The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics

The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics
Author: Rob Christensen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2010-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807899631

How can a state be represented by Jesse Helms and John Edwards at the same time? Journalist Rob Christensen answers that question and navigates a century of political history in North Carolina, one of the most politically vibrant and competitive southern states, where neither conservatives nor liberals, Democrats nor Republicans, have been able to rest easy. It is this climate of competition and challenge, Christensen argues, that enabled North Carolina to rise from poverty in the nineteenth century to become a leader in research, education, and banking in the twentieth. In this new paperback edition, Christensen provides updated coverage of recent changes in North Carolina's political landscape, including the scandals surrounding John Edwards and Mike Easley, the defeat of U.S. senator Elizabeth Dole, the election of the state's first woman governor, and voters' approval of an African American candidate for president. The book provides an overview of the run-up to the 2010 elections and explains how North Carolina has become, arguably, the most politically competitive state in the South.

The New Politics of North Carolina

The New Politics of North Carolina
Author: Christopher A. Cooper
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469606585

Political scientist V. O. Key in 1949 described North Carolina as a "progressive plutocracy." He argued that in the areas of industrial development, public education, and race relations, North Carolina appeared progressive when compared to other southern states. Reconsidering Key's evaluation nearly sixty years later, contributors to this volume find North Carolina losing ground as a progressive leader in the South. The "new politics" of the state involves a combination of new and old: new opportunities and challenges have forced the state to change, but the old culture still remains a powerful force. In the eleven essays collected here, leading scholars of North Carolina politics offer a systematic analysis of North Carolina's politics and policy, placed in the context of its own history as well as the politics and policies of other states. Topics discussed include the evolution of politics and political institutions; the roles of governors, the judicial branch, interest groups, and party systems; and the part played by economic development and environmental policy. Contributors also address how geography affects politics within the state, region, and nation. Designed with students and interested citizens in mind, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary North Carolina politics and government. Contributors: Hunter Bacot, Elon University Christopher A. Cooper, Western Carolina University Thomas F. Eamon, East Carolina University Jack D. Fleer, Wake Forest University Dennis O. Grady, Appalachian State University Ferrel Guillory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sean Hildebrand, Western Carolina University Jonathan Kanipe, Town Manager, Catawba, North Carolina H. Gibbs Knotts, Western Carolina University Adam J. Newmark, Appalachian State University Charles Prysby, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Ruth Ann Strickland, Appalachian State University James H. Svara, Arizona State University Timothy Vercellotti, Rutgers University

The Making of a Southern Democracy

The Making of a Southern Democracy
Author: Tom Eamon
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469606976

Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory

The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901

The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901
Author: Helen G. Edmonds
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469610957

Edmonds gives a detailed and accurate record of the political careers of prominent North Carolina blacks who held federal, state, county, and municipal offices. This record shows that the ration of Afro-American voters was so low that black domination was neither a reality nor a threat.

Tar Heel Politics 2000

Tar Heel Politics 2000
Author: Paul Luebke
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807889326

Offering an insightful analysis of North Carolina political trends and personalities, Paul Luebke moves beyond the usual labels of Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal. In Tar Heel Politics 2000, he argues that North Carolina's real political battle is between two factions of the state's political and economic elite: modernizers and traditionalists. Modernizers draw their strength from the bankers, developers, news media, and other urban interests that support growth, he says. Traditionalists, in contrast, are rooted in small-town North Carolina and fundamentalist Protestantism, tied to agriculture and low-wage industries and threatened by growth and social change. Both modernizers and traditionalists are linked with politicians who represent their interests. An updated and revised version of Luebke's Tar Heel Politics: Myths and Realities (1990), Tar Heel Politics 2000 highlights the resurgence of the southern Republican Party for the first time in a century and discusses a number of significant changes that have occurred over the last decade. These include the institutionalization of a viable two-party system in the General Assembly, the further shift of native-born whites throughout the South into the Republican voting column, and ideological conflict in North Carolina that parallels to some extent the post-1994 battles between the Republican Congress and the Clinton White House. In addition, the book provides a detailed analysis of the political appeal of Senator Jesse Helms and draws on Luebke's insights as a member of the North Carolina State House since 1991.

Fragile Democracy

Fragile Democracy
Author: James L. Leloudis
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469660407

America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation. North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why--a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment--we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.

A Political Education

A Political Education
Author: Elizabeth Todd-Breland
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1469646595

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Radical Reform

Radical Reform
Author: Deborah Beckel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN:

Radical Reform describes a remarkable chapter in the American pro-democracy movement. It portrays the largely unknown leaders of the interracial Republican Party who struggled for political, civil, and labor rights in North Carolina after the Civil War. In so doing, they paved the way for the victorious coalition that briefly toppled the white supremacist Democratic Party regime in the 1890s. Beckel provides a nuanced assessment of the distinctive coalitions built by black and white Republicans, as they sought to outmaneuver the Democratic Party. She demonstrates how the dynamic political conditions in the state from 1850 to 1900 led reformers of both races to force their traditional society toward a more radical agenda. By examining the evolution of anti-elitist politics and organized labor in North Carolina, Beckel brings a new understanding to party factionalism of the 1870s and 1880s. As racial conditions deteriorated across America in the 1890s, North Carolina Republicans forged a fragile coalition with Populists. While this interracial pro-democracy movement proved triumphant by 1894, it carried the seeds of its ultimate destruction.

Gender and Jim Crow

Gender and Jim Crow
Author: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469612453

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism. According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys

The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys
Author: Rob Christensen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781469688459

Louisiana had the Longs, Virginia had the Byrds, Georgia had the Talmadges, and North Carolina had the Scotts. In this history of North Carolina's most influential political family, Rob Christensen tells the story of the Scotts and how they dominated Tar Heel politics. Three generations of Scotts--W. Kerr Scott, Robert Scott, and Meg Scott Phipps--held statewide office. Despite stereotypes about rural white southerners, the Scotts led a populist and progressive movement strongly supported by rural North Carolinians--the so-called Branchhead Boys, the rural grassroots voters who lived at the heads of tributaries throughout the heart of North Carolina. Though the Scotts held power in various government positions in North Carolina for generations, they were instrumental in their own downfall. From Kerr Scott's regression into reactionary race politics to Meg Scott Phipps's corruption trial and subsequent prison sentence, the Scott family lost favor in their home state, their influence dimmed and their legacy in question. Weaving together interviews from dozens of political luminaries and deep archival research, Christensen offers an engaging and definitive historical account of not only the Scott family's legacy but also how race and populism informed North Carolina politics during the twentieth century.