Legally, the silence of the good people lasted from the start of Reconstruction to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, a period which spanned 101 troubled years. In large part, the Reconstruction project to which Dr. King ultimately gave his life was irreparably damaged by the assassination of President Lincoln, but it was the legacy of another President–Herbert Hoover–that had enormous repercussions for the future of race and politics in America.

Herbert Clark Hoover is, undoubtedly, remembered best for both his namesake dam and his inability to save the American economy from the Great Depression; but it was his actions, or rather inaction, that predated his rise to the Presidency that produced consequences far beyond his wildest imagination.

Before thoughts of the Oval Office had ever entered Hoover’s consciousness, however, he had made a name for himself as an engineer and miner of some renown while working halfway across the world in China and Australia. His true foray into public life didn’t begin until the first great War, where he became known as a brilliant social engineer–a man who manipulated both Britain and Germany into feeding starving Belgium and who returned to the United States known colloquially as both “the Great Humanitarian” and “the Great Engineer.” Herbert Hoover was indeed a brilliant mind, but, unfortunately, he was also a fool.

He was brilliant in the way his mind could seize and grapple with a problem, brilliant in his ability to accomplish a task, and brilliant in the originality, comprehensiveness, and depth of the politcial philosophy he developed. He was a fool because he deceived himself. Although considering himself as objective and analytical as science itself, in reality he rejected evidence and truths that did not conform to his biases, and he fooled himself about what those biases were (Barry 1998, 262).

Nowhere would this self-denial produce greater ramifications than for the sake of his Republican party in the aftermath of the greatest flood ever experienced in America.

In 1927, historic, torrential rains tormented the Mississippi River Delta for months. On Good Friday alone, 6 to 15 inches of rain poured over a few hundred-thousand square miles. The pressure that months of such rain put upon the many levees lining the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries was so great that when the levees began bursting, hundreds of thousands of square miles would be inundated with water. In some areas the flooding would reach heights greater than 20 feet, with tsunami-like waves pounding farmsteads and towns into ruble and reducing the land to a writhing torrent of black, muddy depths. Before the flood waters would begin receding in the late summer and fall of 1927, hundreds of thousands of people would be displaced from their homes.

Hoover had been named to the flood commission responsible for dealing with this wretched aftermath, and it was a job into which he threw his entire being. Hoover’s gift was managerial. He keenly understood the bureaucratic roadblocks that made such a task nearly impossible, so he began by decentralizing the execution of rescue and relief efforts by ceding power to local Red Cross chapters. This not only sped reaction time and saved money, but in the case of scandal, “would put responsibility squarely on the local community and not the national organization (1998, 274).”

There would be no lack of scandal.

At the time, tens of thousands of blacks lived in the Delta as tenant farmers. They were generally treated poorly by their white neighbors, but in some areas blacks had become quite successful and integrated into a larger social existence. The flood would destroy this progress.

As the river continued to rise, voluntary work on the levees in some towns transitioned into the compulsory. Whites would drive around towns rounding up blacks, who were then pressed into work gangs (often under threat of death) and forced to work 12 hour shifts while armed white guards patrolled their progress.  Lifting wet sandbags was no easy task–they could weigh up to 80 pounds when wet–but this hardly mattered. Those who struggled were simply introduced to the butt of a rifle, or, worse, shot and thrown over the levee into the angry waters of the Mississippi. Their payment, if they got paid at all, was less than what whites were paid to do for the same work. Oftentimes their efforts were simply credited to their food bills, making it nearly impossible to save enough spare cash to escape the levee camps and start life afresh. And all this to say nothing of the racketeering by whites who charged blacks for supplies that were supposed to have been freely given by the Red Cross.

While tragic, the situation would get worse. There were charges of rape and murder in some levee camps, and as Mississippi waters would recede,

a surge of violence erupted against blacks. In Little Rock, a black man allegedly attacked two girls. He was tied to an automobile and dragged through downtown streets crowded at rush hour, trailed by a dozen cars blowing their horns like celebrants of a football victory. Then he was thrown onto a pyre and incinerated; photographs showed police officers watching (1998, 329).

Elsewhere, mobs burned, lynched, and hung blacks.

Hoover, for all his skill in managing the momentous relief effort, couldn’t restrain nor contain these growing injustices. In order to investigate the abuses (he was essentially forced to do so by a growing national effort of black newspapermen), he created a “Colored Advisory Commission” (CAC) which was tasked with examining the charges of misconduct. Though this commission found rampant abuse in several levee and relief work camps, the reports given to Hoover were tempered by the man chosen to head the CAC, Robert Moton.

Moton was the head of the famed Tuskegee Institute. He was a conciliatory man, appointed to the head of the CAC by Hoover precisely because Hoover’s self-denial couldn’t allow that blacks were being mistreated. Moreover, Moton could be counted on to not rock the boat, and he added a degree of credibility to Hoover’s reports that would silence Hoover’s critics in the papers. But Moton could be hardly blamed–in a tacit exchange for downplaying these abuses, Hoover dangled a carrot in front of him: given the magnitude and scope of the flood, holding destitute black farmers to old debts on land and supplies that no longer existed hardly made sense. There was a chance, Hoover suggested, that these old debts would be wiped away, allowing thousands of blacks to begin afresh–free from a legacy of debt-bondage.

Hoover, however, had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Moton’s services, while valuable, were relatively inconsequential…or so he thought. Hoover was, by now, the Republican presidential nominee, and he hardly worried about the black vote, for

[i]n presidential politics it had always belonged to the Republican nominee. Lincoln had freed the slaves. Democrats had destroyed Reconstruction, enacted the Jim Crow laws, stripped the vote from blacks, opposed antilynching legislation. Only four years before, the Democratic National Convention had voted down a resolution condemning the Klan (1998, 412-13).

Hoover, however, was playing fast and loose. As a lily-white Republican presence burgeoned in the South, he became less concerned about the role of black voters, and would snub a number of leaders in the black community during the lead-up to his election. Though he won handily, the damage, when coupled with Hoover’s role in the tragic abuses of the 1927 flood relief programs (of which he was certainly complicit) and the fortuitous lies told to Moton about assisting the plight of black subsistence farmers (which had now been leaked to black presses), was now complete. Hoover had birthed a deep wedge in the traditional alliance between blacks and Republicans. It was a wedge that would grow to unbelievable proportions.

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It is difficult to understate the damage that Hoover did to the relationship between blacks and the Republican party. At a time when he could have become a national hero, he became a figure of failure, impotent in both his social and economic efforts.

Today, blacks vote solidly Democratic. As the two graphs below demonstrate, both in Presidential voting and in party identification, blacks have eschewed almost all ties to the party of Lincoln in favor of freer, Democratic pastures.

By the time Dr. King was leading Civil Rights marches, the good people willing to take a stand weren’t Republicans but Democrats. And whereas Republicans simply counted on the unquestionable loyalty of blacks after the Civil War–largely denying them integration into their political institutions (I say largely because Theodore Roosevelt at least made a half-hearted attempt to dialogue with blacks as President)–Democrats eventually included and became intimately involved in the plight of blacks, championing a cause that rewarded them with a monolithic base of support.

Statistically, the strength of this relationship is straightforwardly demonstrated by examining feeling thermometer scores (a type of question which asks a respondent to rank how they feel about a person on a 0-100 scale).

The two figures below represent regression outputs from both 1980 and 2008 National Election Studies survey data. The intercept of either equation is simply the feeling thermometer score of how a non-white, non-black independent feels about both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates (each candidate has its own intercept because they represent two separate regressions). To find out how blacks feel towards the Democratic candidate, you add the number found under the Intercept coefficient heading  for the Democratic candidate (b = 47.5)  to the number which corresponds to “black” (b = 17.262). To this number, 64.8, you simply add the mean values of the other control variables (they are not pictured here for brevity’s sake), and you are then left with what the effect of being black–holding all else constant–has on the feeling score of a Democratic candidate. In the case of this example, black individuals feel about 68 points out of 100 towards the Democratic candidate, or, in other words, he or she feels relatively positively disposed towards the candidate. The stars represent levels of statistical significance, and, in both election years, the variable “black” is significant at the .01 level–meaning we can be relatively confident that this relationship is not random or artificial.

By doing some simple math and following the steps that I previously described, I can then find the values for how being black or white affects how each might view candidates in both the 1980 and 2008 elections. Pictured below are these scores:

As you can see, blacks give Democratic candidates massive boosts to their feeling scores, in both elections preferring the Democratic candidate to the Republican by significant margins. But why does this matter?

Simply, such scores are important because they undergird eventual voter decisions at the ballot box. Perceptive preferences, studies show, beget behavior (Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg 1998). And in the case of black voters, it is easy to see how they have so solidly voted Democratically over the last half century. Answering “why” blacks have voted this way is truly beyond this scope of this short article, but in many respects, the history of President Hoover’s actions and the inability of the Republican party to meaningful fold the needs and demands of black voters into the larger Republican base surely have much to do with the lack of black support for Republican candidates. And while the election of Barack Obama was a clear indicator that America is slowly beginning to realize Dr. King’s vision, that one party would engender such lopsided support by a racial group also suggests that our political institutions have not yet accomplished that dream.

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The above post draws much of its historical material from the fantastic book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Additional information above the statistical effects of race and party affiliation will appear in a forthcoming post.

Dijksterhuis, Ap and Ad van Knippenberg 1998. “The Relation between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit.” Journal of Personality  and  Social  Psychology. 74: 865 – 877.

Barry, John. 1998. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Simon and Schuster.

–The American Voter (Campbell et. al 1960, 121) 

While it may seem absurd today, what with a 24 hour news cycle dedicated to bringing you the news in your flavor of reality, the idea that partisanship is the primary driver of  voter attitudes and behavior hasn’t always engendered widespread acceptance.

In fact, in a highly critical response to a ground-breaking 1960′s book titled The American Voter, well-known political scientist V.O. Key rejected the proposition that psychological partisan loyalties were responsible for voter behavior. Famously arguing that “voters are not fools,” Key believed that electoral decisions were instead a function of a highly-rational, “reward-punishment” calculus which drew upon careful retrospective judgments about past economic success (Key 1966, 7). What good was a theoretical framework of voting behavior based on partisan loyalties that dated back to the Civil War era and that was, furthermore, rapidly evolving in a post-Depression world that spawned the Johnson landslide in 1964 and the South’s abandonment of the Democratic party in favor of Republicans (Bartels 2008b, 11)?

Suspicions about the salience of partisanship persisted for another 30 years, with varying explanations building on Key’s original analyses. In a textbook written in the mid-1990′s, two authors asserted that perhaps major parties didn’t resonate with voters as they had in the past, citing evidence which suggested that strong party identifiers had decreased. Some researchers suggested that a general partisan decline was the result of a drift towards candidate-centric politics (beginning with the Johnson campaign of ’64), while others thought that voters were less likely to connect their circumstances to their choice of political affiliation (just plain bizarre).

In a very real sense, however, party affiliation did suffer a marked decline beginning in the early 1960’s and continuing through the mid 1970’s. Because the National Election Studies survey (the most well-known, academic-quality series of election polling in American politics) not only tracks respondents’ party association, but the strength of that preference as well, we are able to examine nuanced party affiliation trends that extend back to 1952. Figure 1 illustrates that strong Republican identifiers began to decline after the 1960 presidential election, while strong Democrat identifiers began to show weakening signs of support after 1964. Although Figure 2 suggests that the number of weak Republican partisans has remained fairly consistent over the course of the last sixty years, weak Democratic support has dropped farily significantly since the 1964 elections. As a consequence of this decline, as illustrated in Figure 3, a great many of these partisan “defectors” apparently became Independents.

According to Fiorina (2002), the era of dealignment pictured above was the direct result of the organizational decline of the parties, facilitated by the implementation of new federal regulations which ensured that public sector jobs were largely removed from party control and that the payoff system for public office was abolished. When combined with the civil rights upheaval, the war in Vietnam, and the further realignment of the traditionally southern Democratic bedrock, the theoretical framework behind The American Voter’s partisan voter seemed to deteriorate at an alarming rate—so much so that even its authors began to hedge on their original analysis of the salience of partisanship on voter behavior (Miller et. al 1976; Bartels 2008b). In place of party loyalties, it was suggested that perhaps issues of public policy, a transition to decidedly candidate-centric elections, or even an increase in the consistency of mass political attitudes had become the new prominent influences on voter behavior (Converse, 1964; Key 1966; Nie, Verba and Petrocik 1976).

There seem to be two plausible responses to these substantial criticisms. First, the idea that voters had developed more consistent attitudes about issues and candidates was shown by Brunk (1978) and Sullivan et al. (1978) to be the result of a structural change in the way public opinion surveys asked and formatted certain questions. As Bartels writes in a detailed history of the study of partisan behavior, the increased issue-coherence found by critics “was probably an artifact of the change in question wording, rather than reflecting a fundamental transformation in the structure of political attitudes (2008b, 14).”

Second, while there was some decline in the level of partisan loyalties during this period, the stability of individual voter partisanship appears to be quite consistent over time when we examine votes cast by respondent party identification. Figures 4 and 5 demonstrate that over the past sixty years, strong Democrats voted for Democratic candidates at an average rate above 80 percent, while strong Republicans voted for Republican candidates well over 90 percent of the time. Weak partisans showed similar average support for their party’s candidates, with weak Democrats voting more than 70 percent of the time for Democratic candidates and weak Republicans voting 85 percent of the time for Republican candidates. Thus, even though the number of partisans may have decreased, partisan adherence to strict own-party voting patterns certainly did not.

If partisans’ voting habits showed little change over time, then what about those of the growing ranks of Independent voters? Were they as open-minded as their new, party-neutral affiliations insinuated? A closer examination of the behavior of this voting bloc suggests they were not. Because the National Election Study survey not only measures the strength of partisan affiliation, but the party-leaning tendencies of Independents as well, we can actually observe how Independent-leaners voted. The groups of Republican and Democratic leaners—who made up, on average, two-thirds of all Independents—were actually more likely to vote in a manner reflective of their partisan predilections than weak party identifiers: Independent Democratic leaners voted for Democrats an average of 77 percent of the time, while Republican leaners voted for Republicans more than 86 percent of the time. Thus, even though the numbers of strong and weak partisans slightly decreased over the course of time, when the behavior of Independent leaners is accounted for, partisan voting hardly seems to have declined. This echoes Keith’s (1992) findings in The Myth of the Independent that any level of partisan identity has an extremely high likelihood to be reflected in vote choice.

———

Bartels, Larry M. 2008b. “The Study of Electoral Behavior.” Jan E. Leighley, ed. The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior. Web manuscript: http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/electoralbehavior.pdf

Brunk, Gregory G. 1978. “The 1964 Attitude Consistency Leap Reconsidered,” Political Methodology. 5: 347-35

Converse, Philip. 1964. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”

Key, V.O. 1966. The Responsible Electorate. Belknap Press.

Fiorina, Morris P. 2002. “Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective.” Political Behavior. 24: 93-115.

Miller, Arthur H., Warren E. Miller, Alden S. Raine, and Thad A. Brown.  1976.  “A Majority Party in Disarray.”  American Political Science Review 70: 753-778

Nie, Norman H., Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik. 1976. The Changing American Voter. Harvard University Press

Sullivan, John L., James E. Piereson, George E. Marcus, and Stanley Feldman. 1979. “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Stability of Mass Belief Systems,” American Journal of Political Science. 23: 176-186.

Dismaying as these sentiments were, however, perhaps a greater sense of alarm has arisen over the loss of centrist politicians as the bulk of “moderate” legislators across America retired (Sen. Evan Bayh, D-IN), took hard-line party stances to survive primary challengers (Sen. John McCain, R-AZ), or were  beaten outright in the general election (Rep. Gene Taylor, D-MS). To hear Texas Democrat Jim Hightower describe the new Congress, “There’s nothing left in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Should Americans be surprised?

Hardly. For years, statisticians Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have been predicting the disappearance of this vaunted middleground and quantifying the polarization that has replaced it. Using a variation of a technique called multidimensional scaling—which allows one to map a set of points relative to how “close” each pair of points is supposed to be—Poole and Rosenthal have mapped the increasing distance between the two parties based on legislator roll call votes. They write that

only two dimensions are required to account for the great bulk of roll call voting. The primary dimension is the basic issue of the role of the government in the economy, in modern terms liberal-moderate-conservative. The second dimension picked up regional differences with the United States — first slavery, then bimetallism, and after 1937, Civil Rights for African-Americans. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Open Housing Act, this second dimension slowly declined in importance and is now almost totally absent. Race related issues – affirmative action, welfare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. – are now questions of redistribution. Voting on race related issues now largely takes place along the liberal-conservative dimension and the old split in the Democratic Party between North and South has largely disappeared. [Thus], voting in Congress is now almost purely one-dimensional – a single dimension accounts for about 93 percent of roll call voting choices in the 110th House and Senate – and the two parties are increasingly polarized. (bolded mine)

The following graph represents this first dimension, as seen in both the House and the Senate. Party polarization spikes during the Civil War years, decreases enormously after Reconstruction, and bottoms out in the years leading up to and during the Great Depression. After a relatively stable, 20-year period throughout the War years, polarization slowly begins to increase again until a rapid upswing occurred in the 1970’s, leading to today’s unprecedented gap.

While the historical reasons for this pattern are incredibly diverse, one curious, concurrent phenomenon—party unity voting—may be useful in partially explaining this volatile picture of party polarization. Indeed, examining the frequency of the two parties to vote in unison against each other (50 percent or more of one party voting against 50 percent or more of the other) reveals a pattern that roughly mirrors the behavior found in the party polarization graph.

The connection between party unity voting and polarization is a reasonable one. The stronger a party’s unity, the more power it wields as a voting block, and, during times of unusually lopsided power distribution, the more likely it will act solely in its own, partisan interests. This behavioral pattern describes both the majority and minority parties: the majority attempts to ramrod its legislation through Congress while the minority obstinately attempts to deny their opponents actions. This utter rejection of bipartisanship, in turn, creates an ultrapartisan envirionment ripe for gridlock.

If that picture sounds familiar, it should. The last two years of the 111th Congressional session were notably plagued with gridlock over stimulus spending and health care reforms as Democrats uniformly pushed their legislation through while Republicans united themselves in an attempt to block it . And if Americans thought that logjam was bad, the next two years don’t hold much more promise.

In fact, returning to Poole and Rosenthal’s work on polarization, one could attempt to forecast a rough vision of the next Congressional cycle’s polarization gap by controlling for the removal of out-going legislators. Although no one knows exactly how the newly-elected Congressmen will act, examining the current group of incumbent legislators can provide a basic, baseline picture of where the gap currently stands.

Predictably, the situation doesn’t look encouraging.

After removing defeated and retiring members, which included statistical moderates Evan Bayh D-IN, Blanche Lincholn D-AR, and George Voinovich R-OH, the polarization gap in the Senate increases from approximately .88 to .897 . In the House, the gap jumps from around .97 to 1.034, the first time polarization breaks the 1.0 barrier.

So, what do these numbers mean? First, this increase in polarity has meant the number of statistical moderates has fallen to around ten percent of members in both Houses. Second, the standard deviation for both parties, that is the distance of a given legislator in relation to the party’s rough ideological mean, decreases—suggesting that the parties are becoming further ideologically homogenized. Third, in light of the incumbents’ incredibly wide polarity gap at the outset of the 112^th Session, and considering that an overwhelming portion of the outgoing legislators in 2010 were replaced by Republicans and Tea Party activists with an ideological ax to grind, the new Congressional environment doesn’t appear to be terribly conducive to bipartisan exchange.

And while it remains to be seen whether or not the newly-strengthened Republican party will, in fact, further aggravate the polarization gap, the data suggests that a steady acceleration will continue. If Poole and Rosenthal are correct, and there are few reasons to think they are not, then the 112^th Congress will experience another significant increase in polarization. After all, as the great novelist Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”