boll weevil

1. A small, grayish, long-snouted beetle (Anthonomus grandis) of Mexico and the southern United States, having adults that puncture cotton buds and larvae that hatch in and damage cotton bolls.
2. Informal. A conservative white Southern Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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Boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) (credit: Harry Rogers)

Small beetle (Anthonomus grandis) found almost everywhere cotton is cultivated. It is the most serious cotton pest in North America. Adults vary in size according to how much food they received as larvae, but they average about 0.25 in. (6 mm) long, including the long, curved snout. In the spring adults deposit eggs in cotton buds or fruit. After hatching, the larvae live within the cotton boll, destroying the seeds and surrounding fibres. Because the larvae and pupae remain inside the cotton bolls, they cannot be killed with insecticides. The boll weevil destroys an estimated three to five million bales of cotton annually.

For more information on boll weevil, visit Britannica.com.

When Ronald Reagan won the Presidency in 1980, he carried with him the first Republican majority in the Senate in 26 years. Democrats retained their majority in the House, but the margin between the parties was narrowed. The balance of power in the House was held by a group of conservative Democratic representatives from the South and West. They organized themselves as the Conservative Democratic Forum but were more popularly known as the Boll Weevils, after the beetle that infests Southern cotton.

Led by Representative Phil Gramm (Democrat–Texas), the Boll Weevils voted with Republicans to enact Reagan's economic program, which involved cuts in federal spending and a plan to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes. Democrats responded by removing Gramm from his seat on the Budget Committee. Gramm resigned and won reelection as a Republican and soon after was elected to the Senate. Several other Boll Weevils also changed their party affiliation, but with less electoral success.

Boll Weevil, a quarter-inch-long beetle that eats the buds and young bolls of cotton plants, resulting in damage that reduces the fiber output of the plants. Boll weevils produce several generations each year between spring and fall before hibernating over the winter. A native insect of Mexico and Central America, the boll weevil first crossed into south Texas about 1892. Over the next three decades, it advanced north and east through almost the entire Cotton Belt of the South, reaching the Atlantic coast by the 1920s. The damage was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars annually.

The arrival of the boll weevil triggered an examination of cotton planting, harvesting, and field-clearing practices by farmers, scientists, and government officials in attempts to decrease areas where the pests could live. They also searched for and developed weevil-resistant cotton varieties that could be planted earlier and grow faster, which reduced the time plants were susceptible to boll weevils. Even though cotton agriculture changed radically as a result of the boll weevil invasion, the changes resulted only in controlling and limiting the damage caused by the boll weevil, but not in its extermination.

Since the 1970s the boll weevil has made new advances into parts of western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This pest continues to cause $300 million in damage annually, mostly in Texas and the mid-South. Its total impact has been estimated at over $15 billion during the twentieth century. The boll weevil is the target of ongoing eradication efforts in regional programs throughout the United States and northern Mexico. The National Boll Weevil Eradication Program, established in the late 1970s, has certified California, Arizona, and from Alabama eastward as now being weevil-free.

In 1919 residents of Enterprise, Alabama, erected a larger-than-life statue of the boll weevil as a monument "in profound appreciation" of being forced to diversify its economy from cotton into other crops because of the pest's arrival a few years earlier.

Bibliography

Hunter, W. D., and W. D. Pierce. The Mexican Cotton-Boll Wee vil. U.S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Entomology Bulletin No. 114. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Entomology, 1912. A detailed history and scientific description.

Dickerson, Willard A., et al., eds. Boll Weevil Eradication in the United States through 1999. Memphis, Tenn.: Cotton Foundation, 2001. A comprehensive history of boll weevil eradication in the United States and each state.

—Cameron L. Saffell

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Boll weevils was an American political term used in the mid- and late-20th century to describe conservative Southern Democrats.

During and after the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, conservative southern Democrats were part of the coalition generally in support of Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal economic policies, but were opposed to desegregation and the American civil rights movement. On several occasions between 1948 and 1968, a prominent conservative Southern Democrat broke from the Democrats to run a third party campaign for President on a platform of states' rights: Strom Thurmond in 1948, Harry F. Byrd in 1960, and George Wallace in 1968. In the 1964 presidential election, 5 states in the Deep South (then a Democratic stronghold) voted for Republican Barry Goldwater over Southern Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, partly due to Johnson's support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Goldwater's opposition to it. After 1968, with desegregation a settled issue, the Republican Party began a strategy of trying to win conservative Southerners away from the Democrats and into the Republican Party (see Southern strategy and Silent Majority).

Nonetheless, a bloc of conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, remained in the United States Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Conservative Coalition). These included Democratic House members as conservative as Larry McDonald, who was also a leader in the John Birch Society. During the administration of Ronald Reagan, the term "boll weevils" was applied to this bloc of conservative Democrats, who consistently voted in favor of tax cuts, increases in military spending, and deregulation favored by the Reagan administration.

"Boll weevils" was sometimes used as a political epithet by Democratic Party leaders, implying that the boll weevils were unreliable on key votes or not team players.

Most of the boll weevils eventually retired from office, or in the case of some such as Senators Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby, switched parties and joined the Republicans. Since 1988 the term boll weevils has fallen out of favor. A bloc of conservative Democrats in the House, including some younger or newer members as well as the remaining boll weevils who refused to bow to pressure to switch parties, organized themselves as the Blue Dogs in the early 1990s. A different bloc of Democrats also emerged in the 1990s, under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), espousing conservative pro-business views on economic issues and moderate views on social issues. Neither the DLC-affiliated New Democrat Coalition nor the Blue Dogs are known as boll weevils, and are considered by most observers to not be nearly as conservative, or as concentrated in the South, as the boll weevils were in their heyday.

See also

• Blue Dog Democrats
• Conservative Democrat
• Dixiecrats
• New Democrats
• Reagan Democrat
• Republican/Democrat In Name Only
• Southern Democrat
• Yellow dog Democrats
• Gypsy moth Republicans

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