Morning Jay: Leave the Southern Republicans Out of It!

Far be it from me to sound off on an internecine battle on the left, but I do have to call foul on this comment from Harris-Perry:

To say that this is factually untrue would be a gross understatement. It’s bettert to say that this statement is not even in the same area code with what we commonly call “the truth.”

In 1960, Kennedy beat Nixon in the South by 5 points. In 1964, Johnson beat Goldwater by 3 points. In 1968, Nixon won just 35% of the Southern vote. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won 54% of the Southern vote, including a majority of Southern whites. Prior to 1980, the GOP only won a majority of the Southern vote once — when Nixon swamped lefty peacenik George McGovern in 1972. As late as 1996, Bill Clinton lost the Southern white vote to Bob Dole by just 6 points.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans did not crack 40% of the Southern vote until 1978, and did not win a majority until 1994.

I think this comment speaks to a broader issue, which is the tendency of liberal Democrats to misrepresent the origins and nature of Southern Republicanism. That is what I would like to focus on today. Granted, I doubt very much that what follows will persuade liberals who have committed themselves to the crude narrative that “GOP racism equals Southern votes,” but I do think it is worthwhile for conservatives to understand the nature of the their own political coalition.

To that end, I offer three points.

1. Southern Republicanism had little to do with Southern segregation.

The systematic repression of the constitutional rights of black citizens in the South was not due to mere racial enmity. Instead, it had as its origins the need of the elite doctor-lawyer-planter-merchant class that resided in the majority black counties of the Deep South to retain its privileged position. If African Americans enjoyed the right to vote, these elites would lose their power. 

These elites had nothing to do with the Republican party. Indeed, they actively resisted the entreaties of Republican Rutherford Hayes, who thought that, as former Whigs, they might unite with the GOP on economic issues. But that never happened. Indeed, these hard-core segregationists were so staunchly committed to the Democratic party that they backed Al Smith over Herbert Hoover in 1928. 

Until roughly the 1980s, Southern Republicans were generally of two types. The first was the mountain Republicans of Eastern Tennessee, and Western Virginia and North Carolina, who were the descendants of former Whigs and Constitutional Unionists, and who had opposed secession. These mountain Republicans were not the friends of the plantation elites, as they opposed the Crump machine in Tennessee and aligned with the populists in North Carolina and Virginia.

The second type of Southern Republican was not to be found until after World War II, with the rise of the “New South” economy that was based on energy, tourism, high-tech, and agribusiness. These sorts of people settled in cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Tampa, and were often Northern transplants. They were conservative on economic and cultural issues, and they were actually an implicit threat to the segregationist regime; after all, bank managers in Tampa or insurance executives in Houston had no economic reason to keep blacks and poor whites in the Deep South suppressed. We can see the power of these voters as early as 1952, when Eisenhower won all five of those cities (and this despite the fact that the Democrats nominated for vice-president Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, a staunch segregationist).  

Liberals like to point to the Goldwater campaign in 1964 as the origins of Southern Republicanism, but this is just not the case. It is a terrible shame that Goldwater – a principled conservative but an inept national politician – allowed his philosophical opposition to the Civil Rights Act to be exploited by Southern segregationists. However, we have to remember that the Goldwater candidacy was a disaster that Republicans never repeated. If anything, Goldwater’s lasting legacy was to show the Republicans what not to do.

Goldwater’s hard-line stance on civil rights, as well as other issues, cost the GOP dearly. Some 20% of self-identified Republicans backed LBJ that year. What’s more, Goldwater did worse than any previous Republican candidate in the North, where he won just 36% of the vote. And in the South, he did worse than Eisenhower in 1956. In other words, the Goldwater candidacy did not buy the Republicans any votes in the South, and lost them upwards of 10 million in the North. The Goldwater disaster was brutal for the GOP down the ballot as well, and Democrats finally had the outsized majority needed to implement the Great Society.

Little wonder that Nixon returned to the strategy of denouncing segregation and focusing on the rising middle class of the peripheral states of Florida and Texas. In his 1968 convention address, he said:

This has, more or less, been the GOP approach ever since – because this is how the Republicans intuited they could win a national majority. It was at its core a focus on economics to unite Northern conservatives in the Midwest with the rising middle class of the Border South and the West.

2. Almost every national politician played a double game on civil rights for 100 years.

Often, liberals will invoke Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to indict the Republican party. A lot has been made of this supposed deal Nixon made with Strom Thurmond in Atlanta before the 1968 convention, but it never included repeal of the landmark civil rights acts. Instead, its focus was on integration (especially busing), and symbolic recognition of the South. Nixon took the task of school integration out of the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and sent it to the Department of Justice. Integration would continue apace through his term, but without the threat that HEW would withhold funds from local schools. He also tried to get Clement Haynesworth then Harrold Carswell appointed to the Supreme Court. But he also instituted the first affirmative action plan, signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act, and offered the “Family Assistance Plan,” which was hardly neglectful of poor African Americans.

Liberals who get hot under the collar over this should remember that Lyndon Johnson intervened in the late 1960s when HEW threatened the Chicago public schools. Mayor Richard J. Daley was an important client of the party, and LBJ could ill afford to anger him, so he told HEW to back off. They might also recall that JFK appointed judges to the Southern courts that even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – a Kennedy hagiographer if ever there was one – called “unfortunate.” And they might recollect that Jimmy Carter won his first statewide office in 1970 by actively courting the George Wallace vote.

That speaks to an important point about civil rights, one that is true for 100 years after the end of Reconstruction. Almost every nation politician played both sides of the issue. I can really only think of three major exceptions: Woodrow Wilson, who was an out-and-out racist and saw to it that African Americans were left genuinely worse off; and Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom were by and large consistent advocates for civil rights (although Harrison gave up to soon and Ike didn’t push hard enough). But pretty much everybody else did something “unfortunate” on civil rights (to borrow Schlesinger’s highly nuanced term) between 1876 and 1976 – even the liberal greats. FDR refused to back the Wagner-Costigan Anti-Lynching Bill, Truman denounced the liberal civil rights plank in the 1948 platform as a “crackpot” idea, JFK voted to water down the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, LBJ led the charge to water it down, Nixon slowed the pace of integration, and Carter won his first big election by race-baiting.

That’s everybody. Democrats and Republicans. Liberals and conservatives. 

3. The meaning of “civil rights” has changed. In the 1940s, a liberal on civil rights would have been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, federal legislation to outlaw discrimination in private establishments, and of course laws to ensure voting rights. In other words, the debate was whether and to what extent African Americans should be included in the political and judicial systems.

But after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, the debate shifted. With African Americans brought into the electorate, it transformed into the more typical ideological debate over distribution of the national wealth, and the extent to which the federal government should be involved. So, the same Republican party that had been professedly liberal on civil rights in 1944 would, twenty-five years later, oppose school integration via busing. Why? Because the former is about civic rights and the latter is about the federally-mandated distribution of local resources, which — if you read the 1936 GOP platform — you’ll see the GOP was never much in favor of.

The problem is that the terminology did not change – thus somebody who was “liberal” on civil rights in 1945 might also be “conservative” in 1970. This is a confusion that continues to this very day, as is evidenced by the above quotation from Harris-Perry, for Southern whites did not really abandon the Democratic party until some time after the “Second Reconstruction,” and the GOP never promised that it would it would roll back the gains of the mid-1960s. Today, Southern Republicans are not “opposed to civil rights” in the minds of many leftists because they want to repeal the Voting Rights Act, but because they favored welfare reform in 1996. This is a critically important distinction, yet it is so often overlooked.