Declaration of dependence: Popular politics in North Carolina from Reconstruction to the New Deal

In thousands of letters and petitions, North Carolinians between Reconstruction and the New Deal made claims upon political leaders not as rights-bearing citizens but as dependent subjects. By studying those appeals, the rituals of politics, and the efforts of elites to create a reformed, citizenship-based political discourse, this dissertation argues the United States became a liberal democracy without its citizens becoming liberal democrats. Drawing upon petitions, letters to politicians, testimony from contested elections, oral histories, newspaper reports, and published fiction, it argues that many North Carolinians---white and African-American, male and female---imagined relationships of fictive dependence upon distant patrons. By petitioning government for patronly favors, not bureaucratic programs, they reinvigorated and refashioned customary ideas about the rights of the weak and their expectations of government assistance. Political leaders, confronting their audiences\u27 fantastic hopes at campaign canvasses, in turn remade themselves and their rhetoric to fit their constituents\u27 demands. Rather than emphasizing critiques of American politics that originate within liberal citizenship and that describe the government\u27s failure to live up to its own promises, this study traces a critique rooted in the rights of subjects. By tracing the endurance and creative reformulation of these arguments through emancipation, Redemption, Gilded Age reform, Populism, White Supremacy Progressivism, Prohibition, and the early New Deal, this dissertation undermines some scholarly assumptions about the political roots of those movements. For example, Populism emerges less as a rational program and more as a partly magical approach to politics, rooted in fantasies about the gift of money promised in rhetoric about silver. Modern white supremacy similarly takes on magical qualities as orators proclaim the fantastic gifts associated with white skin. Other sections describe the role of fantasies and a muscular subjecthood in shaping political responses to reform, prohibition, and emancipation. Like political outsiders across the globe, Americans responded to the innovative languages of liberal citizenship with confusion, skepticism, and, at times, resistance