The Other Great Migration: Southern Whites and the New Right

Abstract

This paper shows how the migration of millions of Southern whites in the 20th century shaped the cultural and political landscape across America. Racially and religiously conservative, Southern white migrants created new electoral possibilities for a broad-based coalition with economic conservatives. With their considerable geographic scope, these migrants hastened partisan realignment and helped to catalyze and bolster a New Right movement with national influence over the long run. More than just augmenting the conservative voter base outside the South, they influenced non-Southerners by building evangelical churches, diffusing right-wing media, and mixing through intermarriage and residential integration. Tracking non-Southern households, we show that exposure to Southern white neighbors increased adoption of conservative religious norms. Overall, our findings suggest that this mass migration blurred the North–South cultural divide and reshaped the geography of conservatism in the U.S.

Using Digitized Newspapers to Address Measurement Error in Historical Data

“…28 Our approach is particularly suited for measures that can be easily generated or extracted using textual data. Simple n-gram or bag-ofwords approaches, as in Beach, Clay, and Saavedra (2022), Ferrara and Fishback (2023), Albright et al (2021), Beach and Hanlon (2023), Bazzi et al (2023), or Ottinger and Winkler (2022), are particularly promising. Anything that can be measured or extracted with a single search word or a combination of a few words lends itself to this approach and the generation of newspaper-based data.…”

“…We also contribute to a recent literature that uses digitized newspapers to generate novel data for research in economic history. This includes measures of media competition and partisan influence (Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2014;Gentzkow et al 2015), racial and anti-group sentiment (Ferrara and Fishback 2023;Ottinger and Winkler 2022;Bazzi et al 2023), the spread of news relating to racial violence (Albright et al 2021;Calderon, Fouka, and Tabellini 2023), technology diffusion (Feigenbaum and Gross 2022), the 1918 influenza (Beach, Clay, and Saavedra 2022), fertility restrictions (Beach and Hanlon 2023), advertisements for the movie "Birth of a Nation" (Esposito et al 2023;Ang 2023), the price and types of available cotton seeds (Rhode 2021), among others.…”

Black Empowerment and White Mobilization: The Effects of the Voting Rights Act

“…8 Bazzi et al (2023) document that the migration of southern racially conservative whites caused the political and ideological realignment of the U.S. North.…”

“…Recent work byBazzi et al (2023) shows that the 1900-1940 migration of southern born whites favored the spread of right-wing and racially conservative ideology outside the U.S. South.45 Data on county characteristics by race was digitized from the 1960 Census of Population. While information on white characteristics is not reported in the 1960 Census, we computed them as the difference between total characteristics and Black characteristics (the latter are reported for counties with at least 1,000 non-white individuals in 1960).…”