Brown and White: Accounts of Southern Moderate Politicians in the Shadow of Civil Rights

ABSTRACT

How do politicians sustain their reputations with audiences whose expectations cannot be satisfied? This tension is acute for legislators seeking to bridge divided local and national discursive arenas, requiring strategic communication when policy outcomes contradict prevailing local community values. To examine this dilemma, we expand a theory of accounts, extending it from interpersonal settings to the multi‐audience dynamics of institutional politics. Analyzing archival correspondence, speeches, and public statements from four moderate Southern politicians—Albert Gore Sr, Estes Kefauver, Lister Hill, and J. William Fulbright—in the decade after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, we identify a repertoire of accounts organized along two dimensions: audience (speaking to and for the South) and temporal frame (past‐ versus present‐focused). Speaking for the South, senators deployed excuses, invoking historical tradition and the necessity of gradual attitude change. Speaking to the South, they deployed justifications, appealing to institutional legitimacy and the benefits of national influence. By reinterpreting Southern moderation as a form of alignment work, we demonstrate that moderation is a historically specific communicative accomplishment with an underlying logic. Moderation is not merely an averaging of value differences, but an ideological formation that combines defense of rejected values with a commitment to institutional loyalty.