1933 Confederate States Presidential Election (Brothers No More)

Confederate States presidential election, 1933
All 363 electoral votes of the Electoral College; 182 electoral votes needed to win
	Electoral College results
President before election; Cordell Hull; Southern	Elected President ; Joseph Taylor Robinson; Southern

The Confederate States Presidential Election of 1933, the 13th CS presidential election, took place on November 7, 1933. Joseph Taylor Robinson of the Southern Party won a four-way race against disjointed opposition, most notably the fascist Robert Rice Reynolds, to become the 15th President of the Confederate States.

Background[]

This election took place at a point of transition in Confederate politics. The traditional political order had completely broken down, with the two-party balance of the Southern and Confederate parties being shattered as the Southern Party dominated the polls and the Confederate Party lost almost all of their support due to their role in losing World War I and abolishing slavery. The void the Confederates left in the CS political structure was largely filled by the New Dixie Party, the political arm of the fascist and white supremacist White Cross League. Awful economic conditions caused by the Great Depression and skyrocketing rates of racial violence combined to make the rise of such an extremist party possible, as the very core of Confederate society seemed to be destabilizing. Lynchings and bloody race riots were widespread, often worsened by the presence of the White Cross League's military arm, the White Shirts. The Southern Party was largely unable to mitigate these issues and President Cordell Hull became very unpopular. However, this loss of support for the Southern Party did not do much to bolster the prospects of the Confederate Party, as the populace still blamed them for the loss of slavery, which many saw as the beginning of the downward trend for the Confederacy. The fascists took support, then, from both the populist and racist Southern Party and the militarist and conservative Confederate Party, combining these platform planks to make a party that seemed quite attractive for the average Confederate citizen.

Another debate that raged in the time between this election and the last related to the admission of Missouri and Kentucky as equal states of the CSA. Missouri and Kentucky had been annexed from the United States in the aftermath of their revolution, and Confederate politicians became split on the question of how fully integrated they should be. The states had spent over six decades separated from the rest of the Southern states and, while they still shared some things in common with the rest of Southern culture, they had grown apart in many respects. For one, slavery had been abolished in Missouri and Kentucky 60 years ago while the rest of the South was still reeling from its abolition in 1923. Blacks and women had been allowed to vote in Missouri and Kentucky while they were in the US, but neither of those groups were allowed to vote in the Confederacy. On top of it all, Missouri and Kentucky had just been involved in a war against the Confederacy a decade earlier, and many citizens and politicians there had long been conditioned to view the CSA with suspicion and their "backwards" way of life with derision. All of these factors, and more, combined to make the integration of these two states into the Confederacy anything but seamless.

In a show of unity, Confederate politicians made it a goal of theirs to amend the Constitution in order to elevate citizens of Missouri and Kentucky to full natural born citizen status, thus allowing them to run for president among other things. This resulted in the passage of the 5th Amendment to the Confederate States Constitution, which accomplished that goal and also gave Congress the authority to designate individuals or groups of people as eligible to the presidency, with some restrictions. Another amendment was sent to the states at the same time, that being a proposition to make women's suffrage legal nationwide. This amendment was ratified by 8 states, falling 3 states short of the threshold needed for adoption into the Constitution.

As soon as they were admitted as states to the Confederacy, Missourian and Kentuckian politicians who had been part of the US political system had to adapt to the differences of the Confederate system. Not willing to integrate easily to the Confederate way of thinking, a new party was immediately formed by influential politicians in these states: the American Unity Party. This party claimed to represent the interests of Missouri and Kentucky while also striving to work toward a fruitful union with the Confederacy that would allow the two states to keep their traditional institutions. They also strived to work towards peace with the other American nations of the USCA and the WSA, not wanting to see another destructive war grace their homes.

American Unity Party Nomination[]

The American Unity National Convention was held from July 3-6 in St. Louis. They affirmed their platform of states' rights and isolationism while easily nominating one of their most well-known leaders, Alben W. Barkley, for president. William L. Nelson, a representative from Missouri, was chosen as Barkley's running mate.

Confederate Party Nomination[]

The Confederate National Convention, the last in the party's history, was held from June 27-July 1 in Memphis. With very few members left serving in the federal government, and increasingly fewer being elected in local state governments, there weren't very many options for a high-visibility presidential candidate. Supreme Court Justice Walter F. George, who had been nominated to the court by the last Confederate Party president, Richmond P. Hobson, won the presidential nomination as one of the last remaining officials from the party in the government. John Nance Garner, the party's presidential candidate in 1921, was nominated for vice president.

New Dixie Party Nomination[]

The New Dixie National Convention was held from July 20-23 in Birmingham. It was a raucous affair, with fanatical supporters of the White Cross League gathering from all around the country to show their support for the party and its policies. With so many White Shirts in one place, racial violence unfortunately plagued the city of Birmingham for the duration of the convention and for days after, with some estimates saying that over 150 African-Americans were killed, with almost none of the murders ever being officially investigated. Party leader Joe McWilliams gave a long and passionate speech before introducing the party's nominee for president, Robert Rice Reynolds, who was received with loud cheers. Army veteran and political author Lawrence Dennis from Georgia was chosen for vice president.

Southern Party Nomination[]

The Southern National Convention was held from June 15-20 in Atlanta. Like in 1927, the convention was crowded with candidates, all seeing a probable easy victory ahead if they could just win the presidential nomination. Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson, who had been the runner up at the previous national convention, had spent the last six years engineering support for a presidential run in 1933. He entered the event as the frontrunner and this time was able to emerge victorious. Perhaps more intriguing was the vice presidential nomination. Party leaders were inclined to give the position to the rising senator Huey Long. Long was completely opposed to the political establishment and his unorthodox methods and opinions made him unpopular among his colleagues in the senate. This is exactly why he was nominated for vice president- party elites wanted him gone from the senate and locked away in a position where he could not drive real change. Robinson himself was opposed to this, as he had come into conflict with Long before and preferred a more conventional running mate. Delegates followed the party will, however, making Long the nominee. Long considered declining the nomination, allowing him to continue his duties in the senate, but he ultimately could not pass up on the opportunity of being second-in-line for the presidency and also adding legitimacy to a planned run for president in 1939.

The Campaign[]

Despite being mostly uncompetitive, with Robinson retaining a firm lead for all of the campaign season, this campaign was one of the most vitriolic, chaotic, and violent presidential campaigns in Confederate history. White Shirt agitators drove most of this. Although their activities were nominally illegal, police in many areas ignored this and allowed them to operate freely, either because they were genuine supporters or because they were intimidated by the group's violent mobs. Reynolds, in tandem with this, ran an energetic and hateful campaign, speaking in cities around the country, and sometimes even in multiple states a day. He aimed to rouse racial tensions by blaming most of the country's problems on free Blacks as well as the corrupt political elite. Many of his rallies ended in violence as he fired the crowd up, not-so-subtly urging them to go out and commit violence against any minority they saw. Other rallies were broken up by authorities after getting generally out of hand, but this was more rare as most local law enforcement simply chose to stay out of it.

Robinson, partially not realizing the full extent of the fascists' popularity and partially not wanting to give them more publicity, largely ignored the White Shirts and Reynolds' campaign, instead focusing on his own policy promises. Long backed him up, giving charismatic and energetic speeches almost as frequently as Reynolds. Long had proven effective at suppressing fascist agitation while he was Governor of Louisiana (his critics alleged that this was because he was a pseudo-fascist himself), and so sometimes the campaign put him on "Reynolds duty", where he would follow Reynolds around the country and calm tensions in cities the White Shirts had recently terrorized. Long characteristically ignored most of his party's platform, instead speaking mostly about his own beliefs and sometimes even directly criticizing his presidential running mate, as well as the incumbent President Hull. This annoyed and sometimes even infuriated Robinson, but Long's effectiveness at capturing crowds and leading them away from fascist influence compelled him and another party leaders to continue to allow the Kingfish free reign in his speeches. By the end of the campaign, political commentators had made note of Long's vigorous speaking schedule as compared to Robinson, who barely hit the road out of fears of political violence. Some began to sarcastically refer to the ticket as the "Long Campaign" instead of the "Robinson Campaign" because of this.

Barkley and the American Unity Party were well aware that their influence mostly ended at Missouri and Kentucky's borders. Despite this, they still tried to attract votes from elsewhere by emphasizing their messages of unity and states' rights. On the other side of things, the other three campaigns barely targeted Missouri and Kentucky. Fascist influence was low there, as the states lacked the extreme racial attitude and patriotic nationalism of the rest of the South. The Confederate Party was also rejected in the two states as the initiators and leaders of the destructive World War I. The Southern Party was somewhat popular, due to their progressivism and populism, but even their racial undertones were too much for most Missourians and Kentuckians.

The Confederate Party campaign as a whole was largely lost beneath the headlines as the press focused on the White Cross League and the Robinson/Long campaign. Justice George simply found it hard to get noticed, even in the former Confederate stronghold of Virginia, where the party had dominated politics for 60 years. The party found the most success when it presented itself as the stable alternative to the racial demagogy of the fascists and the rabid populism of the Southern Party, but even that strategy wasn't enough to get them truly in the race.

Results and Aftermath[]

As predicted, Robinson won the race handily. What was surprising was the level of support the Reynolds campaign was able to gather, as he came in second place with over 25% of the vote. Those in the political elite had previously estimated fascist support to be at no more than 15% of the Confederate populace, if even that, so that result was truly startling and provided the wake up call many needed to start to fight the movement in earnest. Robinson won a strangely low percentage of the popular vote when considering his domination in the electoral college, but that number is a bit misleading as it counts the new voters from Missouri and Kentucky. Excluding those two states, Robinson and Long won 58.5% of the popular vote, though this was still down from the last election's total of 64.3%.

Barkley won Missouri and Kentucky but barely made a dent elsewhere. He was able to scoop some votes out of northern and eastern Tennessee, but that was the extent of his impact in the Old Confederacy. Still, this result netted him 59 electoral votes, good for second place and also the most for any non-Southern Party candidate since 1915.

The Confederate Party underperformed even their humble internal predictions. This sounded the final alarms of panic for party leadership as they began to realize that perhaps their ship wasn't salvageable. Over the next three years, the few remaining federal officeholders from the party all bolted to the Southern Party in order to build a united front against the still-rising White Cross League. Left without support in the government or among the people, the Confederate Party disbanded for good in 1936, 56 years after their founding.

As president, Robinson did his best to fight the economic and political crisis, instituting tougher policies against the fascists than his predecessor did. Vice President Long, meanwhile, fumed on the sidelines, constantly expressing his belief that the president was not doing nearly enough either to end the Great Depression or fight the White Cross League. This rift in the administration was present nearly from the beginning and never healed, with Robinson saying many times that he would fire Long in an instant if he could. Unable to do much through direct action, the vice president instead spoke around the country, gathering support for his policies. He also pushed the powers of the office to the limit, presiding over the Senate often in an attempt to steer legislation in the way he saw fit. In 1937, the immense stress of the situation caused President Robinson to die of a heart attack, thrusting Long into power much to the horror of the old political establishment. President Long, however, quickly won supporters in the government as he aggressively fought back against the fascists, finally putting an end to their rapid rise in popularity. His popularity among the common people led his party to fall in line behind him, passing radical legislation that completely restructured the economy of the Confederacy and finally began to dig the country out of its economic hole. Long also leveraged his popular support to successfully call for another constitutional convention, which led to the passage of the 6th Amendment, allowing vice presidents that rose to the office of president to run for reelection if they had served less than half of their predecessor's term. This allowed Long to run for election in his own right in 1939.