Benjamin Travis Laney

His studies were interrupted by World War I. Laney entered the United States Navy in 1918 and served until the end of the war.

In 1924, Laney earned a degree from the University of Central Arkansas (then known as Arkansas Teacher's College), also in Conway. He also took graduate courses from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Laney owned a drugstore in Conway, dealt in real estate, and had interests in cotton gins, feed, and banking. Oil was discovered on Laney's farm near Camden. He was hence called "Business Ben" because of his varied business interests.

Laney was elected mayor of Camden in 1935 and served until 1939.

Historically, the solidly Democratic South had emerged in the wake of Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when the Republican Party worked to help African-Americans make the transition from slavery to freedom, and to secure their civil, political and voting rights. When conservative white Southerners usurped control of their state governments in the 1870s, largely with the aid of white terrorist militias and insurgent groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the region gave its political allegiance to the Democratic Party.

The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a splinter (or offshoot) from the party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. For more than a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but in 1948 many bolted from the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States.

Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage. For example, it was used to refer to those members of the Electoral College who voted for Harry F. Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960, and to the white Southern voters and electors who supported George C. Wallace in 1968.