(3 of 7)
Conflicts of interest and of principle are more often resolved inside the parties than they are settled by ideological contests between the parties. Calhounism survives in a great and much maligned American institution, the smoke-filled room, where party leaders can do what the ballot box cannot do: measure the intensity with which various groups will react for or against (especially against) certain proposals. The majority may be mildly in favor of a policy, and a minority (sectional or otherwise) may be fanatically against it. Under those circumstances, the American politician will often withhold support until he can find a way of placating the minority.
That this system has its weaknesses and grave dangers is too obvious to need saying. But it is the American political system, it works better than most (e.g., the French), and somewhat surprisingly, it does not prevent quite rapid change in policy where change is clearly needed and skillful leadership is applied.
Richard Russell is carrying out a somewhat abnormal variation of the Calhounian process. It is abnormal because the South's political position is abnormal— partly as a result of historic Republican departures from normal American political processes.
The Ghost of Thad Stevens. The post-Civil War Republican Party, under the leadership of Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens, engaged in a non-Calhounian effort to establish the uncompromised will of the. majority in a section that was bitterly unreconciled to that will. The G.O.P. finally gave up, without having either broken or reconciled the South's resistance. Contrary to all the basic rules of American politics, it never again made a serious effort to win the South. In consequence of his deep-seated opposition to the Republican. Party, a Southern Democrat cannot bring himself to do what all other minority groups do when their veto is overriden by their party—shift to the other party.
The crisis of which Russell is the symbol is caused by the fact that the voting Negroes found it possible to leave the party of Abraham Lincoln, but the Southern whites did not find it possible to enter the party of Thaddeus Stevens. In key Northern states during the 1930s and 40s, Negroes gave the Democrats the margin of victory. Legitimate Negro demands of faster progress toward equality became an important practical factor in
Democratic politics. These demands were reinforced by 1) a world war against enemies who professed extreme racist doctrines, and 2) a postwar international situation in which the U.S. was severely handicapped by the racial inequalities inside its borders.
The concrete expression of these demands was the Truman FEPC program. It was probably supported by a majority of Americans, but it was violently opposed by the majority in that section of the country that it affected most intimately. The program was beaten in Congress by the filibuster (another form of the Calhounian veto). Northern Democrats used their majority to force an FEPC plank into the 1948 platform.