Could the Confederacy rise again in the 20th century?

It was only because of the Cold War. No Cold War, no more reason for self-restraint.

And after President Adalai Stevenson scuttles the Suez Plan citing the Monroe Doctrine, it won't just be Apartheid South Africa (Holding or, through DeBeers controling a majority of the world's precious metals and stones mining and cutting trade) and Francoist Spain that supports this new Confederacy.

Nope. American sentiment was strong in the South with or without the Russkis. You might get more disorder and local resistance/white civil disobedience than OTL. But you are also likely to just get a slower roll-out of civil rights, if that's a big problem.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
It was only because of the Cold War. No Cold War, no more reason for self-restraint.

And after President Adalai Stevenson scuttles the Suez Plan citing the Monroe Doctrine, it won't just be Apartheid South Africa (Holding or, through DeBeers controling a majority of the world's precious metals and stones mining and cutting trade) and Francoist Spain that supports this new Confederacy.
I have no idea what TL you live in, but it is clearly one where the patriotism of entire generations of Southerners and Appalachians --around 55% of who were dragged into this war they did not want by a clutch of mad, imperialistic, feudal-minded planters exploiting regional over national loyalties--is dismissed as incredibly suspect, well 90 years past the war itself. I suppose we ought also to dismiss the 1/4 of all Union troops who came from states which had seceded from the Union, and the bloody Unionist sacrifices to fight for their country and home and rights and against the treacherous slavers in Confederate "territory." Virginia lost it's entire western portion over this, and southern Appalachia was a bloodbath of CS forces trying to conquer Unionist loyalist rebels.

I find this attitude rather chauvinistic, but you are entitled to your belief that Southerners and many Appalachians are nothing but rebels-in-waiting.
 
I have no idea what TL you live in, but it is clearly one where the patriotism of entire generations of Southerners and Appalachians --around 55% of who were dragged into this war they did not want by a clutch of mad, imperialistic, feudal-minded planters exploiting regional over national loyalties--is dismissed as incredibly suspect, well 90 years past the war itself. I suppose we ought also to dismiss the 1/4 of all Union troops who came from states which had seceded from the Union, and the bloody Unionist sacrifices to fight for their country and home and rights and against the treacherous slavers in Confederate "territory." Virginia lost it's entire western portion over this, and southern Appalachia was a bloodbath of CS forces trying to conquer Unionist loyalist rebels.

I find this attitude rather chauvinistic, but you are entitled to your belief that Southerners and many Appalachians are nothing but rebels-in-waiting.

He's entitled to it, but he's not entitled to have anyone tke it seriously.
 
I find this attitude rather chauvinistic, but you are entitled to your belief that Southerners and many Appalachians are nothing but rebels-in-waiting.

Oh no, that window closed in 1968, with the election of Richard Nixon and his "Southern Strategy," and the slow-but sure takeover of the Republican party by ex-Dixiecrats and their spiritual decendants. But if the RNC of the time had been actually been sincere, they would have pulled out all the stops on Goldwater's candiacy in 1964 like they actually believed it, perhaps even tried to recruit George Wallace or Asa Earl Carter as his running mate.

Furthurmore, had such a Civil War II happened, one of the changes to the Post-war US Map would have been a new state in the Union between Tennessee and North Carolina. Or maybe not; coal mining was negligible in the 1850s and 60s compared to 100 years later, and there was more than a little animosity for "Yankee" mine operators. I do not downplay the role the Mountains had in putting down the Confederacy. But it's pretty hard to resent formerly rich planters dead at least two generations whose descendants were now sharecroppers for their own survival, and much easier to resent Mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and California based agribusiness conglmerates. Okay, there were Oilmen in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, but aside from Ashland, Ky, they stayed out of the hills and oil was cheap at the time.

Much of what kept the New South knuckeled under was the concept of "Progress" and how slave labor retarded economics and technology. This is and was pure hogwash. In the 1850s, the state with the highest installed horespower may have been Pennsylvania, but second place, by only 15%, went to Louisiana, which had much more installed per-capita, especially counting the slaves. With the appropriate faculty additions at Southern Millitary and Land Grant academies, that myth could have been exploded (at least south of the Mason-Dixon line) forty years or more early.

I could go on, but I'm starting on the sixth draft of an AH novel about the premise.
 
Are there any realistic means by which the southern states rebel against the national government in the time from 1900 to 1999? I thought of the Little Rock incident in 1957 might be plausible. I'm not asking whether the South would actually win, but if it is possible that they would try to recreate the CSA?

No. To begin with, the Upper South (NC, TN, VA), which was reluctant about secession in 1860, is about 40% Republican by 1900. Tennessee even elected a Republican governor in 1910, 1912, and 1920.

Second, the Federal government didn't do anything about black civil rights between 1900 and 1950, so white Southerners had no incentive to attempt secession or any other kind of rebellion then.

By 1950, Florida and Texas had become demographically diversified (especially Florida, with migration from other regions and immigration from abroad), and the new residents were not fanatic white supremacists.

To a lot of Southern states would never participate in any such movement.

The remaining Deep South states and Arkansas were still "Solid Southern", so to speak. But even there, the white supremacist tradition had been nibbled away. Lynching had practically disappeared by 1950, for instance.

But most importantly - the secession crisis of 1860 reached the critical level because a lot of white Southerners lived among slaves that outnumbered them, and were in terror of slave insurrection. Those Southerners believed that a Republican President was an "existential threat" requiring the drastic remedy of secession.

The overthrow of the Jim Crow regime in the 1950s and 1960s was painful, but not scary.

However - one possible scenario (very loose and tentative):

Zangara aims better and kills FDR before he can take office. Cactus Jack Garner hasn't a clue about checking the economic collapse, much less restoring confidence. Food riots break out in late 1933. Somehow this leads to radical takeovers in many areas and in Washington by 1936; rival revolutionists control other areas in uneasy cooperation. The U.S. is de facto balkanized. The People's Technocratic Republic announces a radical program which includes mandatory atheism and forcible racial integration. That's too much for the South, which breaks away.

(I'd like to find some mechanism for secession that would be based on immigration. In 1860, "the South" was the area where there was slavery.

In 1910, the South was the area where there were no immigrants.)
 
I buy this story until you get to "People's Technocratic Republic" and mandatory atheism. Maybe the US can largely adopt Technocratic ideals, but not incorporate them into their name. And Americans like religious freedom too much to implement mandatory atheism.
I think you're right that changes during the Great Depression could really tick off the southerners.
 
Absolutely impossible by the mid 20th century; virtually unlikely before that.

To have anything like the ACW happen again, you would need to see the virtually complete alienation of southern elected leadership and the defection of a significant proportion of the US military leadership to the Southern cause. The first is highly unlikely, given the powerful role that Southern democrats played in US throughout the early and mid 20th century - particularly in obtaining porkbarrel projects for their states, and the latter is completely impossible. By 1940-50 there is no chance senior military leaders from southern states would do like R.E. Lee did in 1860 and decide their first loyalty was to their states.

1960 is not 1860. By the mid 20th century the country as awhole was far too homogenized, the southern states had too much stake in what the federal government could do for them, and virulent racists (the kind that would actually put their attitudes into action by rebellion over desegregation) were a very small minority of white southerners. At the very most you might see some sort of renewed KKK-like terrorist group try to cause serious unrest in a few locations, but this would be disavowed by the vast majority of elected officials - even ones who were themselves racist.
 
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