Gone with the vote: for the GOP in the South, reconstruction isn't quite over.

• Author: Pitney, John J., Jr.
• Position: Culture & Reviews - Critical Essay

The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 442 pages, $29.95

FOR SUPPORTERS OF limited government, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) was an ideal candidate. Running in 1998 for the U.S. Senate, he scorned the idea that lawmakers should scrounge federal pork for their constituents. He actually voted against projects meant to benefit his home district, and he promised to take the same approach in the upper chamber.

His opponent was incumbent Democrat Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, who dealt with pork the same way the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart dealt with illicit sex--seeking it as vigorously as he damned it. The only difference was that Hollings had no shame.

Inglis tried to say that Hollings' approach was out of date. "In 1966 [the year Hollings first won the seat], we sent senators to Washington to get whatever they could because we were desperately poor," Inglis said. But the prosperous South Carolina of the 1990s, he insisted, no longer needed government guarantees. "The senator is selling day-old bread, and we're not going to buy it." Alas, South Carolinians find their day-old bread quite filling. They re-elected Hollings, 53 percent to 46 percent.

Earl and Merle Black, twin brothers who teach at Rice and Emory universities, offer this case study in The Rise of Southern Republicans, the latest in a series of books, including The Vital South and Politics and Society in the South, that have established them as leading experts on Southern politics. Inglis' story exemplifies their broader analysis.

On one hand, Inglis' success shows how far the GOP has come. During the 1950s, a Republican could not win a House seat inmost of the South (the II states of the Confederacy), much less score 46 percent against a veteran Democratic senator.

On the other hand, the Hollings victory is a reminder that Republicans have not gained the overwhelming dominance that Democrats once enjoyed. Throughout the region, statewide elections remain competitive. The GOP's century of impotence in the South following the Civil War was caused by race; and racial questions, as the Black brothers show, are still a regrettably dominant concern in Dixie politics.

This richly documented book does a good job of explaining both the Republicans' surge and the Democrats' survival. For decades after the Civil War, American politics exhibited a pattern that the Black brothers dub "battlefield sectionalism." The party of...