Did Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison “Cause” the U.S. Government Shutdown? The Institutional Path from an Eighteenth Century Republic to a Twenty-first Century Democracy

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Aldrich
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Party System ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The South ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
The North ◽  
Post War ◽  
Separated Powers

This address asks how we got to today’s politics in America; a politics of polarized political parties engaged in close political competition in a system of checks and balances. The result has often been divided control of government and an apparent inability to address major political problems. This address develops the historical foundation for these characteristics. Historically, the Founding period set the stage of separated powers and the first party system. America developed a market economy, a middle class, and a mass-based set of parties in the Antebellum period. Through the Progressive era, nation-wide reforms led to a more democratic but increasingly candidate-centered politics in the North, and the establishment of Jim Crow politics in the South. The post-War period saw the full development of candidate-centered elections. While the breakup of Jim Crow due to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s ended Jim Crow and made possible a competitive party system in the South, the later was delayed until the full implementation of the Republican’s “southern strategy” in 1980 and beyond. This set in motion the partisan polarization of today, to combine with separated powers to create what many refer to as the “current” political “dysfunction.”

Progressive White Catholics in the South and Civil Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-110
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The South ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Pastoral Letters ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
Catholic Organizations ◽  
Diocesan Priests

A progressive minority of white Catholics in the South strove to counter segregationist arguments and, when necessary, to persuade and pressure southern prelates to inaugurate and enforce desegregation. The progressive minority included some ordinaries, religious and diocesan priests, nuns, editors of diocesan newspapers, faculty and students at seminaries and Catholic and secular higher educational institutions, and laity. Progressives disseminated their message through pastoral letters, sermons, classes, editorials, articles and letters in the diocesan press, pamphlets and newsletters. With the approval of their ordinaries, progressives often formed Catholic organizations, most commonly interracial councils, to disseminate their message. Sometimes progressives cooperated with or joined civil rights organizations, and a few participated in civil rights protests. Despite the opposition of militant Catholic adherents of Jim Crow, progressive prelates positively influenced the views of some Catholic segregationists. Although progressive priests and laity lacked the authority of prelates, they also helped change some segregationists.

“Let us all be Kissing-Friends?”: Zora Neale Hurston and Race Politics in Dixie

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
ANNETTE TREFZER
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Race Prejudice ◽  
North And South

The conflicted racial identity politics of Zora Neale Hurston climaxed in a statement printed in February 1943 in the New York Herald Telegram. In the article, “When Negro Succeeds, South is Proud,” Hurston argued that “the Jim Crow system works.” Hurston later retracted this statement, claiming that it was taken out of context and grossly distorted. Hurston said that her point was to show that “there was plenty of race prejudice both north and south” but that the South “by opportunity of long practice had worked out a system, while the North, caught between declarations of no prejudice, and its actual feelings [ctdot ] was groping around for the same thing, but with fine phrases.”

Electoral Competition and the New Party System in Mexico

2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (02) ◽  
pp. 103-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Klesner
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The South ◽  
Opposition Party ◽  
The North ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
Ideological Differences ◽  
Opposition Parties

Abstract Mexico's former opposition parties had specific social bases that would not, on their own, have catapulted either opposition party into power. In the 1990s, specific regional bases of support developed for the parties, reflecting their efforts to develop their organizations more locally. Nationally, this led to the emergence of two parallel two-party systems, PAN-PRI competition in the north and center-west and PRD-PRI competition in the south. In parallel, a proregime-antiregime cleavage came to dominate the Mexican party system, which, combined with local-level opposition efforts to oust the PRI, created new incentives for the opposition parties to abandon past emphases on ideological differences and to act like catch-all parties instead. The regime cleavage fostered the dealignment of the Mexican electorate, a process that promoted the development of catch-all parties. Movement within the parties to behave like catch-all parties has not come without internal tensions, but electoral dynamics prove powerful inducements to catch-all behavior.

Jim Crow Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Post War

Jim Crow Capital tells the story of how black women in Washington, D.C. transformed civil rights politics between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation’s capital could cast a ballot, women nonetheless proclaimed their first-class citizenship rights by working to influence congressional legislation, lobby politicians, shape policy, and secure freedom and justice for all African Americans, both in Washington, D.C. and across the country. During the course of their political campaigns, African American women’s relationship to federal and local politics underwent a fundamental transformation. During the 1920s, black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to intervene in federal matters, thereby working to improve conditions for disenfranchised African Americans who lacked a political voice on a national level. But by the early 1930s, black women turned their attention to focus more fully on local politics in Washington, D.C. by waging campaigns for economic justice, voting rights, and an end to racial segregation and interracial police brutality, making their freedom struggle an example for the nation. Black women in Washington, D.C. crafted a broad vision of citizenship by waging comprehensive and interconnected campaigns for legal equality, economic citizenship, public commemoration, and safety from violence. Women’s political activism in Washington, D.C. influenced the post-war black freedom struggle and still resonates today.

Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The North ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

How Civil Rights Lawyers Emerged

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The North ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status

Part 1 tells ten stories of young people who chose to be civil rights lawyers. Part 1 includes chapters 1, “Children of the South,” and chapter 2, “Children of the North.” Some of the lawyers were children of the South. All had grown up in a completely segregated society. For blacks, the opportunity to challenge the status quo they had always known contained a large measure of personal and cultural gratification and moral outrage. For whites, the evolution was one of a growing conviction of the immorality of the system that had nurtured them. Some of the lawyers were children of the North. Through a variety of experiences, they caught the fever of the civil rights movement in the Deep South and came south to help make changes. Some were Jews whose feelings were informed by the Holocaust. Some were blacks who had had a big enough taste of racism in the North to be lured into the rapidly changing South. For young lawyers from both the North and the South, their experience was materially impacted by their race

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Laura Warren Hill
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
New York State ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
York State ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South

This chapter provides a background to the story of transformations brought by the rebellion of the Black community that happened first in Harlem, New York and then in Rochester on July 4, 1964. It points out that the rebellions in Rochester and Harlem shared a common spark: police brutality and misconduct. It also explains how the twin rebellions in New York State in 1964 were a foretaste of the Southern-based civil rights movement, which gave way to a different kind of Black political mobilization that centered largely in the urban North. The chapter reviews the consequences of the civil rights movement that dismantled Jim Crow as a system of legalized racism in the North and South. It emphasizes that the new Black political mobilization, which built on the energy arising from the rebellions and fashioning theories of a Black political economy, sought to address the structures of socioeconomic marginalization and impoverishment that survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow.

Equality Deferred, 1870–1900

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-116
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
System P ◽  
Black Resistance

This chapter argues that the revolutionary changes brought to the South by Reconstruction and black empowerment generated a sustained and violent reaction from southern whites that, by 1900, was successful in restoring white dominance because of restrictive Supreme Court decisions, congressional inaction, and waning public support for civil rights among white northerners. Republicans remained committed to civil rights and deployed federal power to break the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s, but white southern persistence and divided government in the late 1870s and 1880s compromised this effort. In the 1890s, white Democrats, in control of state and most local governments in the South and fearful of continued black resistance, enacted measures to disfranchise African Americans and impose segregation. Although African Americans continued to resist and enjoyed some successes in the North, by 1900, southern whites had created a repressive racial caste system.

Screening the Twenty-First-Century South

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-190
Author(s):  
Erich Nunn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Twenty First Century

Our understandings of early moments of southern literature and culture share some common frameworks. Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century, for example, revolve largely around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth-century South as defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographic place? What does it mean to read, watch, listen to, study, and teach southern literature and culture in the twenty-first century? What do we mean by the terms southern and literature? What cultural forms and media are central to understanding twenty-first-century southern culture? What is the utility of the literary? How do southern literature and culture relate to the nation as a whole?

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