Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South: Alabama's Hill Country, 1874-1920

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson received only 70 percent of the votes in the 1912 presidential election in Alabama, a dozen years after the disfranchisement of many poor whites and over 90 percent of the state's then overwhelmingly Republican African-Americans. What was the lineage of the remainder of the largely white Republican voters of 1912? Were they new men, industrialists and their allies, or employees in Birmingham and other cities, attracted by the Republicans' traditional high tariff stance and alienated by the Democratic party of William Jennings Bryan? Were they ex-Unionists, nonslaveholders from the Hill Country in the north or the Wiregrass region in the south who had opposed the Black Belt slavocracy before the Civil War, joined the Republican party during Reconstruction, and stayed more or less loyal to it afterwards? Or were they latter-day Jacksonian communitarian opponents of "the market," as well as of strong government and Reconstruction activism, independent voters in the 1880s and Populists in the 1890s? Studying some of the major political leaders who opposed the Democrats in 15 (chiefly, in 5) Hill Country counties from the 1870s through 1920, Samuel L. Webb emphasizes the third group and says that they mostly backed the "progressive" Theodore Roosevelt, not the more "conservative" William Howard Taft.

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