Article on Atlanta and the "new South ", 1974

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Take the political change, for instance. We all know that in Presidential elections, the old "Solid Democratic" South has been shattered once and for all. ^{The region's}[illegible] dissenchantment with the national Democratic party began with Harry Truman's civil rights program and Strom Thurmond's ^Dixiecrat candidacy for President in 1948. It gained steam during the '50s as Eisenhower, and then Nixon in 1960, expanded Southern Republicanism from its old mountain strongholds to win support of high proportion of voters in the growing cities and suburbs. This Republicanism was economically conservative, but not particularly racist. But a racist undertone was there in Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential candidacy, such a collossal failure nationally but so successful in the Deep South. In 1968 the renegade Democrat George Wallace [illegible] deprived the Republicans of their new race-based support, but Nixion won it back in spades in 1972 as he carried the South was a staggering 70 percent of the vote.

How deep [illegible] is the Republican rise in the South? Some [illegible]^figures tell the story-- Among governors, there are only three Republicans in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy.

Of the region's 22 U.S. Senators, seven--less than a third--are Republicans.

Of the South's 126 seats in the [illegible] house, 52 are held by Republicans, but 74 by Democrats.

And much worse for the GOP, in the state legislatures of DIXIE, only 16 percents of the seats are held by Republicans. The Republican situation is just as gloomy, if not worse on the county and city level. [illegible]

Where, one asks, is the South going politically in the next few years?

My guess is that while it may continue to prefer Republican Presidential candidates -- and I am not too sure about that -- it will stay with the Democratic

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party on the state and local level. Why do I think that?

^/__One ^reason is that many of the Republican advances in the South have been tinged with racism or the so-called "social issue" that Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon tried to popularize^. [illegible] Now, as the nation heads into tough times economically, pocketbook issues are going to be [illegible]ch much [illegible]------→^{We could revert to something analagous to the 1950's, when Southerners, especially [illegible] in Wash., were quite liberal folk, happily voting for the TVA & other New Deal measures that would benefit their region↓} more important, and racism, to put it bluntly, will become an unaffordable commodity^.

^{On todays' politics,} Let me hasten to add that a [illegible]^goodly proportion of Southern Republican election winners [illegible] have been and are racial moderates. The most prominent of these were the late Winthrop Rockefeller, twice governor of Ak Arkansas, and Virginia's former Governor Linwood Holton.

But Republicans of any ideological stripe are running into the problem that of the Democratic party's own housecleaning. The old Senator Claghorn types and the demagogue^s[illegible] like the [illegible] Talmadges,^{Lester Maddoxes,} Bilbos, Jimmie Davises, Ross Barnetts, and Orval Faubuses are being systematically purged in Democratic primaries. The black vote has a lot to do with that; so does the rising educational level, and thus sophistica[illegible]^ion, of Southern voters.

And so we have seen the election of a remarkable group of moderate Democrats -- men like Florida's Reuben Askew, Louisiana's Edwin Edwards, Arkansas' Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, and two men on your program here this week -- Jimmie [illegible]^Carter, your speaker last evening and South Carolina's John West, who is scheduled for this afternoon. These politicians have all managed to project themselves as moderate, modern-day Populists responsive to the broad interests of the people.--→ They have brought^{back sounder} management to Southern state government, and [illegible]

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They have brought much sounder management to state government, and they have [illegible] succeeded in politics as men of principle k light years away from the [illegible] demagoguery of old. Several of them, including Jimmy Carter, whom I consider as decent and human a man as one can find among the 50 state [illegible] governors, have a really good chance -- which I do not believe George Wallace has -- of being chosen by the Democratic party as candidates for President or Vice President in 1978.

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At the same time, we are [illegible] in the midst of the end of the remarkable dominance Southerners so long had in Congress. You all know the story of the Southern conservative Democrats -- Reelected in good years and bad, outliving politically their colleagues from the more fickle Northern states, absolute masters of their legislative specialties, they rose to control of a majority of the committee chairmanships in both the Senate and House. Some of these men still remain-- John Sparkman of the Senate Banking Committee, John Stennis of Armed Services, James Eastland of Senate Judiciary, John McClellan of Senate Appropriations, Wilbur Mills of House [illegible]^{Ways and Means,} Texas' George Mahon of ⁽Louisiana's Russell Long of Senate Finance, Ga's Herman Tamadge of Sen. Agric.,⁾ House Appropriations,^{^} and several others. [illegible] But with the exception of Long and Talmadge, all these /__ in their chairmanships X are old men who can't last too much longer, ^\ and they will be succeeded ^{in their chairmanships} not by Southerners but by liberal northern Democrats^/ when they retire, die, or meet defeat at the polls./ And in their place, the South is sending to Congress sometimes Republicans, but more frequently moderate Democrats [illegible] similar in ideology to the new breed governors I spoke of a moment ago.

This means that Southern industrial and agricultural interests will be losing some powerful friends in [illegible]^Washington -- men who have skewed federal appropriations to this region for more than a generation, and been helpful with all sorts of other favors^{, including a disproportionate share of space work and military bases.} The South is going to have to fight for its interests on Capitol Hill based on far more on the merits of its case, and far less by the sheer privilege of the powerful position held by its Congressmen.

And the same ^thing, I suggest, is happening in the relationship between Southern business and state government. [illegible] The "New South" governors are friendly to business, but not available at its beck and call. Several of them have an interest in [illegible] more rigorous business regulatory practices than their predecessors. They have a broad and rather aware constituency to answer to, so I also see Southern tax systems, over the next years, becoming much less [illegible] ^oriented to the interests of business and high-income persons than they now are.

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And the new-style Southern legislatures, cleansed of their rotton boroughs by the reapportionment decisions of the 1960s, are a new thing to deal with, too. Urban representation has increased by leaps and bounds, and it is a much less predictable commodity than its hayseed predecessor. For a while after the Supreme Court's reapportionment decision, conservative Democrats retained their control by ^{virtue of their seniority and experience, and by} means of at-large elections in the metropolitan counties, in which they generally emerged victorious. But now the courts are forcing sub-districting of those metropolitan areas, and the [illegible] predictable result is the election of more Republicans and of more blacks. As the new-style Southern legislators gain experience, as they move to modernize legislative processes and information gathering systems, the way is paved for more progressive tax, environmental, and consumer lx laws, for higher overall state spending, and also for much more complex relationships with any outside constituency, including business.