The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics [Book Review]

Abstract

Historians have failed to understand the phenomenon of early twentieth-century southern demagoguery, Raymond Arsenault contends, because they have focused too much on the personalities and shenanigans of individual leaders and too little on the responses of voters. From 1898 to 1912, as an Arkansas attorney general, governor, and U.S. senator, Jeff Davis's mass base was rural and was attracted to him, Arsenault speculates, by a desire to resist the modernizing culture of towns and cities and its symbolic instrument, the railroad. Whereas in the 1880s and 1890s, Arkansas Wheelers and Populists had gained near-majority popular support for significant economic and social change, the gentry- baiting, Yankee-baiting, race-baiting Davis, who filled the political air with irresponsible charges about his opponents but never carried through on any judicial, executive, or legislative program, offered the hicks only a "politics of catharsis" (p. 15), a rhetorical denigration of their geographically or racially distinct adversaries. Less neatly separated into politically relevant social groups than their ethnically and religiously divided northern counterparts and largely protected, as a result of disfranchisement, against racial and partisan schisms, voters in the disorganized and restricted one-party Arkansas electorate, Arsenault conjectures, were skeptical of governmental activism and were consequently well satisfied to attend Davis's breadless circuses.

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