ut the South, the political balance was ripe for change. The 1948 election was rightly viewed as a watershed that heralded the end of the peculiar brand of American colonialism that had prevailed in the region since the Civil War. Though traces of the traditional hierarchy remain today, and racial discrimination has hardly disppeared for good, the solid South of legend has been replaced by a region whose political and social responses may be traced to a variety of local influences.
As William C. Havard put it in the introduction to his volume on the South in 1972, in the midst of some of the greatest of these changes, the South had already begun to reap the harvest of the ending of its state of "semiquarantine from the remainder of the country" that had lasted from the end of Reconstruction to 1929. As Havard notes, in addition to feeding on dreams of past glory and nurturing the culture of segregation, this isolation had had the effect of retarding urbanism and preserving a rural and agrarian culture past its point of viability. Mechanization of South
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