My family, the Southern Belle I married, most of her family, and myself are Yellow Dog Democrats. We are Southerners who would vote for a yellow dog before we would vote for a Republican. A rarity in the modern South. The term yellow dog is meant as an unpleasantry. But the science shows that the term may indeed be flattery. Yellow dogs, the animal, may represent the penultimate Southerners.
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, famously said
“A fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has Gen. Jackson’s popularity been to you [Democrats]. You not only twice made President of him out of it, but you have had enough of the stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.”
The term became particularly strong in usage in the 1928 presidential election when despite being a Northerner, governor of New York, and Catholic, Al Smith was overwhelming elected onto the Democratic ticket by Southerners who were not even fans of Smith’s politics. In Alabama this upset Democratic Senator Tom Helfin who crossed party lines and supported Republican Herbert Hoover. This led many Alabama Democrats to retort with the now popular line about yellow dogs.
And that term “yellow dog”? The term stems from the only native dog to the South, the Carolina Dog, a sort of American Dingo with a yellow coat. Carolina dogs were only discovered in the 70’s living amongst the beautiful stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps of the Southeast. Lehr Brisbin Jr., a scientist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Lab, was the first to recognize the uniqueness of the breed when supposed “strays” were roaming around the lab. A particular dog, a stray white dog with brown markings named Horace by lab members, caught Lehr’s attention. Escaped dogs, European breeds or some mix thereof, roaming wild are common. But Carolina Dogs are whole ‘nother critter. Lehr was struck by the similarity of these dogs and others he found at a local pound the Australian dingo and South Asian pariah dogs.
Later genetic evidence indicated that the Carolina Dogs, are most closely related to dogs from Asia, suggesting their migration did not originate from Europe like most other breeds. Carolina Dogs possess a unique string of DNA, a haplotype A184, which most closely related to the genes from dogs in East Asia. One of the individuals of Carolina Dog also had haplotype A39 only found Chinese non-breed dogs and the Japanese breed shiba inu. All this points to Carolina Dogs being pre-Columbian. To resate, Carolina Dogs are 100% indigenous American origin and are not just ‘run-away’ dogs of European descent.
So being a Yellow Dog doesn’t seem that bad to me.
Brisbin, I L, Jr, and T S Risch. 1997. “Primitive Dogs, Their Ecology and Behavior: Unique Opportunities to Study the Early Development of the Human-Canine Bond.” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 210(8): 1122-1126
van Asch, Barbara, Ai-bing Zhang, Mattias C R Oskarsson, Cornelya F C Klütsch, António Amorim, and Peter Savolainen. 2013. “Pre-Columbian Origins of Native American Dog Breeds, with Only Limited Replacement by European Dogs, Confirmed by mtDNA Analysis.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 280 (1766). The Royal Society: 20131142–42. doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.1142.
Featured image above by Drew Blood on Flickr (CC)