Why Did Big-City Machines Decline in the South?
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The conventional explanations for machine decline in the United States, including welfare reform, civil service reform, and income growth, were largely developed without considering Southern machines. The South adopted civil service reform later than did the North, the welfare expansion of the New Deal was significantly more limited in the South than in the North, and the South was much poorer than the North until at least the 1980s. Therefore, according to the existing literature, Southern political machines should have declined at a slower rate than did their Northern counterparts, since the conventional explanations for machine decline are weaker in the South than in the North. This thesis uses the Newspapers.com database to build the first census of Southern citywide machines from 1920 to 1970, and finds that Southern political machines peaked in the same decade as did Northern machines, and declined at approximately the same rate thereafter. The fact that the peak and decline of Southern machines was similar to that of Northern machines, despite Southern machines not being influenced by the ostensible factors that caused the decline of Northern machines, suggests that the prevailing explanations for why machines declined in the United States are insufficient, or at least do not apply to the South. This thesis, then, presents a puzzle for future research: why did Southern machines decline at the same rate as did Northern machines, even though the conventional explanations for machine decline do not apply to the South? After outlining this puzzle, this thesis begins the work of future researchers by using the Newspapers.com database to review contemporary newspaper articles that analyzed the decline of prominent Southern citywide machines as they collapsed in real time and build a dataset that categorizes these explanations for machine decline. By centralizing all explanations that contemporary journalists, who are experts in municipal politics, offered for the decline of Southern machines, this thesis provides a starting point for future researchers to determine whether these explanations generalize across the South and Nation. In particular, the elimination of the poll tax and other restrictive Jim Crow era voting measures, the end of one-party Democratic dominance in the South, and the return of politically active GIs from WWII who fought to defeat political machines are promising, understudied explanations for Southern machine decline that merit more attention.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 4, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Barry, Quinn |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Cox, Gary |
| Advisor | Bonica, Adam |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Symbolic Systems |
Subjects
| Subject | political machines |
|---|---|
| Subject | The American South |
| Subject | Symbolic Systems |
| Subject | Newspapers.com |
| Subject | Stanford |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Barry, Quinn. (2021). Why Did Big-City Machines Decline in the South? Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/pb426hg3378
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University
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- Contact
- qmbarry@stanford.edu
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