By Kevin D. Williamson
Published in The National Review on May 28, 2012, Reprinted with Permission.
Senator Everett Dirksen
The National Review magazine has long
specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, but worse than a myth and
the cliché is an outright lie, an utter fabrication with malice aforethought,
and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief
that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis
protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly
concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of
Richard Nixon.
That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a
symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it
the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of
Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to
Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true
and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.
Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their
Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their
pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights
legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant
inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to
demolish this myth nonetheless.
The
Republican Enlightenment on Racial Issues
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the
South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no
competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern
resentment over the political successes of the civil rights movement — would be
an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the
old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.
That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the
1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more
enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been
for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil rights
history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the
Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no
means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the
politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from
Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and
1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and
Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil rights reform was not a radical
turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical
turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
The depth of Johnson’s prior
opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be
properly appreciated. In the House, he did not represent a particularly
segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely
segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely
anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically
antebellum in his views. Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress,
Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect
black Americans from lynching.
As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act
of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an
act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it
to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom
Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in
history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block
the bill. The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the
deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a
record-setting filibuster.
In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy
liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same
time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the
legislation. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes,
they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since
they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up
their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give
them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a
difference.”
The
14th Amendment, 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act
Johnson did not spring up from the
Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the
Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth
Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower as a
general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as
president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that
President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had
resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people
made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)
Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent
positions in the Democratic party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic
Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.
Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the
“nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact,
nothing.
"Democrat
Wars"
President Johnson was nothing if not
shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators
appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late
1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern
blacks.
The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political
monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had
been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of
the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and
Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and
that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican party.
Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is
never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later
famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant
when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a
very divisive war in Vietnam).
The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the
backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937. Republicans
would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s
all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first
Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did
Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was
joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican
party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly:
Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with
Texas’s election of John Tower.
The American South and Politics
The American South
At the same time, Republicans went
through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed,
wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional
amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black
Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black
citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be
healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than
through a second political confrontation between North and South. (As late as
1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such
discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of
equal rights under law.”)
The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward
because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward. And their
strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the
South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended
to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race — but among the emerging southern
middle class, a fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard
Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan
Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006). Which is to say:
The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race
as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class
voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.
That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a
symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it
the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of
Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to
Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true
and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.
Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their
Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their
pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights
legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant
inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to
demolish this myth nonetheless.
The
Transformation of the South
The South had been in effect a Third
World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war
economic boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South
transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy,
giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.
This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented
its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the
surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to
the Democrats. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned
rightward in Congressional voting.
” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your
white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because
LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately
Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.
Republican Politicians
Senator Barry Goldwater
There is no question that Republicans
in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had
delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio
in the Nixon campaign. But in the main, they did not do so by appeal to racial
resentment, direct or indirect.
The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a
Western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues
one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its
extension of federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but
believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional,
based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork. But far from extending a
welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New
York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of
Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s.
The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the
Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the
minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply
Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where
they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other planks
in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to
changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative
actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of
the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed,
national origin or sex.”
And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full
implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all
other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities
guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.
Racists
in the Political Parties
Of course there were racists in the
Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic party. The case of
Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial
obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed
on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he
hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his
f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative
record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote
speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil
rights.
Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican affiliation was
beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on
black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.
By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the
North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great
Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of
the Democratic party. Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had
the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted
in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure
politics.
Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining
for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate
was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had long supported a program
to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program
cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most
affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average
wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony
J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the
elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to
transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal
agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs.
In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights
conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an
attempt to make clients of them.
The Senate and Congress: Segregationist Democrats
If the parties had in some meaningful
way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral
results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.
Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the
1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist
constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of
Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were
replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before
those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because
of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the
late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South —
but not that slow.
Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases
segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of
civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the
House was Texas’s John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964
reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s
office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive
action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced
and subjugated the German people. I would say this — I believe this would be
agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the
first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political
rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) Dowdy was thrown out in 1966
in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a
little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.
It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the
southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years
campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.
How the Cold War Changed Politics
It was not the Civil War but the Cold
War that shaped midcentury partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country
against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had
represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the
Republican party over what remained of the America First/Charles
Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency. The Republican party had long been staunchly
anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and
looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and
its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the
“creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.
By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in
U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially
conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the
welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic
party.
Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party was not his alone.
George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Bill
Clinton, Barack Obama and the South
The schizophrenic presidential
election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of
southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an
independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states,
while Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights
Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina,
South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried.
Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas. Mindful
of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed
Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be
lost anyway.” Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a
49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election
of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less
occupy the South like Sherman.
Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests,
and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia
and Florida.
The
Reality of Democrat Policies
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is
associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly
trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam
controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted
in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and
the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party.
Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic
convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican
Party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare
and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this
criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those
issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades.
Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are
those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the
same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when
he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society
was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.”
Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his
strategy endures.
Kevin
D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review and the author of
The Dependency Agenda, which was published by Encounter Books on May 29, 2012.
This article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.
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To view additional black history information, you may visit the National Black Republican Association website.
Here is the direct link: https://nationalblackrepublicanassociation.org/
