Politics Across the Country: The South

The eleven states of the South will be electing 7 governors, 5 U.S. senators, and 106 representatives in 1970. Whatever improvements might come in the elections of lesser officials, it seems a safe bet that the quality of those in higher office will not increase.

This has nearly always been true in the South, but developments in the rest of the country make it discouraging this year. In the past, no matter how garish or tragic our politics might be, we could always look to a semblance of governmental responsibility in the rest of the country, and feel that the few decent Southern political tendencies were thereby encouraged. No more. We see now a foundering Democratic leadership and a racist-tending Republican one, and everywhere debilities that once were exclusively Southern: racism in campaigning, irrelevance of party affiliation, candidacies based on personality rather than principle. And the effect on the South has been to make these debilities more pronounced. George Wallace’s victory in the Alabama gubernatorial primary can be at least partly attributed to the bad influence of national politics, and this has pushed the general tone of Southern campaigning several notches downward and to the Right.

Wher...