I had grand visions of writing about this book, this rather extensive narrative with shoots and tendrils running into every nook and cranny of Southern politics at the end of the twentieth century. And as I read . . . and read . . . and read, postponing this post within the Editor’s Reading List more than once, it became clear across four hundred pages of text that writing about Southern Politics in the 1990s was going to be difficult. So I’m taking the easy road, in part because I know that, if I were to write thousands of words, going chapter by chapter, most readers would not make it to the end anyway.

Looking back from the year 2024 at the substance of Alexander Lamis’ 1999 book, I feel like he had a strong grasp on what was happening, but there was no way that he could have foreseen the endgame: a South dominated by Republican majorities and super-majorities. In his Preface, Lamis calls the GOP’s 1995 victories an “amazing Republican advance.”  He also points out that, by 1998, Republicans held about two-thirds of the South’s major statewide offices, though Democrats were still holding on to a similar majority in Southern statehouses. Thus, the 1990s were among the middle years, the decade when the two-party South of the 1970s and 1980s was giving way. What would follow Lamis’ narrative, in the first decade of the twenty-first century? A seismic shift in Southern politics that culminated in the “red wave” of 2010 and a new one-party South ever since. This edited collection, published twenty-five years ago with the help of scholars and journalists from each Southern state, describes the varied scenarios and ties them all together with a historian’s introduction and conclusion. Reading the collection today, a modern reader can get a ground-level view of the machinations that moved the South from blue to red.

In chapter one, “The Two-Party South: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” Lamis lays the groundwork for what he and his contributors will delve into. Looking back even further than the era in the chapter’s title, we learn here that, from 1932 through 1958, Southern elections were dominated so thoroughly by Democrats that the yields are almost unbelievable: a consistent showing of 80% or more of the vote for Democratic candidates. Then, the Civil Rights movement and the national Democratic Party’s response to it produced a change of fortunes that is equally astonishing. Lamis writes, “From its 83 percent perch in 1958, the Democratic Party strength in Dixie plummets to 63.4 percent by 1966 and bottoms out at 55.0 percent in 1972.” Moreover, a few sentences down, referring to white voters’ general feeling of betrayal as segregation crumbled: “Southern Republicans sought to ride this resentment to power.” Looking beyond the issues of race and integration, Lamis notes a “second factor propelling the Republican Party in the South.” Since the New Deal, many Southerners were turned off by those heavy-handed economic policies and preferred that the federal government took a more conservative, hands-off approach to local and state issues. For decades, extremely weak Republicans in the South searched for in-roads, policy proposals, and rhetoric that would reel in voters. Eventually, two issues – both accompanied by popular narratives about federal overreach – brought them their chance.

For the rest of chapter one, Lamis previews the state-by-state histories that will appear in his chapters. Among the key events that fostered the shift was Strom Thurmond’s switch to the Republican Party in 1964. This giant of Southern segregation had defected in 1948, made a go at it with his Dixiecrats, then decided to play for the other team. One state over, North Carolina was not as ardently Democratic, due in part of the presence of “Mountain Republicans,” those fiercely individualistic Appalachian people who shared little in common with their lowland counterparts. The giant here was Jesse Helms, a longtime Republican who strapped himself to opportunity and rode hard all the way. To the south, Georgians had moved from the axe handle-wielding governor Lester Maddox in the 1960s to the kind, gentle small towner Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, but Atlanta’s suburbanites had also elected a soon-to-be well-known congressman named Newt Gingrich in 1978.  Up in Virginia, their giant Harry Byrd was toppled, while the moderate “New South” Democrat Dale Bumpers became governor in Arkansas in 1970. By the late 1970s, Bumper’s mantel was picked up by a young politician named Bill Clinton. In Tennessee, their politics was split into the three sectors: the old-style Southerners around Memphis, the New Dealers in the central portion of the state, and a slew of Mountain Republicans in the east— the combination of which made running for statewide office a complicated task. Down in the Deep South, Alabama had the post-Wallace years that weren’t really post-Wallace, as the segregationist reinvented himself and kept coming back for more. To the west in Mississippi, race dominated the action and split the Democratic Party as white voters clung to their state party and black voters tried to remake it in the national party’s image. US Senator Trent Lott would emerge from this battle royal. Louisiana differed from them all, having a population of French-speaking Catholics and an “open primary” system, where candidates of all parties piled in together with the strongest emerging for the general election. Finally, there were Texas and Florida— the former being a hub of New Deal versus anti-New Deal friction, the latter changing rapidly due to expansive population growth, racial diversity, and environmental concerns.

Considering all of this, Lamis writes about how the decline of Democrats and the rise of republicans should be seen in multifaceted ways. On the one hand, the GOP’s rise was an inevitable result of their opposing party’s fall— the “flip side” of the equation. On the other hand, Republicans had long been maintaining a party structure that would enable them to pounce when the time came. Making this even more complex was the “New Democrat,” politicians like Bill Clinton, who sought to bring the old party of segregation into modern times through accommodation of and compromise with black voters. Likewise, Lamis points out, “The number of African Americans in Congress from the South more than tripled in the 1992 election.” These trends occurred simultaneously, but to varying degrees in the different states, in state and local offices across the region. The results of these trends are still seen today. Of course, I know in 2024 what Lamis did not in 1999, but I had to notice the current relevance in his paragraphs on the creation of Alabama’s black-majority District Seven and Republicans’ countercharges of “racial gerrymandering.”  I also couldn’t ignore the ongoing struggles over healthcare when Lamis writes about later-President Clinton’s efforts to reform that system, which led his GOP opponents, including Newt Gingrich, to brand him a “big government liberal.” Finally, following the example set by Strom Thurmond, there comes the “rash of party switching at various levels, almost all in one direction: Democrat to Republican.” Here, Lamis once again highlights my home state of Alabama for his prime examples.

Chapters two and twelve then consist of state-level analyses, beginning with South Carolina, a state that I’ve been told is the most Southern of all. This portion of the book is hard reading, and to be frank, it is probably most useful as a reference book. The chapters are loaded with names that will not be meaningful to the average reader, unless that reader has lived and voted in every Southern state. Being biased, I began in the book’s middle with Alabama, since I was most interested and most familiar with that story and its characters. Otherwise, these pages were, for me, a slog through information and data: matchups, endorsements, scandals, percentages, vote totals, etc. I’ll also be frank that I don’t know how much knowledge I gleaned from reading, considering the sheer volume of information. Other than my home state, I was most interested to read about Louisiana and its “open primary” system. Before reading that chapter, I had either forgotten about David Duke or blocked him from my mind, but there he was in a contest dubbed the “runoff from hell.” From the chapter on Arkansas, I had not realized that once-presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee had been the leader of his state’s Southern Baptist Convention (though it did not surprise me.) Another reason that I would recommend this book as a reference work, not one for general readership, is that the latter portions of each chapter are devoted to state level races, like legislature or education commissioner. On the bright side, the best fun fact I drew from my effort: I did not know that NASCAR driver Richard Petty had run for governor of North Carolina. (I’ve always liked – but have never wanted to emulate – his look.)

Early in his final chapter – number thirteen, simply titled “Southern Politics in the 1990s” – Lamis’ second paragraph explains that he will first cover “intraregional developments” then a “national context.” After a few pages on methodology, the breakdown of data, and categories and subcategories, we get into the meat of it with the “the growth of the suburbs” and “the South’s impressive economic advances since World War II.” Per capita incomes rose significantly, and new non-Southern arrivals appeared in both neighborhoods and voting booths. We also read: “Everywhere in Dixie the advancing Republican party is divided between adherents who are motivated primarily by economic conservatism and those who are more interested in an array of conservative social and cultural issues.” Here, we have the Christian right in general and the Christian Coalition in specific. Moving on to the issue of race, during his discussion he cites one myth/narrative that seems to come up over and over; in the words of one Alabama politician: “[Many Republicans] do not like black people.” What resulted then was a biracial, coalition-based Democratic Party and a very white Republican Party, which leads some onlookers to embrace beliefs about self-identified conservatives’ ideas about race. As for the “national context,” Lamis explains how post-Civil Rights changes constituted a “realignment” that brought Southern parties in line with national parties. This was a distinctively different paradigm from earlier periods, especially where Southern Democrats differed so sharply from Democrats in other parts of country. By the 1990s, it was possible to have truly national political parties that included the South. This scenario enabled leaders like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and George W. Bush – all Southerners – to make their way into major national offices after the Twenty-Five Year Re-Alignment.

Even though this book was a challenge to read, I wanted to include it in the Editor’s Reading List for two reasons. First, the 1990s is the middle decade within the scope of this project— the 1970s and ’80s come before it, the 2000s and 2010s (and the first part of the 2020s) come after it.  Second, the ’90s was the period when my political consciousness was formed. I turned 16 in 1990, and I remember the excitement over Bill Clinton’s 1992 candidacy, his appearance on Arsenio, and the glaring contrast between him and George HW Bush, who was rude and dismissive toward Tabitha Soren of MTV News. I also remember sensing the nastiness of Newt Gingrich’s approach, the hopeful pragmatism of Al Gore’s environmentalist ideals, and the demeaning nature of Rush Limbaugh calling the First Lady “Hillary” instead of Mrs. Clinton.  (So no one thinks that I’m baldly partisan in favor of Democrats, I will also add that I found Second Lady Tipper Gore’s PMRC baldly censorious and anti-First Amendment.) These were all Southerners, duking it out on the big stage, and Southern Politics in the 1990s is the back story, the in-depth behind-the-scenes exposé of how things got that way. Beyond the fact that the book is twenty-five years old, I would not recommend buying it – probably better to borrow it –nor to even read it through like I did. For most folks, engaging with their own state’s chapter would make for the most relevant experience.

As the editor of a project about the beliefs, myths, and narratives that have shaped Southern culture since 1970s, I was glad to see that this book totally supports my notion that there was never one South. If any book on my list goes into fine detail about how different these states are, this is the one. One may object that I seem to be conflating politics with society, but my assertion is based on the fact that the political process simultaneously reflects and defines the society it is a part of— political outcomes are both causes and effects in society. Though engaging with his work is not easy, Alexander Lamis does an excellent job here of providing the micro and macro perspectives, the zoom-in and the wide-angle view. His point, I believe: Louisiana is not Texas, which is not Virginia, and none of them are Alabama, which is not North Carolina or Arkansas. Common beliefs and narratives may refer to all Southerners collectively, but the facts defy the simplification.

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