Disruption of the Solid South

In less than twenty years Republicans have created a viable opposition to the Democratic party in the South for the first time since the heyday of the Whigs in the 1840s. The turn in Republican fortunes below the Potomac, writes George Brown Tindall in this important new study, owes less to new strategies than to new conditions, for the Southern Strategy was not born yesterday. It was invented—or at least first pursued—in the 1870s by Rutherford B. Hayes, who called it his Southern Policy. Subsequent changes have been only variations on a theme by Hayes.