Electoral Instability, Civil Disorder, and Relief Rises: A Reply to Albritton

In Regulating the Poor, we argued that the welfare explosion of the 1960s had its roots in the problems created for the national political system, particularly for the national Democratic party, by economic and demographic changes. Agricultural modernization in the South, followed by mass migration, eventually generated a rising tide of mass volatility, both at the polls and in the streets, which in turn destabilized the regional coalition of the national Democratic party. In the 1960s, the party's response was to cope with these instabilities with a series of measures, ranging from civil rights legislation to urban service programs; one consequence of the urban service programs was to help set off the welfare explosion at the local level. In our analytical scheme, the relationship between mass volatility and the welfare explosion was indirect; it was mediated by complex national electoral conditions. Given the main elements of this analysis, the proper relationships for testing are apparent. One set of relationships is between unstable voting patterns and mass protest, on the one hand, and the national Democratic party's "New Frontier" and "Great Society" legislative and administrative initiatives, on the other. Another set of relationships is between these policy responses and the rising welfare rolls. In short, did mass volatility help explain a series of national policy initiatives that in turn contributed significantly to the subsequent rise in the welfare rolls? Albritton short-circuited these indirect relationships, and proceeded as if we had said black crime and rioting alone led directly to welfare rises, locality by locality. If we had thought the matter so simple, we would not have troubled to make a detailed analysis of the complex interaction among economic and demographic change, mass volatility, and national legislative responses, and then between national legislative responses and the subsequent local welfare rises. Only by tossing aside our entire analysis of national electoral politics could Albritton treat "mass volatility" as equivalent to crime and rioting among blacks. In fact, we included voting instabilities in that term, and we gave voting instabilities great weight. Agricultural modernization drove southern rural blacks northward to the urban strongholds of the national Democratic party, with the consequence that a civil rights bloc formed in the northern wing of the party. The South responded with outrage and voting defections. The resulting regional fissure was first visible in the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, and it worsened in the elections of 1952, 1956 and 1960 (it also worsened because industrial modernization in the South was thrusting up a new middle class whose political sympathies tilted toward the Republican party). The volatility in black voting patterns which then appeared in the election of 1956, and to a lesser extent in 1960, compounded these problems. Perhaps the national Democratic party could survive defections among southern whites, or among blacks, but it could not survive defections among both. Civil disorder, welling up in the context of electoral instability, aggravated the national Democratic party's problems all the more. Nor was civil disorder limited to crime and rioting, or just to one contending racial group. Blacks mounted organized protests, exemplified in the southern civil rights movement and the northern welfare rights movement. Southern whites also rose up in protest, ranging from the emergence in the mid-1950s of a movement of "massive resistance" led by the political leaders of the South, to the southern white mob and police violence that erupted at the same time and persisted for ten years. These various expressions of mass volatility were treated as interactive in our analysis; discontent first took form in the voting booths, and then in the streets, but each manifestation