This phrase was common in the South, "I'd Vote for a mangy

Yaller Dog before I would vote for a Republican"

Click on Link for more details on "Yaller Dog" and the term used today "Blue Dog Democrats".

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Dixiecrats and the GOP Why should anyone have been surprised that the senator who led the Republican Party of 2002 paid homage to the States Rights Party of 1948? Those Dixiecrats fatally extolled by Trent Lott at the hundredth birthday celebration of their onetime presidential nominee Strom Thurmond were very much a template for today's Republican Party. Lott's expedient demotion does not change the core affinity between the two parties--a kinship ignored in the year-end controversy over whether the senator from Mississippi is a segregationist.

Sure, segregation (aka "states' rights") was the centerpiece of the Dixiecrats' platform. But the exploitation of race has never been an end in itself.

Then and now, it is an emotional means to a pragmatic political and economic goal: The key objective shared by Republicans and Dixiecrats is a government that's a passive referee overseeing a status quo of unfettered free enterprise rather than a dynamic agent of social progress.

Many seem to have been under the impression that the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt--the Southern bolt from the Democratic Party in protest of Harry Truman's civil rights plank--was some spontaneous redneck uprising of rebel-yelling snuff-dippers.

Actually, it was quite the opposite, a power play carefully orchestrated by the corporate mandarins of the region (or their lawyers), many of whom answered to parent companies in the North.

The racial demagogy they used to achieve the secession was a tried-and-true ploy of those so-called better classes, usually trotted out when the not-so-good classes (poor whites and blacks) were forming an alliance across the color line that threatened the oligarchy of planters and industrialists who had historically ruled the South.

This particular white-supremacist tantrum had been brewing since Franklin Roosevelt created the Committee on Fair Employment Practice in 1941, seeking to end race discrimination in wartime defense industries. Truman was proposing to make the FEPC a permanent agency.

The voting rights act of 1965 which was signed by President Johnson was the final thing that placed the Southern States in the Republican Party. President Johnson knew that the Democrats would loose the Southern States.

The price of passing the Voting Rights Act was to allow Republicans control of the country for decades to come. Thus the GOP Southern Strategy was born as a means to exploit the Southern Vote.

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download THIS Dixiecrat History file

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yellow dog Democrat (yaller dog Democrat)

Sponsored Links In the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century, yellow dog Democrats were voters in the U.S. Southern states who consistently voted for Democratic candidates because of lingering resentment against Republicans from the Civil War and Reconstruction periods.

The term arose from the notion that a Southerner would vote for a yellow dog before voting for a Republican. Etymology Historically, the term is correctly “yaller dog” and refers to the primitive canine native to the South Carolina woodlands and swamplands, now known as the Carolina Dog breed, which has a coat that is predominately a yellowish color. (1848). Many pronunciations of the American South are inherited from older forms of English, rather than indicators of ignorance as often characterized today.

History and usage

The first known usage to date of “yaller dog” in relation to Democrats occurred in the 1900 Kentucky gubernatorial contest which turned into quite a dogfight. Irvin S. Cobb wrote a first hand account in his book Exit Laughing, published in 1941, now in Canadian public domain and authorized for academic and non-profit use. It details the saga of the Kentucky Governor William Goebel, who killed a man, exploited the split Democratic Party in Kentucky, and was assassinated in 1900, barely living long enough to take the oath of office.

Politically we can see the South coming full circle as moderates pull away from the GOP. The only thing the GOP had to offer the South was Segregation. It is an irony that the party of Lincoln would turn out to be the racist party.

The Democrat Party has become the standard of realistic conservatism and human rights.

The GOP pursues a course of corporatism that borders on Fascism and reckless abandon for being fiscally irresponsible.

(The real goal of the GOP is to transfer the wealth of our nation to less than 1% of the country.)

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New Southern Movement Blue Dog Democrats are a group of 47 moderate and conservative Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives.

[1] The Blue Dogs are a coalition seeking to promote what they see as fiscally responsible budget reforms and accountability for taxpayer dollars.

Many members come from conservative districts, where liberal Democrats comprise a decided minority. In 2006, Blue Dog candidates such as Heath Shuler and Brad Ellsworth were elected in conservative-leaning districts, ending years of Republican dominance in these districts.

Blue Dog Democrat