Fall 1996
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One of the major arguments of The Shaping of Southern Politics may be reduced to a syllogism: The major consequences of election laws are intended. Those who frame the laws do so out of a desire to insure their own victory or that of their party, race, class, or other group with which they identify. Therefore, one can reason forward from the identities of the framers to deduce the likely consequences, or backward from the consequences to deduce the motives of the framers. Although I believe these generalizations apply widely, their application to any particular law is a matter of fact, not philosophy.
Among the types of laws to which I applied the syllogism in Shaping was the direct primary. During the Democratic presidential campaign in 1984, Jesse Jackson attacked the runoff primary in the South as having a racially discriminatory effect. The New Republic, then less conservative than now, but still against Jackson, invited me to write an essay proving that whatever its current effect, the original intent of the runoff primary was not discriminatory. Conducting only secondary research, I found that the question had never been seriously considered by scholars, and that I could not honestly say that the original purposes were nondiscriminatory. The journal, interested only in undermining Jackson (whom I also opposed) refused to publish the essay in any form. Here are the results of my fairly brief secondary search, which have been published before only in fairly obscure publications. So far as I know, no one has done any important research on early runoff primary laws in the South, though I have since done a lot on the adoption of such laws in Memphis in the 1950s and Georgia in the 1960s.
Nowhere were the partisan purposes of the primary system more evident than in the post-Reconstruction South. Turnout was still above 60% of the adult southern males during the 1880s, and the Republican, independent, and later, Populist threats to Democratic dominance remained quite real. In the 1880 presidential contest, for instance, a majority of black men are estimated to have voted in 9 of the 11 ex-Confederate states, and in 10 of those, they managed to have a majority of their votes counted for the Republican party, which they overwhelmingly supported. The South was far from "solid" yet. Any significant bolt from the Democratic or "white man's" party could well lead to defeats--and to the assumption of power by blacks and their white allies--at the local or even the state level, as it did in Virginia, where a coalition of blacks and hill-country whites led by a Democrat discontented at his defeat in a boss-controlled party convention ruled the state from 1879 to 1883.
The primary was recognized and touted as a minimizer of bolts. Thus, at the height of the Greenback-independent challenge in his state in 1878, the chairman of the Alabama Democratic Executive Committee proposed that delegates to the state convention be selected in primaries in order "to promote harmony, . . . and to prevent as far as possible the occurrence of combinations injurious to the party . . . " A Tuskegee Democratic newspaper thought the primary "the only thing that can unite and hold the party together." Governor Wade Hampton of South Carolina advised Democrats in one country that "we cannot afford to be divided on State matters. Your country is the first to adopt the system of primary elections--be governed by its results and allow no independents to run."
Deeply divided over the question of continuing the corrupt state lottery company in 1892, Louisiana Democrats settled their differences in the first statewide primary ever held, so far as I know, in the United States. That it was limited to whites and that it came at the time of a very serious Populist and Republican challenge to Democratic control should give pause to those who picture the primary as a well-intentioned, racially neutral device to expand popular control.
Likewise, in the same year, South Carolina Democrats kept the bitter split between Ben Tillman and his "conservative" opponents within the confines of the party by electing convention delegates in primaries coordinated throughout the state. After the 1894 elections, the same South Carolina Democratic convention which endorsed calling a constitutional convention to disfranchise as many blacks as possible by law passed a party rule requiring nominations for state offices from 1896 on to be made by direct primaries. In case no candidate received a majority, the party provided for a runoff primary. Ben Tillman, who dominated both the party and constitutional conventions, selected the primary, according to his biographer, "as the most satisfactory means of allaying discontent within the Democratic ranks and of reducing the danger of political appeal to the Negro."
Yet there were no other statewide direct primaries in the South (or elsewhere in the nation) during the 1890s. By 1902, when Mississippi became the first state in the Union to require, by law, the primary method of nomination for all non-judicial state officers, disfranchising conventions or constitutional amendments had severely reduced black--and poor whites--voting in all eleven southern states. Since direct primaries in general and the runoff in particular were, except, in South Carolina, mandated only after 1900, could they have had any racial intent? Since most blacks were disfranchised by then, wasn't the situation "race proof?"
The most obvious answer is that very little in the South since 1619 has been devoid of racial motives or at least racial implications. Perhaps less obviously, the "race proof" argument depends crucially on hindsight. When white primaries, sometimes with runoff provisions, were adopted by Democratic party rule or by law in the early part of this century, it was by no means so clear as it seemed later that party competition and black participation in politics were doomed for a half century. Furthermore, this argument underestimates both the continuing extent of black voting and its potential, as well as the degree of southern white antipathy in the "lily white period" to any black political activity whatsoever.
That white racism has been one of the central themes of southern history is familiar enough not to need documentation. The perceived fragility of the disfranchisement settlement, however, must be argued. The most studied case has been that of Alabama in 1902. Republicans, Populists, and some relatively liberal Democrats had coalesced to oppose the 1901 disfranchising constitutional convention. After they lost, they kept up their organization, established a newspaper, and prepared to contest the 1902 election against the conservative Democratic incumbent. Recalling that a decade earlier the Populists had gotten their start in the state by bolting the Democratic party after a rigged convention had rejected the front-running agrarian candidate, conservatives feared, probably correctly, that the liberal coalition candidate planned to use the same tactic in 1902. They therefore authorized a primary--with Populists and Republicans carefully excluded, but with a runoff authorized, if needed--because, according to a leading conservative newspaper, the primary's "adoption is the only way of preserving the Democratic organization and the control of political machinery in this state by the Party organization."
Why was party control so important to the Democrats? The reason was that "without the legal primary," according to a North Carolina editor who surveyed opinion in 1899 in three states which had held disfranchising conventions, "divisions among white men might result in bringing about a return to the deplorable conditions when one faction of white men call upon the Negroes to help defeat another faction." After all, fairly administered literacy tests and funds to pay the poll taxes of potential voters could easily have enfranchised a majority of the blacks in any southern state in the early twentieth century, and Democrats feared that the self interest of opposition politicos might, as it had during Reconstruction and the Populist era, overcome their devotion to white supremacy. Moreover, southern moves to subvert the purposes of the fifteenth amendment never received the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court, but only its agreement, in effect, not to intervene to overthrow the restrictive laws, a modus vivendi which lasted only from 1903 to 1915, when the Court overturned the Oklahoma "grandfather clause."
The number of blacks who were registered to vote after "disfranchisement," moreover, was small, but not negligible--9% in Mississippi in 1896, and 14-15% in South Carolina and Virginia in 1904. In certain areas, blacks might be able to elect one or more officials. Some whites, in a period when lynchings became public carnivals, were genuinely horrified by the slightest deviation from complete black subordination. More importantly, opportunistic politicians could be depended upon to whip up any racial issue for their own purposes. Token appointments of blacks to federal offices, which had been treated quite casually as late as the 1890s, aroused a storm of criticism during Theodore Roosevelt's administration.
Nor were blacks wholly barred from the largely locally regulated "white" primaries. In 1899 at least 200 blacks voted in a Democratic primary in one Mississippi county, and, as one historian concluded about that state as a whole, "Negroes had not been eliminated from the polls but were playing the same part a decade after [the Mississippi disfranchising convention of 1890] that they had played for a dozen or fifteen years before its adoption." The Little Rock, Arkansas Democratic central committee turned down a white-only primary resolution in 1901, and Arkansas primaries became fully Caucasian only as a result of the actions of the deeply racist governor, Jeff Davis, in 1906. Aware that an open, legal exclusion of blacks from the primaries risked court action, not state before Texas in 1923 wrote a white-only provision into law. All acted by party rule, they usually gave local Democratic committees discretion on the matter, and some areas never established utterly white primaries.
Runoff provisions were adopted nowhere outside the South, and their original passage should be seen as merely another means to insure against the danger of organized opposition to the Democrats. Since a plurality nominee in a very split primary would be perceived as less legitimate than one who had received a majority, he might stimulate politicians and voters to defect from the Democratic party.
A bill imposing a primary and containing a runoff requirement passed the Mississippi Senate but was bottled up in the House in 1900. When many representatives from black majority counties opposed a similar measure in 1902 because the convention system, apportioned on the basis of total population, rather than votes, gave an advantage to whites in areas which had large numbers of nonvoting blacks, a minority report exploded. "The salvation of our State," these backers of a primary with a runoff contended, "depends on the unity of our white people. This vote can only be secured by ascertaining and effectuating the choice of [the] majority, to the exclusion of Negroes." Perhaps responding to this implicit threat of hill country defection from the party, the Mississippi legislature this time passed the bill, the state executive committee for the first time barred blacks entirely from the primary, and in its 1903 gubernatorial primary the state elected one of the most strident racist demagogues in its history, James K. Vardaman.
That white Democratic party hegemony was a prime motive for the adoption of the primary in Mississippi was openly avowed by the chief sponsor of the 1902 law, Edmund F. Noel, in a 1904 article: ". . . White supremacy could be maintained only by the members of that race remaining together, politically, otherwise comparatively few Negroes who were qualified to vote might wield the balance of power. No political organization can long be kept from factional contests, without confidence in the fairness of its methods of ascertaining and carrying into effect the will of the majority . . . . Conventions or mass meetings as the ultimate method of expressing popular choice would not be tolerated in any civilized community, . . . "
In between Mississippi's two legislative considerations of a primary law, in 1901, Florida had provided by statute for a non-mandatory primary containing a runoff provision. Setting temporary rules for each election, the Alabama Democratic Executive Committee provided for runoffs in 1902 and 1914, but pluralities in the elections between those two years. In 1915, the legislature substituted a complicated preferential voting scheme, similar to one adopted by Florida in 1913, for the double primary. South Carolina conducted runoff elections by party regulation from 1896 on, but wrote the provision into law only in 1915. Texas in 1903 and 1905 required primaries for state offices by law, but left it up to the party whether or not to declare a majority or plurality vote sufficient. In 1907, the legislature specified a plurality win system. The Louisiana legislature regulated primaries in 1906 and its law stipulated that a majority was necessary to nominate. After a particularly racially demagogic gubernatorial campaign in Georgia in 1906, the convention delegates elected in the indirect primary for governor backed not only a constitutional convention to redistrict black suffrage, but also Georgia's first statewide direct primary. Its runoff provision was modified two years later to provide that the candidate had to receive a majority of the "county unit" vote. Murderously divided over prohibition, Tennessee Democrats authorized a primary in 1908, in the words of the standard state history, because party leaders "hoped that the primary would avoid an outright split." Authorized by statute in 1909, the primary made a runoff requisite, but after the law as a whole was voided by the courts, the majority clause was dropped. When it finally overcame Republican and independent Democratic opposition to holding a statewide primary, North Carolina in 1915 included a majority vote proviso.
Neither historians nor political scientists have specifically investigated the intent of the original framers of runoff requirements. There is likely to be little direct evidence about their purpose, since they were often adopted at non-public party executive committee meetings, and even in cases when they were written into law, the surviving evidence from state legislative records will probably not be conclusive. None of the southern state assemblies recorded debates or printed committee reports, newspaper stories on any but the most controversial amendments are usually uninformative, and few legislators left collections of their papers. There was lots of press discussion about the general principles of primaries and conventions, but little on such specific topics as the runoff.
Popular discussions stressed not only the party-strengthening features of primaries, but also the shift in control toward "the people" -- loyal white Democrats -- which the primary allegedly fostered. These two purposes were, of course, completely complimentary. Had the primary not quieted protests against clique or "ring" domination, it would not have been an effective means of confining dissent within the Democratic party.
Usually less mentioned in editorials and news stories, particularly by primary proponents, was the effect of decision rules on the fortunes of particular politicians or demographic areas. Those politicos who were popular with courthouse factions, but whose stump speeches were uninspiring naturally favored the convention method of nomination, while crowd pleasers just as calculatedly supported primaries. Likewise, people from such regions as the Mississippi delta opposed denizens of white-majority counties on the issue. The votes of each black belt and hill country white would count equally in primaries, but in conventions, which were apportioned on the basis of both black and white population, the power of a white vote in areas which contained many blacks would in effect be multiplied. Such factors doubtless account for seeming anomalies in the temporal pattern of adoption of direct primaries as well as of provisions such as the runoff.
The indirect evidence from the pattern of adoptions of the runoffs suggests that racial motives for choosing the device were hardly absent. South Carolina, which had the largest proportion of blacks of any state in 1900, was the first to put the statewide primary and the runoff into regular use. The Democratic convention which proposed the scheme in that state, in an action paralleled in Georgia in 1906, also called for state constitutional action to disfranchise blacks. Mississippi, which had the second largest percentage of blacks, became the first state to mandate the runoff primary by law, and Alabama acted by party rule in the same year. Florida, still over 40% black at the turn of the century, held its first runoff in 1904, and Louisiana, third in black proportion, acted by law in 1906. Texas toyed with the idea, Tennessee's runoff was born late and died in infancy, and North Carolina acted only in 1915. Among the eleven ex-Confederate states, only Arkansas in the Deep South and the border state of Virginia, its machine and anti-machine factions solidified early, never instituted the double primary during the first two decades of this century. No northern state, not even such uncompetitive ones as Maine, Vermont, and Kansas, ever experimented with runoff primaries.
In sum, the evidence suggests that the primary in the South in general, and the runoff in particular, was not part of a general "progressive" movement to democratize elections, but rather, that it was one episode in a reactionary crusade to eliminate any chance of black influence in politics by perpetuating one-party rule.
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