Racial Rule

This chapter turns to home rule, in particular southern evaluations of prospects for a new national labor policy and attention to voting rights protections. Southern success in defeating a renewed consideration of the franchise established the terms of the broad national accommodation that came to characterize American policy and politics for the first half of the twentieth century. The South would be left alone to determine the contours of black citizenship, while the economic program of the Republican Party would be placed on a stable political foundation. When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, the region's representatives provided fifteen of the nineteen votes cast against the initial war resolution in the House. Yet despite the region's anti-imperialist sentiment, the war with Spain became an occasion to affirm the South's definitive return to the Union.