Your challenge, is to make the Socialist Party (now major thanks to McKinley living and butterflies from there...) have the South as a bastion of Socialism, like the Dems and Reps had at sometime in the 20th Century.
Your challenge, is to make the Socialist Party (now major thanks to McKinley living and butterflies from there...) have the South as a bastion of Socialism, like the Dems and Reps had at sometime in the 20th Century.
Figure out how to build a majority coalition of poor whites and African-Americans and the Socialists will own the South. It wouldn't be easy to do at any point in the 20th century but the Socialists would be the party with the best shot at building such a coalition.
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.
They would need to fell a lot of jungles and constantly replenish the areas with slaves. Unless they take the route of Dutch and British Guiana and bring in Indians and Indonesians.
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.
I think the bigger problems facing southern Socialism is a combination of racial attitudes (which divides the obvious base for a Socialist push) and the system Southern elites had in place for quashing any hint of dissent or resistance via extralegal means. The problem strikes me as less an issue of economic systems and more of the local social obstacles.
Speaking culturally and economically if agrarian socialism or Christian socialism gained sufficient acceptance in the South among the poor whites and the blacks either could serve as the bedrock for a Solid Socialist South. Those ideologies gel much more closely with the circumstances in the South and similar ideas have taken hold in largely rural areas before. When you get down to it as much as socialism is anti-capitalist in nature that is within the context of resisting economic elitism. It wouldn't be hard to apply the same slogans aimed at New York bankers to the great lords of cotton. I could see a mix of agrarian and Christian socialism taking off in the South provided, again, you can bridge the black-white divide. Historically speaking that has always been THE biggest obstacle to any kind of radical or progressive social movement in the South.
Speaking more broadly if you have a Christian agrarian socialist South as the "Solid South" of the Socialist Party how would the SPUSA look as a whole if they have to depend on the South's support to be viable? Would Southern success isolate the SPUSA to that region or be the main pillar of a powerful, competitive Socialist Party?
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.
Figure out how to build a majority coalition of poor whites and African-Americans and the Socialists will own the South. It wouldn't be easy to do at any point in the 20th century but the Socialists would be the party with the best shot at building such a coalition.