The Great White South

Will there ever be a day when Southerners and/or Republicans are no longer tarred as inveterate racists? Well, maybe, if they start endorsing gay marriage and high taxes and hippie communes, but certainly not until then. It's too good a weapon for liberals to discard, and they seem to have some superficial evidence on their side. Emphasis on "superficial."

Of course, I don't have to tell you how political dialogue goes where the GOP and its Southern base are concerned. Southerners are backward bigots who still have Klan hoods in their closets and keep looking for a chance to keep the black man down; the Republican Party depends on them, so it must be like that, too. Now, occasionally a few people on our side will get smart and point out that the GOP is the party of Lincoln and 19th-century abolitionists, and in fact was more supportive of the Civil Rights Act in the '60s than the Democrats were. That rarely fazes any liberal worth their salt, though. They come right back with what is often called "The Southern Strategy."

Sure, liberals admit, the Democratic Party was the party of white racist Southerners until the 1960s. But then LBJ signed all the civil rights legislation, blacks began voting Democrat lock, stock, and barrel; and those white cross-burners became very disillusioned: at which point certain Republicans, especially Nixon and his circle, seized an opportunity by opposing further civil rights to gain Southern votes, making the GOP the racist, knuckle-dragging, red-state party it is today and the Democrats the enlightened knights of progress. It's a very neatly tied-up story, you gotta admit; one that absolves Democrats of any racial guilt. It also perpetuates North-South stereotypes where race relations are concerned, which never hurts.

Basically, the only way to refute this story is to suggest that white Southerners were starting to change their position on the GOP, and perhaps civil rights as well. And one of the best-kept secrets in the political conversation is that, as a matter of fact, they were.

You have to take a careful look at the changing electoral map to see what was going on here. As multiple historians have shown, the famous "Solid South" electoral bloc was already breaking down by mid-century, especially in the Upper South states like Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, less so in the Deep South. This alone would call the Left's claims into question, for if GOP success was linked to racism alone, one would expect just the opposite. Overall, among the states of the "Old Confederacy," Republican candidates were getting around 25 percent of the vote in the '44 and '48 presidential elections, itself a dramatic rise from results in the '20s and '30s (and keep in mind, this came at the end of the reign of FDR, who was famous for tossing lots of federal money South-wards and not lifting many fingers to improve race relations). During the Eisenhower era, Ike was breaking off Virginia, Texas, even Louisiana, despite his party's noticeable lack of an anti-civil rights stance. And lest one think this was a function of presidential personality, the GOP was making similar inroads in congressional seats--again, especially in the less-racist Upper South.

What gives? It turns out that, demographically, the growing Republican support was coming especially from urban and suburban areas, middle- and upper-middle-class voters, and younger generations--the people who made up the "New South." And party strategists at the time recognized this, telling Nixon and candidates all down the line their best shot was to appeal to the "youthful middle-class," downplaying racial issues as much as possible. This is the exact opposite of what the liberal P.C. version of history would have us believe.

Also, this raises the question of just how racist Southerners were in the '50s and '60s. It would be stupid to suggest that race issues during the period were overblown, but neither should we assume that anti-black racism was uniform. Plenty of evidence exists that already by the '50s, many Southerners, especially younger ones, were changing their minds on segregation, with church organizations in particular, including the Presbyterians and Southern Baptists, coming out against it. And it would be many of these same people--young, religious, upwardly mobile--who would begin building a Southern GOP and the subsequent New Right/Religious Right. I wouldn't go so far as to say that racial equality in the South would have happened without federal legislation, but we shouldn't just assume Jim Crow would have otherwise persisted into the twenty-first century, either. Things were already changing.

This is not to imply that the Republican Party was entirely free of racial prejudice, before, during, or after the Civil Rights Era. Many party members and politicians were quite happy to strike unsavory deals with racist/segregationist Southerners. But the stereotyping of these two groups the Left indulges in rests on the narrative that Southern whites haven't changed in their racism, simply jumped ship from the Dems to the GOP, and the latter became racist as a result. Like most stories liberals spin, it just ain't so.