A history lesson on American politics – The Ledger
We’re on the cusp of the campaign season and the first presidential primary debate is the first marker. The winnowing of the field that follows is the second.
I’ve managed to pay attention to presidential campaigning since knocking doors for George McGovern in 1972, and I’m always a bit apprehensive about the process.
I’m also teaching Southern Politics this semester, a class that has become increasingly tricky to navigate as the years roll forward. Part of the problem is that much of the important scholarship in this area of the discipline is aging. V.O. Key, whose book “Southern Politics in State and Nation” is the starting point for almost all of the historical studies of the politics of the South, was written in 1949. It is just as insightful and just as pertinent today as it ever was. I would not dream of teaching the course without it. But there is a problem. As I wrote to my students tonight, I wanted to warn them: there are words and phrases in this work that are no longer acceptable for use.
Professor Key was not a racist. His treatment of the issues of the politics of the South is careful, fact-based and crafted from evidence. It is, in fact, a cross-section of what the world of Southern politics was, in 1949. “The politics of the South is the politics of race,” he tells us. And though race was not the only issue, the subject overlay every other issue. But it is a baseline. If we look at what the world of politics was in 1949, how does it compare to the world of 2023? Key goes through, state by state and polity by polity, the culture of elections, the incredible damage to democracy of the one-party system then extant, and the ever-so-slowly emerging civil rights movement taking place just under the surface. It is like entering a time machine and looking on what can sometimes seem an unlikely landscape.
I’ve studied Southern politics for most of my adult life and much of my published work is in this arena of inquiry. But I am always surprised to stumble upon one or another of Key’s critical points in my re-readings. The most stunning revelations, I find, are not the echoes of the past, but the realization of how incredibly far we have come as a nation since 1949. There are similarities, of course, but the ugliness that Key reported in 1949 is history.
Or is it?
There are those who would claim that recent developments in the polity are harbingers – red flags – that we will return to where we’ve been. Nothing I’m saying here can blunt the awful scent of racism that is sometimes on the wind. But we have to keep well in mind just where we’ve come from in so little time. Even the language is different. From the politics of Key’s day, some things are simply unacceptable.
In my assignment warning, I wrote:
“We will be working with VO Key’s seminal work, “Southern Politics in State and Nation”… and it is important to point out that the book was written in 1949. There are words that may have been acceptable for use in that era that are no longer used and are no longer acceptable. When you are reporting on these passages, please be sure to … indicate that the word or phrase used was used in the original and is not your word or phrase. Most of these words and phrases have been deported from general use, and it is my hope that we will not revive their use.”
As we enter on another campaign season, I am optimistic that the same can be said of the ugly, oppressive politics of that era, and that we’ve seen the back of it. I hope.
Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger.
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