V.o. Key Quotes

Florida is not only unbossed, it is unled. Anything can happen in elections, and does.

If democratic elections continued, political scientist V. O. Key observed, it “would have been fatal to the status of black belt whites.

That the South's spectacular political leaders have been indiscriminately grouped as demagogues of a common stripe, when wide differences have actually separated them, may likewise be regarded as an excusable failing of the Yankee journalist insensitive to the realities of southern politics.

Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro.

In most southern, and perhaps most most northern, states a man with political ambition-and some political prospects-can always find a disgruntled or hopeful contractor or supplier willing to help finance a campaign. And these businessmen are often not concerned about political ideology: they want to do business with a winner, be he right, left, center, or monarchist.

As institutions, parties enjoy a general disrepute, yet most of the democratic world finds them indispensable as instruments of self-government, as means for the organization and expression of competing viewpoints on public policy.

The runner-up in the first primary often wins the nomination in the second primary, a fact often advanced to support the contention that the popular will would be defeated by awarding the nomination to the winner of a plurality in a single primary.

In all probability the rock-bottom basis for the authority of Democratic primary decisions has been southern attachment to Democratic presidential nominees. That attachment insulated southern politics from the divisive issues of national campaigns. If those issues had been raised more effectively and more consistently in the South, they would have spread by infection to state politics and would have provided powerful coat-tail support for Republican state and local candidates.

If a democratic regime is to work successfully it must be generally agreed that contestants for power will not shoot each other and that ballots will be counted as cast. Consensus on these propositions has been reached pretty well over the entire South except in some counties in East Tennessee, which have a high incidence of electoral irregularity and a high mortality from gunshot during political campaigns.

In the governing of peoples, a few always hold power; it is exercised, however, subject to the influence of the governed which may be almost imperceptible or it may be irresistible.

Friends and favors, perquisites which are everywhere the usual practices of politics, take on a special significance in one-party states.

Social mechanisms for the transmission and perpetuation of partisan faiths have an effectiveness far more potent than the political issue of the day.

A more or less totally irrelevant appeal - back the hometown boy - can exert no little influence over an electorate not habituated to the types of voting behavior characteristic of a two-party situation.

The colorful demagogue possessed of an intensely personal following can introduce into the disorganized politics of one-party states elements of stability and form that are of the utmost importance.

When there emerges a factional system of competing politicians whose differences provide opportunity for the expression of cleavages of sentiment latent in the electorate, localism is apt to decline in significance in the face of the divisive effects of a politics of substance.

City dwellers, except under machine rule, tend more than rural people to divide their vote.

The bald fact is that in most of the South most of the time party machinery is an impotent mechanism dedicated largely to the performance of routine duties.

In the mid-1950s, Governor Luther Hodges cited Aycock’s “march of progress” in his defense of Jim Crow as a system that both ensured political tranquility and enabled racial uplift. His successor in the state house, Terry Sanford, noted that Aycock famously proclaimed “as a white man, I am afraid of but one thing for my race and that is we shall become afraid to give the Negro a fair chance. The white man in the South can never attain to his fullest growth until he does absolute justice to the Negro race.” This framing enabled Hodges, Sanford, and, later, Governor Dan Moore to define the “North Carolina way” in sharp contrast with the racially charged massive resistance rhetoric that defined the approaches of Alabama under George Wallace and Mississippi under Ross Barnett. This moderate course caused early observers like V. O. Key to view the state as “an inspiring exception to southern racism.” Crucially, it operated hand-in-hand with North Carolina’s anti-labor stance to advance the state’s economic interests. Hodges, Sanford, and Moore approached racial policy by emphasizing tranquility, and thus an intolerance for political contention. These officials placed a high value on law and order, condemning as “extremists” those who threatened North Carolina’s “harmonious” race relations by advocating either civil rights or staunch segregation. While racial distinctions could not be elided in the Jim Crow South, where the social fabric was shot through with racial disparity, an Aycock-style progressivist stance emphasized the maintenance of racial separation alongside white elites’ moral and civic interest in the well-being of black residents. This interest generally took the form of a pronounced paternalism, which typically enabled powerful white residents to serve as benefactors to their black neighbors, in a sort of patron-client relationship. “It was white people doing something for blacks—not with them,” explained Charlotte-based Reverend Colemon William Kerry Jr. While often framed as gestures of beneficence and closeness, such acts reproduced inequity and distance. More broadly, this racial order served dominant economic and political interests, as it preserved segregation with a progressive sheen that favored industrial expansion.12

For a two-party system to operate effectively each party must, almost of necessity, have a territorial stronghold in which it can win legislative elections and control local governments.

Reliance on personality (however it may be associated with policy) as an organizing point for voters inevitably produces impermanence in factional systems.