Introduction

The South really has no parties. Its factions differ radically in their organization and operation from political parties. The critical question is whether the substitution of factions for parties alters the outcome of the game of politics. The stakes of the game are high. Who wins when no parties exist to furnish popular leadership?

— V. O. Key (1949)

On February 22, 1937, Representative James P. Buchanan of Texas's 10th congressional district suffered a fatal heart attack. The special election triggered by the long-serving congressman's death attracted seven candidates — all Democrats, as was the norm in the one-party state of Texas. Among these was the ambitious young director of the state branch of the National Youth Administration, one of the many government agencies created by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As a 28-year-old making his first run for elected office, Lyndon Baines Johnson sought to compensate for his youth and lack of name recognition by distinguishing himself as "Roosevelt's man" in the race. Johnson did everything he could to tie himself to the immensely popular president. The centerpiece of Johnson's campaign was his support for FDR's controversial court-packing plan, which conservatives assailed as a dictatorial power grab but district residents reportedly favored seven-to-one. On election day, Johnson's strategy of all-out support for Roosevelt paid off. With about a quarter of the eligible white population voting, Johnson earned 28% of ballots cast, enough for a plurality victory.

At first, Johnson proved himself a loyal and effective New Dealer. Only on bills related to civil rights for African Americans, who at that time were effectively disenfranchised in Texas and across the South, did Representative Johnson, like nearly all his fellow Southerners in the House, toe an unwaveringly conservative line. During his first term he helped secure the passage of bills funding dam construction, rural electrification, farm tenancy reduction, and crop control, all of which brought concrete material benefits to the residents of his relatively poor district. He was even among the few Southern representatives to support the passage of the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which established national minimum wages and maximum hours. Rebuffing critics who feared that the FLSA would undermine the South's economic advantages as a low-wage region, Johnson declared, "If an industry cannot pay decent wages, I do not want it in my district."

The 1938 elections, however, in addition to reducing the Democrats' House majority by 72 seats, also brought the primary defeat of Johnson's fellow Texan and FLSA supporter, Representative Maury Maverick. Johnson interpreted the defeat of the outspokenly liberal Maverick, who represented the adjoining 20th district, as a sign of his constituents' increasing conservatism. The next year, when pressed by White House counsel Jim Rowe to support an administration priority, Johnson replied, "You know, look where your old friend and my old friend Maury Maverick is, he's not here. The first problem we've got is to get re-elected. I don't want to go that way." Throughout his career Johnson continued to cite Maverick as a cautionary tale, insisting, "I can go [only] so far in Texas. Maury forgot that and he is not here. ... There's nothing more useless than a dead liberal."

Although Johnson remained a relative progressive by Texas standards, he continued to tack to the right over the course of the 1940s. His conservative drift culminated in the Republican-controlled 80th Congress, when, along with nearly all Southern congressmen, he voted for the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. Johnson's support for Taft–Hartley's partial dismantlement of the pro-union New Deal labor regime earned him the enmity of organized labor, but given his constituents' anger over wartime strikes and unions' growing power, it was "good central Texas politics." It also proved crucial to his razor-thin election to the Senate the following year over the conservative governor Coke Stevenson, who ran on a platform of "less government, lower taxes, states' rights, and 'the complete destruction of the Communist movement in this country.'" Famously, Johnson also benefitted from election fraud in south Texas. But as Stevenson's gubernatorial successor Allan Shivers later observed, it was support for Taft–Hartley that "enabled Johnson to get close enough in votes to where [fraud] could make the difference." Once in the Senate, Johnson maintained the careful centrism he had cultivated in the House, balancing the leftward pull of party loyalty and national ambitions against his constituents' (and financial backers') skepticism toward many aspects of New Deal liberalism.

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Lyndon Johnson's career in the House is not merely an intriguing prelude to his subsequent career as Senate leader, vice president, and ultimately president. It is also emblematic of the contemporaneous careers of members of Congress (MCs) across the South. Like Johnson, the Southern congressional caucus — which numbered almost two dozen senators and a hundred-odd House members — underwent a dramatic ideological transformation between the mid-1930s and late 1940s, even as almost every single one remained, as Johnson did, a member of the Democratic Party. The consequences of this transformation were momentous at the time and continue to reverberate today.

A rich scholarly literature has documented Southern MCs' critical role in American political development during and after the New Deal. After many years as the dominant faction in a minority party, Southern Democrats' position in national politics was radically altered by the Great Depression. The Depression not only devastated the already-poor and underdeveloped South, but also in 1933 handed the Democratic Party unified control of the national government for the first time in a generation. Amidst the economic emergency, Southern MCs relaxed their traditional opposition to external intervention and gave overwhelming support to President Roosevelt's New Deal, which vastly expanded the federal government's role in the nation's economic and social life.

In the late 1930s, as the economic emergency receded and traditional fears of federal power resurfaced, Southern MCs' support for New Deal liberalism began to ebb. Though the South remained a one-party region, its representatives in Congress began allying with Republicans to block liberal reforms and even roll back elements of the New Deal regime. By the mid-1940s, with the passage of landmark laws such as Taft–Hartley, this conservative coalition had become a durable feature of congressional politics. Southern Democrats did not fully abandon New Deal liberalism, however. Rather, balancing party loyalty and desire for federal aid against fear of external intervention, they came to occupy a centrist...