The Paper Curtain and the New GOP

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Deep South ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Public Events ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
White Press

This chapter chronicles the effort by white editors in South Carolina to battle northern public opinion supporting civil rights reform in the South. As the black community’s interpretations of public events received greater attention in the mainstream white press, Charleston editor Thomas R. Waring Jr. led the campaign to break through the so-called “paper curtain” that he claimed northern media used to silence the voices of white southerners who supported segregation. As 1960 approached, Waring and and political reporter William D. Workman Jr., worked to build a new political home for white racial conservatives in a revamped Republican Party. In 1962, Workman left journalism to run for the US Senate as a Republican. The effort failed narrowly, yet his campaign signaled the arrival of the conservative Republicans as a new force in Deep South politics.

History Made: The Rise of Republican Tim Scott

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (03) ◽  
pp. 405-413
Author(s):  
Scott H. Huffmon ◽  
H. Gibbs Knotts ◽  
Seth C. McKee
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
American South ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Level Data ◽  
The Us ◽  
Racial Polarization ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
Race Ideology

ABSTRACTIn a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott’s rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report results from an embedded-survey experiment to assess respondents’ favorability toward Scott when he is characterized by two different frames: (1) “Tea Party favorite,” and (2) “first African American Senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction.” We found that conservatives, evangelicals, and less-educated individuals respond more positively to Scott when he is described as a “Tea Party favorite.” More than an intriguing case study, Scott’s rise tells a broader story of the complicated relationships among race, ideology, and partisanship in the contemporary American South.

Newspaper Wars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
White Press

This study examines the role of the black and white press in the cultural and political struggle over civil rights in South Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s, when black newspapers in the Deep South were mostly cautious and conservative, John McCray and his allies at South Carolina’s Lighthouse and Informer challenged their readers to “rebel and fight” for their rights – to reject the “slavery of thought and action” that created “uncle Toms and aunt Jemimas” and become “progressive fighters for the emancipation of the race.” As black activism spread, journalists at the state’s daily newspapers assumed leadership roles in the white resistance movement. They crafted new narratives designed to undermine black activism, but they also engaged directly in the political process to help implement the policy of massive resistance. When that strategy began to fail, the same journalists ignored their profession’s new norms of impartiality and joined the fight to create a new political home for white segregationists in a conservative Republican Party in the South. By moving the press from the periphery to the center of the political action, Newspaper Wars asks readers to reconsider the role of journalists during times of social, cultural, and political change in their communities.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

Partisan Journalism and the Rise of the Republican Party in South Carolina, 1959–1962

2013 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Professional Standards ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Deep South ◽  
American Press ◽  
The U.S

When political journalist William D. Workman, Jr., resigned from Charleston’s News and Courier and announced plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 1962, he said it would be “unethical” to combine “objective reporting with partisan politics.” Yet Workman’s personal papers reveal that, for three years, he and editor Thomas R. Waring, Jr., had been working with Republican leaders to build a conservative party to challenge Deep South Democrats. Workman’s story provides an example of how partisan activism survived in the twentieth-century American press, despite the rise of professional standards prohibiting political engagement.

scholarly journals Disparities Research at the Deep South Alzheimer’s Disease Center of the University of Alabama at Birmingham

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 100-100
Author(s):  
Maria Pisu ◽  
David Geldmacher
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Medicare Beneficiaries ◽  
University Of Alabama ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University

Abstract Residents of the US Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) have a 20–30% higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or related dementia (ADRD). Moreover, >20% of African Americans, who are at higher ADRD risk than whites, live in this region. Therefore, one important goals of the Deep South Alzheimer’s Disease Center (DS-ADC) of the University of Alabama at Birmingham is to spearhead research to address these disparities. This panel presents current DS-ADC research, with two presentations focusing on the local patient population and the last two on the Deep South population compared to the rest of the nation. Addressing the challenge of recruiting representative samples in clinical research, the first paper is part of a research program to understand difference that may exist between African American and white research participants. The second paper examines patients with multiple conditions, in particular dementia and cancer, showing a marked disadvantage in cognition outcomes for African Americans. The next two papers take a broader perspective to better understand the population of older adults with ADRD in the Deep South and in the rest of the US. The third paper examines socioeconomic and medical contexts of African American and white older Medicare beneficiaries with ADRD, and the fourth paper examines differences in utilization of specialists, ADRD drugs, and hospitalizations in the two regions taking these contexts into account. The discussant will close the session by placing these studies in the larger context of the disparities research at the DS-ADC.

Mr. Rhee Goes to Washington

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-107
Author(s):  
David P. Fields
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
American Mission

Chapter 3 examines how Rhee and the Korean independence movement utilized this constituency to place pressure on American policymakers during the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty and during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922. The chapter pays special attention to the common cause the Korean activists and their American supporters made with the so-called Irreconcilables in the US Senate. The Korean independence movement provided these senators with an “internationalist” justification for opposing the treaty and thus an answer to the charge that they were advocating isolationism. The Koreans in return received an airing of their views in the US Senate and even a vote on a Korean reservation to the Versailles Treaty. While scholars have examined the importance of the issue of the Shantung Peninsula to the case against the Versailles Treaty in the Senate, few have realized that it was the brutal Japanese suppression of the March First Movement that injected such passion into the debate over the Shantung. While Korean activists’ passionate invocations of the American mission during both the fight over the Versailles Treaty and the Washington Naval Conference did not result in any official policy changes toward Korea, they significantly shifted American perceptions of the Japanese colonization of Korea and brought much of informed American public opinion on the situation into sympathy with the Koreans.

Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALLISON GRAHAM
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
First Year ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan W. Keating
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Popular Vote ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
Commander In Chief ◽  
Precarious Situation

In April 1861, newly elected president Abraham Lincoln found himself in a precarious situation. Although he had won the presidency in the November elections, his victory was by no means a mandate from the people for the Republican Party platform. The nation was perilously divided. Winning less than half the popular vote in 1860, the tall, gaunt lawyer from Illinois looked on as his nation teetered on the brink of civil war. To keep the nation together, the new commander in chief drew support from a rather tenuous alliance of political rivals openly divided in their opinions about the actions of their southern brethren. The attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, however, galvanized public opinion throughout the north and fostered, at least momentarily, a powerful wartime alliance between Republicans and Democrats that allowed Lincoln to carry out a war to preserve the Union. As Federal troops lowered the Stars and Stripes in surrender from the ramparts of the bastion in Charleston Harbor, banners were hoisted in towns and cities across the North as men of all ages, ethnicities, classes, and backgrounds rushed to the defense of their flag and their nation....

Confidence without Sacrifice

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-176
Author(s):  
David T. Burbach
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Civilian Control ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military

The American public expresses more confidence and trust in the US military than in any civil or private-sector institution. Such esteem for the military is notable given that the public also believes recent US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were failures. Confidence may emerge from the military’s professionalism rather than delivery of battlefield results and may also reflect positive sentiments based on social expectations and “cheap” patriotism. The public’s willingness to fund, join, or grant autonomy to the military is more circumscribed than high trust would suggest; the public may be “confident” but is willing to overrule generals and admirals when values are in conflict. Confidence may increasingly reflect political support: both a growing affinity between the military and the Republican Party and a tendency (again, stronger for Republicans) to express more confidence when the president is of one’s own party. Disturbingly, trends in public opinion as well as recent behavior of politicians and retired military leaders all suggest growing politicization, with possible ramifications for weakening civilian control, ultimately causing a loss of the public’s trust.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document