“Southern Dems”

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

RINOTom did a good job explaining it but I will just an angle of dealing with political evolution, something that is almost always looked over as we try to super-impose modern ideological understandings on a past context without understanding that which existed in a previous time and how it differed.

The South was Democratic because the Democratic Party was formed as a Classical Liberal party that wanted to oppose the elitist, nationalist oriented National Republicans than dominated Congress and President JQ Adams, and expand the influence and power of lower class farmers and workers via expanded voting without property/wealth restrictions.

The Democrats fit the South like a glove on issues like trade and such forth. Beyond that it was the case that there was always an element of opposition to NE based banking institutions that stretched from the days of Madison all the way through Jackson to the New Deal and beyond to today. Madison for instance as a Jeffersonian, wanted to give part of the money from the redemption of the War era notes to their original holders (unpaid soldiers, farmers and such forth) and not the speculators who had stormed the back country to buy up this worthless paper for pennies on the dollar and then pushed for face value redemption via Hamilton's economic program. This comes down to today through people like Bernie Sanders and Warren in terms of opposing banking and speculative interests. It is also no accident that both Carter Glass and Henry Steagall were Southern members of Congress, Steagall also pushed for creation of FDIC in exchange for supporting the other regulations in the bill.

The Southern Democrats were most certainly unified around the liberalism of the Democratic Party, as such was understood in the 19th century. However, things began to change towards the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century, as the class element began to become a driving force within the Democratic Party again as it had been from the days of Jackson (Jefferson if you include the DR period) through the early 1850's. A lot of people had joined the Democrats, who being economic elites and former Whigs during the period between the 1850's and 1880's because of a combination of regional unification in support of Slavery, The CSA And Segregation. This meant that the end result was an ongoing civil war within the Democratic Party, that really only ended in the mid 20th century when upscale and middle class Southern Whites bolted to the GOP. 

Over the same time the unifying forces also broke up somewhat as liberalism evolved from the classical to modern variety and support for social reform and other such policies began to look to a powerful central government to effect change. This was a marked shift from previous when both rich and poor Democrats had unified behind Democratic support for limited Government since a powerful Government would merely be a tool for those banker crooks and rich Yankee elites.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Was the de-polarization of tariffs after Smoot-Hawley and WWII part of what allowed the Buckeyite wing of the GOP to form?

What it did do was remove the glue that held the GOP coalition together. Just as free trade, immigration and business regulation had always unified the Democrats for the most part, protectionism had been the unifier for the GOP like tax cuts are today. Not only did it keep progressive and conservative Republicans under the same nationalist roof, but it also got working class voters to support a coalition dominated by yankee business elites.

Once the tariff was removed as a legitimate policy tool, urban GOP machines began to collapse, because that was what kept the workers under the same roof. At the same time the GOP lost the workers, they also lost the African American urban vote to the New Deal coalition as well. This meant that the politically neutered middle and upper middle class whites who had previous dominated large segments of urban America, began to move to the Suburbs or move South.

Smoot-Hawley is important thus as one of many factors that tore apart the old GOP hegemony of the North and forced it to look South and West for new outlets of support.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The reason that that South dominated the Congressional Democrats was because of the fact that they had the safest seats and never lost.

In other parts of the country, save for a few urban enclaves, Republicans could and very often did wipe out Democrats and take a majority of Representatives outside of the South. This happened in 1920 - 1928, 1942, 1946, 1952 etc. This made it difficult to build seniority in places like the Midwest or New York State outside of say immigrant/irish districts like Emanuel Celler's. Meanwhile a Democrat elected in GA to Congress in 1918 could easily hold onto office for 40 plus years.

Only beginning with the election of 1958 and cemented with 1964 and 1974, did the Democrats begin to skew decisively away from the South in its Congressional delegation.