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against civil rights and free elections were explicitly racist. “We will never surrender our government to an inferior race,” argued (Appalachian) Georgia representative Allen Candler, who was later elected governor. “We wrested our State government from negro supremacy when the Federal drum-beat rolled closer to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free Government.” In solid Borderlander tradition, Representative William Breckinridge of Kentucky likened the Force Bill to those “passed by an English Parliament for Irish constituencies and defended on precisely the same grounds.” Rarely mentioned was the fact that so long as blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised, the oligarchs would retain power in the Deep South and Tidewater. Even as the Force Bill was being debated, Dixie governments were imposing new poll taxes and other measures to suppress democratic participation. In Mississippi voter participation fell from 70 percent in 1877 to less than 10 percent in 1920. “The results were everywhere the same,” historian Richard Franklin Bensel found. “Almost all blacks and most poor whites were disfranchised and the plantation elite achieved hegemonic control over the region.” 5
    Dixie’s effect on federal politics was minimal, however. In the early twentieth century the coalition secured the White House only once, when Teddy Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party, split the Northern alliance vote, and gave the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, as we’ve already seen, was a committed segregationist who persecuted dissenters during World War I. But he was also an Appalachian Southerner, born in Staunton, Virginia, to a Borderlander family of mixed Scots-Irish, Scots, and north English origin. In accord with national stereotype, he combined racism and intolerance of dissent with attempts to curb corporate power: namely, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, and programs to channel credit and innovations to small farmers of the sort who dominated his home region. The oligarchs of the Deep South had not yet had their day.
    The dynamic changed in the 1960s, when Democrats JFK and LBJ backed up civil rights activists against extralegal resistance in Dixie. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson told an aide hours after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. Indeed, much of the Dixie coalition promptly abandoned the Democratic Party and the populist Appalachian president who’d dared betray the caste system. In 1968 their presidential nominee was the radical Deep Southern racist George Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on a promise to demonstrate that “there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.” They might have backed him in 1972 as well had he not been shot and paralyzed by a deranged fame seeker while campaigning in Midland Maryland. They rallied instead to a new cohort of Dixie-style Republicans from El Norte’s Anglo minority—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—who succeeded in overthrowing the Northern alliance’s control of the GOP. 6
    Since the mid-1960s these three nations have always endorsed the more conservative presidential candidates, except when faced with a choice between a Dixie Southern Baptist and a more conservative Yankee. They all endorsed McCain over Obama, George W. Bush over Kerry, George H. W. Bush over Dukakis, Reagan over Mondale, Nixon over McGovern, and Nixon and Wallace over Humphrey in 1968. Defections came when the more liberal candidate was from the Dixie bloc: Appalachia and the Deep South went for Carter (a Georgian Baptist) over Ford (raised in Yankee Michigan) in 1976, while Tidewater split; Appalachia and the Deep South chose Arkansas Borderlander Bill Clinton in 1992 while Tidewater went for more conservative (but