Limited Progressivism

This chapter identifies the issues and policy debates that underlay distinctive southern preferences and choices as national progressivism increasingly came to be shaped by the region's representatives. It underscores the transformations to southern politics in the first three decades of the century as southern legislators increasingly drove an economic program, much of it progressive, that ultimately would define the era's legislative accomplishments. The economic agenda of southern agrarians and populists had buffeted the region since the Civil War, but was now both tamed and channeled into the mainstream of southern political life, enabled by the successful suppression of black electoral politics and the rise of systematic racial segregation grounded in law.