olds-b arred com-
mentary throughout its construction. David’s first book, Party Loyalty among
Congressmen, moreover, was instrumental in pushing us to think about the
importance of policy issue substance. Also especially noteworthy are Josh
Clinton, who shaped the book more than he probably realizes; Wendy Schil-
ler, whose combination of precise knowledge and sense for intellectual archi-
tecture proved especially valuable; and the peerless Matthew Holden, who not
only informed the book’s treatment of black disenfranchisement but demon-
strated a special gift for working with younger scholars.
As Southern Nation took shape, it also benefited from the critical counsel
of other scholars in addition to those already named or those at our home
universities: Scott Adler, David Brady, John DiIulio, Gerald Gamm, Jeffrey
Jenkins, Bryan Jones, Sunita Parikh, Justin Peck, Keith Poole, Eric Schickler,
the late Barbara Sinclair, Tom Schwartz, and Stephen Skowronek. Two of the
most significant were our anonymous reviewers, whose sharp insights and
close reading of the text gave us much to think about and work with, and
whose suggestions led to innumerable improvements, big and small.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University
was where David’s participation on this project began. His experience there
early in his faculty career was formative in shaping his contributions to the
book, which benefited especially from the feedback and support of Jean-
François Godbout, Kyle Dropp, and Miguel R. Rueda, as well as Michele
Epstein, Charles Cameron, Nolan McCarty, and Keith Whittington.
We also are indebted to Barbara Gilbert and Daniel Meyer at the University
of Chicago for their assistance in reproducing a photo of James O’Hara, and
for granting us permission to reprint it here, as well as Molly and Mary Bell
Kirkpatrick for graciously allowing us to use an extended quote from their
grandfather, Donald Davidson.
Colleagues and graduate students at our home universities have offered
especially supportive intellectual milieus within which our work has pro-
ceeded. At Columbia, the project has gained much from presentations at the
American Politics Seminar and from comments by Robert Erikson, Andrew
Gelman, Fred Harris, Jeffrey Lax, Robert Shapiro, Greg Wawro, and Justin
Phillips, whose office at the Russell Sage Foundation was adjacent to Ira’s
during an additional semester there as a visiting scholar. And we are grateful
as well to those who, when graduate students. devoted many efforts to deep-
ening the research and stimulated ideas that underpin the volume, including
Alexander de la Paz, Sean Farhang, Christina Greer, Quinn Mulroy, Thomas
Acknowledgments ix
Ogorzalek, David Park, Eldon Porter, Charlie Riemann, Amy Semet, and
Melanie Springer.
At Cornell, the book was considerably improved through a workshop and
discussions with Bryce Corrigan, Peter Enns, Sergio Garcia-R ios, Claire
Leavitt, Adam Levine, Alexander Livingston, Jamila Mitchener, Erica Salinas,
Delphia Shanks-B ooth, AshLee Smith Garrett, Mallory SoRelle, and others.
Particularly helpful were the numerous conversations with Richard Bensel,
Suzanne Mettler, and Elizabeth Sanders, who offered vital guidance about
how to think through some of the difficult questions raised by southern history
and policymaking, and whose individual contributions to the study of Ameri-
can political development informed Southern Nation at each stage of its devel-
opment. A special debt is owed to Elizabeth for her determined insistence that
southern political history not be flattened, and that its diversity, including
ideological diversity, be integrated into our story.
At Penn, David would like to thank Brendan O’Leary and Rogers Smith
for their unerring guidance and tireless mentorship, as well as Stephan Stohler,
Tim Weaver, Meredith Wooten, Chelsea Schafer, and Emily Thorson, who
have each provided generously of their time as intellectual interlocutors and
as wonderful friends. There, a wonderful crew participated in the research
venture, including two employees of the university, H annah Hartig and An-
drew Arenge, and a small army of graduate and undergraduate students, in-
cluding Will Marble (now a PhD student at Stanford), Chris Brown, Zac
Endter, Sarah Wilson, Sarah Engell, Max Levy, Chris Wogan, Hugh Hamilton,
Isabella Gillstrom, and Annie Caccimelio.
We also wish to thank Daniel Galvin and Matt Glassman, who assisted this
project at Yale.
The ideas in this book were tested at multiple venues: meetings of the
Congress and History annual conference, and workshops at Cal- Tech, MIT,
Yale, NYU, and Brown and at our present home institutions. We also gained
from the institutional milieus at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies,
the Fox Leadership Program and the Program on Opinion Research and Elec-
tion Studies (PORES) at Penn, and the Institute for Social Research and Policy
at Columbia.
We have been incredibly fortunate to collaborate with the exceptional pro-
fessionals at Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation. Eric
Crahan has been a wonderful editor, who has believed in this book and waited
for it ever since he inherited the portfolio from Chuck Myers, together with
the estimable Suzanne Nichols at Russell Sage, who leads a vigorous pub-
lishing program at the foundation. We also have a special word of thanks for
Cynthia Buck, whose copyediting of the manuscript was superb. Her work
substantively improved the book in many ways. We also benefited from Natalie