From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism

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FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE NEW RIGHT

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Joseph E. Lowndes

from the new deal to the new right RACE AND THE SOUTHERN ORIGINS OF MODERN CONSERVATISM

Yale University Press / New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Galliard type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lowndes, Joseph E., 1966– From the New Deal to the New Right : race and the southern origins of modern conservatism / Joseph E. Lowndes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-12183-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States —Race relations—Political aspects—History—20th century. 2. Racism—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. Southern States—Race relations—Political aspects— History—20th century. 4. Racism—Political aspects—Southern States—History—20th century. 5. Conservatism—United States—History. 6. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– )—History —20th century. 7. United States—Politics and government— 20th century. 8. Southern States—Politics and government— 20th century. I. Title. E743.L59 2008 973.91—dc22 2007044683 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8

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For Priscilla, and for Benjamin and Adam


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix 1 Beyond the Backlash Thesis 1 2 “White Supremacy Is a Political Doctrine”: Charles Wallace Collins and the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 11 3 “Goldwater Was the Horsepower”: National Review and the New Southern GOP 45 4 “You Are Southerners Too”: The National Campaigns of George Wallace 77 5 “The South, the West, and Suburbia”: Richard Nixon’s New Majority 106 6 “Guv’mints Lie”: Asa Carter, Josey Wales, and the Southernization of Conservatism After Watergate 140 7 Between Political Order and Change: The Contingent Construction of the Modern Right 155 Notes 163 Bibliography 185 Index 199


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was fortunate enough to have many people read parts or all of this book along the way. Members of my writing group in New York, including Jessica Blatt, Kevin Bruyneel, Cat Celebrezze, Mike Diamond, Edmund Fong, Susan Hibbard, Ron Krabill, Priscilla Yamin, and Bill Winstead, were all helpful in shaping the manuscript. Of this group, I especially thank Kevin, Cathy, Edmund, and Priscilla, who read and commented on numerous drafts of every chapter from its inception. To this list I must add Nancy Wadsworth, who acted as an honorary member of the group while in Denver and Ithaca. I could not have asked for a better adviser in this project than Victoria Hattam. Vicky continually encouraged me to follow my own inclinations in this project, regardless of the conventional constraints of the political science discipline. She acted as a good critic as well, and thereby made this a far better and more interesting book than it would have been otherwise. I have benefited immensely from her wide-ranging intellectual interests and egalitarian spirit. George Shulman was an important source of insight and support throughout. He pushed me to resist simple answers to complicated questions, and to stay focused on the fundamental questions that I was asking. Adolph Reed’s lucid insights about racial and class politics in the United States were invaluable, and his encyclopedic knowledge of southern politics and history helped to point me toward many sources I would have otherwise neglected. David Plotke, always a conscientious reader, helped me clarify my arguments and rein them in when they threat-

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ened to gallop off in every direction. Ira Katznelson was generous with his time throughout, and I am grateful to him for turning his considerable intellect toward my project, always offering fruitful suggestions on framing and organization, as well as argument. My understanding of the relationship of discourse and politics was helped enormously by a long-standing study group on that theme, which intersected with a larger workshop on identification and politics organized by Vicky Hattam and Ernesto Laclau, which held two meetings: once at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and once at the Committee on Ideology and Discourse Analysis at Essex University, Colchester, UK. This larger group included Glenn Bowman, Jason Glynos, David Howarth, Courtney Jung, the late Deborah Mitchell, Anne Norton, Aletta Norval, Francisco Panizza, Yannis Stravakakis, and Linda Zerrilli. Other fora provided important opportunities for me to present parts of this project, including the New York American Political Development Colloquium, the Re-thinking African American Politics Summer Seminar at the University of Chicago, and panels at the American Political Science Association, the Northeast Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association. Daniel Delaney, Stephen Duncombe, Mustafa Emirbayer, Andrew Grossman, Grrrt, Ronald Hayduk, Catherine Holland, Simon Hollis, Joseph Luders, Joel Olson, Andrew Polsky, Thaddeus Russell, Jacob Slichter, Stephen Skowronek, and Philip Triadafilopoulos all read parts of this book and offered useful comments and criticisms along the way. My colleagues at the University of Oregon Gerald Berk, Leonard Feldman, and Julie Novkov read the manuscript in its later stages and were invaluable interlocutors. I received research assistance from Sverre Bodung and Jennifer Hehnke, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to Adrienne Van der Valk for her extraordinary efforts to bring this manuscript to finished form. I am grateful to my editor at Yale University Press, Keith Condon, who saw potential in this book and whose enthusiasm for it was a much-needed buoy at times. I also want to thank Noreen O’Connor, whose keen eye has made this a more readable book. I was assisted by a number of archivists in this project: Norwood Kerr and Nancy Dupree at the Alabama Department of Archives and History;

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jim Baggett at the Birmingham, Alabama, Public Library; Stephanie Adams, Alan Burns, and James Cross at Clemson University; Jennie Levine at the University of Maryland Archives; Sam Rushay of the Nixon Presidential Materials at the National Archives and Records Administration. A version of Chapter 6 first appeared in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (New York: Verso, 2005) and is reprinted here with the permission of Verso Books. Chapter 6 in its original form appeared in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 16, no. 2 (Winter 2002), and appears here with permission. My ability to complete the book depended on numerous sources of support. They include the New School University Fellowship; the Elinor Goldmark Black Fellowship for Advanced Studies in the Dynamics of Social Change; the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Chicago; and the Junior Professorship Award, New Faculty Award, and the Colligan Award for Political Science Faculty, all from the University of Oregon. My father was a great resource for this project. As a southerner whose adult life has covered the historic span of this study, he provided keen insights and observations, even if we differ on many of the conclusions. My mother, the late Kathleen Flynn, was always a sharp and humorous critic of the Sunbelt South in which she found herself. Much of how I interpreted my surroundings as a child came through her eyes. Finally, I thank my partner, Priscilla, and my two children, Benjamin and Adam, who continually remind me of surprises and possibilities that life holds.

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1 BEYOND THE BACKLASH THESIS

At a birthday party for Strom Thurmond in December 2002, Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) praised the centenarian’s role in the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948, saying, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Lott’s comments were widely quoted in the press and drew an angry response from civil rights leaders and liberal Democrats. Lott was initially taken by surprise at the outrage prompted by his words, and his office issued a curt response intended to quell the controversy: “Senator Lott’s remarks were intended to pay tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. To read anything more into these comments is wrong.” Indeed, as conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote, “When Democratic attacks began, Lott was advised by Republican counselors the storm would soon blow over.”1 Yet the storm continued to build and threatened to wash away the GOP’s recent assertions of being a racially inclusive party. Prominent black Republicans began to call for his resignation, followed by conservative pundits like Paul Greenberg and Charles Krauthammer. Faced with mounting controversy, President George W. Bush addressed a largely black audience in Philadelphia, saying: “Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country.” Republican colleagues soon deserted him, and by early January 2003 he resigned his post as Senate majority leader.2

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How is it that Lott—or his GOP advisers—could have initially found his comments uncontroversial, only to be so strongly rebuked by that same party within a couple of weeks? As Lott explained it afterward, the man he praised had consistently held up the principles of strong defense, law and order, and fiscal conservatism. That these policies went hand in hand with a defense of white supremacy in the Dixiecrat Revolt may have gone unnoticed by Lott because the postwar histories of race and conservative politics have been so intertwined. “States’ Rights Strom” logically made the journey from the States’ Rights Democratic Party to the GOP when the latter became the anti–civil rights party in the 1964 presidential election. The South Carolina senator helped make the Republican Party dominant by delivering the South to Nixon in 1968 and continuing to move the region into the Republican column over the next three decades. Indeed, Thurmond himself never apologized for his leadership of the Dixiecrat Revolt, and the party never asked him to.3 For Republicans, Lott’s real crime was to reach back across forty years of modern GOP history to revel in its unseemly genealogy. Acknowledging Thurmond’s racist past was one thing, but claiming it as a legacy too clearly gestures to the foundational violence of modern Republicanism which—as political theorists from Machiavelli to Ernest Renan have observed—must be forgotten in every regime. To be sure, the Republican Party has gone to great lengths in recent years to distance itself from the taint of racism. George W. Bush is the first president to place African Americans in such key White House positions such as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. But it has not been easy for the GOP to shed its racial legacy because the party became dominant through racially inflected positions on poverty, crime, affirmative action, and government assistance. However, the GOP mostly embraces a politics of “colorblindness,” and many conservatives promote policies that are claimed with nonracist intent. Such are the paradoxes of the GOP: Lott began his political career as a protégé of the ultrasegregationist Democrat William Colmer, and prior to that he presided over the Sigma Nu Fraternity at the University of Mississippi when it was raided by the FBI for stockpiling weapons during the desegregation riots there in 1962. Forty years later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaned on her biography of having been born black in Jim


Crow Birmingham to justify Bush’s war in Iraq. With Lott and Rice, both highly visible figures, representing contradictory narratives about race, the South, and the GOP, how should we interpret the political trajectory of the modern Republican Party?4

The Backlash Account of the Rise of the Right The rise of the modern Right has become naturalized in much academic and popular literature as a “backlash” against the excesses of the 1960s, particularly in regard to race. In turn, the story goes, conservatives were thus granted the opportunity to assert basic American values of patriotism, family, hard work, independence, and governmental fiscal responsibility; in doing so, they reclaimed the political field. Versions of the backlash account from across the political spectrum have abounded over the years. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1968) made the case, in the wake of both sixties-era protests and Nixon’s presidential triumph, that stoking white populist resentment toward both liberal elites and the black poor could make the GOP the dominant party in years to come. But what had been for Phillips an intentional strategy (he had been a campaign adviser for Nixon) came to be understood twenty years hence as an truism of recent political history for Thomas and Mary Edsall. Their 1991 book Chain Reaction, which exercised strong influence over rising Democratic star Bill Clinton, claimed that sixties-era black politics reached a “combustion point” that set off (to continue their atom-splitting analogy) a fission process of self-reproducing effects, including tax revolt, opposition to rights claims of other disadvantaged groups, the emergence of anti-government conservatism, and finally the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. Their story that programs to enforce desegregation of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods broke up the New Deal coalition and “forced” a realignment avoids mention of the racial stratification built into the New Deal on the one hand and active conservative mobilization on the other. The inescapable conclusion was that Democrats, in order to win back a majority of white middle- and working-class voters, would have to disown prior commitments to racial equality and the “special rights” of other marginalized groups. The hegemonic power of the backlash is perhaps most dramatically

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demonstrated, though, by its articulation further on the Left. Sociologist and former New Left leader Todd Gitlin and others have repeatedly assailed racial militancy and identity politics as the major contributors to the demise of the American Left, and have extended this critique to scold post9/11 antiwar activists for being insufficiently patriotic. Such is the reach of the backlash chain of associations.5 Thus while backlash accounts assert that racial issues were key to the rise of the Right, they generally do not interrogate the cross-cutting institutional, discursive, and cultural paths that made race an important aspect of political identification for an increasing segment of white voters in the postwar era. Nor can backlash explain how that political identification became linked to others, such as social or economic conservatism, in a coherent political rhetoric. Finally, backlash cannot tell us how that rhetoric was translated into effective political strategies by the Republican Party. Instead of accepting the premise that white voters were pushed too far in the 1960s, we might ask: Why should white voters necessarily have seen increasing claims for black equality as detrimental to their own interests? Why, for that matter, should anxiety about racial issues have automatically become yoked to conservative positions on other matters and finally be translated into identification with the Republican Party? What’s more, to foreground only the political upheaval of 1960s is to miss both the deeper legacy of the modern Right to which Lott unwittingly referred and the racial exclusions stretching back through the New Deal that helped lay the basis for later confrontations. Politics is not merely the realm where preexisting interests, grievances, and passions are given expression. Rather, it is in and through politics that interests, grievances, and passions are forged and new collective identities created. Backlash, the ideological cornerstone and justification for modern conservatism, masks what was a long-term process whereby various groups in different places and times attempted to link racism, antigovernment populism, and economic conservatism into a discourse and institutional strategy through linguistic appeals, party-building, social movement organizing, and the exercise of state power. In the process, the very interests and self-understanding of these groups were continually under construction as they moved from coalition to collective political identity. As opposed to being entrenched and traditionalist (or reactionary, depending


on one’s politics), the Right that developed is better viewed as contingent, mobile, and highly adaptive, constantly responding to changing conditions on the ground. By the end of the 1960s energized conservatives claimed to speak for a majority. With the benefit of two decades of prior experience in reframing issues of race and economics, they were successful to a great degree in getting many voters from across classes, regions, and occupations to understand their resentments and desires, as well as their social, cultural, and economic experiences in opposition to racially egalitarian policies, to Great Society programs for the poor, to liberal elites generally, and to the state itself.

Southern Origins Southern racial politics clearly had an impact on the rise of the Right, but what is the nature of that impact? To the degree that the South is discussed in accounts of national political changes in the postwar era, focus tends either to be on the dismantling of Jim Crow or the success of the Republican southern strategy. Yet there is a flip side to each of these phenomena which reveals a more critical role for the South in national politics. Although legal segregation and barriers to voting were largely undone in the decade between the Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the racial politics that animated the southern system were translated into a national political idiom. While southern segregationists are generally depicted as primarily wanting “local control,” this book shows that there were important figures in the opposition to racial liberalism who sought to make their struggle national from the start.6 Recent work has begun to demonstrate the role of class politics in the postwar realignment of the South. Such scholarship can expand our understanding of both southern and national politics of the era. However, it is a mistake to separate out race and class as fully distinct elements. As this book demonstrates, race was increasingly articulated in a language of economic conservatism both regionally and nationally, just as conservative appeals were continually made by reference to racial identity.7 Far from simply being regionalists, segregationist intellectuals, citizen

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activists and politicians attempted to align themselves with forces outside the South from the onset of the New Deal. Some actors looked northward because they knew that their only real hope for the preservation of southern racial practices depended on a national movement. Many believed that white supremacy was not merely a southern concern but the true ground of American national identity. And as they looked northward, they began to find other opponents to the New Deal who had different prerogatives, but the possibility of shared commitments. This national focus was manifested in Dixiecrat attempts to win over northern sentiment and George Wallace’s Democratic and independent presidential campaigns. And as opposed to the Republican capture of the white South, we may better speak of a southern capture of the Republican Party. Moderate Eisenhower Republicans built the first viable Republican Party structure in the South since Reconstruction, but segregationists soon turned that structure into a vehicle for promoting Barry Goldwater, who proved sympathetic in regard to their views on civil rights. The new party apparatus was put to use across the South in the 1966 midterm congressional elections, and was critical to securing Richard Nixon’s presidential victories in 1968 and 1972. As political scientist V. O. Key cautioned more than half a century ago, there are many “Souths.” Rather than treat the South and its influence as homogeneous, I argue that the success of modern conservatism depended on the mobilization—and nationalization—of many different southern political elements. Among these were the bourbon politics of the black belt regions, which dominated the South for most of its history; the complex tradition of southern populism; and the political aspirations of the emergent metropolitan bourgeoisie of the mid-twentieth century. All have been contributing elements to modern American conservatism.8

The Politics of Race in the Rise of Modern Conservatism Racism has had enormous potency in American politics, but this is not to say that “race” itself has been a static concept or identity, nor that racism is expressed in politically consistent ways over time. Race is not a biological attribute, but rather a contingent product of politics, and its


meaning varies with context. Racial identifications have become linked to political grievances and aspirations when political actors—in widely varying circumstances—have successfully developed credible language through which to make these links.9 In the case of modern conservatism, race has been both an open and coded signifier for popular mobilizations against redistribution, regulation, labor protections, and myriad other aspects of neo-liberal opposition to “big government.” The rightward shift in American politics since the 1960s has gone hand in hand with stubborn forms of racial stratification including starkly disproportionate rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, poor health, as well as the construction of what Naomi Murakawa has called the American “carceral state,” which has the world’s highest imprisonment rates both per capita and in absolute numbers, half of which is black. And across the nation, the Brown era of school integration appears to be coming to a close, with school districts resegregating across the nation with Supreme Court approval.10 Yet the rise of the Right came about as enduring civil rights reforms were also achieved. Jim Crow has been dismantled, there is now a large black middle class, and major American institutions are far more integrated than in any previous era. The civil rights movement is enshrined in American iconography and cited as a source of inspiration for actors across the political spectrum. Most Republican leaders now attempt to claim the mantle of racial inclusiveness, a fact which makes a racial archaeology of the modern GOP that much more necessary.

Outline of the Book I begin Chapter 2 by examining the opposition to racial liberalism that emerged from the South in the 1940s in the States’ Rights or Dixiecrat Party, and focus on the movement’s primary intellectual, Charles Wallace Collins. Although Collins’s influence on the Dixiecrats was fundamental, his influence on the revolt has hardly been explored, nor his ideas examined. Collins’s analysis and critique of the racial liberalism that emerged in the 1940s, and his vision of a new national alignment of conservatives and segregationists, shaped the philosophy and political direction of the states’

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rights movement, which had southern ramifications in “massive resistance” and national ramifications in later connections with northern conservatives. Collins and other Dixiecrats looked for allies outside the South and anticipated what that alliance might look like. Thus in Chapter 3 I move from a focus on northward-looking southerners to southward-looking northerners to examine how northern conservatives responded to the states’ rights movement. I do so through an analysis of the southern focus of the most prominent conservative periodical of the 1950s and 1960s, National Review. Numerous scholars have chronicled the fundamental role of the National Review in creating the modern Right. None have examined the magazine’s extensive reportage and editorial interest in the struggle over desegregation. Soon after its inception in 1955, National Review developed a keen interest in the political possibilities of the South. By the end of the decade, articles on the South appeared regularly, often penned by prominent southern segregationist authors and journalists. Conservatives at National Review also began working with GOP strategists in the late 1950s and early 1960s to develop a language and political strategy to produce an active Republican Party across the South for the first time since Reconstruction. This new southern party used its concentrated strength to make Goldwater a critical Republican player in 1960 and the presidential nominee in 1964. The southern-driven Goldwater movement succeeded in securing the nomination of its candidate in 1964, but it failed miserably as a strategy for winning over large segments of the American electorate outside the South who still saw conservatism as the province of wealthy elites. In Chapter 4 I look at another attempt to take southern race politics national that began to establish populist credibility for the Right: the presidential campaigns of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace had a surprising impact in a number of Northern Democratic primaries in 1964, and collected more than ten million votes when he ran as an independent in 1968. Wallace drew on older racial sentiments, to be sure, but he linked them to the fears and desires experienced by many white southerners and northern working-class white ethnics threatened by neighborhood and job integration. Wallace drove a wedge into the New Deal coalition outside the South and severed the party identification of many Democrats, thereby creating new


opportunities for the Republican Party. While later conservatives would distance themselves from Wallace’s overt racism and pugnacious rhetoric, he left an indelible mark on the campaigns of Nixon and later Reagan, both of whom drew from his language of racial, antigovernment populism. In Chapter 5, I examine the culmination of the conservative race strategy in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns and administration. Nixon’s presidency built on the legacy of the Dixiecrats, Goldwater, and Wallace; weaving together racism, conservatism, and populism in a coherent political identity that could claim majoritarian status. The key was a rhetorical constituency variously called the “silent majority,” the “emerging Republican majority,” “the Forgotten Americans,” and “Middle America.” This invented political demographic was meant to appeal to voters primarily on the basis of white racial resentment. This strategy won two elections for Nixon, but his emergent coalition could not be sustained in the face of a still-vital liberal regime. Hence the president who sought to “bring us together” left a country politically divided, ambivalent about both parties, and distrustful of the federal government itself. What did the deep political divisions in the United States mean then for the triumph of racial conservatism? I turn in Chapter 6 more explicitly to the cultural sphere, where crises of political interpretation are often worked out. I argue that the antigovernment sentiment that ranged across the political spectrum in the early 1970s began to cohere into modern conservative discourse, not just through race, populism, and economic conservatism but also through the selective appropriation of antiracist, Left, and countercultural themes. Specifically, I focus on the work of former Citizens’ Councilor, Klan leader, and Wallace speechwriter Asa Carter and the discourse of antistatist populism he developed throughout his career. In particular, the chapter centers on his book Gone to Texas and the popular 1976 Clint Eastwood film based upon it, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Metaphorically linking anti–Vietnam War sentiment, anger over FBI abuse of power, and Indian rights issues to a defense of the white South, the film makes a culturally potent case for backlash against the liberal state. In the concluding chapter I consider the implications of my account of the rise of modern conservatism for the study of politics. Reflection on the relationship between political order and change, and between culture and

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institutions, suggests that close attention to the way that language reshapes political identities (and therefore interests) can yield much that is missed by prevailing methods of political analysis. Such attention may help us move beyond the standard narrative of twentieth-century U.S. politics, which not only constrains our thinking, but which restricts us to cramped notions of the possible.

2 “WHITE SUPREMACY IS A POLITICAL DOCTRINE”: CHARLES WALLACE COLLINS AND THE DIXIECRAT REVOLT OF 1948

On November 8, 1944, one day after Franklin Roosevelt was elected to his fourth presidential term, southern attorney Charles Wallace Collins retired from his legal practice to write a book that would, he states, “rationalize and strengthen the position of the orthodox Southerner and . . . arouse him to action in the face of organized hostility to Southern States.” Finally published in 1947, Collins’s book Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations became both manifesto and blueprint for the states’ rights—soon nicknamed the “Dixiecrat”—Revolt. Although Collins’s intellectual guidance is generally acknowledged in accounts of the Dixiecrats, there have been no sustained analyses of his ideas, nor examinations of the political substance of his influence.1 Collins’s writings and political biography offer an essential perspective for understanding the origins and development not only of the states’ rights movement but also of the role of race in the evolution of the modern Right. Collins’s writings demonstrate how southern elites began to link racism and free market conservatism in theory, and began the first steps to break with the Democratic political order in practice. This process of forging new political identifications and severing old ones involved ideas, longterm strategies, and improvised tactics. Viewing the complex matrix of theory, strategy, and implementation of the Dixiecrat Revolt and its aftermath in massive resistance through one of its central figures, we see that there was nothing automatic or natural about the political changes that

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came to pass in the 1960s. Indeed, they constituted a dynamic and highly contingent process.

Political Conditions for the “Second Reconstruction” The New Deal was an extraordinary project of centralization and growth that fundamentally altered relations between the state and society, the federal government, and the subnational states. This historic undertaking was possible because the Democratic Party was able to put together a powerful coalition and shift the very ground of legitimate political discourse. New Dealers used the term “liberalism” or “progressive liberalism” to describe the priorities of the Democratic regime, distinguishing it from the conservative liberalism of the prior era by emphasizing modernization, national economic coordination, and political inclusion. These priorities were linked together into a coherent political ideology, and they shaped the terms of debate for all major political issues of the time.2 Yet the massive state expansion that took place in the 1930s and 1940s did not go uncontested. Critics in both parties objected to increasing state power and its threat to civil liberties, the private sector, and federalism. For many such opponents, a society socially engineered by the state was anathema to American values and traditions. But over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, progressive liberalism’s main themes were ascendant. Anti– New Deal sentiment could gain only limited traction when expressed in opposition to labor, universalistic social programs, or the development of a national security state, all of which enjoyed wide support. One increasingly visible issue was vulnerable, however, to the development of a broad political resistance: black political and civil rights. From the beginning, the Democratic political order was constituted along a volatile fault line between two very different political realms. On one side there was a competitive party system in the process of enfranchising new groups and incorporating formerly excluded interests, such as organized labor and new immigrant groups. On the other was a one-party system of political exclusion, economic exploitation, and social domination. Before 1932, Southern Democrats had been the majority segment of a minority party; now that had changed. The fragile coalition of Northern


and Southern Democrats became even more so during Roosevelt’s long presidential tenure. As African Americans migrated to northern cities in the first few decades of the century, presumed black allegiance to the Republican Party steadily eroded. This was in part because the general economic benefits provided by the New Deal substantially improved the lot of the majority of blacks. But as Nancy Weiss argues, black voters did not leave the Republican Party in the 1930s and 1940s because the Democratic Party or Roosevelt championed black issues. Indeed, the Democratic Party promised little and delivered less for African Americans in terms of opposing Jim Crow laws, supporting anti-lynching legislation, and eliminating job discrimination. The New Deal brought greater benefits to blacks in terms of employment and relief than they had experienced under any previous administration and more than they could have hoped for from the Republican Party. As such, African Americans were not incorporated into the Democratic regime in the way that (white) labor or other constituencies were, for they had little clout. Roosevelt moved slowly on racial reform, particularly to the degree that he depended on the South both to move legislation through Congress and to implement programs locally. Nevertheless, Democratic rhetoric and limited practices of inclusion and enfranchisement would later force liberals to deal with black civil, political, and economic rights.3 White southerners firmly supported Roosevelt and the New Deal in its early years, enjoying the rise of their party to majoritarian status. Almost all southern delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1936 supported the abolition of the rule requiring a two-thirds majority of delegates to nominate candidates, which had formerly guaranteed southern control over the presidential nomination process. Southern Democrats felt that they had at last achieved “a great national party” and no longer needed these cumbersome checks. However, after Roosevelt’s landslide victory that year, which included large numbers of northern urban workers and African Americans, it dawned on southern political elites that being in a national majority meant that their sectional power was diminishing. The South became just one among many components in an alignment that included urban white ethnic and black voters.4

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In 1937, the first hints of a conservative coalition of Republicans and anti–New Deal Southern Democrats took shape around issues of increased federal power, opposition to industrial unions, and welfare spending. This cooperation across the aisle was sparked by FDR’s controversial “court-packing” scheme. Between 1935 and 1936 the Supreme Court had struck down more national legislation than in any comparable period in U.S. history, including two decisions the president thought were key to the success of New Deal imperatives.5 On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt proposed a bill providing that for each justice who failed to retire by age seventy, the president must appoint a new additional justice. Roosevelt would have been able to enlarge the Court to fifteen members, as six of the nine justices were already septuagenarians. In response, a small group of senators from both parties who had been meeting privately to strategize against what they considered excesses of the New Deal created what became known as the Conservative Manifesto. This document was written primarily by Josiah Bailey (D-N.C.) and Arthur Vandenburg (R-Mich.), with input from other powerful senators in both parties. The manifesto consisted of a statement of principles and a tenpoint list of demands, including a balanced budget, tax reduction, a new labor policy, maintenance of states’ rights and local self-government, and reliance upon the “American form of government and the American system of free enterprise.” The story of the manifesto itself reveals the limits as much as the potential of such a coalition at the time, as many critics of Roosevelt in both parties refused to sign it. Southern Democrats feared that it would appear to be a “coalition manifesto” that would give undue political advantage to the GOP. Meanwhile, many conservative Republican senators distanced themselves from it after Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary from Oregon announced, “Anyone who signs that thing is going to have a Liberty League tag put on him.” The manifesto itself was prematurely published in major newspapers, generating much negative publicity. In fact, initially only Bailey admitted to drafting the document.6 The Conservative Coalition began to limit the reach of the New Deal in the late 1930s, but on most issues, southerners in Congress continued to vote with the president. Solid southern opposition could only be found on the issue of race. As such, the possibility of a durable alliance was remote;


racial stratification on its own was not enough to build a political identity along new lines. As the 1944 election approached, divisions in the party sharpened; southern politicians began to speak openly about the possibility of abandoning the national party. While FDR’s renomination was guaranteed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia gave all their votes to Harry Byrd (D-Va.) in protest (Byrd never declared candidacy), and South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Texas gave a portion of their votes to the senator from Virginia as well. The biggest victory for Southern Democrats was that Missouri senator Harry S. Truman got the vice presidential nomination over the left-leaning and pro-civil rights candidate Henry Wallace.7 Nevertheless, the great majority of southern voters were still identified with the party that had been theirs for a century. As Birmingham columnist John Temple Graves described it, among southerners Roosevelt was still “the Democratic Party, the rebel yell, Woodrow Wilson and Robert E. Lee rolled into one,” and as V. O. Key still observed in 1949, “an underlying liberal drive permeates southern politics.”8 Having benefited from the New Deal, southern voters were still passionately loyal to the president. Opposition to New Deal liberalism and the Democratic Party in the South was still an elite phenomenon that had limited political appeal. Effective resistance to the New Deal would require an issue on the ground that could more strongly engage political passions in the South, and a political discourse that linked the issue to a condemnation of the New Deal project as a whole. The issue of race became increasingly salient in the immediate postwar era, and Charles Wallace Collins became one of the central figures in the development of a language of opposition.

Collins and the Road Map to Revolt Born in 1879 into an Alabama planter family and raised in black belt Hale County, Charles Collins studied law in Birmingham before going north to study Semitic languages and archaeology at the University of Chicago, then politics and economics at Harvard. Collins’s career encompassed work in government, private legal practice, and continual political

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writing on economics, constitutional law, and states’ rights. He directed the Economic Section of the Legislative Reference Service at the Library of Congress, and went on to become the librarian for the Supreme Court, the law librarian for the U.S. Congress, and adviser to numerous congressional committees. He also worked for the Treasury Department, where he wrote successful legislation on behalf of the banking industry. In 1927 Collins left government to focus on private law practice and consulting work. As an authority on banking law, he was counsel to numerous financial institutions and holding companies, including the Bank of America.9 Throughout his career, Collins wrote books and articles on economics, constitutional law, and race relations. Along with Whither Solid South? he wrote The Fourteenth Amendment and the States (1914) and numerous pamphlets, including “Plan for a National Budget System” (1918), “The South and the Electoral College” (1944), “The South Must Not Surrender” (1948), and “The Race Integration Cases” (1954). Collins’s background in government, banking, constitutional law, and southern politics are all reflected in Whither Solid South? The work weaves institutional, linguistic, legal, and strategic arguments together in an appeal for a marriage of economic conservatism and white supremacy. In the book, Collins urges a realignment of U.S. politics that would link southern Democrats and conservative Republicans on one side, and New Dealers and racial liberals on the other.10 For Collins, the link among language, politics, and institutional power was key to analyzing political authority and interest. Much of Whither Solid South? is concerned with demonstrating how New Deal liberals developed a rhetoric to promote specific political ends. For him, language was crucial in the New Deal because the concentration of power at the federal level achieved by state actors allowed them to redefine political terms for the nation at large. As he put it, “Centralization has brought national planning and with it new words and new meanings to old words. ‘Education’ is coming to mean coercion. The South must be ‘educated.’ ‘Democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘right,’ ‘law,’ ‘security,’ ‘production,’ ‘private enterprise,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘fascist’ and a host of other words have had their meaning distilled out and a new content put in. The form remains the same. The substance has been changed.”11 Collins understood that emerg-


ing interpretations of basic American ideals were shifting the political terrain, bringing together formerly unrelated groups into a new national political identity. Collins thus attempted to show that religious, labor, fraternal, and civil rights organizations, which “otherwise having nothing in common,” were coming together around the term “democracy,” and that they threatened the very basis of the southern system in their attempt to “make the Negro equal to the white man economically, politically and socially.” This new use of “democracy,” Collins argued, moves the term from the strictly political to the social and moral sphere. “For the past decade,” he asserted, “the word ‘democracy’ has, with increasing frequency, been used in the United States to connote moral and spiritual values in relation to rules of conduct of individual persons.” According to Collins, the use of the word was misapplied. “No such definition can be found in the dictionary. This is an old word which comes down to us from the Greeks and means literally ‘rule of the people.’ It is a political term and is used to describe a form of government.”12 Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s assertion that this modern notion is merely an updated form of Judeo-Christian morality, Collins asserted that “the current concept of ‘democracy’ as a rule of personal conduct . . . is derived from the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.” But, he argued, “Our Federal Government is based upon a written Constitution,” and “Congress cannot lawfully concern itself with the enactment of a moral code for the control of human conduct.”13 The discursive link between democracy and racial equality in the social sphere was indeed strengthened during the 1940s, particularly in relation to World War II. Democratic rhetoric was critical in the war against racial fascism, but such language inevitably raised questions about democracy and race at home. Roosevelt contrasted American democracy to Nazism by claiming that the former was “a matter of mind and heart,” and not “a matter of race and ancestry.” As the war wore on, white liberals produced many books that argued for greater racial equality. As Mary Dudziak and others have shown, in the context of war and anticolonial movements around the world, liberals were forced to begin to confront the reality of white supremacy in the United States.14

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The most successful attempt at the time to redefine American political ideals in the cause of civil rights (and therefore at the center of Collins’s crosshairs) was Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Published in 1944, Myrdal’s study was an enormous research undertaking, and—at roughly 1,500 pages—the largest study on race ever produced in the United States. Given the increasing political importance of social science in the Democratic project of state-building, a generously funded project by a notable economist and a team of American sociologists could be expected to shape the dominant discourse and policy framework for racial progress. Proposed originally by Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Newton T. Baker, the idea for An American Dilemma was not so much to bring America in line with its ideals, but rather to find ways of dealing with the “Negro problem” that threatened significant social disruption in northern cities. The book demonstrated in great and sobering detail the prevalence of racial exploitation, violence, and discrimination in the United States in a way that no major study of race ever had. In the face of this overwhelming evidence Myrdal developed an argument that American national identity was defined by a central trend in its history toward “the gradual realization” of an “American Creed” of democracy, freedom, and equality. Myrdal asserted that these “valuations preserved on a general plane” for Americans meant that white racist practices lacked a substantive basis; they were pathological and could be defended only “in terms of tradition, expediency, or utility.” Hence, the egalitarian ethos could expect to finally conquer racism, which for Myrdal was mostly a characteristic of “poor and uneducated” whites in “backward” areas of the Deep South.15 For Myrdal, racism did not reside in the realm of politics and power, but rather in a pre-political space of morality, psychology, and knowledge. By this logic, nothing fundamental about political relations in the United States required change except that the country live up to its liberal tradition and bring its people out of ignorance and backwardness. Thus, as Stephen Steinberg has pointed out, Myrdal’s study called attention to white supremacy in the United States without proposing solutions except to goad the conscience of a fundamentally decent white America and to dissipate irrationality. Once expressed, Myrdal’s position was echoed by


other liberal intellectuals. While wartime liberals began to recognize the gap between democratic ideals and racial practices, little direct political redress was proposed and less, even, was acted upon by the New Deal state.16

White Supremacy as a Political Doctrine Because of the prominence and increasing influence of An American Dilemma, Collins singled it out for particular opprobrium. In doing so he demonstrated the sharp distinction between his and Myrdal’s interpretations of American national identity. Myrdal’s liberal view of America was that of a deeply egalitarian society for which racism was merely an embarrassing residue. For Collins, there could be no greater misunderstanding of what America really represented. He registered disbelief that Myrdal’s “so-called creed,” which he saw as a confused “conglomerate mass” of ideas, could possibly be attributed to most white Americans, and he found absurd Myrdal’s assertion that “the guilty conscience of the white man” is the greatest weapon African Americans had in their struggle. Not only was it anathema to the white South, but “practically no white person in the United States,” he wrote, “can endorse [such] extreme and radical views.” Believing that America’s bedrock commitments since the founding had been about increasing political, social, and economic inclusion, Myrdal saw a future where the irrational aberration of racism must necessarily wither away. Believing that America’s bedrock commitments since the founding had been about state sovereignty, traditions of exclusion, and economic liberalism, Collins, in contrast, saw a future where white national identity and conservatism would triumph over the aberration of racial liberalism.17 Interestingly, while Collins challenged Myrdal’s political and moral claims about race in the United States, he did not reject the author’s emphasis on the fallacy of scientific racism. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, an increasing number of intellectuals began to dismiss beliefs in innate racial inequality. Cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, who worked to dismantle scientific racism for decades, wrote the 1930 entry on race in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, where he debunked all theories of biological racial difference, particularly in relation to intelligence.

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By the late 1930s, a new consensus among scholars held that there were no innate racial differences in aptitude.18 Collins did not deny this growing body of evidence against scientific racism; in fact, he conceded that “white supremacy is a political doctrine,” not a biological fact. “The fact that many individual Negroes have accomplishments and ability beyond that of many whites does not make any difference. . . . It is not a question of scientific proof. It will do no good to bring in the phrenologist to measure skulls, the anatomist and the chemist to study brain capacity and brain cells, the psychologist and the social engineer to conduct questions and answers with white and Negro school children or the anthropologist to study racial origins.”19 This seems like an extraordinary assertion for a self-described “orthodox Southerner,” given that southern advocates of racial domination since Jefferson had employed scientific rationales to justify their beliefs and practices. Perhaps Collins was simply abandoning science because science had abandoned white supremacy. But this admission was by no means a retreat. In fact, it amounted to a fairly accurate appraisal of power that served his strategic cause well. Liberals like Myrdal claimed that scientific advancement would eliminate racism and clear the way for the attainment of the creedal imperative he described. But Collins understood that this was merely a conceit. As he described their position, “Starting from the theory of racial equality, ‘science’ must be brought in to explain the white man’s attitude toward the Negro. Then having shown that the white man is irrational, intellect and conscience will do the rest.” But as he states, “There can be no ‘scientific’ solution of the Negro question in the United States. . . . How would science explain the causes of the Civil War, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction of the South thereafter? . . . One may speculate, one may philosophize and one may trust in some divine purpose, but the working relationships between the races are left to practical politics.”20 By naming white supremacy a political doctrine, Collins understood better than many liberals that it was never about science to begin with. To be sure, the science discrediting the biological basis of race would become an important part of antiracist discourse in the next decade, but science itself could not determine political commitments. Ironically, Collins rightly understood his critique of Myrdal to have


something in common with that of prominent black intellectuals and activists. To make this point he cited the work of Rayford Logan, a historian at Howard University and editor of the 1944 book What the Negro Wants, the most publicized intervention into the discussion of race and politics by black writers at the time. Indeed, many of the fourteen essays in What the Negro Wants are telling in their distance from Myrdal’s understanding of the American Creed, and from liberal confidence that education would soon dissolve racial stratification. “Even if ‘race’ were nothing more than a ‘superstition,’” wrote Logan in the opening essay, “it would be for that reason a very serious psychological hurdle. Even if racial attitudes and conduct are due in large measure to ‘prejudice,’ that fact similarly makes improvement a tremendous task.” Logan then turned Myrdal’s assertion on its head by arguing that white America’s ideals and sense of progress are not contrary to racism, but rather deeply connected to them. “Finally,” he wrote, “most white persons, whether they be superstitious, prejudiced, or intellectual, believe that their fullest enjoyment of life—economic, political, cultural and social—demands the denial of full equality to the Negro.” The point was clear both to Collins and to many black intellectuals at the time: reducing racism to mere prejudice left many New Deal liberals ill prepared to deal with its potential as a form of political identity.21

The Negro Race Objectives and the Deadly Virus of Statism Unlike Myrdal, who had little to say about black political struggle, Collins demonstrated a clear understanding of the political shift being attempted by black activists. He saw that this emergent civil rights movement was not content to react to “southern customs,” but rather was changing the entire terms of debate, fighting on different terrain. It was evident to him that a new black political identity was being forged, in great part out of the African American experience in World War II and the political meanings that civil rights activists and intellectuals generated out of that experience. He wrote: I think the real change came with Pearl Harbor when the mass of Negroes were at once forcibly thrust forward into every sort of

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war activity. . . . Studies and investigations like that of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, on which a number of Negro intellectuals were employed, offered the opportunity for the rationalization of the position of the Negro as a citizen of the United States in time of war. Every circumstance of his race relationship with the white man was brought under review de novo as though the Negro had just landed on these shores and had been declared a citizen of the United States with all the constitutional rights of the white man.22 This new identity was the most dangerous threat to the white South for Collins because it portended a new set of relationships of black independence and leadership that would come to shape the American political landscape in the coming decades. Lamenting this, Collins warned, “My white brother of the Deep South, the Negroes are organized to get what they want. They are organized intelligently and rationally. They are organized nationally and locally, effectively and functionally. They are working for themselves through their own organizations and in addition, they are being assisted by bi-racial voluntary associations and by all-white voluntary organizations.”23 Collins understood the impending stakes in the struggle for black rights, and his critique of the connection between antiracism and liberalism became the mirror-opposite of his linkage of racism to conservatism. In his book Collins outlined what he saw as the dual dangers of “Negro equality and State capitalism,” which he saw as having been promoted by liberals in both parties under the auspices of the New Deal. He viewed civil rights advancements and increased federal power as distinct political projects, but ones that were becoming fused to the mutual benefit of black activists and New Dealers. He wrote, “There is a strong left-wing movement in this country toward stateism [sic] the aim of which is to centralize all governmental power in the executive branch of the Federal Government under a system of national planning. . . . The Negro race objectives have been caught up by this movement and are now an important part of the ‘liberal’ legislative program.”24 Linking the advancement of black rights to the notion of a tyrannical national state was not new, of course; states’


rights have been used to defend southern racial domination since the founding. But Collins updated this association by framing it in a postwar context. He modernized Calhoun’s nineteenth-century ideas to evoke recently defeated European fascism as well as the new political threat of Soviet totalitarianism. Using Orwellian imagery, he asserted that racial liberals planned to “establish a reign of terror of a centralized national police state with a vast secret service to track down individuals who have been charged with the violation of the rights of other individuals.” For him, any advance in civil rights was logically tied to such a plan, for “the whole Negro program is infected with the deadly virus of stateism.”25 For Collins, the issue that most linked statism to civil rights was the attempt to establish a permanent Federal Employment Practices Commission. The struggle over the FEPC was a critical one that went back to the start of the decade when a delegation of black leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, and T. Arnold Hill, had pushed FDR on employment for blacks in the defense industry. When this effort failed, Randolph began to organize a national march on Washington, D.C. The president strongly discouraged the march, but Randolph refused to back down. Fearing embarrassment, FDR signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, which established the FEPC. The order banned racial discrimination in any defense industry receiving federal contracts and empowered the FEPC to investigate complaints and take action against alleged employment discrimination. Southern politicians both in Congress and in the states continually attacked the FEPC throughout the war, as did southern union leaders; as a result the commission was able to do very little in those states. Roosevelt himself backed away from support of the committee for fear of splintering his coalition in 1944.26 The fight to establish the FEPC and the vociferous resistance to it were both important moments in the emerging relationship between race, liberalism, and antiliberal resistance to the New Deal. A march on Washington would do nothing to directly challenge Roosevelt’s power. However, because the New Deal’s progressive liberalism was based ideologically on a democratic and egalitarian ethos, a very public accounting of the gap between New Deal rhetoric and reality when it came to black Americans could harm the regime’s legitimacy at home and abroad. Therefore, al-

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though the order was barely enforced, FDR responded to pressure on the issue. Southern Democrats seized on FDR’s compromise to whip up southern opposition not only to black advancement but also to the very progressive liberalism that had opened the door to black political claims. Moreover, the FEPC produced a natural affinity between Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans who did not want to have the federal government—or state governments—exercising such employment controls over business.27 When Roosevelt died in April 1945, southerners were relieved that his more conservative Missouri-born vice president would take the reins of executive power. Although Harry Truman showed himself to be less liberal than his predecessor on many issues, within two months of taking office he intervened in Congress on behalf of a stalled bill to create a permanent FEPC. For Collins, then, it was not simply the Truman administration that was betraying Southern Democrats; it was the active coalition of wellorganized groups that had to be countered by a coalition linking opposition to labor with opposition to civil rights. Describing congressional committee hearings over the passage of the FEPC bill, Collins wrote that black advocates spoke with conviction and determination and with amazing assurance in view of the wide sweep of the objectives for which they were fighting. . . . The Negro intellectuals, labor leaders and organizers have done a good job of spade work all along the line. Furthermore, in presenting their aims they ignore that fundamental position of the white South with which they are quite familiar. They are not defending themselves against Southern customs. They are on the offensive. They are storming the breastworks and if they win what they want, the South will be turned upside down.28 Collins recognized the FEPC as the issue that best kept conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats in alliance as it attempted to regulate both private employers and race relations. For him, this alliance was crucial, and he extensively cited Republican opposition to the bill in a filibuster that killed it, although in reality opposition had been led by Southern Democrats. Nevertheless the existence of Republican opposition was


proof enough for him that the South was finding trustworthy allies outside the Democratic Party.

The “Grim and Bitter Struggle Ahead” The coupling of black equality with an increasingly centralized state had begun to create a fundamental crisis for the nation, according to Collins. As he saw it, “The people of the United States have been pushed to the left of their accustomed position. In high places only lip service is now given to States Rights, local self government and individual initiative. The institution of private property itself is on the defensive. . . . A question mark now faces everything that has made America great.” For Collins, the “question mark” of America’s future would fundamentally alter the parties themselves. “There is a grim and bitter struggle ahead which bids fair to shake both the Democratic and Republican Parties to their foundations.”29 This “political cleavage across party lines . . . is an illustration of a national condition under which men and women are seeking new affiliations for self-expression. The old associations are losing their meaning in the face of a determined move toward complete stateism on the one hand and a desperate attempt to hold on to the old values of personal freedom and local self-government. Among the latter will be found practically all Southerners.”30 Collins believed that under such conditions the possibility might emerge of a national realignment that could unite Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in the North and West into “the strongest party in the country, provided that the issue of Negro equality was left to the sponsorship of a new Liberal Party.”31 Collins anticipated almost exactly the successful strategy that Kevin Phillips developed for Nixon’s presidential run twenty years later. The pieces were not yet in place for such a shift in political identification, but we can see how Collins laid the political groundwork for the change to take place. And like Phillips’s efforts later on, race would be at the heart of any new change, Collins asserted, for Truman “will no doubt try to hold the old Roosevelt illogical coalition—the radical labor vote, the big city machine vote, the Negro vote and the conservative Solid South vote. The Republicans on the other hand—riding a conservative reaction and trend—may not find it expedient or necessary to cater to the Negroes who

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hold less than ten percent of the population and only about three percent of the popular vote.”32 However, Collins acknowledged that a new party alignment would not be likely in the immediate future. Short of this possibility, he still saw it as crucial that southerners break with FDR and the national Democratic Party. It would be better, he thought, “for the South to fight independently in the Electoral College than to continue to keep political company with the left-wing New Dealers who are at heart the South’s most bitter enemies.” Collins’s central focus on presidential elections makes sense given the extraordinary expansion of federal power and executive power in particular since 1932.33 Ideology was combined with hard-nosed strategy with the suggestion of three possible tactics for the South to use to defy the national party. One would be to reorganize the Democratic Party in the South by creating a Southern Democratic Party that would nominate its own candidates for president and vice president, adopt a platform, and choose electors pledged to support the party if it won in that state. Such a bloc of electoral votes might throw the election into the House of Representatives, giving Southern Democrats possible control over the outcome. However, Collins did not quite trust that white southerners would abandon the party with which they had identified for so long. A second plan would avoid that possibility by eliminating the popular vote altogether, leaving election up to state appointed electors pledged to support the state party nominee. A third plan would have Southern Democrats appoint unpledged electors, who, after the popular vote, would hold a convention to decide whom to support. These strategic musings would become relevant soon after the publication of Whither Solid South?34

The States’ Rights Revolt In a speech at the annual conference of the NAACP on June 28, 1947, President Truman stated that Americans “can no longer afford the luxury of a leisurely attack upon prejudice and discrimination . . . We cannot, any longer, await the growth of a will to action in the slowest state or the most backward community. Our national government must show the way.” In October of that year, Truman’s biracial Committee on Civil Rights produced a report entitled To Secure These Rights, which recom-


mended the enactment of antilynching, anti–poll tax, and fair employment legislation, measures prohibiting discrimination or segregation in interstate transportation, and desegregation of the armed forces.35 Truman was initially circumspect about his own plans with regard to the committee’s recommendations, but the upcoming presidential election forced the issue. Republicans were open about their desire to win black voters back from the Democratic Party, while Henry Wallace announced his plan to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination from the Left, endorsing all aspects of the committee’s recommendations on civil rights. Truman adviser Clark Clifford and others urged Truman to compete fiercely for the black vote; in several key industrial states, black voters could hold the line for him in a close election, while the South had nowhere else to go. In a State of the Union address on January 7, 1948, Truman announced that the “recent report of the President’s Civil Rights Committee points the way to corrective action by the federal government and by state and local governments. Because of the need for effective federal actions, I shall send a special message to Congress on this important subject.”36 Truman’s announcement sent shock waves throughout the South, sparking angry responses from many quarters. “The South we know is being swept to its destruction,” said Mississippi Senator James Eastland. “It is a real danger—it is an imminent danger.” Days after, Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright announced in his inaugural speech that his state might actually bolt from the Truman ticket in 1948. Committed segregationist political elites and intellectuals began to mobilize in response with the blueprint closest at hand, Collins’s Whither Solid South? which was at the time in wide circulation among Southern Democratic elites. Southern governors quickly met in Wakulla Springs, Florida, to denounce Truman’s desegregation attempts, and agreed on a resolution penned largely by Strom Thurmond warning that the white South would not “stand idle and let all of this happen. . . . It is thought that we have no redress. This assumption ignores the Electoral College set up in the Constitution of the United States.”37 However, Thurmond recommended that the group have a forty-day “cooling off period” to decide what to do next. In that time, a committee formed to recommend next steps, the first of which was to meet with Dem-

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ocratic Party chairman Howard McGrath and voice their complaints. After an unsatisfactory meeting with McGrath on February 3, 1948, the Thurmond committee scheduled a meeting of all southern delegates to the national convention, where conferees decided that they would withhold their votes from any pro–civil rights candidate at the 1948 Democratic convention. Were such a candidate chosen, they would reconvene southern delegates in Birmingham, Alabama, to choose alternative candidates for president and vice president.38 At the Democratic convention held in Philadelphia in July, Northern Democrats backed Truman and, after a pitched floor fight, finally endorsed several civil rights planks in the Democratic platform. It was time, said the liberal young Minneapolis mayor, Hubert H. Humphrey, “for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights.” In response, many Southern Democratic delegates staged a walkout. Alabama State Democratic Party chair Gessner McCorvey offered a plan. Based on Collins’s Electoral College strategy, he recommended southern electors pledge support for Dwight Eisenhower, then a member of neither party, but technically a Texas native, a supporter of segregation in the military, and—importantly—disliked by NAACP head Walter White. Collins was skeptical of going this route, however, thinking it better to have a states’ rights southerner run or to leave southern electors unpledged for the time being. In any case, Eisenhower did not want the nomination.39 Former Alabama governor Frank Dixon, another leader in the states’ rights struggle, wrote to Collins from the national convention to say that he thought that there eventually needed to be a third-party split, but that for the time being he was with Collins on the idea of having southern electors withhold their votes from Truman in order to “recapture some of the strength to which we are entitled in the councils of the Party.” He went on, “After the adoption of the platform in Philadelphia today, I am morally certain that there will be a demand for the continuation of the movement which you so admirably charted in your book.”40 The meeting in Birmingham, held immediately after the Democratic convention, had more the flavor of a revival meeting than a political convention as thousands of excited white southerners streamed into the hall. Thurmond had hoped to keep the campaign focused on constitutional


questions of states’ rights as opposed to racial issues, but as historian Robert Garson has pointed out, “the organizers felt that it was impossible to create a mood of solidarity and defiance without emphasizing the very issue that sparked off the revolt in the first place—that is, race.” After Gessner McCorvey convened the meeting, Frank Dixon delivered a harsh attack on the president and his civil rights proposals. Warning that the poll tax would indiscriminately enfranchise mentally inferior African Americans and asserting that there was no such thing as lynching in the South, he then told his audience that “government is a dangerous thing,” and called on whites to “preserve their basic principles of democracy and . . . prevent the establishment . . . of a police state.” Dixon was met with wild applause and the waving of Confederate flags. The former Alabama governor was followed by Texas State Representative Lloyd E. Price, who blamed race problems in the United States on New Englanders who first brought “howling, screaming savages” from Africa.41 Throughout the day Dixiecrat leaders, including Collins, met at the Tutwiler Hotel to debate strategy. That afternoon, Birmingham judge Horace Wilkinson emerged to give the report of the resolutions committee—an eight-point “Statement of Principles” affirming the Constitution as “the greatest charter of human liberty” and their opposition to “the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.” The resolution was unanimously adopted as the crowd erupted in rowdy support. That evening, conventioneers formally nominated Strom Thurmond as the Southern Democratic presidential candidate and Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright for vice president, although it was hardly unanimous. As southern historian Numan Bartley described it, “Many of the Dixiecrats found little about the South Carolina governor to admire beyond his energy and enthusiasm. After all (as one of them sniffed in delivering the ultimate put-down within states’ rights circles) Thurmond had never even read Collins’ Whither Solid South.”42 Wright gave a speech exhorting the audience not to see the convention as a bolt from the Democratic Party, while Thurmond told conventioneers that “for our loyalty we have been stabbed in the back by a president who has betrayed every principle of the Democratic Party in his desire to win at any cost.” And although he claimed to want to keep the movement fo-

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cused on high-minded ideals of states’ rights, he told the audience, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit Negroes into our schools and into our homes.”43 The odd strategy of nominating their own candidates without breaking ranks from the national party showed the influential hand of Collins. As Dixon told Collins in a letter afterward: “My sincere thanks for your help with reference to our good friend, Gessner McCorvey. You really accomplished something, since, when the question came up of agreeing to cast the electoral vote for Thurmond and Wright, McCorvey went right along and helped to secure others, on the theory that the States’ Rights candidates would, under proper circumstances, release their electors to vote for Eisenhower, or any one else whom they thought they could actually carry Congress over Dewey or Truman.”44 Mississippi’s Wright and Senator Eastland pushed the idea of a regional break with the national party and made Whither Solid South? the Bible for the movement by mailing copies of the book to states’ rights sympathizers across the South.45 Although race had set off the Dixiecrat Revolt, the States’ Rights Democratic Party campaign pushed states’ rights as the real reasons for the split with the national party. As Thurmond campaigned throughout the South, he toned down the racist rhetoric but continued the “police state” language of states’ rights. His earlier racist statements notwithstanding, Thurmond began insisting that “The South’s fight is not being waged on the theory of white supremacy, but on the theory of State sovereignty.” Free-market conservatism was also a primary component. The Southern States Industrial Council, the Arkansas Free Enterprise Association, the Associated Industries of Florida, and other state business associations played an active role in the campaign. Newly appointed campaign chairman Judge Merritt Gibson announced in August that the Dixiecrats “could be the core of a new conservative party which would attract the conservative elements from both major parties.”46 In the election, Thurmond came in a distant third to Truman, receiving only one-fifth of the popular vote even in the South, where 98.8 percent of his total vote came from. The Dixiecrats did carry the four states where they were the only party listed on the Democratic ballot: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana. After his defeat, Thurmond distanced himself from the states’ rights revolt, thinking that it had perhaps


run its course. In an immediate sense, he was right. Such a drubbing at the polls was a serious blow to both popular and financial support. Moreover, the Democratic Party purged its national committee of Dixiecrats and withheld patronage to disloyal congressmen. For the hard core of the movement, however, this was just the beginning of what they hoped would be a long-term struggle.47

Moving Right, Heading North Key to the continued political influence of the movement was the development and propagation of their ideas. For Collins and other Dixiecrat leaders, this meant building both a southern and national movement. As Collins wrote Thurmond just prior to the election, the campaign had created “a core of southern resistance around which a new political movement can be built.” For him, southern and national questions were intimately connected, and had to be argued and organized that way. Just after the election, Collins wrote to Gibson in an attempt to assess what he saw as both the “proximate and ultimate cause of the [Dixiecrat] Revolt.” The immediate cause, he wrote, was the “rude blow struck in the face and Truman gets all the blame for it.” But the Leaders of the States’ Rights Movement must pay the most attention to the remote or ultimate cause because it is inherently the more dangerous and operates continuously. I would divide the ultimate cause into its component parts. It is composed of a number of groups which are determined to establish national stateism in the United States under a system of national planning for everything and everybody, thereby invading the domain of the reserve powers of the States and destroying their sovereignty, all of which groups are for one reason or another supporting the Truman program to break down mass social segregation in the South.48 Collins then went on to list the NAACP, “unorganized professional Negroes,” “Jewish Communists,” the CIO, “various Protestant and Catholic groups,” “powerful monetary funds like the Carnegie Corporation,” and “hundreds of other organized left-wing groups,” among others, as the en-

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emies in this struggle. Here Collins was describing the elements he saw as constituting the hegemonic position in American society at that time; to him their aims were reflected in both national parties. He wrote that there was in fact “no difference between Truman and Dewey. Both hold to National stateism. . . . [In the election, Dewey] said only, in effect, that he would make a better manager of national planning than Truman.” To this alliance only the South was in open opposition. “The issue,” he wrote, “is fundamental and national but only the South has taken up the gage of battle.” The South, then, would have to be the vanguard of national salvation.49 However, Collins had long-term hopes for a national struggle, in part because he understood the dominant elements to be united around only one issue which could not ultimately be sustained. For “while these individual groups are well organized they possess no overall unity of purpose. . . . While all favor or profess to favor the Negro program of legislation, only the Negro groups have a predominant interest in it.” Thus, while the white North was currently not allied with the South, he argued, it would become so when the South could organize itself, sharpen its arguments and begin to wage a war not just in the political sphere, but in the cultural as well—through southern literature, art, and philosophy. “When those on the other side of the Mason and Dixon Line, who love the Constitution, see the quality of the fight the South is making, they will respond with respect and admiration.” In order for this to happen, a “way must be found to educate the North on the issues in this fight. They must be given the information and the arguments to enable them to understand.” Building such a political alliance then would necessitate not just a sense of political expediency on behalf of northern conservatives, but a deeper identification with the white South—its perspectives on race and state sovereignty, as well as its heritage and cultural values.50 Attempting to pursue their national vision, states’ rights leaders met in Birmingham in December 1948 to discuss the future of the states’ rights organization. The group elected to pursue a national education program by establishing a nonprofit institute in Washington “for the purpose of spreading, nation-wide, the principles on which the states’ rights campaign was founded,” with an eye toward passing a states’ rights amendment to the Constitution. This meeting, and the report issued afterward,


clearly moved in the direction of linking states’ rights and opposition to civil rights to a broader conservative economic and political agenda. The proposed amendment promoted by the group was composed of six provisions: First, that “Congress . . . make no law . . . that conflicts with a state law pertaining to education, elections, qualifications for suffrage, civil rights of individuals, racial relations, labor, zoning, [and] transfer and ownership of property.” Second, that there be “no nationalization of labor, business, industry or the professions.” Third, that “grants and aid” from the federal government “be administered exclusively by the states.” Fourth, that the “proceeds of all income, profit, estate, gift and inheritance taxes, not expended on the armed forces and our veterans and their dependents be . . . returned to the states.” Fifth, that the “national debt . . . be funded and any future sales tax pledged to its payment.” Sixth, that deficit spending “cease except in time of war.” Hence, as the movement attempted to go national, its focus on economic conservatism increased.51 Evidence of this shift is made clear in a letter to Thurmond from Birmingham Post columnist John Temple Graves. Graves was a major public voice in southern politics and had been a noted New Dealer. He became an active supporter of the states’ rights revolt, but did not see a necessary connection to conservatism. In the letter he told Thurmond that he could not support the new states’ rights organization “because I have some doubts about letting any group like this to hold itself forth in the coming years as inheritors of the movement you led.” If the movement were to be a successful and positive development, Thurmond had to regain control, Graves told him, “because you stand for a liberalism . . . that set[s] you apart from most of the leadership.” Like Graves, Thurmond had indeed been considered a liberal political figure prior to his increasing involvement in racial politics in South Carolina.52 In late January 1949 a group that included Louisiana political boss Leander Perez, Birmingham judge Horace Wilkinson, W. W. Wright, and South Carolina attorney James Murphy met in Collins’s Washington office to further discuss the creation of an institute. Although they agreed to open a Washington bureau, they decided that pending federal civil rights legislation compelled them to forgo appeals to northern allies and focus instead on bringing southern pressure to bear on Congress to stop the president’s program by organizing at the grassroots level.53 Collins wrote

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to Frank Dixon that there was “no doubt . . . an extreme amount of shame and disappointment throughout the North from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the failure of the Republican Party to rise up against the national planners in defense of the Constitution generally and in particular of the powers reserved to the states. . . . The time is ripe for new party alignments but for historical and psychological reasons the South is not at this time in a position to call to her Northern brothers.” Not only was the Republican Party platform of 1948 intent on undoing “the compromise of 1878,” but “the tremendous and continuous outpouring of propaganda from New York City against the South” had put the region “on the moral defensive,” unable to respond to liberal charges because “they have dropped an insulated curtain against us.” The battle had to stay, for the time being, on southern soil, because the possibility of effective northern support was slim.54 The group agreed that “unless Southern Representatives hear from the ‘grass roots’ this pressure will be of such a nature that the younger congressmen . . . will fall in line and vote adversely to our interests.” Collins wrote to Dixon, “We must therefore organize, on a county-wide basis, in every state in the South, a grassroots States’ Rights Movement. We must establish a States’ Rights line which a congressman will violate at his peril. . . . When we have done this successfully we can then turn our eyes northward and may expect to be met with respect and admiration.” By directing efforts southward, Dixiecrat leaders helped foment a broader social movement in the form of the Citizens Councils, and shaped the ideological content of its opposition to desegregation.55

The Republican-Dixiecrat Romance of ’52 In the two years following the Dixiecrat Revolt, race came to dominate southern politics as it had not in a century. In 1949 and 1950, congressional debate raged over another FEPC bill proposed by Truman. The controversy allowed Dixiecrats to link racial stratification to issues of property rights, business rights, and states’ rights, creating the basis for an alliance with Republicans outside the South. Then in 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court issued unanimous decisions in two cases that began to wear away at the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal. McLau-


rin v. Oklahoma State Regents struck down segregation in graduate schools and Sweatt v. Painter did the same for law schools. The Dixiecrat defeat in 1948 now receded into the distance as neo-bourbon sentiment built in opposition to the growing threat to segregation; southern liberalism began taking serious blows. In the 1950 election, two pro–civil rights populist liberals, Senators Claude Pepper of Florida and Frank Graham of North Carolina, were felled in primary elections by segregationist opposition. Two Deep South states elected segregationist governors that year: Georgia brought the openly racist Herman Talmadge to office, and South Carolina chose the powerful former U.S. senator James Byrnes. Both aligned themselves with former Dixiecrat leaders and, along with Mississippi, began to form the front line of resistance to desegregation.56 Intensifying racial politics in the South began to gain national expression as the 1952 presidential election drew near. Some Dixiecrats still held hopes that a third-party run was possible. Yet three years after the Dixiecrat Revolt, the link between race and conservatism was not cemented, even for some of the most prominent Dixiecrats. Speaking before the National Cottonseed Products Association in 1951, Mississippi governor and 1948 States’ Rights Party vice presidential candidate Fielding Wright declared, “The old traditional Republican Party is too reactionary to inspire confidence. The present party has lost the confidence of the American people and I am convinced will not be returned to office.” That the Republican Party was still “too reactionary” for even a top Dixiecrat figure like Wright demonstrates the openness and contingency of the move from states’ rights revolt to political conservatism. Such a coalition was not a logical step, but rather one that had to be argued and fought for by the likes of Collins and other conservatives.57 Collins did his best to bring old allies along toward racial conservatism, arguing that their cause was one and the same. In June 1951 he wrote to John Temple Graves, I think your “genuine liberal” and my “genuine conservative” will turn out to be the same man. The leftwing political element in this country has taken over the word “liberal” and has squeezed the original meaning out of it. This new liberal is in fact a rank reactionary. He stands in the shoes of the old conservative who used

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the power of the federal government to promote his personal ambition. . . . I therefore classify everyone a conservative who fights on our side to conserve those basic principles of government upon which the Republic is founded.58 This “same man” was at once a New Dealer who championed the National Industrial Recovery Act and the TVA and an enemy of all the New Deal stood for, but such appeals were essential to the assertion that political positions like Collins’s and Graves’s were naturally aligned.59 While the struggle to determine the future of the states’ rights revolt went on, a more general battle went on between Dixiecrats and Democrats. The hand of Democratic regulars was strengthened when Truman announced that he would not seek another term, but the question remained whether the chosen Democratic nominee would uphold the civil rights plank of the national party. Meanwhile, some Republican leaders began to see the openings for the alignment that Dixiecrats had been encouraging for the previous three years; they began to openly court the Dixiecrat vote. Guy Gabrielson, chairman of the national Republican Party, attempted a “trial marriage at the top” between Dixiecrat leaders and national Republican leaders. Speaking at a Lincoln Day rally for Alabama Republicans in February 1952, he endorsed a racial politics generally opposed by Southern Republicans. Instead of contrasting Republicans to Southern Democrats through racial liberalism, Gabrielson linked Republican notions of small government to the Dixiecrat movement. “Our friends call themselves States’ Righters and we call ourselves Republicans. But they oppose corruption in government and so do we,” he proclaimed. “We want the Dixiecrats to vote for our candidate. The Dixiecrat movement is an antiTruman movement. The Dixiecrat party believes in states’ rights. That’s what the Republican Party believes in.” Such an unabashed bid by the top Republican Party official in the country demonstrates the impact of southern battles on the nation. Never had the party of Lincoln committed itself to the racist vote in such a manner.60 Yet the language of race was avoided in the attempt to link the Republicans to the Dixiecrats. Instead, the terms employed were meant to convey a number of potential common interests. The displacement of racism onto other political issues had long been a staple of southern political discourse.


Now political elites outside the South were beginning to engage in the same justifications. Along with South Dakota Senator Karl E. Mundt and a few other national Republican leaders, Gabrielson proposed institutional cooperation between Dixiecrats and Republicans.61 Conservative GOP leaders met with Dixiecrat leaders and spoke at gatherings of Southern Democrats in Deep South states. At a local luncheon club in Jackson, Mississippi, in April 1951, Karl Mundt was met with enthusiasm when he endorsed cooperation between Democratic states’ righters and Republicans. “Not mere applause,” editorialized the Jackson Daily News, “but ear-splitting Rebel yells the kind heard at political gatherings in this State three score years ago.” The next month, speaking in Charleston, South Carolina, Mundt suggested that informal conferences be held between Southern Democratic and GOP leaders to find agreement on several issues; a Republican candidate who is “acceptable to Dixie,” a strong states’ rights plank in the Republican platform, “omitting from the Republican platform any plans understandably repugnant to the South,” and the possibility of a Southern Democrat as the vice presidential GOP candidate. He further suggested that Southern Democrats retain their party label as in 1948, and make their cooperation cross-party.62 Collins, quoted by John Temple Graves in a Birmingham Post column, argued that states’ righters would be wrong to try to influence the Democratic Party in the 1952 election. “I am inclined to doubt, along with Senator Mundt, that they will succeed,” Collins said. “Like him, I look to see the Democratic Party go further to the left.” Instead, Collins suggested having the Democratic electors of the South vote not for a separate nominee but for the Republican nominee, “If the position of the Republican candidate conformed to the principle to which the Southern elector was pledged.” Whereas the revolt was regional in 1948, Collins asserted that “it has now moved on a broad front to the national level where the whole fabric of our organic law is at stake.” Graves concluded the column by stating, “In the changed circumstances of 1952, the South must be led by men less identified with the Negro question and more identified with the national revolt against federalism in general.” In other words, it was time to go national to save the local, and doing so would require backing off a bit on the issue of white supremacy.63 As the Republican Party elites attempted to make incursions into the

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South in 1952, simultaneous efforts were made by Democrats at the national level to yield to southern concerns. While staunch liberals at the convention were prepared to lose the southern states by adopting a progressive platform, northern moderates sought conciliation with the South. The eventual presidential nomination of Adlai Stevenson was meant to foster party unity, as was the choice of Alabama Senator John Sparkman as his running mate. The civil rights plank was substantially toned down as well. In return, the southern state Democratic parties stuck to the national ticket. However, the compromise was not good enough for the emboldened Dixiecrats, who took the lead in a southern “I like Ike” movement, making a fundamental break from the century-long identification with the Democratic Party. Dixiecrats had started down a heretical path four years earlier by running a Southern Democrat; they were now in open revolt. Former Alabama Democratic Party chairman Gessner McCorvey and Louisiana Democratic Party boss Leander Perez, both Dixiecrat veterans, were among Eisenhower’s earliest supporters. McCorvey publicly announced that he would not vote for Eisenhower, as it would have required him to resign from the State Democratic Executive Committee. But he did, in his words, raise “Heaven and Earth to elect [Eisenhower]” because he was “so very, very deeply interested in seeing Stevenson defeated.” As he bragged to Karl Mundt, this work included distributing across the South tens of thousands of copies of a photograph of John Sparkman standing with “his Negro friend” George Vaughn, a black Democratic convention delegate from Missouri. In his response, Mundt thanked McCorvey for “the wonderful leadership [he had] demonstrated in his work for Eisenhower.” There was no attempt to hide, in such correspondence with GOP leaders, the role race played in the ostensible fight to save federalism.64 Dixiecrat leaders in other states similarly worked for the GOP national ticket. In a speech at the South Carolina Democratic Convention, Governor Byrnes made the point clear. “If we act in concert with other Southern states on these questions and let the leaders of both parties know we are no longer ‘in the bag’ of any political party we can no longer be ignored.” The Texas Democratic Party convention stated in a resolution that, “Every Democrat in Texas [should] vote and work for the election of Dwight D.


Eisenhower for President and Richard Nixon for Vice President.” Dixiecrat rebels, whose black belt counties delivered his strongest majorities, were helped in the Eisenhower drive by the traditionally Republican hill country as well as a new source of support: the urban middle class in the cities and suburbs. As a result Eisenhower won five states of the peripheral south—Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma—and made serious inroads in the Deep South states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi.65

From Dixiecrat Revolt to Massive Resistance: Broadening the Identification Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was (until Little Rock) nearly inactive on civil rights. By the time the Supreme Court handed down its ruling Brown v. Board of Education, the implementation decree requiring that schools desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” it was clear that his administration would provide no leadership in this area. Part of the issue was that the GOP was itself divided. Some looked to the growing power of the black vote in the North and advocated a stronger stand on civil rights. Others were in no hurry to push desegregation because they saw new opportunities developing below the Mason-Dixon Line.66 The first Brown decision summoned a variety of reactions in the South. Four Deep South state legislatures passed bills making desegregation illegal, in some cases a criminal offense. Border states, in contrast, generally accepted the Court’s decision and began preparations for school integration. Peripheral southern states were somewhere in between resistance and accommodation. It was in this tumult that the planter elite politics of the Dixiecrats translated into broader channels. Southern politicians were to take up the cause of segregation from above, and a mass social movement of private organizations throughout the region, known generally as Citizens’ Councils, turned up the heat from below. Together they became known, in the term coined by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, as “massive resistance.” Taking up the aborted project of the States’ Rights Institute, former Dixiecrats, Democratic leaders, and grassroots activists founded the Federation for Constitutional Government. Like the States’ Rights Institute

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before it, the federation was designed to bring together the southern power structure with white supremacy organizations to build a broad states’ rights movement by maintaining a lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., producing a magazine, undertaking an extensive public relations program, and working with northern ultraconservative groups. “The purpose and scope of the federation will be national and not sectional,” said organization chair and former States’ Rights Institute promoter John U. Barr. Along with Eastland and Barr it included the rest of the former Dixiecrat leadership. But the federation also included emerging Citizens’ Council spokesmen who were interested in broader organization-building. Combining elite and mass elements, it was a milestone in the development of a strategic, counterhegemonic discourse. It allowed elite Dixiecrats to make contact with and convey their political perspective to a burgeoning grassroots movement. Here, Dixiecrat leaders joined with Democratic Party loyalists and emergent Citizens’ Council figures to strategize about massive resistance, publicly committing southern political leadership to militancy on desegregation. It was the springboard for expansive states’ rights activity, both among political elites and at the grassroots level: the former represented in state and national legislative bodies, the latter in local, regional, and even national social movement activity.67

Nullifiers and the Doctrine of Interposition Of all the ideas embraced by proponents of massive resistance, interposition was elevated above all others. This notion originated in James Madison’s Virginia Resolution of 1798, which, along with a similar Kentucky Resolution penned by Thomas Jefferson, claimed the right of state opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The resolution held that states, as sovereign bodies, could interpose their authority between the local and the federal over any issue that was not explicitly delineated as a federal power in the Constitution. Arguments for interposition were used intermittently throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, most notably by South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun as he attempted to craft Constitutional justifications for southern state sovereignty. In his famous Fort Hill Address, Calhoun declared that “the right of interposition . . . be it called what it may—state-right, veto, nullification, or by any other


name—I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts historically as certain as our Revolution itself, and deductions as simple and demonstrative as that of any political or moral truth whatever; and I firmly believe that on its recognition depend the stability and safety of our political institutions.”68 Interposition, applied to Brown v. Board of Education by James Jackson Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond NewsLeader, quickly caught on with other southern elites and the broader public. The Calhounian notion that interposition was “the fundamental principle of our system” allowed southern supporters of segregation to delink the South from national political authority over the issue of school segregation while simultaneously claiming to defend the very foundations of the nation. Kilpatrick asserted frankly that policies based on the doctrine would raise the political struggle out of sectional racism to a more justifiable “higher ground” of state sovereignty. Such an admission should not be dismissed as a hypocritical attempt to rationalize segregation to the rest of the nation. Given that American national identity was being recast in the postwar era as racially democratic, white southerners who sought to hold onto racist practices required a discourse they believed to be about fundamental American principles. As we saw in Collins’s writings, faced with an emerging racially democratic discourse in the nation on the one hand, and long-held attitudes, practices, and power relations on the other, white southerners who believed in segregation needed a political language that could address the former while upholding the latter. As the Charleston News and Courier editorialized, “Interposition, though presently forming around the explosive issue of race, would go far beyond segregation below the Mason-Dixon Line. It would help restore the sagging sinews of the Republic itself.” Thus, not only could interposition maintain codified white supremacy in the South, in doing so it could redeem the nation. As Collins saw it, “Any interference with [education] by the Federal Government would violate the most fundamental principle of our Constitutional Republic and plant the seeds for its destruction.”69 Whites across the South, from Virginia to Texas, from political elites to grassroots activists, and from moderates to radical white supremacists, breathed life into the concept, creating both regional unity and a potent counterhegemonic discourse. Throughout the South, newspaper editorial

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writers, state and county judges, and politicians began to call for interposition against the Supreme Court, invoking it along with the writings of Jefferson and others. The Citizens’ Councils all endorsed it enthusiastically and put it at the top of their list of legislative aims. Although its articulation was often contradictory and confused, nullification had an underlying simplicity that translated easily into popular parlance. J. Evetts Haley, a conservative Democrat from Texas, explained it to listeners as liberal contract theory in a radio address while running for governor. “If you look over a menu and order ham and eggs for breakfast, you have made a contract,” he said. “If Brussels sprouts and beans are brought to you instead, you, as a partner in that contract, interpose your objections, and refuse to eat and pay for them. . . . Interposition, in spite of all the political mumbo-jumbo, is just as . . . Constitutional as ham and eggs.” It was clearly tempting for many segregationists to believe that they could have their legislative waiter send Brown back to the kitchen simply because it was not what they themselves had ordered.70 As long as the states could interpose their authority between local school officials and the federal government, there would be no need for negotiation or compromise—they could simply deny, resist, and therefore ultimately defeat the Brown decision. Such a stance was entirely untenable in the long run, and the states that committed themselves to interposition courted violence, social breakdown, and, in many cases, armed federal intervention. Many elites, even in states that adopted interposition resolutions, saw the notion as dangerous, ridiculous, or both. Alabama’s liberal-populist governor, James Folsom, called his legislature’s vote for interposition “just a bunch of hogwash” and likened it to “a hound dog baying at the moon.” The Mississippi Delta Democrat-Times called it “hysterical bravado which is making our state a laughing-stock.” The paper went on to say, “Nullification means, in extremity, that Mississippi should use armed force against the United States in order to frustrate the national law. . . . [This] is no humorous matter, the damage done to Mississippi, economically, politically and morally by the reckless words and actions of men who purport to speak for all of us.”71 Nevertheless, interposition was a powerful elixir, and those who opposed it were greatly outnumbered by those who took long pulls on the


jug. Legislatures in six states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) quickly passed resolutions of interposition in early 1956. Legislators in North Carolina approved a resolution of protest against Brown. Texas voters made interposition (and two other white supremacy proposals) part of the state Democratic Party platform. Arkansas voters approved two interposition measures in that year’s November elections. Florida passed an interposition resolution in early 1957, and Tennessee legislators passed a “Manifesto of Protest.” All the interposition resolutions held to the same logic as the original Virginia Resolution of 1798. They endorsed the compact theory of the union and claimed that the Tenth Amendment protected them from any federal control over public schools. By this logic, Brown was not an interpretation, but rather an amendment to the Constitution. The general view held was the Calhounian variety from a century earlier—that interposition was valid until the other states of the union passed a constitutional amendment rendering racial separation in educational facilities illegal. Thus, the Brown decision, most of these states held, was null and void.72 Even the South’s most prominent national figures were drawn in by nullification rhetoric. This was made dramatically evident in the southern congressional delegation’s presentation of the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles” on March 12, 1956. The purpose of this “Southern Manifesto,” as it was called, was to openly challenge Brown by condemning “the unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court,” for substituting “naked power for established law.” Although toned down in the final draft, the manifesto was originally meant as an endorsement of interposition. It was finally signed by nineteen senators and eighty-two representatives throughout the South, among them many of the South’s most respected leaders.73

Toward a National Movement of Racial Conservatism Interposition was a doomed strategy for blocking desegregation. Indeed, as historian David Chappell argues in A Stone of Hope, this constitutional focus, beloved by intellectuals and lawyers, could not hope to inflame the passions of the masses of southern whites the way that open racial appeals might. According to Chappell, the interpositionists vainly

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sought to use constitutional arguments to mobilize southern whites while gaining northern sympathy. Unable or unwilling to make open racist appeals to the white “rabble,” the segregationists’ cause was thus lost. However, interposition turned out to have great political value in other ways. If nullification was a poor way to contest the power of the national state directly, it was successful in turning the heads of conservatives outside the South. Kilpatrick and other segregationists became regular contributors to the most important conservative organ in the country, National Review, and the right wing of the GOP increasingly made the most of the segregationist states’ rights stand to build a party apparatus there for the first time in a century. National Review came out in favor of massive resistance and interposition while attempting to distance that position from racism.74 Collins had predicted that “when those on the other side of the Mason and Dixon Line, who love the Constitution, see the quality of the fight the South is making, they will respond with respect and admiration.”75 The respect and admiration that began to flow from northern conservatives did not save Jim Crow, but it did begin a long-term political shift in American politics. There was nothing inevitable about this shift. It was the result of deliberate action by political actors, like Collins, who married a critique of emergent racial liberalism to a new political vision that linked heterogeneous political elements in ideas and on the ground.

3 “GOLDWATER WAS THE HORSEPOWER”: NATIONAL REVIEW AND THE NEW SOUTHERN GOP In the decade following the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948, Republican strategists began making inroads in the South for the first time in nearly a century. Since the end of Reconstruction, local Republican parties in the region generally functioned as patronage organizations whose sole function was to produce delegates to national conventions. As V. O. Key observed, “Southern Republican leaders are usually pictured as vultures awaiting the day when the party wins the nation and they can distribute patronage in the South. Meantime, they exert themselves only to keep the party weak . . . in order that there will be fewer faithful to reward.” New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, had been a strong advocate for civil rights and thus had little chance of making inroads in the South. But leading up to the 1952 presidential election, party activists loyal to Eisenhower tried to build a legitimate Republican base in the South through which to challenge the credentials of “post office” Republicans committed to the other Republican contender for the nomination, conservative Ohio Senator Robert Taft.1 In their book The Rise of Southern Republicans, Earl Black and Merle Black argue that Eisenhower’s “pathbreaking candidacy” in 1952 “was directed toward dynamic Peripheral South states, where urbanization and industrialization were creating large white middle classes sympathetic to the economic conservatism of the Republican Party.” It is true that while Eisenhower cracked the Solid South that year and had an impact in the for-

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“GOLDWATER WAS THE HORSEPOWER”

mer Dixiecrat states of the Deep South, his electoral votes were not from these areas. Rather he took Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, and Oklahoma. Although Eisenhower knew that his strength was in peripheral and border South states, he campaigned vigorously throughout the region. He secured the endorsement of several Southern Democratic governors, including James Byrnes of South Carolina, and, as discussed in the previous chapter, received the backing of former Dixiecrat leaders, and tallied high vote totals from black belt counties in the Deep South.2 After Eisenhower’s victory in the 1952 election, Taft, also hoping to strengthen ties to the South, urged Eisenhower to appoint the staunch segregationist senator Harry Byrd (D-Va.) to head the Treasury Department. Eisenhower declined, saying he could not appoint a Democrat, an explanation that “looked foolish” to Taft, given that Eisenhower had appointed a pro-union Democrat as Labor Secretary. Taft complained to one southern backer that, “For some reason, the [Eisenhower] group never had any interest in the South because it interferes with their idea that we should appease the minorities of the North.” But while Eisenhower was hesitant about openly embracing segregationists, he had a great interest in the South and had frequent discussions with Republican National Committee chair Leonard Hall about the possibility of a major realignment that would bring moderate-to-conservative voters in the South into the Republican fold.3 Eisenhower often reminded southern senators that he was born in the South and that he had spent much of his life in places where Jim Crow reigned. In general, his statements showed sympathy with the white South—if not as a segregationist, then at least as one who saw racial equality as requiring an evolutionary process that would not be helped by government intervention. In the 1956 election, he proved his popularity again in parts of the South by winning Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and Texas, this time taking the Deep South state of Louisiana as well. The next year brought decisive challenges in the area of civil rights that could not be dealt with merely by taking a middle path, as Eisenhower was able to do with other divisive issues. In what became a showdown with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, Eisenhower ordered in federal troops to protect nine black students attempting to enroll in Little Rock’s Central High School. Even then, however, he asserted that he was using troops


not to defend or enforce integration, but merely to restore order. This distinction was lost on segregationist southerners such as Georgia senator Richard Russell, who charged the president with “applying tactics that must have been copied from the manual issued to the offices of Hitler’s storm troopers.” As a result of Eisenhower’s actions, opportunities for the expansion of Southern Republicanism were stymied for the time being.4

Operation Dixie Eisenhower moderates made one crucial contribution to the longterm growth of the Republican Party in the South, however: Operation Dixie, a program that built on their campaign work in both 1952 and 1956. In 1957, the Republican National Committee under Meade Alcorn established this five-man subcommittee to run moderate-to-conservative candidates on explicitly nonracist platforms, thereby beginning to realize the political realignment in the region that Ike had envisioned. I. Lee Potter, a Virginian who was head of the party’s southern division, oversaw the project, and began speaking throughout the region on the importance of a two-party system. Potter sought to depict the GOP as the party of moderation and Southern Democrats as racial extremists who were out of step with the future of American politics. He also began recruiting young activists to build up local and state Republican parties and to run for office. These recruits tended to be young, college-educated professionals, moderately segregationist, and part of the South’s growing urban middle class. Burgeoning industrialism in the region, particularly in the war industries, had begun to create new wealth in the metropolitan areas, and with it a new bourgeoisie that was attracted to economic conservatism and had fewer ties to the Democratic Party. Moreover, lack of local party infrastructure meant that these new activists could quickly rise up through the ranks to be party leaders or candidates for office.5 Operation Dixie appeared to have met with modest success in its first year. Each of the eight incumbent Republican congressmen from the South was reelected in the 1958 midterm elections, a year that saw very poor Republican showings nationally. But Eisenhower’s decision to send troops to Little Rock limited the reach of the new Republican drive. In fact, the number of Republican candidates running in the twelve southern

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states included in Operation Dixie was down from both 1954 and 1956; in some of those states, Republican candidates played down their party affiliation. At the time Potter did his best to put a good face on Little Rock, saying that southerners would be better off in the long run with the Republicans than with Democrats over issues like integration, but to little avail. The southern party remained remain circumscribed under Eisenhower’s national leadership.6 The mixed success of Southern Republicans in 1958 raised the question of whether to try to woo the South by opposing civil rights in the 1960 presidential election, or to attempt to compete with the Democratic Party for the liberal and black vote in urban areas of the North. The question was related to a long-standing feud in the GOP between conservatives and moderates. Republican moderates had prevailed in the party at the national level since the New Deal, with most of the party’s presidential candidates supporting internationalism and the welfare state. This wing was based in the Northeast and linked to Wall Street. Conservatives in the party tended to be midwestern or western, identified with small business, isolationist, and opposed to nearly all aspects of the New Deal. This split, which went back at least to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party splinter in 1912, had never been resolved and was in part responsible for the Republicans’ inability to become the dominant party. But emergent racial issues in the South would alter the equation between liberals and conservatives and even shape what those labels would come to represent.

The Southern Politics of National Review While Republican moderates were attempting to build up a likeminded party in the South in the late 1950s, conservative intellectuals were more interested making ideological connections to southern segregationists. The weekly magazine National Review (NR) was instrumental in turning the attention of these conservatives southward. Founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, the aim of NR was to “stand athwart history” by opposing New Deal liberalism in all of its forms and making a vigorous intellectual and political case for a rejuvenated Right. The magazine, which was aimed at both intellectuals and a broad conservative public, tried to bring together different ideas into a coherent framework and present, in


the words of NR publisher William Rusher, “a world view, rather than merely a political philosophy or the theoretical underpinnings of an economic system.”7 Buckley and other NR editors linked economic antistatism and social traditionalism to develop this worldview in a combination that came to be called fusionism. This sometimes uneasy alliance brought together free market ideology with a philosophical commitment to transcendent moral horizons binding individuals in community and tradition. Both libertarians and traditionalists sought an organic basis for social order and were thus hostile to centralized state planning. They also shared a dislike of egalitarian impulses. In the context of the Cold War, anticommunism was a very tangible connection between the two. One key aim of the magazine which has not been discussed in historical accounts of the modern Right is the attempt to link southern opposition to desegregation to their emerging modern conservative agenda. Yet this development was fundamental to the conservative triumph.8 In the mid-1950s, almost no other conservative journals approached the issue of segregation, but NR’s editors saw it as a prime opportunity to extend the conservative movement. States’ rights was coming into increasing conflict with federal power in the South, and the motivating issue had to do with the maintenance of what southerners claimed were traditional local practices. Conservative scholar and regular NR contributor Richard Weaver invested the South with the quality of being the most anti-liberal region in the country, because of its commitment to the preservation of history, “principles of exclusion,” and rigid hierarchies. Although these qualities are anathema to capitalism’s tendency to disrupt historical bonds and sedimented forms of hierarchy, antistatism and a belief in nonplanned societies and economies provided enough common ground to build discursive links. Moreover, in the wake of Brown, segregationists were increasingly interested in anticommunism, as communist conspiracy provided a clear way to explain the growing civil rights struggle in the South. Indeed, Weaver went even further by claiming that desegregation was itself a form of communist practice. As NR attempted to bring states’ rights into the conservative movement, the character of both conservatism and states’ rights discourse were altered.9 Within the first month of its publication in 1955, NR looked for chinks

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in the New Deal armor among southerners, and began to build a case on its editorial page that the struggle against civil rights was critical to the conservative movement. However, the NR approach to the question reveals just how open and contingent the political moment was on the right. The editors at NR were not GOP activists, and in any case bringing segregationists into the Republican Party did not seem like an obvious political choice to them in the mid-1950s. The GOP itself was dominated by the moderates who were coming to be called Modern Republicans, and with a Modern Republican president in office, it appeared to NR that Southern Democrats might have a stronger hand within their own party. It is indeed striking how much hope NR held out for conservative revival within the Democratic Party as compared to the minimal potential they perceived in the GOP. One editorial from November 1955 revealed a sense of optimism about the future of the Democratic Party because of the potential strategic positioning of the South. “The Southerners have never lacked skill, but in earlier conventions they had a federal machine against them,” asserted the editors. “The convention next year will be the first in a generation in which a majority of the delegates were not picked by a sitting Democratic president.” The same issue featured an article promoting for the Georgia Senate race diehard segregationist Herman Talmadge, the supporters of whom were reportedly conservative because of their belief in “states’ rights” and “local autonomy.” There was, at this point, so little faith in the conservatism of the Republican Party at NR that writer Isabel Patterson asserted in another piece that it would be beneficial to have a Republican version of the Dixiecrat Revolt to sharpen internal differences among Republicans. Against the idea that another such split in the Democratic Party would help the Republicans, she argued that conservative Republican interest in the West and Midwest might “slide South, and more readily into the real party of the Solid South, the conservative Democrats, if [the Dixiecrats] were definitely on their own.”10 But conservative Republicans in the mid-1950s did not share all the politics of the Dixiecrats. While racial hierarchy animated southern states’ rights rhetoric, NR wanted to support states’ rights without embracing racism openly. NR came out in favor of massive resistance and interposi-


tion while attempting to distance that stance from anything having to do explicitly with race. First, in a 1956 editorial titled “The South Girds Its Loins,” NR held that, “Those who oppose the South’s resistance tend to rest their case, simply, on the fact that they disapprove of racial discrimination of any kind. It has been surprisingly difficult to fix their attention on the fact that, as far as the South and its sympathies are concerned, something else is at stake. Indeed, support for the Southern position rests not at all on the question whether Negro and White children should, in fact, study geography side by side; but on whether a central or local authority should make that decision.”11 From NR’s perspective, northern and western conservative solidarity with the South hinged on the claim that race was not so much the issue as basic federalist commitments.

“A Reasoned, Principled, and Consistent” States’ Rights Politics While attempting to convince conservatives to see segregationists as comrades in the struggle, NR also aimed to move segregationists away from their otherwise statist orientation and dependence on federal aid. The magnitude of Brown, the editors hoped, had shaken “inchoate statesrighters out of their opportunistic stupor.” One editorial stated, Perhaps it is too late, but political resistance in the South seems to be centering on the broad and—potentially—dynamic concept of decentralized political authority. There has been more talk, these past few months, about the meaning of federation and about the significance of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, than there has been for a generation. The result is that many of the arguments and much of the rhetoric advanced with respect to issues besides that of segregation have taken on an immensely rejuvenating theoretical substance; so that they begin to sound, as they have not for years, reasoned, principled and consistent.12 NR’s editors thought that the issue of states’ rights, animated by desegregation, could exceed the boundaries of race and come to shape other po-

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litical issues of the day that were important to northern conservatives, such as the right of states to enact antisubversive legislation, and confront issues of price regulation, farm subsidies, and “federal aid to—and jurisdiction over—education, housing and road-building.” These conservatives were willing to embrace the cause of massive resistance and make it part of the conservative agenda, but segregationist southerners had to likewise extend their racial states’ rights stand to all conservative ideas and abandon populist New Deal commitments.13 Federally mandated desegregation was an easier matter for conservatives at NR, however, than the issue of voting rights. This posed a problem, because NR’s southern allies were as opposed to federal voting rights legislation as they were to desegregation. The magazine’s response to the issue in the late 1950s showed just how difficult the task of separating racism from conservative principle in matters concerning the South would be, as they searched for a new, common political identity. In an editorial written by Buckley titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” the magazine came out bluntly against democracy and for white supremacy. “The central question that emerges,” he wrote, is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in the areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes . . . because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . . The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. . . . The National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.14 While Buckley’s position was probably well received by many of his southern readers, it threatened to push NR’s politics beyond the boundaries of credible politics. The modern conservative movement was yet small, and, in the minds of many Americans, associated with discredited far-right groups like the John Birch Society. Moreover, for a nation that had fought a war against fascism little more than a decade before and that was currently steeped in pro-democratic Cold War rhetoric, a position that


opposed both the basic principle of democracy and the Constitution was difficult to defend. Most white Americans outside the South, whatever their private feelings about African Americans, would not have supported a movement based on clearly illiberal and antidemocratic politics.15 NR staff writer L. Brent Bozell dissented sharply from Buckley in the next issue. “This magazine,” he wrote, “has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing grave hurt to the conservative movement.” Bozell indirectly endorsed the struggle for white supremacy in the civic sphere by emphasizing NR’s full-throated support of massive resistance but drew the line at political disenfranchisement. “Interposition, yes,” he asserted; “the Constitution contemplates no final arbiter of its meaning. But where the law is clear, as in the case of the Fifteenth Amendment, I have never doubted that National Review and persons whose objectives we approve were, equally with the Establishment, bound to conform.” Bozell argued essentially that conservative support for Jim Crow had to be sustained within the framework of the Constitution, which for him included guaranteed voting rights. As a future ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater, Bozell would help ensure that this would be the political course modern American conservatism would steer.16 NR staff writers closely watched southern political developments and defended segregationists as the natural allies of their nonsouthern readership in frequent editorials, articles, and book reviews. NR also encouraged noted white southern writers to contribute, allowing for the exploration of a range of possible identifications between southern and northern conservatives. Among its regular contributors was James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, as discussed in the previous chapter, was the editor of the Richmond News-Leader and the guiding intellectual of massive resistance. In the pages of NR, Kilpatrick further articulated and defended the states’ rights position and made his constitutional argument against desegregation. Kilpatrick also developed a theory of racial superiority in his book The Southern Case for School Segregation, but significantly this theory was not present in his many pieces for NR. The absence underscores the point that NR’s support for segregation consciously stayed within bounds of generally accepted rhetoric on racial difference.17 Writing from a slightly different perspective was Donald Davidson, one of the authors of I’ll Take My Stand, a Depression-era southern agrarian

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critique of modern society. Davidson’s chief anxiety was not so much civil rights as capitalism, industrialism, bureaucracy, and the elaborate control over everyday life wielded by what he, sounding like C. Wright Mills, called the “modern Power State.” In an article entitled “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” Davidson carefully delineated what he thought the white South had in common with northern conservatives, rejecting most ties except antistatism.18 Anthony Harrigan, another southern writer, in an NR special issue called The South: 1958, took a very different view, granting more common ground between white southerners and conservatives—particularly capitalists— outside the South, while holding onto traditions of white supremacy. “Because the Southerner of today wants new factories on the bayous and in the magnolia groves, enjoys air-conditioning in his office, flies to New York once a week on business and enjoys a martini as well as any Manhattanite,” wrote Harrigan, “one must not conclude that he is prepared to surrender his way of life.” Taking the bond between white racist southerners and northern conservatives a step further, he continued, “The original shapers of Southern tradition believed that progress resulted not from equality of condition, but from fruitful inequalities. . . . The South has always been frank about its position on the question on equality. And, in the North, many persons have shared the view of the Southern thinkers.” This image of the “Southerner of today”—a cocktail-drinking jet-setter who is nevertheless committed to older forms of ascriptivism—differed from Kilpatrick’s Calhounism, linking, as it did, segregation to free market cosmopolitanism.19 Thus did NR begin to make links between the conservative movement and southern opponents of civil rights. But this growing discursive alliance was not, on its own, enough to shape the political field. It needed institutional force, just as the growing institutional reshifting of southern politics required an ideological base and a durable rhetoric in order to be achieved. But, as I show, not only did NR begin to make discursive links with the South, it also laid the groundwork for strategic work among Republicans seeking new conservative allies within the party. This alliance would bear fruit in the nomination of Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential candidacy in 1964.


Goldwater and the South: The Beginnings of a Shift The Republican Party in the South simultaneously began to grow and move in a decidedly conservative direction with attempts to build support for a 1964 Goldwater presidential run. The initial tie between Goldwater and the region was a conservative activist named Clarence Manion. Manion was a small-time industrialist from Indiana and former dean of Notre Dame Law School whom Eisenhower appointed to head the President’s Commission on Inter-Governmental Relations. However, Manion’s politics proved too conservative for that administration, and he was subsequently forced to resign.20 After leaving the Eisenhower administration, Manion, who had been trying to build up a national conservative movement since the 1930s, began looking to the South. When Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock in 1957, Manion saw his opportunity and approached Arkansas governor Orval Faubus about running for president. The strategy (developed by Manion along with South Carolinian William Jennings Bryant Dorn) was to run Faubus for the Democratic nomination in the South and run an ultraconservative candidate for the Republican nomination up North. When both lost, the idea went, their support could be combined by choosing one of the candidates to run as a third-party candidate, bringing in enough Taft Republicans and Dixiecrats to block an Electoral College victory for either major party candidate. Manion circulated a report written by a friend and founder of the Arkansas Citizens’ Councils telling potential backers that “recent actions by the Federal judiciary which have tended to hasten at a frightening speed the Federal grab for power at the expense of the people and the States have placed the Federal judiciary squarely in the middle of the controversy. States’ Rights,” he went on, “have become household words in Ohio as much as in Arkansas or Mississippi. . . . How well would Orval Faubus do in the North, the Midwest, and the West Coast states? There is only one way to answer that question: by encouraging him to enter presidential primaries in those states.”21 South Carolina was central to the development of this strategy. The state’s junior senator, Strom Thurmond, had already run a presidential

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campaign as the Dixiecrat candidate against the national Democratic Party, and had threatened to bolt again in 1956. Thurmond’s famous defiance of the national Democrats made him a hero in South Carolina and helped prepare it to break from the century-long identification with the party. In 1959, two local conservative, segregationist, anti-union industrialists, Gregory Shorey and Roger Milliken, organized a state Republican convention in Greenville and invited Goldwater to speak. Convention delegates and television viewers across the state watched and listened as Goldwater told the conventioneers that Brown v. Board of Education should “not be enforced by arms” because it was “not based on law.” For Manion, Faubus was no longer necessary. Goldwater, he realized, would suffice on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.22 Manion, Shorey, and Milliken set about organizing a Goldwater for President organization and got Brent Bozell to ghostwrite a book on “Americanism” for Goldwater. The book, Conscience of a Conservative, debuted at number ten on Time’s best-seller list and soon after at number fourteen on the New York Times list. Succinct and easy to read, the book did a skillful job in packaging the modern conservatism that had been crafted by Bozell and others. Its aim was to draw different groups into a shared political identity and to create one sharp cleavage in American politics out of various political elements. The book begins: “I have crossed the length and breadth of this nation hundreds of times and talked with tens of thousands of people, with Democrats and Republicans, with farmers, with laborers and businessmen. I find that America is fundamentally a Conservative nation. The preponderant judgement of the American people, especially the young people, is that the radical, or Liberal approach has not worked and is not working. They yearn for a return to Conservative principles.”23 Bozell certainly knew that such a claim was not borne out by the electoral facts of the time, but the rhetorical tactic opens the possibility for a wide variety of people to begin to see themselves as opponents of the liberal regime, and to see their bedrock national identity residing in what he called “Conservative principles.” In order to make this work, specific chapters speak to different groups. Thus there is a chapter called “Freedom for the Farmer,” and one on “Freedom for Labor.” However, the group for whom the book was perhaps most meant to appeal is not specif-


ically named. Rather, it is implied in the chapter titles “States’ Rights” and “Civil Rights.” Using the formula developed at NR for dealing with issues of civil rights and the South, Bozell both separated and connected the principle of states’ rights and black subjugation. Just as Bozell carefully distinguished massive resistance and interposition from a politics of white supremacy as such, here he had Goldwater claim to be an opponent of both racism and the tyranny of government intrusion into local affairs. “States’ Rights,” the author wrote, “affects Northerners as well as Southerners, and concerns many matters that have nothing to do with the race question. Still, it is quite true that the integration issue is affected by the States’ Rights principle, and that the South’s position on the issue is, today, the most conspicuous expression of the principle. So much so that the country is now in the grips of a spirited and sometimes ugly controversy over an imagined conflict between States’ Rights, on the one hand, and are what are called ‘civil rights’ on the other.” Civil rights, defined as rights to desegregated education, are neither valid nor legally enforceable, the author claims, for “despite recent holdings of the Supreme Court,” he is “firmly convinced—not only that integrated schools are not required—but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education. It may be just or wise or expedient for Negro children to attend the same schools as white children, but they do not have a civil right to do so. I . . . support all efforts by the States, excluding violence of course to preserve their rightful powers over education.”24 This position was extended even further in a call for a constitutional amendment to reaffirm the control by states over education.25 Having stated that he believes that white southerners should control education, Bozell then has Goldwater declare that desegregation was nevertheless a good idea. But, he wrote, “I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems is best handled by the people directly concerned.” Through this logic, Goldwater supporters outside the South could at once denounce racism and make common cause with segregationists by claiming that their fight is at the forefront of the struggle for basic American freedoms.

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Toward a “Union of Corn Belt and Cornpone” The same year Conscience of a Conservative was published, both parties became more internally polarized over civil rights. The Democrats endorsed a strong civil rights platform in their national convention, including a proposal to outlaw segregation in federal housing or homes financed with FHA mortgages. Conservative and southern GOP organizers saw this as an opportunity, demonstrating the ideological shift of Southern Republicans between 1956 and 1960. Unlike in 1956, when Operation Dixie director I. Lee Potter contrasted his party’s moderate race politics to the extremism of Southern Democrats, he now called the civil rights plank in the Democratic platform “a direct slap in the face” to those same Southern Democrats. RNC chair and Kentuckian Thruston Morton similarly stated that “the South is coming out of this Democratic Convention in an angry mood. . . . Personally I don’t think our platform is going to be modeled after theirs on its extreme provisions.” The term “extremism,” used by Southern Republicans to describe Democratic support for segregation prior to Little Rock, now was used to describe opposition to segregation in federal programs.26 The issue of the civil rights plank in the GOP platform became the focal point of the two ideological camps of the Republican Party as they faced off at its convention. In response to Potter and Morton, liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller expressed concern about the party’s stance on civil rights. Hoping to avoid a floor fight at the convention, Richard M. Nixon, the likely Republican presidential candidate, traveled to meet the governor at his Manhattan townhouse. There, the two crafted a compromise platform that called for “aggressive action” to abolish racial discrimination and explicitly endorsed the lunch counter sit-ins that were then sweeping the South. The meeting, dubbed “the Surrender of Fifth Avenue,” enraged conservatives at the GOP convention; they concluded that Nixon had succumbed to Rockefeller’s “ultra-liberal” politics, particularly on the civil rights plank. Goldwater, believing that Nixon had doublecrossed him, declared it the “Munich of the Republican Party.” Goldwater had come to Chicago planning to bow out and throw his support to Nixon, but news of the Rockefeller pact made him decide to temporarily sit on his withdrawal speech.27


The new strength of the conservative wing of the party was evident in the Goldwater support at the convention. South Carolina had already committed its delegates to Goldwater, and three new groups, Americans for Goldwater, Goldwater for President, and Youth for Goldwater, all descended on Chicago. After what the Texas delegation called Nixon’s “damned sell-out,” it released its pro-Nixon delegates to back Goldwater. Goldwater knew that he did not have enough delegates to challenge Nixon, and he did not want to split the party the way that it had been in years past. Yet South Carolina refused to give up their Goldwater votes, so Goldwater arranged to be nominated by delegates of that state in order to formally withdraw. When he came to the podium to make his withdrawal speech, he was drowned out temporarily by a spontaneous demonstration, where his enthusiastic supporters marched around the hall to the strains of “Dixie.” In his speech, Goldwater told conservatives to “grow up” and work for Nixon in order to win the election, and to work in the longer term for a conservative takeover of the party. The Nixon-Rockefeller platform passed without debate, although it continued to rankle conservatives and southerners. As one Louisiana delegate lamented, “We’ve lost Louisiana, I tell you, we’ve lost Louisiana. Lyndon Johnson’s going to come across the border and talk ‘magnolia’ to them and they’ll vote Democratic and we could have had Louisiana, we could have had it.”28 But Nixon nevertheless was a popular candidate in the South. In Atlanta, 150,000 residents came out for his campaign kickoff, and he was well received throughout the rest of the region. Other Republicans, particularly conservatives, were also popular in the South in that campaign. “Demands for Senator Goldwater to appear before Southern audiences,” according to RNC southern division and Operation Dixie head Lee Potter, “are in such volume that the Senator couldn’t satisfy them if he spoke in three cities a day for the rest of the campaign.” Nixon, who lost the election by an extremely tight margin, ran a very strong race in the South, carrying 46 percent of the vote and three of the four Eisenhower border states—Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia. Republicans made gains at the state level as well. In five gubernatorial races, the Republican candidates increased their vote “105 percent above the 1956 level or by over one million votes,” according to the RNC research division. These results led the report’s authors to conclude that “organizational effort at least in selected

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areas of the Southern states to expand the base of the Republican Party is clearly justified by the 1960 results.” However, Nixon’s loss provided arguments for both moderates and conservatives about the future direction of the party. Moderates argued that Nixon could have appealed to more traditional Democrats such as union members, urban ethnics, and northern black voters had he run a more liberal campaign. Conservatives argued that the party had to look elsewhere and build a conservative party among southerners and Midwesterners, linking traditional anticommunism with opposition to civil rights in a “union of corn belt and cornpone.”29 After 1960, conservative influence in the party rapidly grew, institutionally and ideologically marginalizing the reach and authority of moderate Republicans. The most effective ground of the conservatives—in terms of both organization and newly infused political passion—was the South, where conservative GOP operatives began to organize in earnest to take over the party for a Goldwater run in 1964. Liberals and moderates in the party had made the mistake of forgoing the South in the years since Eisenhower, and now conservatives, working with staunch segregationists in the Deep South, as well as with Republican organizations in border states, began to control the party apparatus that Eisenhower moderates had built up in Operation Dixie. This was important not just because the South was proving to be fecund soil for organizing, but malapportionment of seats on the RNC gave southerners influence greater than their numbers. For the most part, the moderates who argued that the Republican Party should invest resources in building an urban base among Democratic constituencies made the case purely on organizational grounds, leaving aside ideological questions. This put them at a disadvantage in building the discursive links necessary to make a majoritarian bloc, either in the Republican Party or in the electorate. Conservatives were able to use their ideas and in particular their passionate opposition to the New Deal state to recruit committed organizers to build their base.30 In 1961, the RNC, now run by archconservative William Miller, began plowing a huge portion of the RNC budget into Operation Dixie. With this new influx of cash, Potter hired a publicist to begin a newsletter for circulation around the South. Soon a slick magazine named Southern Challenge, with a readership of 39,000 and a decidedly conservative bent, attacked Democratic congressmen as disloyal to the South because of their


support of the policies of their northern liberal colleagues. The magazine’s content is evidence that by the early 1960s Operation Dixie, and the national party apparatus more generally, had entirely abandoned a moderate approach in the South. This was probably the most efficacious political strategy for it was unlikely to build a party of moderation and civil rights liberalism given the changes both in the South and in the national party. In race, there was an easy issue around which to build a coalition, and the conservatives in the party were both well-positioned and ideologically disposed to exploit this tactic of abandoning the black vote in favor of, in Goldwater’s words, “hunting where the ducks are.” As he said in a press conference in Atlanta that year, “I would like to see our party back up on school integration. The Supreme Court decision is not the law of the land.”31 The strategists of Operation Dixie publicly denied that they used race as a wedge issue. But the RNC actively recruited well-known segregationists to run for office. One was South Carolina’s William Workman, a columnist and television commentator whose book, A Case for the South, was an important articulation of resistance to integration. Another was Rubel Phillips, the Republican candidate for Mississippi governor in 1963, whose campaign literature assured that he was “a staunch segregationist [who] condemns the use of federal power or threats of reprisals to force integration on Mississippians to curry favor with the minority voters on the big Northern and Eastern cities.” There was also Alabama’s hard segregationist senate candidate James Martin. Building the Republican Party in the South thus required a double game of convincing white southerners that the Republican Party would defend segregation while assuring Northern Republicans that they were only creating a party that looked politically like its northern counterpart.

Suite 3505 The Republican Party organizing that took place in the South in the early 1960s was directly descended from the Eisenhower efforts to create a moderate party there in 1952, 1956, and the early phase of Operation Dixie. Paradoxically, this continuation of Republican party-building in the South begun by moderates eventually contributed to their loss of control

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of the national party. Key to the success of this conservative Republican organizing was the dynamic linkage of intellectuals at National Review with hard-nosed institution-builders—in particular NR’s William Rusher, Ohio GOP Congressman John Ashbrook, and consummate Republican organizer F. Clifton (Clif) White. In 1961, White, a party operative from New York who had worked in Operation Dixie, was recruited by Rusher, the new publisher of NR, to create a strategy for a conservative takeover of the party. Rusher was the first real activist-oriented member of the National Review staff, and as such sought a way for the magazine to begin to intervene in strategic politics. White, Rusher, and Ashbrook, along with South Carolina’s Shorey, Milliken, and a number of wealthy former Young Republicans, began an ad hoc group to plot strategy. At the first meeting of the “Suite 3505” group—named for their secret meeting place in the Chanin Building above New York’s Grand Central Station—White outlined for them a strategy of how they could take over the party by gaining control of the party apparatus in the Midwest, West, and South. The ultimate aim of this takeover was a Goldwater run in 1964, but this was not openly discussed, as Goldwater had said repeatedly that he was not interested in the nomination. The Goldwater group kept their plan secret as they built it up, so that by the time they approached Goldwater, they would have a viable vehicle for him and could therefore convince him to run.32 White, a professional political tactician who had a unique understanding of the arcane world of party rules and procedures, outlined a strategy of organizing Republicans starting with local precincts, moving up through counties, and finally the state level in the course of three years so that Goldwater supporters could take over local and state party organizations, choose their own delegates, and over time have those delegates influence the choice of new delegates. By the 1964 Republican Convention, states without primaries could be counted on to have their delegates back Goldwater, and states with primaries (of which there were only twelve at the time) would have mobilized forces to register Republicans and get them, block by block, to the polls. The strategy demanded extraordinary organization, but even more it depended on the tireless devotion of state party chairs and thousands of local volunteers under a small cadre of national organizers.


The growing rift between the liberals and conservatives in the party was opened up dramatically when a meeting of White’s group in a Chicago motel was leaked to the press. Liberal Republicans, such as New York senator Jacob Javits, accused White and what was now being called his “southern strategy” of wrecking the party by appealing to the worst in southern racial sentiment. Conservatives responded that they were merely attempting to build a truly national party, one that left appeals to minorities to the Democrats. Goldwater appeared irritated by the negative publicity generated by White’s group, but he did not openly repudiate it, which White took as a sign of encouragement.33 Operation Dixie had become White’s domain, and as such became one of the party’s more vital projects. Time called the young Republican activists in the South the party’s “New Breed; furrow-browed, buttondown, college-trained professionals who, one by one, took control of the state parties from apathetic and aging professionals.” Much to the lament of the program’s moderate founders, it also had become the instrument of conservatives, who used it push a hard, segregationist line in the party.34 South Carolina Republican William Workman, running for Congress in 1962 against three-term Democrat Olin D. Johnston, himself a strong segregationist, painted his opponent as being in the pocket of the Kennedys, and therefore unable to stop desegregation in the South. Workman did so by tying Johnston to Kennedy’s Medicare plan and to being the administration’s point man on farm support legislation. Such a discursive strategy was meant to link the New Deal itself with racial liberalism in the minds of white southerners. Yet this rhetoric was not in itself enough, as many white southerners liked both Medicare and farm subsidies. This tension among Southern Republicans and Democrats over the role of government benefits was not so much resolved as overcome by the emerging racial crisis, beginning with the integration of the University of Mississippi in September 1962, where a violent, bloody clash left two dead and thousands of federal troops stationed in Oxford. It was then that southern support for Kennedy began a precipitous decline. Goldwater immediately came out against the Kennedy administration, denouncing the intervention. “We haven’t turned over to the federal government the power to run the schools. . . . I don’t like segregation. But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.” In the wake of the riots

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at Ole Miss, the Republicans did extraordinarily well around the South by southern standards. In South Carolina, Workman took 44 percent of the vote. In Alabama, James Martin lost to thirty-seven-year Democratic congressional veteran Lister Hill by nine-tenths of a percent. A congressional race in Tennessee, which hadn’t seen a Republican challenger since 1936, was closer still. GOP congressional candidates across the region had taken 606,000 votes in the previous off-year election. This time they polled more than two million votes. Local gains were impressive as well. For instance, GOP candidates swept all state and county offices in play in three North Carolina counties, and in doing so unseated the Democratic speaker of the state House of Representatives. They also had major gains at the local and state level in Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee.35 After the election, moderate Republicans publicly attacked Operation Dixie’s strategy of promoting segregationist candidates in the South. The editors of Advance, the magazine of the moderate Republican Ripon Society, asserted that, “though a traditionally conservative appeal to the South is certainly acceptable, a segregationist appeal is totally unacceptable, both morally and politically.” The editors also attempted to downplay southern victories altogether, calling instead on the party to build up its base in northern industrial cities among blacks and labor. For moderates, the ideological direction of the party was doomed to be shaped by an emergent southern GOP.36 Defending southern gains against claims that Operation Dixie sought segregationist votes, Lee Potter turned the question around. “If the Kennedys’ actions at ‘Ole Miss’ enter into the picture at all,” he wrote in a letter to the New York Times, “it is only to emphasize the split personality with which the Democratic Party has been afflicted for a century.”37

“Goldwater Was the Horsepower” Using effective state organizers such as Alabama Republican state chair John Grenier and Texas state chair Peter O’Donnell as regional strategists, White was able to get backing for Goldwater among Republicans throughout the region. In fact, White’s experience in the South went back to the Eisenhower campaign strategy to challenge the credentials of Taft’s southern patronage delegates. But building a small base of party


regulars to nominate candidates is different than mobilizing an electorate. Republican recruiters could convince ambitious young professionals to join the party, but without a clear ideological perspective, there was no way to win over significant numbers of voters. In other words, the institutionbuilding that the party had engaged in over the prior decade had been critical, and showed that it was possible to begin to pry away support from the Democrats. Without that work, the Republicans could not have gained a foothold in the region that had despised them for a century. But successful institutional change necessitates changes in the political landscape; and changes in political interest and identity are required to transform the landscape. Moderate appeals to the importance of party competition in the region were not enough to produce this transformation. The conservative embrace of segregation, however, excited passions and made the growth of the southern GOP possible.38 Describing this evolution, White later said, “I first got involved in the South for Eisenhower in 1952. In that year the only Republican organization in the South was the Young Republicans. The oldsters had been holding conventions in phone booths. By 1964 we had a bunch of young kids in the South who couldn’t be bought.” And it was the promise of a conservative candidate who opposed civil rights that allowed the Republicans to build the party in the electorate. As John Grenier put it, “Goldwater was the horsepower. We needed voter sentiment in depth. We had the local leadership without the horsepower, but we couldn’t get the voters to switch parties until we provided them with the catalyst.”39 After the 1962 election, William Rusher made the argument in National Review that encapsulates both how and why the South would be so necessary to the rise of the Right and for the success of the Republican Party nationally. Republicans, Rusher asserted, could either move right and support Goldwater for the next presidential nomination or support a moderate and be crushed. After a detailed account of the growth of the Republican Party in the South, state by state, he made clear that this newly revived party was not the party of Eisenhower, but of Goldwater. “Goldwater, and Goldwater alone,” he wrote, “can carry enough Southern and Border States to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North and still stand a serious chance of winning the election.” Rusher was careful, like other conservative Republicans, to try to

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distance the southern embrace of conservatism from regional race concerns. This attempt is contradicted, however, by two very telling cartoons accompanying the article: one depicts Confederate soldiers firing cannonballs labeled “Republican,” and the other shows a bearded Confederate general holding aloft a flag emblazoned with an elephant.40 Goldwater was well suited to the role of being the conservative candidate behind which southerners might rally, as he was more vocally critical of civil rights than even most conservative leaders in the party. Yet he claimed a personal commitment to racial equality. He had previously supported black voting rights in the South, and said that the “federal government should act even if it means with troops.” He was critical of Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department for not prosecuting voting rights cases more forcefully, and he had even supported a constitutional amendment eliminating the poll tax. But as a presidential run seemed more likely, Goldwater took an increasingly stronger stance against civil rights. He assured southern whites that he would “bend every muscle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life of the South.” This tightrope walking defined the approach conservative Republicans in and around the Goldwater campaign took in relation to civil rights.41 However, not all attempts to link southern segregationists to conservatives outside the South relied on the kind of constitutional hairsplitting pioneered by Bozell. As actual Republican political races heated up in the South, so did the rhetoric of southern GOP candidates. Clifton White, in a political memoir he wrote after the 1964 election, defended the southern strategy against an accusation by Nelson Rockefeller that they had planned a race-based campaign. “Never at any time had I suggested that the GOP ‘write off the Negro and other minority groups.’ Nonetheless, we had to face political realities,” wrote White. “I recognized that any conservative candidate—even a dedicated integrationist—would have great difficulty making inroads in the North. The only hope the Republican Party had . . . was to win the Southern states. And the GOP was already growing by leaps and bounds in the South without emphasizing the race issue at all, as Jim Martin’s senatorial campaign against segregationist Democrat Lister Hill had proved in Alabama.”42 The above statement bears examination because it demonstrates how


conservatives first publicly rationalized the southern strategy. White begins by saying that he never “suggested that the GOP” exclude “the Negro and other minority groups,” but follows immediately by saying that they “nonetheless . . . had to face political realities.” In other words, he may not have wanted to promote candidates who were opposed to civil rights, but this was in fact their best strategic option. He then states that a conservative candidate, “even a dedicated integrationist,” would have gotten them nowhere in the North, and that they therefore needed the South where, of course, a dedicated integrationist would be of little use. But then he changes course to claim that the Republican Party was “growing by leaps and bounds in the South without emphasizing the race issue at all”—a statement that contradicts the logic he has just laid out. As an example of one of these candidates who was not emphasizing race, he offers Alabama senatorial candidate James Martin. Yet Martin, like the other candidates run by Republicans in the South, ran precisely on his segregationist credentials. In a typical speech, Martin called for “a return to the spirit of ’61—1861, when our fathers formed a new nation. . . . God willing, we will not again be forced to take up the rifle and bayonet to preserve these principles.” White goes on to say that none of his group, not even supporters in the Deep South, ever suggested that Goldwater run on a segregationist platform. But there was never reason for him to do so. As long as Goldwater held high the banner of states’ rights, he could appear to split real questions of racial domination from an abstract commitment to the Tenth Amendment, and allow conservatives to show clean hands while building a segregationist party in the South. Meanwhile, southern segregationists could feel that their racial interests could be looked after by the Republicans, even if they would not openly embrace white supremacy.43 Cynical as it was, this position left little room for New Deal Democrats to point fingers. White wrote that in the “twisted semantics of our age, it was somehow morally wrong for Republicans to aspire to political power in Southern states but of course perfectly all right for Democratic segregationists to continue their reign and help keep Democratic administrations in control of the federal government.” But while the New Deal accommodation of Jim Crow had been key to its success, Democratic segregationists were beginning to lose their grip on the region and had been at odds with

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Democratic administrations for some time. Conservative Republicans were merely making all the hay they could from this situation.44 However, if Goldwater’s coded racial appeals could be accommodated by his conservatism, this conservatism did not yet dovetail easily with the views of most white southerners, particularly when it came to issues of federal expenditures on farm subsidies, or giant public utility schemes like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had brought electricity to tens of thousands of people in the region for the first time. In an interview with Stewart Alsop for the Saturday Evening Post, Goldwater flatly stated his belief that the federal government should sell off the TVA. This position immediately made his advisers nervous, for they feared that it threatened the hard-won gains the party had made in the South. Tennessee’s Howard Baker called Goldwater’s position on the TVA “a serious mistake, not only politically, but from the standpoint of the best interest of the nation.” Thousands of letters poured into the Goldwater campaign office from around the region. One from Chattanooga read, “I have contributed to your campaign and helped organize the Goldwater club here . . . but since you have . . . come out . . . for sale of the TVA, I am taking off my Goldwater stickers.” From Atlanta: “For some time now, I have thought I would vote for you if you are nominated. But why in hell did you say that about the TVA? . . . The southeast will never vote for anyone who advocates turning over the TVA to the . . . monopolists.” Such populist sentiment among southerners may well have cost Goldwater the border states that had gone for both Eisenhower and Nixon.45

Race and Conservatism Outside the South Opposition to civil rights, necessary for southern support, came to have increasing purchase outside the South as well, where questions of housing segregation as well as school segregation were becoming more heated. Pollsters and journalists began seeing evidence of what came to be called “backlash” in northern cities, where urban ethnics of Southern and Eastern European descent were becoming more open to racial appeals. Clif White recruited one of these pollsters, Theodore Humes, to his Goldwater group. The wedge into these communities, Humes was discovering, was not conservatism, but opposition to civil rights. As White wrote,


Everywhere he went, Humes found the Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian and other groups of Eastern European origin in rebellion against the school bussing [sic] of their children and the threatened eradication of their old neighborhoods by “blockbusters;” the greedy real estate speculators who were deliberately and systematically exploiting Negroes who wanted to buy homes of their own. [Backlash] was an issue we had no plans to exploit. But it was there nonetheless, and it was helping turn thousands in the “nationality” groups against the Kennedy administration and the Democrat big-city machines.46 Just as White’s justification of the southern strategy can help explain the conservative Republican logic there, here his explanation of Goldwater’s strategy shows how the issue of race was used and justified outside the South. As in his claim about the South, White argued that Republican operatives were not exploiting racism; rather they happened to reap the benefits of Democratic failure. Yet if race were the issue for the “nationality groups,” they would turn against Kennedy and the Democratic Party and vote Republican only if Goldwater was seen to oppose civil rights initiatives. Hence after reading Humes’s study of ethnic racism, White’s group hired him to do more extensive polling. But unlike desegregation in the South, conservatives did not have a cut-and-dried issue here. In order to spell out exactly why white ethnic neighborhoods would be “eradicated” by the introduction of black homeowners, White would have to say either that blacks would change the character of these neighborhoods for the worse, or admit that the mere presence of black neighbors would be so distasteful to whites that they would have to move out. Instead, he displaced the conflict from either white ethnics or black potential homeowners to “greedy real estate speculators”—and by extension “open housing” laws that required sellers to sell fairly to the highest bidder regardless of race. In doing so, he avoided admitting a dubious moral position, sided with anxious working-class whites, and seemed to sympathize with vulnerable blacks all at the same time. Indeed, the Goldwater campaign was quite interested in exploiting the race issue throughout the country. White contracted with more than one

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public opinion firm to analyze the impact of civil rights on white communities, focusing on northern cities with substantial black populations such as Cleveland and Cincinnati.47

The White Man’s Party While Goldwater strategists busily cultivated white backlash, they worked both sides of the issue, publicly claiming that it was not they, but liberals, who were bringing the issue of race to the fore. Buckley, in an NR column in July 1963, most fully elaborated this position. “If the Democrats,” he wrote, in their anxiety to discredit Goldwater and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, hammer away at the theme that such sentiments as Goldwater’s add up to an anti-Negro policy, then those who side with Goldwater may begin reconstructing their habits of thought and argument; and eventually their policies. Thereafter, they might proceed, resignedly, on the assumption that what is anti-Negro and what is traditionally American are apparently the same thing. And that therefore one must now choose between staying free and trucking to the Negro vote.48 Were it not written to admonish Democrats, this argument could be taken as a strategy brief for the Goldwater campaign. In it Buckley shows the conservative formula for constructing a new political identity among whites who will come to see their interests as reflected by conservative candidates. The brilliant formula would allow conservatives in the coming years to reap political dividends from every struggle to advance in black civil, political, and economic rights.49 Influenced by both Bozell and Garry Wills, who at the time was a young staff writer at NR, Buckley moved away from his earlier stance frankly supporting white rule, and as the civil rights movement heated up, he increasingly distanced himself from segregation, and from opposition to black suffrage (which was now being promoted more by a new breed of racial populists in the South, and less by elite bourbon politicians). Buckley’s intervention was also evidence of NR’s new orientation toward practical


politics, which reflected the influence of Rusher, and his desire to make the magazine an organizational tool for conservatives in the Republican Party.50 The new racial bent of the party was evident at the annual RNC meeting in Denver in 1963, where even conservative columnist Robert Novak was alarmed at the openly racial language of southern chairmen and the lack of challenge to it by nonsoutherners. He cites as evidence a statement by Mississippi party chair (and member of Clif White’s group) Wirt Yerger that Kennedy had fomented racial upheaval in the South in order to win the election. Not only did Yerger’s claim go unrepudiated, but an “omnibus resolution” adopted at the national committee came close to endorsing it. “All of this pointed to an unmistakable conclusion,” Novak wrote, that “a good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leaders, envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party.”51 Goldwater confirmed his role as the “White Man’s Party” candidate in June 1964 when he voted against Johnson’s sweeping Civil Rights Bill. He took pains to make clear, however, that he did so entirely on conservative principle. In his speech on the Senate floor before casting his vote he said, “I realize fully that the federal government has a responsibility in the field of civil rights. . . . The two portions of this bill which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections . . . are those which would embark the federal government on a regulatory course of action with regard to private enterprise in the area of so-called ‘public accommodations’ and in the area of employment.” Continuing his objection, he sketched out the Orwellian scenario that had become the staple of segregationists since 1948: “To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of this bill,” Goldwater said, “will require the creation of a federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an ‘informer’ psychology in great areas of our national life—neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen. . . . These . . . are the hallmarks of the police state in the destruction of a free society.”52 This charged rhetoric linked race to antistatism in a way that could evoke passionate opposition to civil rights from both segregationists and conservatives, thus further creating a common political identity.53

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United at Last: The 1964 Republican Convention When the Republican convention got under way in San Francisco in 1964, the southern and conservative alliance dominated the proceedings. The civil rights plank, which in its proposed form pledged enforcement of the new Civil Rights Act, was weakened by the drafting committee. Bending to southern opposition, the word “enforcement” was removed. Texas Senator John Tower defended the change by explaining that the term carried unfortunate connotations for a region that had suffered under Reconstruction. Further evidence that the conservative wing of the party was slouching southward came when respected Iowa Senator Bourke Hickenlooper proposed a plank “censuring” the Supreme Court for having “usurped” the functions of Congress, and demanded a congressional investigation of recent court actions.54 Moderates did their best to resist the conservative takeover. The Ripon Society, a national organization of Republican moderates founded soon after Kennedy’s assassination, issued a statement just before the convention declaring that the party had to choose “whether or not to adopt a strategy that must inevitably exploit the ‘white backlash’ to the Civil Rights Movement in the South and in the suburbs of the North.” The only opposing candidate at the convention, Governor William Scranton from Pennsylvania, supported by the northeastern wing of the party, went fully on the attack against the faction that these liberals depicted as racist and warmongering. The accusation appeared justified when Rockefeller got up to offer a platform amendment that would denounce extremism, particularly the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. Goldwater supporters in the gallery went into a frenzy, and they repeatedly shouted the New York governor down.55 Conservative stridence climaxed with Goldwater’s acceptance speech for the nomination. Unlike in 1960 when he told conservatives to grow up, work for Nixon, and take the party back in the long term, now that they had taken the party he seemed prepared to offer no quarter. “Anyone who joins us in all sincerity we welcome.” He went on: “Those who do not care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case.” And in his now infamous words he proclaimed, “I would remind you that extremism


in the cause of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Although Clifton White and other members of the Draft Goldwater group were aghast at Goldwater’s proclamation, the floor went wild over it. With the southern and conservative takeover of the GOP now complete, the victors celebrated long into the night. “Some of the Goldwater jubilants were singing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and others were singing ‘Dixie,’” reported Theodore White. “But they were united at last.”56

Hunting Where the Ducks Are The battle to wrest the states of the Old Confederacy from the Democrats began in earnest after the convention. Early in the fall, Strom Thurmond made a televised announcement to the people of South Carolina that he was switching parties. “The Democratic Party,” he said, “has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors. . . . [It] has rammed through Congress unconstitutional, unworkable and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property rights of the individual.”57 He went on to say that he would campaign for the “Goldwater Republican Party” and “join him in his fight . . . to make the Republican Party a party which supports freedom, justice and constitutional government.” Not only did Thurmond switch parties to try to swing the South to Goldwater in 1964, but, as his announcement stated, his aim was equally to alter the course of the Republican Party, to commit the GOP to racial conservatism.58 Excited about the chance to support a major party candidate who openly opposed civil rights legislation, many southern backers beyond the control of the southern GOP apparatus began their own kind of campaign. One entrepreneur manufactured “Goldwater Cigars” to be distributed around the South. Boxes of the cigars came with a card that stated: “These cigars can be used in many ways. . . . Some Republican People at the San Francisco Convention Slipped a Lighted Cigar Into a Negro Delegate’s Pocket! They Say He Seemed to Get the Idea That He Wasn’t Wanted. And He Left the Room in a Hurry!”59 Mindful of the bad national press

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that could come from these gimmicks, Clifton White discouraged them. Thus in this and other similar cases, the Goldwater campaign sought to avoid open racial signification.60 Although Goldwater was the anti–civil rights candidate for most voters, he rarely raised the subject in speeches between the convention and November. Despite his changing language to accommodate white southern voters, he was still uncomfortable being associated with racism, and was ambivalent about exploiting the issue. However, his candidacy was fast sinking, and it was the one issue for which he could count on votes—particularly in the South, but increasingly in northern urban areas as well. He finally agreed to a speech, written by young Arizona staffer William Rehnquist, that he felt would articulate his views without being racially divisive. “Our aim, as I understand it,” he told the audience at a fundraising dinner in Chicago, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society as such. It is to preserve a free society. . . . Freedom of association is a double freedom or it is nothing at all. It applies to both parties who want to associate with each other. . . . Barriers infringe the freedom of everybody in the society, not just the minorities. . . . Now the removal of such barriers enhances freedom. . . . But it is equally clear that freedom is diminished when barriers are raised against the freedom not to associate. We must never forget that the freedom to associate means the same thing as the freedom not to associate.61 The speech went mostly unreported in the press—there was no news in the fact that Goldwater was the anti–civil rights candidate. But rhetorically it further developed a formula that would be of great use to conservatives in decades to come. Moving beyond earlier awkward attempts to link racism and conservatism, it finally brought conservative ideals together with opposition to civil rights in a way that appeared classically liberal. Its durable “color-blind” logic, stating that all citizens should have the right to associate or not, could appear to oppose the institutions of Jim Crow while ignoring the structural conditions of racial stratification in the South and, more important, in the rest of the country. The argument was not new—its roots were in the nineteenth century, and Rehnquist himself


worked this angle as a Supreme Court clerk for Justice Jackson in drafting an opinion on Brown—but its basic premises were well-suited to the time and would become the hallmark of anti–affirmative action rhetoric used by conservatives thirty years later (including that of Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist). As the fall wore on, Goldwater was increasingly cast in the media and by the Johnson team as a frightening radical who would be quick on the nuclear trigger and out to destroy such cherished New Deal programs as Social Security. Members of Goldwater’s staff felt that the flagging campaign needed to heighten the contrast between him and Johnson in a way favorable to Goldwater by playing up backlash fears of racial transgression and social breakdown. Clifton White produced a documentary for Goldwater called Choice, which focused not on the threat of communism or the “collectivism” of the New Deal and Great Society, but rather on drunken hoodlums, bare-breasted women, and looting blacks—all symbols of what would soon come to be called “the social question.” When he previewed the film, Goldwater was disturbed by its images and angrily told White, “I’m not going to be made out to be a racist. You can’t show it.” While Goldwater did not mind looking like a conservative extremist, he did not want to be seen as a racial extremist. But it was too late for that—race and conservatism had become elements of the same political logic in the Goldwater campaign.62 Goldwater could not clearly distinguish his conservatism from racial pandering, but that may not have been his biggest problem. Civil rights was one of the defining issues of the 1964 contest, but equally if not more important were high stakes questions of war and peace. Since the 1960 election, the Berlin Wall had gone up, the Cuban missile crisis had brought the country to the brink of war, and now the conflict in Indochina loomed large. Moreover, the nation was still reeling from Kennedy’s assassination. Goldwater, having been painted as a warmongering fanatic by liberal leaders in his own party, did not stand much of a chance of altering that image for the country at large. More important, however, conservatism did not yet appeal to a majority of Americans, who saw conservatism and the Republican Party as representing wealthy, elite interests. In fact, race was probably the most compelling issue Goldwater had on his side. Beyond his home state of Arizona, Goldwater did well only in states where the race

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question mattered above all else—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia.63 Conservative GOP strategists like William Rusher were initially wrong; the South could not push Republican vote tallies high enough to win the 1964 election, or even come remotely close. But they were right in the long run. The 1964 election was a watershed for the Republican Right because of both the institutional and discursive pieces that had been put in place by the time of Goldwater’s nomination. Conservative Republicans needed southern delegates in order to challenge moderate and liberal Republicans at the national level and, they thought, to win in 1964. In order to do that, their candidate had to oppose civil rights. Opposition to civil rights, intended primarily to bring in southerners, shaped the very character of modern conservatism itself. As issues of civil rights and black liberation became more acute in the following years, conservatives had a formula in place to interpret these issues for anxious whites, and paint themselves not as defenders of the elite, but of social order generally. In order for this politics to be successful, conservatism had to move beyond being identified with northern economic libertarians, traditionalists, or southern segregationists. Its appeal had to credibly speak to the main themes and concerns in American political culture in order to transform them. This southern racialization of the GOP was a necessary component of the subsequent rise of the Right, but not a wholly sufficient one. Goldwater’s huge loss in the general election demonstrates that while conservatives had found a workable racial language for southern successes and Republican Party control, they had yet to be embraced by American voters.

4 “YOU ARE SOUTHERNERS TOO”: THE NATIONAL CAMPAIGNS OF GEORGE WALLACE The Goldwater campaign of 1964 galvanized the modern conservative movement within the Republican Party. But as Lyndon Johnson’s historic landslide election demonstrated, the Right was far from claiming any national victories. Over the course of the 1960s, however, a racial, antistatist populism emerged that spoke not just to diehard defenders of Jim Crow or to committed political conservatives, but to broader segments of the public which, confronted with political upheaval in the 1960s, were open to new political identifications. This new populism was pioneered by Alabama governor and segregationist firebrand George Wallace.1 Johnson’s victory in 1964 came at the height of the civil rights movement, which challenged the deeply embedded racial stratification and exclusions in American social, political, and economic life. The Johnson administration and its liberal allies in Congress attempted to manage the racial crisis through the aggressively targeted policies and initiatives of the Great Society and War on Poverty. But while most white Americans believed in the Democratic rhetoric of inclusion and equality, many were hesitant about the changes necessary to raise the economic and social status of African Americans. These new divisions over race also added to the emerging split in the Republican Party along the seams of its liberal and conservative wings, leaving even more Americans increasingly unsure about their own partisan commitments. Wallace charged into this open political moment as contradictory figure whose paradoxes were legion: as the simultaneous embodiment of the “av-

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“YOU ARE SOUTHERNERS TOO”

erage citizen” and a self-conscious caricature of a redneck, he was a politician with whom many Americans could identify even as they differentiated themselves from his image. He called for law and order, yet he never strayed from the spectacle of disruptive violence himself. His favorite campaign slogan was “Stand up for America,” yet he complained, in his regional twang, that the South was forever the victim of national prejudice. He was hailed as a conservative, although he was in some ways more New Deal Democrat than right-wing Republican. And although he always claimed he was not a racist, racial demonization was the cornerstone of his success. The advantage of this liminal positioning was that Wallace had the latitude to take stances that the established parties would not, and could stake out new territory to delineate new horizons of political discourse. The making of new political orders is always tumultuous, because creating a new collective political identity requires the rending of people from old traditions and political identifications while producing new exclusions. The fashioning of Wallace’s antigovernment populism was a moment of founding violence for the modern Right in a way the Goldwater campaign was not, because it relied on politics outside of accepted norms or institutional party channels.2 The Wallace movement built on the politics of both the Dixiecrat Revolt and the Goldwater insurgency, and, in a populist idiom, helped push modern conservatism toward eventual political hegemony. Wallace was the first to articulate these diverse political positions together in a convincing way for a public beyond southern segregationists and economic conservatives, and he was able to do so in part because he entered the political arena at a time when the United States was undergoing enormous social, political, and then economic transformation. Populist discourse assumes a homogeneous notion of the people and their right to self-rule. As such, it has greatest purchase as an active political force in moments of crisis when popular sovereignty, and national identity itself, are open to new interpretations. Populism has an egalitarian as well as an intolerant legacy, but even populist movements driven by democratic impulses have ultimately foundered on their excessive concern for homogeneity. Political actors who employ populist language deemphasize differences among the group on whose behalf they claim to speak, depicting group members as wholly equivalent with each other, and utterly dif-


ferent than those outside the collective identity. Moreover, populist leaders claim an immediate identification between themselves and those they represent. As tribunes of the people, they are meant to translate popular will directly into governance. The actual content of popular sovereignty is not distinct. What is crucial is that the people see themselves reflected in those who speak in their behalf. This is why populism is such a broadly used term; it can describe figures as diverse as Pat Buchanan or Jesse Jackson. In the shift from left to right, populism has retained its character to the degree that activists and politicians on the right have been able to reconstruct a coherent notion of the people and articulate a form of popular resentment against the difference and elitism it imagines on the left. Wallace’s symbolic figure was the white southerner under attack from the federal government. But as this symbolic figure was extended it became the more general “Middle American” as the embodiment of the signifier America—the white middle-class male from every region who is pushed around by an invasive federal government, threatened by crime and social disorder, discriminated against by affirmative action, and surrounded by increasing moral degradation. Through its sometimes violent antagonism, this newly constructed identity began to make the Right appear no longer as the defender of privilege, but rather as representative of the whole American people.3

1962: “You Are Southerners Too” Wallace often spoke about the “average citizen” and “the common man” in order to claim a majoritarian bloc in the American electorate and to grant himself authority as a tribune of the people; yet he claimed that these people were not represented by their political leaders. Rather, he said that his Americans were the outsiders, the scorned, those who were distant from centers of power. The people he attempted to bring together into a common identity were poor white southerners, working-class urban ethnics, farmers, small business owners, and alienated conservative suburbanites from across regions. The positions he claimed to represent were also heterogeneous: states’ rights, individual freedoms, law and order, anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and Protestant Christianity. Yet in order for Wallace supporters to see themselves as average citizens,

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their enemies had to be cast as the real outsiders; not people with whom they simply had political disagreements, but parasites on the national body. In other words, in order to make his outsiders insiders, Wallace had to rhetorically connect the liberal center to those he described as unproductive and decadent. Thus as his rhetoric evolved, he invoked bureaucrats, “permissive” judges, the ultra-wealthy, protesters, rioters, welfare recipients, and criminals alike as threats to the nation to establish a fundamental unity among the groups he claimed to represent. In linking together this new antigovernment populist identity, one particular figure first came to stand for Wallace’s national subject—the white southerner. As discussed in earlier chapters, liberals in the mid-twentieth century at the time generally depicted racial domination as a purely southern phenomenon, and many southern segregationists claimed to only be interested in protecting the “southern way of life.” But for Wallace it was not enough merely to say that the South had a unique heritage that had to be protected from northern intrusion in its affairs. Like Goldwater, he asserted that the issues he addressed were of paramount importance to the entire nation. But his politics were simultaneously southern and national because he insisted that the South was the most American region: that only this region could lead the struggle to safeguard the nation’s historic virtues. While liberals claimed that true American identity resided in Gunnar Myrdal’s racially inclusive creed to which the South was an anomaly. Wallace, through an inversion, made the South the guardian of the nation’s soul. He understood that America’s racial problem was neither a peculiarity of a region nor a relic of the past, but a fundamental aspect of American politics. As black political mobilization developed in the 1950s and 1960s, what had been relatively stable racial identities became threatened for a growing number of whites in both the North and South. Indeed, the threat posed by the black freedom movement was double, and thereby produced a double resentment: not only were whites asked to open up their neighborhoods, schools, unions, and state benefits to African Americans, but the very demand challenged the national self-image of the United States as uniquely democratic and egalitarian. As was clear to Charles Collins, liberals who dismissed racism as merely irrational, regressive, and anathema to


American ideals missed the fact that, if handled carefully, racism could have enormous political potential. Wallace first gained national renown as a defender of segregation, but he soon abandoned open racial rhetoric. Rather, he helped create what is often referred to now as “racial coding” by critics of the Right. Generally overlooked in discussions of coding, however, is that the very act of translation—of using nonracial words and phrases to speak about matters of race—changes the meaning of that which is being translated. If audiences outside the Deep South required altered language, that could only reflect their ambivalence about racist politics; otherwise, why not simply openly appeal to racial sentiments? In order to make race work for him nationally, Wallace had to convince his audiences that race meant something else—it had to exceed its own boundaries and come to stand for a number of issues. As a key term in an emergent chain of associations, race both saturated and was masked by this new antigovernment populism. Wallace was elected governor of Alabama in 1962 as the “Fighting Judge” on the campaign slogan “Stand up for Alabama” and the promise to defy federal orders to desegregate the University of Alabama. This political logic and imagery of violation and resistance were in place when he gained national exposure for his first inaugural address. The oration, penned by the Birmingham Citizens’ Councilor and populist Klan leader Asa Carter, conveyed to white Alabamians and white southerners generally that Wallace would stand up against a regime that reviled and ridiculed them, and was forcing them to alter their way of life. But Wallace also meant for his speech to be heard outside the South.4 On the steps of the state capitol “where Jefferson Davis once stood,” Wallace began his inaugural address with an oratory device dating back to Pericles’ funeral oration by invoking the Confederate dead to recommit white citizens to time-honored values and practices. Wallace then underscored for his audience how appropriate, in the “very heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us. . . . Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. . . . In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the

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gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”5 In the speech, the new governor then specifically referred to the recent fatal clash between white rioters and the military over the integration of the University of Mississippi, asserting that “the federal troops in Mississippi could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington, D.C., where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ball game.” In making this claim he was contending that it was whites who needed protection from blacks, not vice versa. In attempting to expose the hypocrisy of racial liberals, however, Wallace did not seek to antagonize all northerners. On the contrary, anticipating more ambitious political goals, he hoped that what he said would resonate with northern whites. Thus he had already begun to link his particular group (pro-segregation white southerners) to a political universal: the desire for freedom and democracy. He achieved this by moving from segregation to general issues about government intrusion that he claimed affected all Americans. “It is . . . a basically ungodly government,” he said, “and its appeal to the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people.” He went on to say: “You native sons and daughters of old New England’s rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Midwest, and you descendants of the far west flaming spirit of pioneer freedom, we invite you to come and be with us, for you are of the Southern mind, and the Southern spirit, and the Southern philosophy, you are Southerners too and brothers in our fight.”6 Like the populists of the late nineteenth century, Wallace aimed to go national to save the local. But while he claimed to be fighting on behalf of the whole nation, it was the South, he asserted, that was best situated to lead the fight, given its distinct history as a champion of states’ rights.7 Wallace went on in the speech to chronicle the trials, humiliation, and abuse visited upon white southerners during and after the Civil War, and related how they stood fast in the face of tyranny. But lest his national audience feel that this suffering had no meaning for them, he reminded them that “Southerners,” including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and Patrick Henry, “played a most magnificent part in erecting this great divinely inspired system of freedom, and as God is our witness,” he told his audience, “Southerners will save it.” Framed this way,


white southerners were not defending despotism but resisting it, and Wallace, like those before him, was a protector of liberty’s heritage.8 By linking school desegregation to governmental authoritarianism, he allowed working- and middle-class whites outside the South to identify with the image of the downtrodden white southerner. In this move, Wallace used the old producerist saw of depicting dependents below and elites above as an alliance against the independent, virtuous middle. Wallace knew that the impression of the threatened white man standing up to an arrogant liberalism would have national purchase.9 Once in office, Wallace held firm to his bold campaign pledge to block the integration of the University of Alabama. This posturing made state officials worry that there would be a replay of the rioting and fatalities that had recently marked the desegregation at the University of Mississippi. But while they fretted, Wallace understood that such a gamble might have an enormous payoff. When the state Attorney General expressed his concern about the possibility of riots and federal troop deployment, Wallace enthusiastically replied, “The first day they bring federal troops into this state, I’m gonna run for President.” A week before the confrontation at the University of Alabama, Wallace ratcheted up the tension by going on Meet the Press to defend his plan to personally block the entrance to the university, describing his act as “a dramatic way to impress upon the American people this omnipotent march of centralized government that is going to destroy the rights and freedom and liberty of the people of this country.” By extension, Wallace would be the protagonist in this drama in the eyes of the nation.10 In the confrontation with assistant U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach on the front steps of the university, Wallace made a speech decrying the “unwelcomed, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion” by the “Central Government,” saying that “millions of Americans will gaze in sorrow upon [this] situation.” The standoff allowed him to perform his politics before a live national television audience. The tension-filled scene that appeared ready to turn ugly at any moment was actually carefully orchestrated so as to minimize the possibility of actual violence (he had gotten assurances beforehand from the Citizens’ Councils and the Klan that they would stay away from the university that day), but his willingness to

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“make a dramatic impression” by facing down the Kennedy administration, national guardsmen, and federal troops immediately elevated him to national stature. This racial drama was followed by a second act that evening when President Kennedy, in a televised address to the nation, called for a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill. In the days that followed, thousands of letters and telegrams poured in from around the country thanking Wallace for his resistance to federally mandated desegregation and urging him to continue to stand up to Kennedy.11

1964: From States’ Rights to Racial Antistatism Wallace capitalized on his “stand in the schoolhouse door” by accepting invitations to speak at colleges and political and civic organizations across the country. As he went north with his message, the governor began to move from segregation to new themes such as anticommunism. “We have permitted the federal government,” he told northern audiences, “to lead us dangerously close to a complete rejection of the democratic idea in favor of a form of statism embracing many of the social and economic theories of Marx and Lenin.” This shift to the language of anticommunism began to endear him to both traditional conservatives and ultrarightists. Wallace entered his first Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin in 1964 and gave his opening campaign speech in the notoriously anticommunist Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton. There, instead of talking about segregation, he focused on the global Soviet threat, accusing the State Department of treachery and bemoaning Franklin Roosevelt’s concessions at Yalta.12 On the occasions when Wallace did raise issues of race outside the South, he was careful to attack the federal government for its overreach of authority, not for integration itself. He claimed that he was not a racist, but rather that he believed that segregation was best for both whites and blacks. Even then, as he told Wisconsin audiences: “I am an Alabama segregationist . . . not a Wisconsin segregationist. If Wisconsin believes in integration, that is Wisconsin’s business, not mine. That is why I’m here to tell you that Wisconsin has the right to choose the pattern it will follow in race relations, and Alabama has the right to choose the path it will follow . . . the central government in Washington has no right to tell either Al-


abama or Wisconsin what to do.”13 Thus, whether or not Wisconsin cared about segregation, it should care about being pushed around by an arrogant and bullying federal government. While still careful to leave race out of his speeches directly, Wallace expanded his stance against integration to oppose other aspects of the racial liberalism of the Johnson administration. In doing so, he was able to rhetorically link whites across class lines by claiming that various aspects of the impending federal civil rights legislation would trample freedoms and rights heretofore enjoyed by whites of all classes. This was a crucial difference from both the neo-Bourbon Dixiecrats, who were vociferously antilabor, and Goldwater Republicans, who were more identified with business interests. When speaking to middle-class suburbanites he decried the destruction of property rights and the federal encroachment on individual market freedoms. When speaking to workers, he speculated that new federal legislation aimed at integrating unions would threaten job security. Going far out of his way to raise the issue of black inclusion without actually mentioning it, Wallace told blue-collar audiences that the Civil Rights Bill would “tell an employer who he’s got to employ.” He would go on, “If a man’s got a hundred Japanese-Lutherans working for him and there’s a hundred Chinese-Baptists unemployed, he’s got to let some of the Japanese-Lutherans go so he can make room for the Chinese-Baptists. . . . And of course, what does that do for your seniority rights?” he asked, driving home his point. “It destroys them!” To both working- and middleclass audiences, he warned that if an open-housing bill were passed, homeowners would be forced to sell to anyone, “even if it’s a man with green eyes and blue teeth.”14 Wallace often cemented his ties to working-class audiences by affirming both their particular ethnic identity and their whiteness. Like Clif White in his northern campaign for Goldwater, Wallace understood that that racial resentment among white ethnics in the North was there to be exploited. And Wallace’s populism proved a better tool with which to do so. In Milwaukee, a city with a sizable black population, Wallace gave speeches to working-class urban ethnics who were nervous about the changing racial makeup of their jobs and neighborhoods. At one rally he was greeted by a packed room that sang “Dixie” to him in a mixture of English and Polish. Here were Eastern Europeans anxious at the thought that their newly es-

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tablished white racial status and its attendant privileges might be imperiled. Bronko Gruber, an ex-marine and tavern owner who sponsored the packed event, articulated just what Wallace’s appeal north of the MasonDixon Line was about. In response to three black protesters in the rally, he said: “I live on Walnut Street and three weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them. . . . They beat up old ladies 83-years-old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal and come home to something like this?”15 This small business owner clearly expressed a gendered mix of racism, populism, and betrayal that would work well for Wallace in northern states.16 Wallace opened his speech at the Serb Hall by emphasizing the citizenship credentials of these white ethnics while affirming their ethnic identity by admonishing the federal government for abandoning the “proud and gallant Poles who fought so bravely” in World War II. However, Wallace’s relationship to white ethnics was challenged by labor unions and church groups who accused him in that campaign of having referred to Eastern and Southern Europeans as “lesser breeds.” Wallace deftly responded to accusations of anti-ethnic sentiment by actively embracing these groups as part of his expanding political identity. He began demonstrating his commitment by bringing Alabamians of Polish, Greek, Jewish, Italian, and German descent with him on his campaign. Prior to Wallace, southern segregationists contrasted the white South to the rest of the nation by claiming that the region was notable for its pure Anglo-Saxon pedigree. As Charles Wallace Collins said less than two decades previous, “The white Southerner has been able to preserve his Anglo-Saxon heritage to a remarkable degree.” Now Wallace attempted to reassure the descendants of the second great wave of immigration that he, a white southerner, was defending their social and political status as both ethnics and whites. Speaking as racial victim to racial victim, he drew them into the collective identity he described, articulating their interests as whites who were being betrayed by the federal government and made vulnerable to blacks, who by definition became their political enemies, just as they were his.17


Violence and the Paradox of Law and Order Wallace and his aides understood early on that the protests and physical clashes generated by his rallies, far from being a hindrance, actually helped his cause. Violence, both material and symbolic, has particular significance in the American context where the cultural meanings assigned to violence have defined and redefined the identity of the nation itself at critical moments. “Law and order” was a hallmark of Wallace’s candidacies. Yet at the same time, Wallace and his supporters were linked to violence themselves in a number of ways, sometimes legally sanctioned, sometimes lawless. The threat, anticipation, and performance of violence were all central to Wallace’s image and political success. As a candidate running against the system, against the two parties and the federal government, Wallace both evoked the specter of unchecked violence that threatened the American people and threatened violence on behalf of that same people.18 From the beginning of his national career, Wallace was linked in the press to violent white supremacists in Alabama and blamed in the national press for creating the context of the Birmingham church-bombing that killed four schoolgirls. Extreme police violence televised around the nation took place in Birmingham and later at Selma. In his speeches Wallace promised retribution against demonstrators and rioters; at his rallies supporters and opponents often clashed. How is it that “law and order” and violent rhetoric and action were both integral parts of the Wallace phenomenon? When questioned on this point, Wallace and his supporters would claim that he condemned illegal violence, that his police only used force that was necessary to keep the peace, and that violence in the South was in fact far less prevalent than in northern cities. His critics charged that as a racist (or proto-fascist) Wallace hypocritically denounced violence while using it to maintain Jim Crow in Alabama and endorse a police state nationally. The two assertions are essentially two sides of a coin. Each maintained that Wallace’s political goal was to uphold the racial status quo in the South and put an end to demonstrations and riots around the nation. But violence was not a means to a political end for Wallace; rather, it was constitutive of Wallace’s politics itself, and a key ingredient of his appeal. The combative opposition that

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Wallace and his supporters performed over the course of his career helped define his political influence. In his stand against federal authority, in his threats to run over demonstrators if they got in the way of his car, in his links to violent white supremacists, and in the fistfights at his rallies, Wallace and his supporters forged a new sense of us and them, drew new lines that defined new identities. The extremity of this founding violence kept it from being hegemonic, but performed the political division that Wallace sought, and could help him and those he represented appear to be the real victims. Bill Jones, the national campaign director in Wallace’s 1964 bid, wrote that the Wallace staff booked small venues whenever possible in order to have unruly crowds of opponents outside the door. They found, he said, “that having mobs outside, we got a more favorable press than otherwise. Our feelings were that the more pickets who appeared, the greater the favorable reaction for the Governor.” He frankly admitted that the anti-Wallace protesters “were encouraged every way we knew, short of endorsing what they were doing.” The more opposition the campaign drummed up, the more it could both incite the anger of those who supported the candidate, and claim the sympathy of many who did not.19 From the stage, Wallace would invite hecklers to shout at him, even egging them on if they were too quiet. He did not just invite attacks against himself; he incited crowd members against each other. During his rallies he would build the tension until a clash became all but inevitable. But through the use of humor, he was generally able to keep fights from erupting outright. For the audience, this perhaps provided a cathartic experience, an energetic disavowal of the enemy that deepened their identification with his antigovernment racial populism. However, physical altercations were by no means uncommon at Wallace rallies. All along the campaign trail, fists and folding chairs flew in the audience and picket signs were wielded as clubs outside venues where he spoke. On a number of occasions, these rallies sparked full-scale riots. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, national guardsmen tear-gassed protesters attempting to march to the site of a Wallace rally, setting off a night of burning and looting. While such events showed that Wallace was a polarizing figure, they also enhanced his luster to supporters.


Building the Wallace Movement: The Role of Citizen Activists In order to understand how Wallace’s politics were conveyed to the public, one needs to look at the role of citizen activists. These volunteers were responsible at different times for getting Wallace into primaries, onto the ballot, and, most important, into the consciousness of voters. Neither professional politicians nor mass electorate, these activists were the link between the two. In their book Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics, Edward Carmines and James Stimson argue that citizen activists are key to any important ideological or political shift. As the authors point out, American voters are notoriously passive in terms of political information gathering and often have very little idea where candidates stand on basic issues. And yet studies show that at the polls, voters tend to accurately choose the candidate who most closely expresses their political positions. This puzzle is solved, Carmines and Stimson argue, if one looks at the role of the citizen activist in generating political knowledge. Voters are likely to take their cues from those around them—in the neighborhood or workplace—who express strong views on political issues and figures. As they state, citizens inattentive to politics “choose to bypass both costs and errors by simply looking to someone in their personal environments, someone whose views they know (often, probably without wishing to) for evidence of the relevant facts.”20 Moreover, Carmines and Stimson argue, activists are best suited to push new ideas because both politicians and the electorate, although for different reasons, are likely to be inert in their political positions. Activists, as occasional actors, have little to lose in working for a candidate, and often have the zeal that makes them a vanguard of discursive shifts. Understanding Wallace’s basis of support then necessitates an examination of his campaign supporters.21 As Wallace began to tour nationally in 1964, word began spreading among ultraconservative organizations that Wallace had national political potential. One member of the anticommunist Conservative Council wrote excitedly to a compatriot in New York state that “this man is totally fearless and represents the viewpoint of the South with strong convictions. . . . Set him up in Syracuse, U. Cornell, even Albany, you’ll kill two birds with one

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stone. You’ll get the strongest conservative in the country fighting for constitutional government in front of the biggest audiences possible because all of your radio and TV will publicize him hoping to make him look ridiculous. But nobody makes this boy look bad.”22 Wallace entered the 1964 Wisconsin Democratic primary at the urging of Lloyd and Dolores Herbstreith, upper-middle-class conservatives who had previously worked in Joseph McCarthy’s campaigns. The Herbstreiths also worked with the Liberty Amendment Committee, a group that grew out of the 1950s anticommunist movement to abolish the federal income tax. The Liberty Amendment movement had little popular appeal, for tax on income, as opposed to property, directly affects the wealthy far more than members of lower income brackets. But in Wallace the Herbstreiths saw the possibility of a candidate with broad potential whom they could back, because his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill dovetailed with their antistatist principles. As the Wisconsin primary campaign got under way, Dolores Herbstreith worked her old conservative contacts around the state to set up engagements for Wallace. He thus got his first warm receptions speaking at service clubs and luncheons before businessmen and professionals. In doing so, Wallace began to build a base of citizen activist support among wealthy suburbanites. Organizational support for the campaign was also obtained by contacting the people who sent letters of encouragement to the governor. This practice became key to sustaining citizen activist support for the rest of his career.23 Still more citizen activists were brought in by holding local press conferences and inviting local people to work on his behalf. These people raised funds by selling Wallace buttons and other paraphernalia, or held speaking engagements in local venues. Citizen activists were necessary to the relative success of Wallace’s campaigns because they had to provide counterinformation and cues to the full-on opposition to Wallace not only in the parties, but also by intermediaries like the clergy and labor unions who passed out anti-Wallace literature and lectured their members in the union halls and from the pulpit. Many activists who worked on the Wallace campaign were also members of far Right organizations that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scattered, marginal, and scorned by the major parties, these groups were depicted by political writers at the time as a curiosity on the fringes of


American political life. However, as the committed foot soldiers of the Wallace campaigns in 1964 and even more so in 1968, these organizations had a concentrated impact on American politics far beyond their numbers. Even as Wallace disclaimed any connection with these organizations, his presidential bids would have gone nowhere without their support. As organized translators of the Wallace campaign within the electorate, they had a vehicle to shape political views among voters. As generators of popular support for Wallace’s candidacy, they could help keep Wallace on course as a staunch law and order and anti–civil rights candidate.24 Wallace’s political success was enabled by far Right groups since his first gubernatorial electoral victory. He had lost in his first run for governor in 1958 when he ran as a relative racial moderate and his opponent had the backing of the White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. Realizing his strategic error, Wallace ran as a hard segregationist in 1962, and successfully worked to get both Council and Klan support. During the 1964 primaries, pro-Wallace mailings went out to conservatives in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland from the racist, anti-Semitic Christian Nationalist Crusade; Wallace was reported to have also gotten support from the John Birch Society, the White Party of America, and the National States’ Rights Party. With the exception of the Birchers, these groups were small. The White Party, for instance, was described by American National Socialist Party head George Lincoln Rockwell as just “a bunch of disgruntled [Nazi] party members who swiped my mailing list and defected.” But given that Wallace had no campaign infrastructure in any of these states, these groups, through pamphleteering and other forms of local organizing, provided voters with a clear association between Wallace and racism, giving them cues on how to vote.25 In some cases, high-level campaign staff leaders were themselves members of these groups and used their ties to build the Wallace organization. The 1964 primary campaign in Indiana, for instance, was organized by two Alabama Klan members—Wallace speechwriter Asa Carter and Grand Dragon Robert Shelton—out of the service-station pay phone of a local Indiana Klansman. In the mid-1950s, Carter had also attempted to organize racist whites in a number of Midwestern industrial cities where he had been impressed with working-class white ethnic resistance to African American encroachments into white neighborhoods and schools.26

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Wallace’s relationship with far Right groups was kept in delicate balance. If he were seen as too close to racist groups, he would be fully discredited. But had he rebuffed them, he would have given up a fount of on-theground support from organizers who were instrumental to getting out the vote in the primaries. When charged with linkages to racist organizations, Wallace would often respond by saying that he could not “be responsible for everything that someone does who supports me.” He would not repudiate far Right and white supremacist groups as much as downplay their importance, however. “At least a Klansman will fight for his country,” he once told Harper’s. “But the Klan, it’s just innocuous in size and they’re just concerned with segregation, not subversiveness.” In other words, Klan racism may be unappealing to some but is in no sense a threat to the country.27 Social scientists, looking for a way to explain the new Wallace phenomenon, began referring to it as a racial “backlash” by white workers who, while liberal on economic matters, were conservative about issues of race and authority. Given that the presiding assumption among scholars like Myrdal, and later Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Hofstadter, and others, that racism was the irrational response of an uneducated sector of society, it is no wonder that observers of the Wallace campaigns would see them as evidence of a working-class backlash. If racism was the result of ignorance, then his support had to come from a population that was least educated. Detailed electoral analysis of the Wisconsin primary, however, shows that Wallace’s votes, reflecting the old base of McCarthy’s support, came as much from middle-class suburbanites and farmers as from working-class neighborhoods.28 Promulgators of the backlash hypothesis naturalized reaction and thus missed the fundamentally political force that race could generate among middle-class whites. In other words, these writers saw Wallace support as an unfortunate behavioral reflex, instead of a new interpretive framework. Wallace drew on older racial sentiments, to be sure, but he linked them to other political positions by foregrounding racial resentments, fears, and desires in a political rhetoric that linked economic libertarians, poor and middle-class white southerners, McCarthyite anticommunists, and northern white ethnics threatened by neighborhood and job integration. For


this reason, Wallace had a surprisingly strong showing in the presidential primaries in these northern states. However, the very components that powered the Wallace phenomenon in 1964 kept him too far outside the mainstream to be a major contender for the Democratic nomination, and he did not have enough clout to make Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, openly embrace him or consider asking him to be his vice presidential candidate. Nevertheless, Wallace had hit on themes that would serve him well during the tumult that erupted in that decade.

1968: Broadening the Base and Deepening the Antagonism As the decade wore on, two aspects of the political and social climate changed in ways that offered more opportunity for Wallace to expand his political base and exploit new divisions. First, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Johnson administration intervened in the private and public sectors to protect the rights of African Americans as never before. Johnson also pushed through a number of pieces of Great Society legislation that targeted poverty on behalf of urban and rural impoverished blacks. Running for president as a third-party candidate for his newly created American Independent Party in 1968, Wallace was able to respond to Johnson by continuing to make appeals to business people on issues of new taxation and federal intervention into real estate and employment, to workers on the basis of union seniority and open housing, and his old, white southern constituency on the basis of racial states’ rights. At the same time, inner-city uprisings and antiwar militancy provided new flames to fan. With the eruption of the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in 1965, urban disorders grew both increasingly common and more salient. A new generation of black activists, such as those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, moved from the demand for civil rights to “black power,” and organizations such as the Black Panther Party began to promote and practice the principle of armed self-defense. The New Left also became more bellicose in its opposition to the Vietnam War, pushing beyond civil dis-

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obedience to direct action, moving from a language of peace to one of revolution. Similar to his 1964 rhetoric, but now more strident, Wallace claimed that American society had descended into dangerous violence and disorder. According to him, street protests, urban uprisings, and increasing crime rates were all part of the same fundamental problem; his promise to restore law and order in American society was a compelling message to white Americans who had grown anxious about these issues.29 Wallace aggressively addressed these themes when he announced his 1968 bid for candidacy under the newly created American Independent Party, distinguishing himself from what he depicted as pallid government administrators who were at worst responsible for the growing chaos, and at best powerless to stop it. If elected, he promised, he would “bring all these briefcase-carrying bureaucrats to Washington and throw their briefcases into the Potomac River.” He vowed to “keep the peace,” even if it meant putting “30,000 troops standing on the street . . . with two-footlong bayonets.” And linking race to economic conservatism, he pledged to make Congress change “these so-called civil rights laws,” which, he claimed, were “really an attack on the property rights of this country and on the free enterprise system and local government.” Ever the authoritarian, he recommended that the “activists, anarchists, revolutionaries and Communists” who were responsible for all the civil unrest in the country “be thrown under a good jail.”30 The emphasis on violence and disorder gave Wallace’s antagonism more force and helped forge a unity out of his various themes. The government was doing nothing to protect the American people from the mounting chaos, the logic went; in fact, disorder was encouraged by government permissiveness. “President Johnson,” Wallace said in one speech, “wanted a crime commission report to tell him why they were burning cities down. Well I could have told him why they were burning them down like you could,” the candidate roared, “because you let them burn them down, that’s the reason they burn them down!” However, while it was doubtless who the lawless were in this and other speeches, he was careful, as always, to disclaim any overt racism. As he said in one speech, “Well, it’s a sad day in this country when you can’t talk about law and order unless they want to call you a racist. I tell you that’s not true and I resent it and they gonna


have to pay attention because all the people in this country, in the great majority, the Supreme Court of our country has made it almost impossible to convict a criminal.”31 Nevertheless, there was no question that blacks constituted an absent presence in Wallace’s rhetoric. As the 1968 election drew near, Wallace continued to rise in the polls. At one point he gained favor with 20 percent of the electorate, possibly enough to rob any other candidate of a majority of Electoral College votes and throw the election into the House of Representatives. Wallace generally drew Republican votes, but he also made substantial inroads to the urban white working-class constituency of the Democratic Party. Wallace continued to define his battle as one of productive members of society against parasitic elites and subversive protesters. He counterposed “pointyheaded intellectuals,” “bearded bureaucrats,” “anarchists,” and “lawbreakers” to “this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, the beautician, the policeman on the beat.” He told a reporter in Lubbock, Texas, “I was a pretty good mechanic. Don’t you think I’d make a great President?” In the North, Wallace tended to attract support from older white skilled workers who feared black incursions into their neighborhoods and schools and from young production workers who were drawn to Wallace’s antiestablishment attacks on liberal elites.32 Wallace played up this rebellious image as a kind of trickster—a mocking figure whose influence is based in his own marginality and ability to lampoon those in authority. The federal government, he would tell audiences, should cease requiring officials of the states to fill out forms in “in triplicate, quadruplicate, or octa-pooplet.” He would also add extra consonants or vowels to words, as in “stastistics” or “Electorial College,” or simply mispronounce them, saying “Latava” for Latvia or describing marching demonstrators as “chomping” in the streets. His aides conceded that the use of such language, which they referred to as “branchheading” (or talking in the style of “the good folks up the creek,” at the head of the branch), was calculated or at least easily correctable. In a national context, Wallace’s branchheading helped craft an image as an uneducated hillbilly whose authority was gleaned from his distance from the centers of power —from his very incomprehension of the organizational forms of modern society and his inability to speak in its terms. This strategy, his aides said,

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made him popular with white working-class and southern voters, yet they were unsure whether it would help or hinder his ability to win over bettereducated white suburbanites.33

The Breakdown of Law and Order That Must Be Stopped Wallace recognized that he represented a marginal political voice and that his rallies needed to build political solidarity through emotional impact. In advertisements for these rallies, he was sometimes billed as “the nation’s most exciting political leader.” In that sense, he was as much about spectacle as anything happening in youth culture at the time. These “exciting” Wallace rallies were occasionally fatal. For instance, in Omaha, Nebraska, one black youth was killed and dozens injured in unrest set off by a Wallace visit, and at a rally in Berea, Kentucky, there was a shootout involving at least fourteen people, two of whom were killed.34 Wallace’s campaigns fed on every new instance of violence and disorder, however tragic. Wallace even used the occasions of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., to advance his politics. He called Kennedy’s assassination “symptomatic of the lawlessness which has invaded our nation and which threatens to destroy the political system nourished by the freedoms enjoyed by Americans,” and King’s death “another example of the breakdown in law and order in this country which must be stopped.” Reporter Jules Witcover described a conversation with Wallace about the riots that followed King’s assassination that captures the thin line between principle and opportunism on which Wallace walked in relation to bloodshed. “I don’t think about it in terms of how it helps or hurts politics,” he said.35 “I just hope they catch the one who did it. I wish we could stop all this shooting. Of course, any breakdown in law and order is going to support the position of anybody like me who is against a breakdown in law and order. Now I don’t want to be helped that way. I don’t want to see any headlines that say Wallace is helped by the riots. All I say is they seem to be getting worse and nobody wants to try to stop it. And that’s all I want to say about that particular subject.”36 Notice the rapid segue from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination to the lawlessness of the riots. By lumping them together, Wallace clearly hoped to profit from all of it.


That summer, following the violence that marred the Democratic convention in Chicago, Wallace praised the police for using “the tactics they ought to have used” against both demonstrators and the press. In response to a dispute over police attacks on journalists at the convention, Wallace stated that the police had acted appropriately against the liberal media. Reflecting on what the melee meant for his candidacy, he said that “the mess in Chicago and in both parties has gotten us into an excellent position to win the election.”37

The Squirrel Party The 1964 campaign, chronically underfunded and run less as a party than as a vehicle for Wallace, built up no local political institutions such could endure between elections. Thus Wallace came to lean more heavily on these organizations in 1968. The American Independent Party was still not a real political party at the time, but rather a collection of fifty state organizations designed solely to get Wallace onto the ballot. The entire operation was run out of Montgomery but depended on the labor of an array of fringe organizations to make it work state-to-state, particularly the John Birch Society, which had skills in telephone canvassing and petition gathering and could staff local offices.38 The decision to engage in election-year activism is remade in each election cycle, unlike more durable decisions like party identification, or longterm ideological commitments. Becoming active is costly in terms of time and resources, and must therefore be accounted for against the general context of political inactivity for most of the electorate. For these activists, the inducements to overcoming inactivity in a particular election have to do with year-to-year calculations of cost and benefits, and the belief that, in a given election, the stakes of the contest are particularly high. Expressing this sense of both urgency and unique opportunity as it attempted to mobilize activists, the United Klans’ Virginia Realm wrote to its members in June 1968, “This is the most important year of our lives. . . . The Honorable George C. Wallace announced his candidacy for President. . . . It is now our duty, and responsibility, to make sure he is elected. This can be done only through combined efforts. If each individual member will bring in two new members, we will triple our membership in the next three

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weeks! We must ‘strike while the iron is hot.’”39 Activists like these were mobilized behind Wallace because of the salient racial issues of the time and because he was perceived as being a last best hope.40 Because of the strong presence of these groups, Wallace sometimes joked that they should call the American Independent Party the Squirrel Party, because it got all the “nuts.” This situation caused no end of consternation for the Montgomery staff, which had to learn to navigate the strange territory of the radical Right in America. Tom Turnipseed, a Montgomery lawyer who co-coordinated the 1968 Wallace campaign, later described with slight bafflement the kinds of people drawn to Wallace. During the California ballot drive, one of the chief Wallace organizers in Los Angeles revealed to Turnipseed a cache of artillery in the back of a pickup truck. As Turnipseed recounted, I asked the guy, “What’s going on?” He told me, “We’re doing maneuvers.” “Well, what. . . . with who?” I asked him, “The National Guard?” “No,” he said, “we’re a private group . . . a militia.” So I asked him, “Well who are you armed against? The Communists gonna get you?” “No,” the organizer replied, “we’re more concerned with Rockefeller interests and the Trilateral Commission.” I just looked at the guy, you know? What could I say?41 Apparently, the traditional white supremacy of the Alabama Klan seemed tame by comparison to the bewildering array of conspiracy theories generated by far Right groups outside the South.42 New Jersey presented another case in the 1968 campaign where Wallace people had to keep a respectable public image while depending on violent ultrarightists and white supremacists. The Newark riots of the summer of 1967 had created ideal conditions for a Wallace candidacy among anxious whites. But the committed cadres of far Right activists in that state forced the Wallace people into careful maneuvering in terms of who they could look to organize the state campaign. This tension is captured in a long memorandum from Wallace aide Cecil Jackson to campaign press secretary Ed Ewing. Jackson’s consideration of possible New Jersey activists in such tense environment is instructive about the possibilities and risks he saw in both the organizers and social climate there. He writes,


John Marvica’s group in Newark is pure dynamite in more ways than one. Since the last Newark riots, the North Ward has become a terrified white ghetto. Evolving from this terror the whites of the North Ward under the direction of John Marvica and [Anthony] Imperiale have organized rifle squads, groups trained in karate and judo, and guerilla warfare. . . . Their headquarters is a karate studio owned by Imperiale. It gave me the jim-jams just visiting the place. This Marvica group will produce thousands of Wallace supporters . . . however, their publicity has been so adverse, including some national television that none of this group should be electors. By the way, I wouldn’t ignore this group because of the support it can bring. I told [them] to stay away from the news media as far as their support of the Governor is concerned.43 The group to which Ewing refers gained national attention after the riots when they called for armed white self-defense and set up bat-wielding patrols in Newark’s working-class, predominantly Italian North Ward. Its leader Anthony Imperiale was often in the news, noted for such provocative statements to the press as “when the Black Panther comes, the white hunter will be waiting.” Even New Jersey governor Richard Hughes denounced the group as Brownshirts.44 In the above-cited memorandum, Jackson went on to write that New Jersey Conservative Party leader Fred Otto knew the laws and loopholes of obtaining ballot status and that he should be used in that regard. But, he wrote, “There is some question as to whether Fred Otto is involved with the [ultra-right paramilitary] Minutemen or not. After two people told me he was, I confronted Fred with the question and he claimed he is not a Minuteman, however, I am not convinced. [But] Fred has a tightly knit group of workers, petition toters, etc., [and] contacts all over the state.” Here again, the Wallace campaign had to choose between organizational expediency and potential public embarrassment. High-profile support from controversial groups could lose sympathy for Wallace among voters who were ambivalent about their political commitments in the late 1960s.45 Wallace made the most of this ambiguity. While he employed an easily translatable coded racist language, he indulged potential voters by giving

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them the option of denying at a conscious level the implications of that language. Once in Eutaw, Alabama, Wallace was seen giving enthusiastic recognition to Klan leader Robert Shelton in a receiving line. When he noticed that he was being filmed by ABC-TV, Wallace directed his bodyguards to forcibly take the film. When the cameraman refused to give it to them, Wallace commanded his guards, “Take it,” which they did by force. Similarly, the Montgomery people declined to hold a national convention for the American Independent Party in 1968 out of fear that too many members of openly racist organizations would show up. They thought the presence of these groups would generate bad press and alienate voters who were willing to back Wallace as a defender of states’ rights or law and order, but not as an open racist.46 Although Wallace did not succeed in throwing the 1968 election into the House, he did come close, receiving more than 10 million popular votes. These came mostly from the South, but also from other regions of the country, particularly the Midwest and West. Nixon, the narrow winner of that election, prevailed by adopting much of Wallace’s rhetoric and pulling together a broad electoral alignment that drew various ethnicities into a white political identity that opposed racial liberalism. This approach was first advocated by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips two years earlier, and then fully explicated in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, as is discussed in the next chapter.47

1972: “Always a Moderate” Wallace ran again for president in 1972, as a Democrat, and began changing his rhetoric to come across as a more centrist and therefore viable candidate. Early in the race, he announced that he was really “always a moderate,” and that he no longer believed in segregating schools or public facilities. This altered position did not leave him without a racial fire to stoke, however. Early in 1972 a series of federal court decisions came down to end de facto school segregation by mandating the busing of schoolchildren to other neighborhoods. Busing was a tailor-made issue for Wallace. He could oppose it without overtly supporting segregation, which allowed him to play to racial anxieties while claiming to do so solely on antistatist principle. In Florida, where the first primary of the season was


held, Democratic voters gave Wallace 42 percent of the vote, and at the same time voted three-to-one for a nonbinding referendum calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting busing. Two days after the Florida primary, Nixon, who had until then been silent on the issue, asking Congress in a televised national address to impose a moratorium on the federal courts to bar them from ordering any new busing.48 Another enormous factor entered into the politics of the 1972 race as it had not for a generation: economic decline. As recently as the prior presidential election, the strength and continual growth of the American economy was taken for granted by observers across the political spectrum. The boom of the 1960s had convinced most analysts that the United States had achieved a permanent state of material abundance. But trends in the global economy long under way were now apparent. The American share of the world gross national product dropped from 40 percent in 1950 to 23 percent in 1970. Imports began pouring into home markets, competing effectively with domestic production. Inflation was now averaging over 4 percent annually. Productivity rates fell from their peak in 1966, and corporate profits continued a downward slide that began in 1965.49 In this new climate, Wallace began to employ a slightly altered economic language. Whereas before he had claimed to “stand up for the working man,” he now presented himself as a champion of the middle class. Just as the shift from segregation to busing helped Wallace move in from the margins of American political acceptability on race issues, so did his shift from working-class resenter to tax-burdened bourgeois. He retained the political identity of the white American assaulted by those below and above, but his new target was “welfare loafers.” He assailed “liberal giveaway programs” which he claimed encouraged people not to work. At the same time he attacked tax loopholes for the very rich. This emphasis on taxes extended to attacks on tax-free foundations, which he said were underwriting lawlessness and disorder. Through this new tax rhetoric he linked the ultrawealthy, federal bureaucrats, protesters, and criminals. Speaking in 1972 before the National Press Club, Wallace said that “Middle America is caught in a tax squeeze between those who throw bombs in the streets and engage in disruptive and destructive protest while refusing to work on the one hand, and the silk-stocking crowd with their privately controlled taxfree foundations on the other hand.” In other words, the very rich fund

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the crime, insurrection, and laziness of the very poor, and in the middle is the average citizen who is powerless, unfairly taxed, and continually threatened by violence.50 By focusing on welfare recipients, Wallace could rhetorically distinguish between the working poor and the “undeserving poor,” a distinction that would become a staple of Republican rhetoric in the following decades. Hoping to cut into Democrat constituencies, Wallace did not so much abandon “the working man” as attempt to absorb this identity into a broad middle. Similarly, in his angling for Republican support, he opposed loopholes for the very rich but was not antibusiness. Inflation and the growing recession, he said, were caused by giving foreign aid to Third World governments who “spit in our face,” and hence, somehow, by busing. As he said on Meet the Press, The Democrats sometimes blame big business, and the Republicans sometimes blame labor . . . but the blame for inflation is on the Government of the United States. They have brought about inflation running these multi-billion dollar deficits, putting this money into circulation that devalues the dollar in a man’s wallet, giving this money overseas by the billions and billions of dollars, and the day of reckoning is here. I think that what they ought to do is cut down on federal spending, and one way you can start is cutting HEW. All these bureaucrats that go around and draw up these busing decrees.51 By blaming the federal government itself, Wallace could avoid directly criticizing labor or big business, or Democrat and Republican voters, for that matter. Wallace’s attempt to leave his extremist image behind and embrace a larger constituency was also reflected in his campaign literature. In preparation for the 1972 run, his staff began to publish The Wallace Stand, a slick-paper publication that was produced in various editions, including a labor edition for workers and versions published in Polish, Yiddish, German, Spanish, and Chinese. These new tactics—embracing a larger middle and focusing on shared economic concerns while hammering away at busing, taxation, welfare, and crime—allowed Wallace to appear nonracist while continuing to appeal to racial sentiments. It began proving effective.


After he came in second to liberal South Dakota Senator George McGovern in the Wisconsin primary, other Democratic candidates became increasingly circumspect about the southern contender. Many Wallace supporters said that McGovern was their second choice, and McGovern claimed to be listening attentively to the frustrations of the Wallace voters. Other candidates began to pick up on his themes of tax reform, urban decay and disorder, and alienation from government. After winning the Alabama primary, Wallace came in second in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and in both states received the majority of the popular vote. In the 1972 presidential race, Wallace kept his options open as to whether to run as an independent again or as a Democrat. After his success in the Florida Democratic primary, however, Wallace chose the latter, although he publicly kept the idea of a third-party run open as a threat to Democrats. While many rank-and-file Wallace supporters believed that he would run as an American Party candidate, Wallace stated he would not. The American Party Convention, where Wallace was to have been nominated, eventually drafted John Birch Society member John Schmitz. The Schmitz effort was made up primarily of Birchers, the Christian Crusade, and the Minutemen; it drew little public support. Of the voters who felt very positive about Wallace in 1972, only 2.4 percent actually voted for Schmitz. As Wallace aide Mickey Griffin later said, “When we left the American Party, we left an empty bag. It was a good vehicle while it lasted, but when Wallace left, he took the voters with him.”52 In his quest for mainstream acceptance, Wallace also no longer courted disorder at his rallies. He was, in fact, rueful about it. Recalling the mayhem of “those big crowds” of his 1968 campaign he explained, “Here’s a little girl listening to me, and some extremist is shouting foul language over her head, and her daddy can’t stand it any longer, and he picks up a chair, and so that’s what the news media tell about, not what I said.” Some former Wallace supporters seemed to feel the same way. As one said, “You go to the same bar every Saturday night. . . . You see the same fight. After a while, it’s not very entertaining.” Only one Wallace rally was marked by violence that year. The day before the Michigan and Maryland primaries where Wallace was the frontrunner, he gave a speech in the parking lot of a Maryland strip mall. Afterward he went into the crowd to shake hands with supporters and was shot five times at close range by Arthur Bremer,

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an emotionally troubled man with no discernable political agenda. Wallace won both primaries, but the shooting left him hospitalized for months and permanently paralyzed from the waist down, bringing his campaign to an end.53

1976: “Trust the People” Wallace’s brief and final presidential bid as a Democrat in 1976 demonstrated that the key to his success also opened the door to his failure. If in 1972 Wallace meant to “send a message” to both parties, by 1976 it was clear that the message had been received; his 1976 populist, antiWashington campaign slogan “Trust the People” could as easily have come from Jimmy Carter as from Ronald Reagan, who challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. There are no reports of serious disruption at Wallace rallies or speeches in 1976. Perhaps it was the fact that the former Golden Gloves champion could no longer whip up his audiences by pacing the stage and punching his fists into the air. It may have also reflected Wallace’s now muted style and his ambivalence about his own, nearly fatal, encounter with violence. During a moment of indecision prior to the 1976 race, his brother Gerald exhorted him to run this one last race. Wallace replied, “Gerald, why don’t you get your ass shot at, get bricks thrown at you, with you at one end of the country and your wife at the other?” But the absence of a turbulent atmosphere also reflected that the country itself no longer convulsed with the uproar that had marked the 1960s. The Vietnam War was at an end, and the New Left and Black Power movements had long since gone into decline. There were only traces of this earlier time, at most transformed into macabre street theater, as when Wallace was greeted at a Wisconsin rally by protesters wearing Arthur Bremer masks, pushing wheelchairs.54 Many former far Right Wallaceite activists attempted to work with New Right conservatives. But conservatism was now no longer a faction of Goldwater supporters within a minority party; it could afford to reject activists from the political fringe. With Nixon’s successful embrace of racial populism in 1968 and 1972, and the emergence of Reagan as an important national party figure since then, Wallace was no longer necessary. Internally split and rendered largely irrelevant to mainstream politics, the vari-


ous factions of the Wallace movement continued to operate on the outskirts of politics in a number of ways: from the electoral campaigns of David Duke to the ultraviolent Order and Aryan Nations in the early 1980s to the militia movement in the 1990s. Looking toward 1976, Wallace sought activist support among more moderate sectors. His campaign film for that election depicts images of people representing various class and racial makeups, while a mellifluous voiceover explains to the viewer that “average citizens can show their true strength in day-to-day action in the election process at the grassroots.” The film then shows a number of hands, white and black, placed on top of each other, further demonstrating Wallace’s desire to bring, if not blacks, then at least white political moderates into his organizing camp. In the film, Wallace himself asks viewers to act as delegates and alternate delegates. This is another shift in the work needed by citizen activists. They were important in 1968 as petition gatherers, as fundraisers, and as partisans with whom voters could identify. But popular votes had proven insufficient in 1972 when complicated Democratic Party rules allowed McGovern to win more delegates in states where Wallace had garnered more votes. It was soon a moot point, however; Wallace did very poorly in early critical primaries both among delegates and voters Although he remained a candidate until just before the Democratic convention, Wallace did not garner nearly the support he had in 1972. Democratic voters backed another southerner who campaigned against government red tape and the alienation of the people. At the convention, Wallace attempted to persuade his delegates to throw their support to Jimmy Carter. In Wallace’s success lay his ultimate failure. He forced more moderate politicians to speak in his language; first Nixon in 1968 and 1972, but soon presidential candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties were drawing on his central themes while distancing themselves from the man himself. As the country absorbed Wallace’s message, the pugnacious race-baiter himself had to be forgotten. His politics would have to be stripped of disruptive elements in order to be integrated into a new homogenizing regime. Like a redneck Moses, Wallace saw the Promised Land but would not get there.55

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5 “THE SOUTH, THE WEST, AND SUBURBIA”: RICHARD NIXON’S NEW MAJORITY

The racial, populist discourse of modern conservatism congealed in the presidential campaigns and administration of Richard Nixon and thus was finally lodged in national governing institutions. Whereas the Dixiecrat Revolt, the Goldwater candidacy, and the Wallace campaigns had all failed in their immediate goals, Nixon succeeded. These other political phenomena prepared the ground for a Nixon victory, as each had contributed something critical to his message. Various political forces that had buoyed modern conservatism were, by the end of the 1960s, willing to dull the edges of their particular demands in order to achieve concrete power at the presidential level. For segregationist leaders such as Strom Thurmond, this meant forgoing opposition to desegregation. For conservative Republicans, it meant turning over the party reins to a comparative moderate after the 1964 electoral debacle. For an increasing number of white, urban, blue-collar Democrats up North it would mean trading some of the social benefits afforded by the New Deal for a check on the black freedom movement. Just as important, however, Nixon himself was initially able to make accommodations to the still-reigning New Deal regime by supporting certain liberal commitments, both to civil rights and to the welfare state. Through this selective appropriation of both liberal and conservative themes, Nixon succeeded in reshaping the political field by the end of the 1960s, building what he called the “silent majority” or, as he came to prefer, the “new majority.” In that decade Goldwater had galvanized the pas-

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sionate dedication of the conservative movement, but in doing so convinced the rest of the nation that he was an extremist out to dismantle the liberal state from which most Americans had greatly benefited. George Wallace had populist appeal, more persuasively as an advocate of the white worker. However, his pugilistic racism and authoritarianism remained beyond the bounds of reasonable politics for the majority of Americans. But these two figures created room for Nixon to emerge as a critic of “bloated bureaucracy,” an advocate of “law and order,” and a moderate friend of the white South. He could move the political center in that direction as long as he claimed to stand for civil rights and for federal action to solve social, economic, and environmental problems. The Left hated him, of course, but he enraged conservatives as well, who felt that they had become, in Pat Buchanan’s revealing prose, “the niggers of the Nixon administration.”1 Nixon’s majoritarianism began to shift; however, as he started to actively promote the politics of both conservatism and white racial resentment. His stated wish to “bring us together” in the 1968 campaign turned into a battle between “us and them” within a few short years. As long as Nixon supported basic elements of the New Deal project, he could both claim majoritarian backing and get cooperation from other branches of government. But as he moved rightward he faced stiffening opposition that eventually led to his demise. Nixon offered a potent challenge to the Democratic regime and drove sharp wedges between significant elements of that coalition. In doing so he forged the political identity of racial conservatism that brought together conservatives, white southerners, Sunbelt dwellers, and blue-collar ethnics. But he was ultimately silenced himself in a constitutional confrontation with the other major institutions of the liberal regime, leaving Reagan to reap the benefits of his efforts seven years later.

Aftermath of 1964: Nixon Builds His Southern Strategy Nixon’s journey toward the 1968 GOP presidential nomination began in the rubble of the Goldwater defeat of 1964. It involved the ability to garner support from both conservatives and southern segregationists without appearing to be either a conservative or a segregationist to the

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electorate as a whole. For right-wingers and Southern Republicans who decided to back him, this meant abandoning dogmatic stances in return for a candidate who finally had a chance at national governance. After Goldwater was soundly beaten by Lyndon Johnson, the Arizona senator’s moment in the sun was over. The conservative movement had been soundly repudiated at the polls and the future of the party was unclear. Goldwater appointees were quickly removed from national committee posts, and the leadership of the Republican National Committee was turned over to Ray Bliss, who was regarded as a neutral figure. Although Goldwater was an encumbrance nationally, he was still adored by party activists. Nixon, attempting to negotiate the distance between a party now committed to conservatism and a larger public that was wary of the Right, called the Republican Party “religious, recidivist and reactionary” to reporters after the election, and began referring to himself as a centrist.2 Nevertheless, Goldwater was willing to bestow the conservative mantle on Nixon. At the first national committee meeting after the 1964 election, Goldwater introduced Nixon to the assembled GOP leaders as the man “who worked harder than any one person for the ticket.” Then, turning to Nixon, he said, “Dick, I will never forget it! I know that you did it in the interests of the Republican Party and not for any selfish reasons. But if there ever comes a time I can turn those into selfish reasons, I am going to do all I can to see that it comes about.” Instead of immediately accepting this invitation to run for president with Goldwater’s blessing in 1968, Nixon urged party members to focus on the upcoming 1966 midterm elections to recoup their losses. Defining this middle ground allowed Nixon to avoid looking like an extreme right-winger yet still appeal to conservatives. At party meetings he plied members with right-wing rhetoric, while still distancing himself from the conservative tag. He called himself a “middle-of-the-roader” and repudiated the John Birch Society, while railing against what he called “crackpot liberal legislation” and harshly criticizing that “dedicated radical,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey.3 Nixon formally reentered politics by organizing a national campaign group called “Congress ’66” to help elect Republicans to the House and Senate that year. Nixon also began focusing on the South, which, after Goldwater, played a critical role in Republican politics. Because Republican vote tallies from the South were so high in 1964, more seats were ap-


portioned to the region in the Republican National Convention, giving southerners nearly half the delegate votes needed to nominate a candidate. As Nixon stumped for Republican candidates in the South, he used the language of Goldwater diehards, exhorting one audience in Birmingham, for instance, to “tell [your conservative friends] to come to the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is the party of conservatives. The Democratic Party on the national level hasn’t been conservative in thirty years and never will be, so get out of it and join the Republican Party.” Such language pleased Southern Republicans, who were looking for a candidate to excite the white electorate. Nixon was careful, however, not to appear to be pandering openly to segregationists. At a fundraiser in Mississippi he told reporters that there was “no future in the race issue.” When asked about racist positions held by the Mississippi party, he claimed to be “opposed to any so-called segregationist plank in a Republican platform. I would fight it in the national Republican platform and speak against it in any state I appear in.” To openly embrace states’ rights would have consigned him to Goldwater’s fate.4 And yet there could be no denying the power of the southern white vote now. When asked about a charge by northern liberal Republicans that he was raising money for segregationist candidates, he replied, “I will go to any state in the country and campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with the local Republicans on every issue.” At a South Carolina GOP fundraiser in Columbia in 1966, Nixon praised former Dixiecrat candidate Senator Strom Thurmond’s switch to the Republican Party. When asked whether he was embarrassed to have “ole States’ Rights Strom” in his party, Nixon replied, “Strom is no racist. Strom is a man of courage and integrity.” In this way, Nixon began to create political ground between open opposition to, and support for, civil rights in the South.5 The 1966 midterm election turned out to be a sweep for the GOP, which picked up forty seats in the House, three seats in the Senate, six governorships, and seven hundred state legislative seats. In the South, the party gained eight new House seats, one Senate seat, and two governorships. Outside the South, racial issues had become heightened since 1964 in part because of an intensification of urban disorders and an alleged spike in the crime rate, as well as increasing black presence in working-class

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white neighborhoods and on job sites. These facts could not in themselves create racial politicization, but in the context of conservative racial rhetoric developed by both Goldwater and Wallace, as well as by numerous local politicians and elected officials across the country, they were ripe for political mobilization.6 Goldwater firmly established the GOP as the anti–civil rights party in 1964, and while his repudiation at the polls was more than decisive, two years later, in an election with lower stakes, voters could register their growing anxieties about the pace of racial change. Nixon had predicted the great midterm success and had campaigned more visibly than any other Republican for many of these candidates. Thus 1966 was not only a stunning reversal of fortune for the GOP after just two years; it was the year that Nixon emerged as the most important Republican figure in the country. Perhaps the biggest victory for Republican conservatives that year was Ronald Reagan’s California gubernatorial triumph over the liberal Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who had beaten Nixon four years earlier. Reagan immediately became a potential conservative presidential candidate for 1968, and began organizing for that possibility by hiring Goldwater strategist and former Operation Dixie organizer Clif White. This was a problem for Nixon in the South. As Mississippi Republican leader Fred LaRue told Nixon, Reagan would be his biggest threat in the South, because the California governor was charismatic, unquestionably on the Right, and had fought hard for Goldwater in 1964. But while LaRue understood that Reagan’s politics were closer to Southern racial conservatism, he also knew that Nixon’s so-called centrism had a better chance of winning a national election. Thus LaRue, working with two former southern Goldwater stalwarts, Texas Senator John Tower and Texas state party chair Peter O’Donnell, began organizing to lock Reagan out and secure the South for Nixon.7 The decision of key southern GOP figures to back Nixon demonstrates the distance traveled by these organizers since they worked for Goldwater in the early part of the decade. Unlike in 1964, they were now willing to trade some principled stands for expediency. But the nation had experienced a political shift in the other direction since then as well; a national conservative victory now seemed a more realistic possibility. Nixon may


not have been as attractive as Goldwater to conservatives and segregationists, but they had pulled the political center rightward already and could now afford to move a little to the left if it meant a shot at the presidency. Throughout 1967, Nixon stayed far ahead of his potential rivals in Republican polls, and after winning numerous primaries in 1968 he became the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. The only question mark was the South, which was not yet openly committed to him. Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond’s top aide and a veteran strategist from South Carolina, brought together Southern Republican leaders to meet with the three biggest contenders for the GOP ticket in 1968: Reagan, Nixon, and Rockefeller. Rockefeller quickly fell out of the running when he told the southern leaders quite frankly that in order to get New York votes, he would have to campaign far to the left of where Southern Republicans were. Dent thought that Reagan, although a far more amenable candidate, was not without his problems, either. He was weak in national polls, he was coy about whether he would run, and he was plagued by a homosexual scandal among two members of his inner circle. Most distressing for Dent, however, was a telephone call he overheard between Clifton White and a Rockefeller aide which made it clear that the Reagan and Rockefeller forces were working together to stop Nixon. Dent was concerned that if the strategy worked to eliminate Nixon, the party might end up with Rockefeller. In other words, it might be better to back a palatable, if not politically perfect, candidate than to end up with a liberal.8 The southern GOP chairmen met with Nixon over two days at a hotel in Atlanta and asked him direct questions about Supreme Court appointments, busing, law and order, communism, national defense, and pledges to build the southern party. In his answers, Nixon carefully embraced certain elements of conservatism and segregation while refusing others. His southern audience’s reception of these positions is also instructive about compromises it was willing to make. Nixon did not oppose Brown v. Board of Education but said that the decision’s phrase “with all deliberate speed” required a new interpretation. He told them that he would appoint only strict constructionists to the bench, and that he opposed busing. He held that no federal funds would be given to school districts that practiced open segregation, but that such funds would not be withheld from schools for tardiness in implementing desegregation. He also assured leaders that he

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would have southerners in key positions in his administration and that the federal patronage would flow southward. These answers were good enough for Dent, who called Thurmond and told him they had found their candidate. Thurmond came to Atlanta the next morning, questioned Nixon himself, and decided to back Nixon for the nomination.9 Southern Republicans understood that their open support might be costly to the candidate, and thus did not force him to publicly claim them in the way that Goldwater had. Their plan was to keep their Nixon strategy quiet by having nominees in states that would be pledged to Nixon at the national convention. “After 1964,” LaRue told a reporter, “Republicans in the South operated very sophisticatedly. We didn’t insist on making Nixon a Southern Candidate. We were very slow in seeking open commitments; in fact we soft-pedaled them and encouraged favorite sons.” This southern discretion allowed Nixon to build his coalition outward and present himself as a moderate whose concerns reflected those of a broad base of constituents.10 At the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, Nixon had to work to keep his delegates in line. Many southern delegates still backed Reagan, as did many from the old Goldwater camp, including National Review’s William Rusher and Phyllis Schlafly, author of the best-selling conservative tract A Choice, Not an Echo. Each attempted to persuade Harry Dent that Nixon was not trustworthy and that Dent ought to back Reagan. Their hesitance reflected distrust that went back to the “surrender of Fifth Avenue” before the 1960 Republican convention, when Nixon worked out a liberal platform with Rockefeller in order to keep factional peace. Unlike the conservatives and southerners who valued political victory over ideological purity, these residual stalwarts resisted being integrated into Nixon’s “centrism.” But even with Clif White at the helm, the Reaganites were overmatched by seasoned organizers who saw Nixon as a more realistic bet and who were able to convince delegates of the same. Most of White’s 1964 cadre was now lined up against him—Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Texas state GOP chair Peter O’Donnell, and Goldwater’s “Arizona Mafia” chief, Richard Kleindienst. And they had been at work for Nixon for a long time. Nixon won the nomination and on the ticket with him was Spiro Agnew, a combative governor from the border state of


Maryland who had recently gained national name recognition for scolding black civil rights leaders.11 Nixon’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination demonstrated the moderated racial conservatism he now represented, while reassuring television viewers outside the Miami hall that he was no Goldwater. He attempted to define the center in a way that called for national reconciliation even while he marginalized liberalism and the Left. The speech played on this tension throughout by evoking a majoritarian class he called the “forgotten Americans” against a divisiveness he blamed on Johnson. This stands in sharp contrast to four years earlier, when Goldwater sought to “remind” Americans that extremism in the pursuit of liberty was not a vice. “We’re going to win,” Nixon said, “because at a time that America cries out for the unity that this Administration has destroyed, the Republican Party, after a spirited contest for its President and Vice President, stands united before the nation tonight. . . . And a party that can unite itself can unite America.” Contrasting his nomination to both the debacle at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year and to the split in his own party four years earlier, Nixon presented himself as a unifier.12 Nixon went on in the acceptance speech to represent a “voice” that was not taking sides in a harsh ideological battle. Rather, it was “another voice,” he said. “It is a quiet voice in the tumult of the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” Goldwater’s legacy and George Wallace’s campaign allowed Nixon to define a people that could simultaneously oppose the civil rights movement and Johnson’s Great Society programs for African Americans while not feeling marginalized or conflicted about their beliefs in American promises. “They’re not sick or racists,” Nixon said of his forgotten Americans. “They’re not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; they are black, they are white; they’re native born and foreign born, they’re young and they’re old.” These forgotten Americans were freed of political responsibility—there was no race issue, according to Nixon, because members of his majority were supposedly of all races. It was also a cross-class coalition, because these forgotten Americans both “work in American factories” and “run American businesses.” Using George Wallace’s rhetorical style of bestowing populist dignity on

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the lives and occupations of his constituents in contrast to threatening parasites, he said that (unlike the protesters, rioters, or welfare recipients), “They’re good people. They’re decent people; they work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care.”13 Nixon promised stronger law enforcement to combat drug dealers, organized crime, and social upheaval. But “to those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justice—justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America, we must have laws that deserve respect. Just as we cannot have progress without order, we cannot have order without progress.” Having carefully established that he was not on the side of racism, he could then safely offer a conservative critique of Johnson’s War on Poverty. “And this brings me to the clearest choice among the great issues of the campaign,” Nixon said: “For the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor, and we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of violence and failure across the land. And now our opponents will be offering more of the same— more billions for government jobs, government housing, government welfare.”14 Just as Nixon was careful to separate urban unrest or social protest from criticism of blacks, here he criticized programs meant to benefit African Americans as being not only detrimental to them, but not even what they really wanted. Nixon called on the assembled faithful to build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America. Black Americans—no more than white Americans—do not want more Government programs to which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation. They want the pride and the self-respect and the dignity that can only come if they have their own businesses, to be managers and executives as well as workers, to have a piece of the action in the exciting ventures of private enterprise.15 This part of the acceptance speech was probably not intended to bring in black voters, as Nixon spent no time campaigning in black communities or meeting with black leaders. Rather, it reassured Republican liberals and moderates, as well as the larger electorate, that he was neither a conservative extremist nor in the pocket of southern segregationists.


Nixon enjoyed a huge lead over his Democratic rival for most of the race. The violence and chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago had splintered the party, leaving the successful nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with a terrible uphill battle. Saddled with Johnson’s war, Humphrey was dogged at every campaign stop by angry antiwar demonstrators. Capitalizing on both the clash in Chicago between New Left demonstrators and Mayor Daly’s police and the growing rift in the Democratic Party that it represented, Nixon campaigned in that city soon thereafter and told his audience, “As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘No one is above the law, no one is below the law,’ and we’re going to enforce the law and Americans should remember that if we’re going to have law and order.” Nixon campaigned hard on the law and order theme, a tactic that was increasingly effective, as it was with Wallace, given the growing social disorder of the decade. Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other cities had experienced major riots in 1967, growing more intense following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968.16 Even though Nixon took an authoritarian line on student protest, crime, and so-called moral permissiveness, he was able to present himself as being middle of the road. Indeed, he did not threaten to dismantle Johnson’s Great Society programs up North or argue against the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the South. As he told biographer Herbert Parmet, “The idea that Goldwater started the Southern Strategy is bullshit.” After reminding Parmet that Eisenhower was the first to make southern inroads among moderate Republicans, he said that Goldwater’s campaign had instead been an opportunistic response to massive resistance. Goldwater, Nixon said, “ran as a racist candidate . . . and he won the wrong [southern] states.” Nixon, by contrast, planned to leave the Deep South for Wallace, and made no promises to Southern Republican leaders that he would even campaign there. He did, however, vigorously challenge Wallace for votes in the upper South and border states.17 In order to compete for these southern votes, Nixon had to use racially divisive language that could reflect badly on his candidacy nationally. Thus Nixon used different voices and said different things to different audiences. One way Nixon did this was to draw on three very different speechwriters. For his conciliatory, unifying speeches, he used his old friend, the liberal Raymond Price. For speeches attacking Humphrey as soft on crime

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and moral permissiveness, he used Pat Buchanan, then a young archconservative and former editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When he needed balance between these perspectives, he used the moderate William Safire. For the most part, Nixon let Agnew take the hard line on protesters, criminals, welfare cheats, intellectuals, and “Establishment elites.” Agnew could say what Nixon would not and so could communicate to Wallace-leaning voters without risking the presidential candidate’s pose of being above the fray. It was not difficult for Nixon to distinguish himself from the combative racist populism of George Wallace’s campaign. As Jonathan Rieder put it, “If Wallace offered rollback, Nixon suggested containment.” Wallace opened space on the right for political discourse that allowed Nixon to credibly attempt to claim the center. The question for Nixon, then, was how to distance himself from Wallace and angle for the Alabamian’s constituency. The threat Wallace posed to Nixon was that he might get enough votes to deny either major party candidate a majority of Electoral College votes, and thereby throw the election into the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Buchanan did not want to attack Wallace at all for fear that it would lose the far Right and segregationist votes. Safire suggested that the campaign should hit Wallace, but as a spoiler instead of as a racist.18 Eighty percent of southern Wallace supporters preferred Nixon to Humphrey, and by a smaller majority, northern Wallace supporters preferred Humphrey to Nixon. Nixon had to play to both constituencies. In the South the work was taken up by Harry Dent. Fearing the accusation of southern pandering, Nixon never brought Dent on officially, but all of Dent’s decisions in the southern Nixon operation were cleared through campaign manager John Mitchell.19 Nixon also angled for alienated, working-class Democrats who were neither conservatives of the Goldwater stripe nor fully comfortable with racial liberalism. In the immediate term, Nixon had to keep Wallace from getting enough votes to throw the election into the House. But Wallace also represented a potential political constituency that could be built into Nixon’s coalition. For his analysis of who these voters were and how he could appeal to them, Nixon relied on the work of a young election demographer, Kevin Phillips.


Phillips, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, was an Irish American raised in a middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx. He had gained experience as an aide to GOP Congressman Paul Fino from the Bronx, where he closely studied ethnic voting patterns. There he discovered that there were electoral riches to be mined in discovering what voters were likely to oppose. Phillips first attempted unsuccessfully to sell his services to the Rockefeller camp. He then landed a job as an adviser to John Mitchell in the Nixon campaign, where he laid out the election strategy that later became the book The Emerging Republican Majority.20 Phillips believed that a combination of demographic shifts and growing racial anxiety among whites would create new openings for Republicans to pull large numbers of voters away from the New Deal coalition in all parts of the country. Based on the Wallace movement in 1964 and Republican gains in the midterm elections in 1966, Phillips saw a potential new racial alignment that would replace the old party division. For working-class white ethnics, votes could be reaped by exploiting discomfort with open housing laws and new union rules that were bringing blacks into white neighborhoods and onto job sites. For southern whites, it meant breaking with the party of racial liberalism. For new dwellers in the emerging Sunbelt (a term Phillips coined), Republican values of private enterprise, lower taxation, and reduced government interference in the private sector along the lines promoted by Goldwater would get votes for Nixon. The key was bringing these elements into a common political identity, defined by what it opposed. At moments in the campaign, Nixon’s ambivalent positioning in relation to conservatives, liberals, white southerners, and civil rights activists was converted into a positive vision of a new majority encompassing all these groups. In nascent form, this “new alignment” (what later became his “new majority”) was linked by a commitment to decentralization and opposition to big government more than anything else. William Safire said about Nixon’s vision of a new alignment that The new direction chosen by these unlikely allies—which included the traditional Republicans, the Moynihan-Goodwin liberals, the black militants and the progressive South—was away from increased Federal power and toward more decentralization,

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more local control, and more personal freedom. These disparate groups, or blocs, often differed sharply about the speed of change, but not the direction of change; they often found each other disagreeable, but did not disagree about the reassertion of individuality against centralized, bureaucratic authority.21 It is a stretch, to put it mildly, to see all of these groups as “allies,” but Safire captures the general antistatism across the political spectrum on which Nixon hoped to capitalize. Candidate Nixon even embraced a vision of black power, albeit one closer to the vision of Booker T. Washington than Stokely Carmichael. In one speech he claimed that “much of the black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist ’30s—terms of ‘pride,’ ‘ownership,’ ‘private enterprise,’ ‘capital,’ ‘self-assurance,’ ‘self-respect,’—the same qualities, the same characteristics, the same ideals, the same methods, that for two centuries have been at the heart of American success, and that America has been exporting to the world. What most of the militants are asking,” Nixon went on, “is not separation, but to be included in—not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs—to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be orientated toward more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest—black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes, black power, in the best, the most constructive sense of that often misapplied term.” This attempt to resignify black power did very little for Nixon’s status among black voters, even if it did in some ways draw on an extant discourse of self-reliance in black political culture.22 In October, Johnson announced an end to the bombing of North Vietnam; Humphrey’s poll numbers began suddenly to climb. With the immediate issue of the war removed, much of the American electorate appeared interested in staying with the Democrats. In response to the closing margin, Nixon began to go on the attack, sounding more and more like Wallace, accusing Humphrey of having a “personal attitude of indulgence and permissiveness toward the lawless.”23 Harry Dent’s polling data in the South also started showing that an increasing number of white southerners feared that support for Wallace


would hand the election to Humphrey. Acting on this concern, Dent and Mississippi GOP operative Fred LaRue produced television and radio advertisements to drive this point home. Political ads featured Strom Thurmond telling viewers that Wallace support would only help Humphrey. Another commercial featured country star Stuart Hamlin singing a lament about southerners chasing a rabbit—George Wallace—while “Triple H” took over the White House. Nixon himself took to the southern airwaves in the last weeks of the campaign, telling viewers, “there’s been a lot of double-talk about the role of the South in the campaign of 1968, and I think it’s time for some straight talk.” Warning listeners that a “divided vote” would help Humphrey, he went on, “And so I say, don’t play their game. Don’t divide your vote. Vote for . . . the only team that can provide the new leadership that American needs, the Nixon-Agnew team. And I pledge to you we will restore law and order in this country.” This idea, that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey, was precisely the centrist logic Nixon backers used in the primaries; in that case, that a vote for Reagan was a vote for Rockefeller. Tom Turnipseed, Wallace’s 1968 campaign manager, later told Dent that this was the one Nixon answer to Wallace they could not overcome. Moreover, he said, Thurmond making the point was a devastating blow. As Nixon rapidly dropped in the polls outside the South in the last few weeks of the campaign, he was rising at an equally dramatic rate in the South.24 Nixon won the election by an extremely narrow margin, 43.40 percent of the total national vote to Humphrey’s 42.72 percent and George Wallace’s 13.53 percent. While victory for the Republican was narrow, defeat for the Democratic Party was historic. Forty-three million citizens voted for Johnson in 1964. Twelve million, or 28 percent, turned their backs on the party in 1968, splitting their votes between Nixon and Wallace. “Although Illinois’ twenty-six electoral votes clinched Nixon’s narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey,” reported the Charleston News and Courier, “they would have been meaningless had not Thurmond already snatched sixty-seven votes from third party candidate George C. Wallace.” The president-elect’s next concern would be balancing (or melding) southern debts with national vision.25

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The Tory Liberal Nixon has generally been regarded in academic literature as the first conservative president in the contemporary era. More recently, however, some historians have begun to regard Nixon rather as the last liberal of the New Deal era. These differing interpretations reflect the ambiguities of the Nixon presidency itself and the distance from which his presidency is viewed. Contrasted with Johnson in the midst of a still hegemonic New Deal regime, Nixon seemed quite conservative. Looking back from a time when much of the New Deal regime has been discredited and partially dismantled, he appears more of a piece with other presidents of the New Deal era. For Nixon, winning elections and governing effectively required certain commitments to liberalism. Nixon’s strategy of “zigging and zagging”—in domestic adviser John Ehrlichman’s phrase—from left to right, as opposed to presenting himself as a hard conservative, was necessary to his electoral victory. On election night, Nixon set a tone of conciliation and openness, reaching across the growing chasm in American politics. “I saw many signs in this campaign,” he said.26 Some of them were not friendly. Some were very friendly. But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping. A teenager held up the sign, “Bring us together,” and that will be the great objective of this Administration at the outset, to bring the American people together. . . . We want to bridge the generation gap. We want to bridge the gap between the races. We want to bring America together.27 Nixon’s attempt to present himself as a unifier and consensus-builder continued between the election and inauguration, and he even portrayed himself as a champion of civil rights. Soon after the election he met with a delegation of black leaders to assure them of his good intentions. Afterward, one participant reported that Nixon had promised to do more for the Negro people than any president had ever done. The Nixon transition team set a tone of bipartisanship; it was made known that a number of Democrats would be considered for high administration positions, including


cabinet posts. Newspaper columns repeated the theme that the period of upheaval and division was over. As one columnist wrote, “The incoming Nixon men seem relaxed and almost mellow. . . . There is none of the moralistic sense of good guys replacing bad guys.”28 Nixon demonstrated his commitment to substantially upholding established liberal prerogatives early on by appointing Daniel Patrick Moynihan as an adviser on urban affairs. Moynihan was a Democrat, a liberal, a Harvard intellectual, and the Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy administration. His appointment angered conservatives both in and outside the Nixon administration, and it particularly rankled southerners. The appointment inspired James Jackson Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News-Leader, regular contributor to the National Review, and a staunch proponent of racial segregation, to say that “We have precious little to smile about. . . . It’s been only three weeks, but conservatives are already asking, ‘What’s he done for us lately.’” However, Moynihan differed from many liberals in his opposition to student protesters, whom he saw as exercising a form of class privilege, and the “cultural elite,” whom he understood to have “pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society” since about 1840. What most angered liberals, leftists, and black activists, however, was his report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which located the causes for persistence of black poverty in what he saw as a matriarchal family structure. Critics blasted Moynihan for defining black American culture as pathological, for lamenting the absence of patriarchy in black communities, and for using culture to mask structural problems, among other things. Prior to taking office, Nixon had said about Moynihan that he was an anti-bureaucratic “new liberal” who would be welcomed in Nixon’s “new alignment.” Nevertheless, Nixon was committed, at least at first, to concentrated federal action to solve social crises.29 Nixon’s broadest attempt at developing his new alignment was the proposal for a guaranteed minimum income, called the Family Assistance Program (FAP). The program would provide a fixed amount for the first two members of a family, and a lesser amount for each additional member. The program was intended to appeal to conservatives in contrast to the current program; where Aid to Families with Dependent Children was seen as dis-

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couraging work, FAP would encourage it. Benefits would be reduced by fifty cents on each dollar as family earnings rose until the benefits reached zero and the family was supported entirely by earnings. The initial public response to the idea was positive. According to one poll, of those who knew about FAP, 65 percent approved, and 81 percent of telegrams sent to the White House on the subject were also in favor. Nixon thought that this plan could “clean up the welfare mess” without upsetting any potential constituencies. Privately he told his aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman that “the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Problem with the overall welfare plan is that it forces poor whites into the same position as blacks.” Nixon advisers thought that conservatives might like the program because of its strict work requirements. However, Nixon’s attempt to build a new majority necessitated appealing to the white working poor, who, while increasingly alienated from the Democrats over race issues, still believed in and wanted to benefit from New Deal social programs. FAP would reward these “forgotten Americans” and bring them into Nixon’s camp without creating racial resentment. Welfare rights supporters, they thought, would back the plan because it offered benefits to those who needed it most and would have made 13 million more Americans eligible for federal aid. Moreover, FAP would have expanded funding for day care for poor families, while creating new public service jobs for recipients.30 Moynihan’s shaping influence on FAP is evident by its reflection of his report on the black family. The report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders had recently found that rioters in the urban uprisings of the late 1960s were primarily young, black, and male, and—to a great extent—single. Whereas AFDC had primarily benefited households headed by single women, FAP would reward working heads of households regardless of gender. Nixon’s policymakers thought that FAP would thus encourage single young men to marry, establish stable households, and forgo urban unrest for the comforts of marital tranquility. Nixon was initially confident in his ability to get the FAP passed because of his belief that “Tory men and liberal policies are what have changed the world.” As it happened, the plan satisfied no one. Conservatives, for their part, were utterly opposed to it. Not only, they complained, was this an ex-


tension of the welfare state, but one that would be paid for with federal dollars. White southern elites were opposed because it threatened their power over wages and their control over the agrarian workforce. James Kilpatrick, speaking for both groups, lashed out at Nixon as a betrayer, offering “a pack of pretty rhetoric and tied up with a bow of conservative blue. Sad to say, some of us who should have known better were fairly swept off our feet.” As Jill Quadagno points out, the program’s impact on southern economies, and therefore southern economic elites, would have been huge. FAP funds would have lifted the whole southern wage base and provided poor southern workers the ability to refuse the most demeaning, low-wage work. Only a fraction of those who should have qualified for assistance received it, and those who did often got assistance under terms that benefited black belt planters. Welfare officials supported fieldhands with federal dollars in the winter and then cut them off from planting to harvest time in spring and summer.31 In contrast, liberals and welfare rights advocates opposed FAP both because of its strict work requirements and because it offered nothing to mothers receiving aid, whose benefits would be less in most states (although above levels in most southern states). The National Welfare Rights Organization said that FAP stood for “Fuck America’s Poor” and called the plan “a multi-headed repression falling most heavily on the children of the poor” that would “legislate a separate class of poor children who are abandoned in custodial care as a means of coercing their mothers to work.” Civil rights organizations, Americans for Democratic Action, the National Council of Churches, and other welfare organizations opposed it as well on the grounds that that the floor was too low and that it punished those who did not work. The plan did not make it through Congress, and by the time it died, Nixon appeared no longer interested or felt that the plan was not actually viable after all.32 At the time, Haldeman wrote in his diary that Nixon “wants to make sure it’s killed by Democrats and that we make a big play for it, but don’t let it pass, can’t afford it.” Moynihan, however, blamed liberals for the death of FAP. “You know the libs will never forgive Richard Nixon for this. And do you know why?” he asked. “Because he’s done what they wouldn’t do, what they wouldn’t dare do. And they can’t stand that.” As a strategist for Nixon’s new majority, he saw the plan as something that only Nixon

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could have accomplished and loved the idea that only a man with conservative credentials could act effectively on behalf of the poor.33 Nixon also divided the Democrats and built his new majority by appearing to advance civil rights in the employment sphere. What came to be known as the “Philadelphia Plan” called for minority representation in businesses with federal contracts. Under the plan, employers that applied for federal money had to present “goals and timetables” for the employment of minority workers. Unions were also required to increase their minority membership. On the face of it, the plan contradicted Nixon’s attempt to build his new majority, as it was a program of social engineering which assisted people of color ostensibly at the cost of white jobs. Moreover, it was originally aimed at construction, a notoriously segregated industry, with almost completely white unions. Labor leaders opposed the plan, as did white workers. Kevin Phillips thought the plan undermined the “emerging Republican majority” of “Northern blue-collar workers and Catholics.” George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, thought the plan would be entirely ineffective, as contractors would just move their black workers from private to government jobsites without expanding black employment. Many civil rights leaders saw the plan as consciously pitting labor against blacks.34 Through the FAP and Philadelphia Plan, Nixon was able to defang criticism of himself as either a heartless conservative or a racist, which was crucial for a nation whose majority still distrusted economic elites and who still held some positive sentiment for the aims of the civil rights movement. He greatly increased spending on domestic programs, from social services to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He signed historic environmental bills into law, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Claiming that “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” Nixon conceded that the federal government needed to intervene in the economy to keep it running smoothly, and even imposed wage and price controls. Yet he also promised to slow down desegregation (instead of opposing it) in the South, and showed that southerners would be far better off with him than with a Democrat.35 Nixon was not able to shape this agenda without opposition by conservatives, but he understood better than these ideologues the importance of institutional power in building a political majority. Simply shrinking gov-


ernment programs and lowering taxes would not appeal to the various constituencies that would make up a sustainable coalition. Instead of reducing federal power and money, the Nixon administration expanded and redirected it in such a way as to deflect criticism by liberals and satisfy other groups. Thus while he doubled the budgets of the NEA and NEH, for instance, he undercut liberal control of it. As Bruce Schulman explains, during the 1960s federal money for arts had gone almost exclusively to institutions of high culture in major cities, funding museums and symphony orchestras, as well as avant-garde artists. Nixon shifted funding to conservative regions in the West and South, and changed emphasis from abstract and high-concept art to representational painting, folk art, commemorative sculpture, and the like.36 In housing policy, Nixon actually increased public funds, but did so in a way that supported his conservative biases, protected him from liberal criticism, and divided his opposition. Federal money for public housing had always made unlikely allies out of developers, construction companies, labor unions, and social service agencies. All of these groups supported liberal Democratic politicians who funded these projects. Instead of cutting housing funding, Nixon increased it but moved monies from specific projects to block grants to the states, which encouraged fighting among groups over fund allocation. Federal housing funds were also shifted from building and maintenance of buildings to rent subsidies, which poor tenants now paid out to private landlords. Thus Nixon could claim to support housing, promote his local control through block grants, and direct money to landowners.37

Cementing Southern Gains Nixon’s majority was perhaps still most vulnerable in the South, where Wallace had made a strong showing in 1968. Wallace also threatened to influence the next national elections as well. Texas GOP state chairman Peter O’Donnell warned Harry Dent that “in 1970 and 1972 it is entirely possible that Wallace and the American Independent Party will be a factor in many U.S. Senate and congressional races. I certainly hope the Nixon administration is fully aware of what the consequences of this might be. It has more than just ‘Southern’ implications.” Nixon was concerned

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about Wallace’s continued appeal and the possibility of his greater strength in 1972, so much so that Nixon’s people did what they could to sink or at least immobilize Wallace. In the 1970 Alabama gubernatorial election, where Wallace had forced a primary run-off with incumbent Albert Brewer, Nixon aides secretly financed the Brewer campaign with $400,000 and had the Internal Revenue Service investigate the tax irregularities of Wallace’s brother.38 Nixon also attempted to placate the white South by holding firm to commitments he had made to Southern Republican chieftains in Atlanta long before the election. One was the issue of southern representation on the judiciary. In the summer of 1969, Nixon attempted to appoint Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., chief judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, more important, a South Carolinian, to the Supreme Court. Haynsworth was a graduate of Harvard Law School with impeccable credentials, and a Republican. However, the judge had voted against court-ordered desegregation efforts in Prince Edward County, Virginia. He had a strong record of pro-management adjudication in labor management disputes and had been charged with conflict of interest in one suit. Liberals immediately lined up against him. The AFL-CIO, the ADA, and civil rights groups all denounced him, and liberal Democrats in the Senate led a charge to kill his nomination. Liberal Republicans, concerned about blacks and union members in their districts, also tried to get Nixon to drop the nominee. Nixon fought back and brought Haynsworth’s nomination to the Senate, where he was rejected in a roll-call vote of 45–55. Seventeen Republicans joined the liberals to defeat Haynsworth, and nineteen Southern Democrats voted for him. While the defeat was a blow for the president nationally, it consolidated support in the South. The defeat of Haynsworth “rankled and itched” the president, according to Ehrlichman, and he retaliated by bringing forth another southern nominee. This one seemed indefensible. G. Harrold Carswell had run unsuccessfully for the Georgia legislature in 1948 as an open white supremacist, and his rulings as a Florida judge since then were consistent with those views. Moreover, he had no qualifications at all for the high court. Nixon aide Bryce Harlow told Nixon that the senators “think Carswell’s a boob, a dummy. And what counter is there to that? He is.” Again Nixon fought for his nominee, offering pork and campaign finance money to senators


who would support him and threats to withhold it for those who did not. Like Haynsworth, Carswell was defeated, making it the first time since 1894 that two consecutive Supreme Court nominations were rejected outright. Afterward Nixon issued a statement that he “reluctantly concluded—with the Senate as presently constituted—I cannot successfully nominate to the Supreme Court any Federal appellate judge from the South who believes as I do in the strict construction of the Constitution.” He went on, “I understand the bitter feeling of millions of Americans who live in the South about the act of regional discrimination that took place in the Senate yesterday.” Although he lost both battles, Nixon earned the loyalty of many white southerners who were used to such principled defeats.39 The other southern pledge Nixon had made was to reinterpret the words “with all deliberate speed” in the Brown decision. The struggle over desegregation in his administration typified Nixon’s mixed approach to questions of civil rights. Nixon’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was headed by his old friend Robert Finch, whose civil rights director, Leon Panetta, was responsible for desegregation implementation. Nixon had told HEW from the beginning just to do what the law required “and not one thing more.” However, just what the law required meant something different to Panetta than it did to Nixon. Panetta was determined to bring schools into line with the will of the Court, while Nixon increasingly tried to accommodate the southern GOP.40 Southern Republicans despised Panetta and the other attorneys in the Office of Civil Rights and were determined to halt their efforts. Thurmond and other leaders sharply protested desegregation efforts through Harry Dent and directly to the president. Panetta described a meeting, early in his tenure, with Southern Republican chairmen and White House officials to discuss desegregation efforts. After being asked to explain his office’s pressure on local school districts, Panetta stated that his office wanted to communicate with school officials to help them meet the law. According to Panetta, the responses he got all ran along the lines of one from Georgia Republican leader Bo Calloway. “The law . . . the law, listen here,” said Calloway, “Nixon promised the South he would change the law, change the Supreme Court, and change this whole integration business. The time has come for Nixon to bite the bullet, with real changes and

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none of this communicating bullshit.” These southern GOP leaders were at least partially mollified by White House assistant Peter Flanagan, who assured the southern GOP contingent that “the entire policy” of school desegregation was being reviewed and that “things will change.” In that same session, Attorney General John Mitchell’s aide Kevin Phillips assured them that the administration would also “change the approach” to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.41 True to its word, the Nixon administration introduced new guidelines in the summer of 1969 that would allow maximum time for schools to desegregate. Dent did all he could to publicize this fact throughout the South, including leaning on southern columnists to report on Nixon’s fidelity to southern campaign promises. Moreover, he routinely sent to all southern party chairs articles reporting on Nixon’s “go slow” approach to segregation and those on Nixon’s unpopularity with blacks. Under increasing pressure from the South, Nixon fired Panetta and soon after moved Panetta’s boss Bob Finch out of HEW.42 Nevertheless, Nixon understood that desegregation had to be enforced, and that the sooner and more quietly it happened, the less likely it would result in the kind of confrontation both Eisenhower and Kennedy faced. Were such a confrontation to happen, Nixon would have had to either ignore a Supreme Court decision or send troops, which would have cost him both the South and parts of an increasingly racially polarized North as well. The trick was to enforce the law without inciting white southern resistance. To demonstrate his resolve, the president announced to southern schools, “Desegregation is required by law. I am duty bound to enforce the law. You are in the best position to formulate and implement your own desegregation plans. If you choose to do so in good faith and within Constitutional limits, we will accept your plans. If you fail to do so, the Federal Government will be required to devise a plan and require you to implement it by court action.” After getting advice on the issue from his aides, Nixon formed a working group on desegregation. The group was placed under the chairmanship of Vice President Agnew. But the plan, actually led by Labor Secretary George Shultz, involved working with local political elites, black and white, to make it happen.43 The Nixon desegregation plan was remarkably successful; in fact, it desegregated southern schools much faster than elsewhere. Here Nixon


showed effective leadership in bringing the South into line with the Brown decision, avoiding being cast as an archconservative or pro-segregationist on the one side or a federal bully on the other. It would also later allow him to oppose a more unpopular court order in the South and the North, busing.

Toward the Silent Majority Nixon’s attempts to appear as a centrist became increasingly complicated because of the Vietnam War. During the 1968 campaign, opponents of the war blamed Johnson and Humphrey. But by inheriting the war and not bringing it to a speedy close, Nixon now became the focus of the antiwar movement, which was becoming increasingly broad-based. In the fall of 1969, two major national demonstrations were called in Washington, D.C. In response, Nixon scheduled a speech for November 3, right between the two protests. Attempting to explain his administration’s policy on the war, his speech contained very little new information, but nevertheless struck a chord with a broad public increasingly distressed and confused about the direction of the war. After explaining his “Vietnamization” plan for slowly withdrawing troops from Southeast Asia, Nixon then turned to the antiwar protesters and accused them of attempting to subvert popular will. In a strong change of tone, he defined the protest movement as a small, antidemocratic force that threatened to subvert the very constitutional structure of the country. His duty thus was to defend the country against that force. He went on, I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days. But I feel it is appropriate to do so now on this occasion. Two hundred years ago this nation was weak and poor. But even then, America was the hope of millions in the world. Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet this challenge of free world leadership. . . . And so tonight to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. . . . Let us be united for peace. Let us

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be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.44 Speaking to his target audience, he appealed to the mythic notion of America as the city on the hill, and for the support of the people who understood this special role. And after appealing to his “great silent majority,” Nixon identified an enemy within. The antiwar movement was, he implied, more dangerous than the external enemy itself. The strategy worked. Response to the speech was overwhelmingly favorable among the public, and Nixon was able to claim popular support in his war aims in a way Johnson had never achieved. Nixon had always believed that the press, Congress, courts, and protesters stood between him and the vast majority of Americans. Buoyed by the popular success of his speech, his administration asserted this populist identification.45 Nixon and his aides reacted angrily to television commentators’ response to the speech. Using Buchanan’s phrase, Agnew denounced what he now called “instant analysis,” claimed that the president had a right to speak to the people without interference of “a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed in one way or another their hostility to what he had to say.” He went on to suggest that “the networks be made to be more responsive to the views of the nation.” Safire later wrote, “Many of us felt strongly that no unelected personality clothed in the garb of network objectivity should be interposed between the elected leader in the ‘bully pulpit’ and the people. Television officials later saw the light or felt the heat, and the trend toward commentators’ immediate rebuttal soon slowed.” The president’s populist showdown with the press began the era of what Stephen Skowronek has called “the plebiscitary presidency,” in which presidents regularly appeal to the public “over the heads of the elites of the Washington establishment, hoping to use their public standing to compel that establishment into following their lead.”46

The Racialization of the “Silent Majority” While Nixon’s populist majoritarianism was not conventionally conservative, it had a political logic that soon made it dangerously opposi-


tional, moving his “silent majority” away from liberal commitments, traditional party attachments, and constitutional governance itself. Prior to the silent majority speech, attacks on opponents of the administration had been carried out largely by Agnew in Wallace-inflected speeches written by Buchanan. Now the president himself was drawing sharp lines, what Agnew called “positive polarization.” Following the speech, Nixon and Agnew began to hammer at more mediating institutions, including the press, Congress, the Supreme Court, and active grassroots movements they claimed stood between the president and the American people. The popularity of the silent majority speech thus allowed the Nixon administration to begin claiming an unmediated identification between the president and the people, a people that now finally understood its political identity. Safire openly asserted as much, saying that prior to the speech Americans were in “pluralistic ignorance.” But “on November 3, 1969, Nixon dispelled pluralistic ignorance and gave the majority both its identity and a new confidence.” New confidence in what, exactly? By definition, members of the “silent majority” are not active democratic citizens, but rather those who stand mute while others engage in the civic realm. Nixon did not inspire or move the majority he sought, but rather praised its passivity. They did not speak—he spoke for them. Nixon defined this group entirely in the negative; they were “the non-shouters, the nondemonstrators,” those not on welfare, those who did not commit crimes. By doing so, he could attribute positive qualities to them. Such a notion of the people, no matter how broad, is necessarily homogeneous and homogenizing. It requires certain features to be shared by the group, as well as outsiders to represent threatening heterogeneity. Thus various descriptive elements of the favored group come to share a commonality, as do elements of those considered heterogeneous. Nixon’s majority would begin as the patriotic nonshouters, ready to back their president against communist foes, but then become typified as morally upright, self-supporting, and law-abiding in a way that juxtaposed the nonmajority protesters, traitors, welfare recipients, criminals, rioters, drug dealers, and pornographers. Nixon’s claim to want to bring Americans together along with his liberal programs helped him seem less like a professional anticommunist and more like the centrist, pragmatic leader he claimed to be. This helped him

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solidify the “silent majority” of working- and middle-class whites who were ready to trust him. But this majoritarianism empowered him to paint all of his critics with the same brush, as opponents not just of him, but of America. He came to see liberal critics as enemies, and as such they were increasingly less welcome in his majority. As he wrote in a note to himself, it was a mistake to think that “R.N. picked up [support] as he became more liberal on Race, Welfare, environment, troop withdrawal.”47 Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority determined to a great degree the political ground on which the politics of Nixon’s majoritarianism was constructed. “The emerging Republican majority,” he wrote, spoke clearly . . . for a shift away from the sociological jurisprudence, moral permissiveness, experimental residential, welfare and educational programming and massive federal spending by which the Liberal establishment sought to propagate liberal institutions and ideology. Democrats among these groups were principally alienated from their party by its increasing identification with the Northeastern Establishment and ghetto alike.48 The “silent majority” soon became a cultural phenomenon that the press played a great role in creating. Pages of such magazines as Commentary, Harper’s, and the New Yorker vied with each other for articles about white backlash and the forgotten American. Soon after, political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg came out with a book that spoke directly to Nixon’s desire to build his “silent majority.” The book, The Real Majority, argued that the key political issue of the time, capable of fueling a historical realignment, was what they called “the social issue,” the four elements of which were crime, race, “kidlash,” and morality. In some ways, the book was a sequel to and further elaboration of Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority. However, both Scammon and Wattenberg were Democrats and saw these issues as “centrist” and critical for either party’s future success. The book had a major impact on Nixon and his domestic staff. Internal debates over how to interpret “the social issue,” however, revealed an as-yet unstable relationship between race and conservatism.49 Phrases like “Middle American” and “Forgotten American” became commonplace at the White House. Nixon aides Bud Krogh and Harry Dent began a “Middle American working group” for a presidency increas-


ingly obsessed with identifying and winning over this group. Dent kept Nixon up to speed on new literature on middle America, making recommendations about how to capitalize on it while publicly disavowing it as a strategy.50 As part of the Nixon administration’s attempt to build its new majority, a request was made by the president’s deputy assistant, Henry Cashen, to the Bureau of the Budget for a paper on how existing federal programs impact “forgotten Americans” and how this group could be fruitfully targeted in the future. In a telling response, Richard Nathan raised the difficulty in classifying a politically defined group demographically. To single out such people statistically, it is necessary to use several population characteristics in combination (for example, income, education, age, and type of employment). The way in which such variables are combined should be arrived at by testing it against the idea it represents. . . . Careful definitions, followed up by this kind of analysis must be obtained before the forgotten American can become a serious subject for governmental programming. Nathan’s difficulty in delivering on Cashen’s request reveals the politically constructed—as opposed to empirically self-evident—nature of the forgotten American (or any of its equivalent terms). This was not an existing demographic category waiting to be served; it was rather a rhetorical assertion waiting to be turned into a political constituency.51 In February 1970, Kevin Phillips gave a speech at Yale University that attempted to further define “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority.” Pat Buchanan was in attendance; in his enthusiasm for the talk, he distributed copies to the Middle America group. In the speech, Phillips asserted that the “nature of the majority—or potential majority—seems clear. It is largely white and middle class. It is concentrated in the South, the West, and suburbia.” Interestingly, while Phillips described the group as conservative in some ways, he asserted that it was fundamentally progressive. He then laid out a lineage of middle America as the coalition of South, West, and working-class North that has been the driving force of democratization in realignment cycles of 1800 (Jeffersonian DemocraticRepublicans), 1828 (Jacksonian Democrats), 1896 (Populists), and 1932 (New Deal Democrats). It is revealing that the one realignment absent

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from this list is that of 1860. Phillips’s white, democratic-populist engine of history could no more encompass the struggle over slavery than it could the racial struggles of the civil rights era. More revealing still are Buchanan’s margin notes for Harry Dent. “The South” is underlined wherever it appears in Phillips’s potted history, punctuated finally with an asterisk and a note to Harry Dent that read: “South as major consistent element in political ancestry of Middle America.” Race, although absent, emerges as the clearest definition of an otherwise vague political concept, and, at least in Buchanan’s reading, the white South was at its core. In September 1970, Phillips wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post called “Post-Southern Strategy.” In it, he argued that the Republicans had the opportunity to build blue-collar support in northern industrial states. The way to do this was not, he argued, by abandoning the southern strategy but by focusing on “the social issue” among northern white ethnics and Catholics. “Most importantly,” he writes, “by acknowledging the conservative and generally Republican ‘social issue’ as centrist and paramount, Democratic leaders are allowing U.S. policies to be substantially redefined so that the Republican right-of-center becomes the center and the Democratic left-of-center becomes—fatally—the left.” He went on to warn that this strategy was being undercut by attempts to expand welfare and by the Philadelphia Plan. While Scammon and Wattenberg saw the social issue as the natural center toward which both parties should move, Phillips more astutely understood that the center itself was a political construct—in this case one that could help move white workers out of the Democratic Party, if the party could credibly speak to their concerns.52 After reading Phillips’s column, Nixon passed it on to Ehrlichman, with a tense note stating that it was a “correct view,” and that Ehrlichman “should take action to correct [his deviation] from it.” In a memo to Nixon, Ehrlichman responded that the social issue was not, in Scammon and Wattenberg’s words, “a straight right/left or conservative/liberal issue,” but that Phillips was using it to promote a conservative agenda. “Young Kevin’s column either shows he misunderstands or misuses the concept to impeach some non-conservative initiatives deliberately designed to furnish some zigs to go with our conservative zags in the same way we have included Moynihans with our Dents (rather than trying to recruit those non-existent middle-of-the-roaders.) . . . But we will not blur


your position on crime, youth, values or race.”53 In other words, Ehrlichman thought that certain New Deal commitments had to be kept in order to bring Northern Democrats into the new GOP coalition, but that a lawand-order anti–civil rights position, which would help the president, could be promoted on its own. Ehrlichman initially scored points with Nixon for his response memo; commitment to the social issue would become the defining theme of the 1972 campaign.

Campaign ’72: The “New American Majority” When Nixon ran for reelection in 1972, he became increasingly strident and combative. He mostly dropped his liberal and pro–civil rights positions altogether, as he envisioned a realignment that would finally bring together southern segregationists, northern conservatives, and urban ethnics. Nixon had already positioned himself as a populist friend of the workingman, particularly to the degree that workers could be depicted as enemies of liberalism, the Left, countercultural communities, and blacks. In response to the clubbing of antiwar demonstrators in New York City’s financial district by construction workers, Nixon invited Peter Brennan, head of the construction union, to a ceremony in the Oval Office where he posed for photographs in a hard hat. Nixon worked hard for working-class ethnic votes in 1972, not through economic liberalism but rather as Wallace had done in 1968, on the cultural terrain of class and racial resentment. As he wrote to his special counsel Charles Colson before the 1972 election, We cannot assume that because we have moved up among Catholics and blue-collar workers that that will hold. We must remember what happened in 1968. That is the use of [Philadelphia Mayor Frank] Rizzo. The Italian labor leaders who moved with us, [Cardinal] Krol and the Polish group, etc., all these are of the very first priority at this time. In other words, the blue collar issues, and the Catholic issues, where McGovern simply cannot be appealing to them as we are.54 Nixon went after the blue-collar vote not simply through Wallace’s rhetoric, but through potentially sympathetic union leadership. Nixon re-

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leased Jimmy Hoffa, the convicted former head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to secure that union’s endorsement. He won the backing of police and fire unions across the country as well. He also had Colson court support of AFL-CIO head George Meany, which diluted the support of the union’s national leadership for the Democrats. In his quest for a new political alignment, Nixon told campaigners to avoid the Republican label. He preferred the term “New American Majority,” which would not hold baggage for the working-class voter, or for southerners not yet ready to fully identify as Republican. As Safire described it, “The administration would not be partisan in the old sense, because Republicans were still the minority; nor would it be bipartisan or non-partisan, since neither would provide the magnetic field necessary for disparate forces to coalesce. It would be superpartisan—that is, aggressively majoritarian, building a new coalition by playing off the unpopularity of the minority.” The more Nixon’s people sought the populist crosscutting cleavages of race and culture that would build his “new majority,” the more they depicted liberals and the Left in Wallaceite terms as decadent, permissive, and unpatriotic. As Pat Buchanan put it, We were the vanguard of Middle America and they were the liberal elite. It’s a schism that’s cultural, political, social, emotional. When we came in 1968, they dominated all American society— the media, the Supreme Court, the bureaucracy, the foundations. They left us with our cities burning, and inflation going, our students rioting on campus. And Nixon challenged all this. He rejected them outright, he challenged their assumptions.55 In other words, liberals represented (or even promoted) the burning, looting, and rioting that were tearing at America from the margins, while also controlling all the major institutions of the country from the center. That image left Nixon as the representative of the American people in between.56 Colson, who perhaps more than anyone else pushed Nixon toward polarization on the social issue, prepared a long strategy memo for the 1972 campaign. The paper endorsed what he called “The New Populism.” In it, Colson wrote that the message of the Nixon campaign should be for workers (not big business) and against the present tax system and big government.


Key to the strategy of this new populism was busing; Colson advised Nixon to show that he opposed busing in no uncertain terms, both in the North and the South, because “it is one of those issues in particular areas that is absolutely decisive in a voter’s mind. He will put up with anything else if he feels that we not only are against busing, but can and will do something about it.” Colson advised the campaign to push the issue among Catholics and organized labor.57 In April 1971, the Supreme Court had upheld busing as a way to get rid of institutional segregation, even if it required sending schoolchildren across district lines. Within months Nixon declared his opposition to the Court’s decision and to busing generally. Busing was opposed by a great majority of the American public, according to opinion polls; Nixon was on safe ground. In March 1972, two days after Wallace won the Florida Democratic primary on a vow to stop busing (and before the assassination attempt took him out of the race), Nixon called, in a nationally televised address, for a moratorium on busing until July 1, 1973. However, in the same speech he also called for an “equal educational opportunity” bill to provide money for schools to poor districts. Once again, through busing Nixon was able to use race in a way that brought together white southerners with constituencies in the North and West.58 Unlike his narrow victory over Humphrey four years earlier, Nixon’s victory over McGovern was overwhelming: the largest numerical margin in U.S. history. He won 60.7 percent of the popular vote, just shy of Johnson’s 61.1 percent landslide over Goldwater eight years before. In the South, Nixon finally achieved the dream of breaking the national Democratic grip on the region by winning every state of the Old Confederacy. Moreover, six of the eight states that gave Nixon 70 percent of their votes were in Dixie. This was at least in part because of Wallace’s absence in the 1972 race. A CBS poll showed that southern voters who had gone for Wallace in 1968 went for Nixon four years later by a margin of three to one. In the rest of the country, former Wallace voters split between Nixon and McGovern. Nixon did extraordinarily well among blue-collar ethnics, and in fact the majority of Catholic voters went Republican for the first time in any presidential election.59 With such an overwhelming victory, why did the Republican Party not come to dominate American politics after 1972? One argument is that Wa-

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tergate postponed a conservative regime until Reagan’s election in 1980. But this theory makes Watergate seem exogenous, or at least a story about the arrogance of power unrelated to the politics that Nixon advanced. Situating Watergate within a political and institutional framework, however, links Nixon’s success to his failure. As Stephen Skowronek explains in The Politics Presidents Make, all presidents are faced with a constitutional paradox. The executive office exists to uphold and defend the political order. Yet at the same time the presidency is “inherently hostile to inherited governing arrangements.” Presidents are meant both to uphold the political order and to alter it with their own political agendas. This contradictory arrangement falls hardest on presidents of opposition parties in an extant regime. Nixon was an opposition president, elected at a time when basic New Deal commitments were still durable. In order to get elected, opposition leaders in still-vital regimes must be independent from reigning political commitments while keeping distance from the regime’s most staunch opponents.60 As we have seen, Nixon precisely followed this strategy. He campaigned against Johnson and liberalism generally, yet did not fully embrace conservatives or segregationists as Goldwater had. Once in office, according to Skowronek, these incumbents are caught between sustaining existing arrangements and forging their own path. The latter involves developing programs that open up cleavages in the dominant coalition in order to expand ones own base. This is what Nixon attempted, and, to a large extent, achieved with the Philadelphia Plan, federal housing plans, and other initiatives. However, the ability to make such changes is circumscribed by reigning discursive and institutional conditions. “These presidents,” writes Skowronek, “will in effect be probing for reconstructive possibilities without clear warrant for breaking cleanly with the past, and when they probe too deeply, they get caught in a showdown crisis of constitutional proportions.”61 Nixon’s experience as president led him—and many around him—to see Congress, the Courts, the press, the Democratic Party, and other institutions, both governmental and private, as being arrayed against his administration. And indeed, they often were. Just as firmly, Nixon believed that he was the sole tribune for the American people “out there” beyond the Beltway. Without the support of the major branches of government


and other mediating institutions, Nixon’s regime-breaking and regimebuilding abilities were limited. Such was the complicated collision course that resulted in his humiliation and resignation. Political themes that linked race, populism, and conservatism had become durable in the American political scene with Nixon, and they played out across the decade, specifically in regard to gender in vigorous struggles over abortion and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. The relationship of race, gender, and the state in American politics in the 1970s would also figure, as we see in the next chapter, in the realm of culture.

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6 “GUV’MINTS LIE”: ASA CARTER, JOSEY WALES, AND THE SOUTHERNIZATION OF CONSERVATISM AFTER WATERGATE The intense political divisions that proliferated in the 1960s, in both parties and in the nation as a whole, were not resolved in Nixon’s “new majority,” yet neither were they subsumed back into Democratic liberalism. One sentiment shared across the political spectrum in the wake of both Watergate and the Vietnam War, however, was growing disillusionment with government itself. Much of this antigovernment sentiment was concomitant with the rise of the Right, for antistatism was a staple trope of modern conservatism, found in the Dixiecrat Revolt, in the Goldwater movement, in the Wallace campaigns, and in Nixon’s own governing rhetoric. However, this politics of state alienation also had roots in the leftleaning social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Elements of black liberation, the antiwar and student movements, and feminism promoted local—even personal—politics while condemning the imperialism of the liberal state. Environmental activists in the early 1970s expanded on this tradition of decentralist politics, particularly in the antinuclear movement.1 In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency, ushering in an era of conservative political rule based on antistatist rhetoric. In order for conservatives to consolidate power, heterogeneous strands of antistatism had to be linked together into a coherent politics. Such linkages were made possible in the 1970s as citizens with diverse commitments came to embody a shared sense of opposition, not just to specific aspects of the Democratic regime, but to the regime as such. This opposition was facilitated through

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the stark racial schisms that emerged in the 1960s and was fed by older streams of antistatism in American political culture. But the antigovernment sentiment that ranged across the political spectrum in the early 1970s began to cohere, not just through conservative, racist, and populist discourse, but also through the selective appropriation of antiracist, leftist, and countercultural themes. Regime shifts take place not only within institutions and in the field of intentional political discourse, but also in the realm of popular culture. Any thorough attempt to explain political change must account for the various ways in which people come to embrace new interpretive frameworks for politics. In media such as literature and film, people interpret and contest interests, values, history, and commitments. Fictional narratives make sense out of a complex political world and provide models for identification and action. Thus, cultural documents reveal how often contradictory discourses congeal into distinct political positions in a way that conscious political speech often does not.2 One key location where the cultural politics of race, the South, and the rise of the Right in the mid-1970s can be found is in the work of activist and writer Asa Earl Carter. Carter was an Alabama Citizens’ Council and Klan leader, and chief speechwriter for George Wallace, who later changed his name to Forrest Carter and refashioned himself as a Native American novelist. Carter’s 1973 novel, Gone to Texas, and the popular 1976 Clint Eastwood film based on the book, The Outlaw Josey Wales, are particularly revealing. The narrative portrays a valorized image of the victimized white American who wreaks vengeance on an authoritarian state. Josey Wales is an appealing figure for the emergent Right. Yet the authority and allure of the protagonist depend in part on the very antiracist, antiwar, and countercultural themes against which the Right defined itself.3

The Life and Times of Asa/Forrest Carter Asa (“Ace”) Earl Carter embarked on his political life in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954 in the midst of the upheaval over civil rights. Beginning as a far-right radio commentator, he was recruited by wealthy Alabama Dixiecrat leaders in the American States’ Rights Association to lead the statewide Citizens’ Councils. These “Big Mules” saw Carter as a figure

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well-suited to organizing Birmingham workers. Indeed, unlike most Citizens’ Councils, which were made up of middle-class whites, Carter’s membership was overwhelmingly working class. By one estimate, 75 percent of his members carried union cards. However, Carter’s populist politics differed from Alabama’s neo-Bourbon Dixiecrats. The elitist courthouse politics represented by lawyers, judges, and politicians like Charles Collins, Horace Wilkinson, Frank Dixon, and other Dixiecrat leaders stood in contrast to the grassroots violence and political independence of the councils and even more so of the Klan. Where other Councilors hero-worshiped Robert E. Lee, Carter emulated Nathan Bedford Forrest, “the only redneck in the army” and founder of the first Ku Klux Klan. Carter finally split with the Alabama leadership and went on to form his own North Alabama Citizens’ Councils.4 Carter also edited a Council periodical called The Southerner that presented heroic depictions of Confederate generals, ranted against the threat of integration in everything from education to rock and roll, and warned of communist conspiracies in both the Republican and Democratic parties. The Southerner also depicted the Citizens’ Council movement as a potentially national one, and reported frequently on organizing among workers being carried on across the Mason-Dixon Line, where whites were ostensibly threatened by black incursions into neighborhoods and jobsites. Carter’s depictions of white workers under assault in northern cities were meant to dramatize the urgent plight of the white race in America as a result of growing racial liberalism. Central to his accounts were stories about harassment of white women by black men on the shop floor, grisly portrayals of rape and murder of white women and girls in integrated neighborhoods, and the helplessness and rage of the white male workers who could not protect them from blacks or the government. In one article about autoworkers in Michigan he wrote, The worker’s hands clenched and unclenched, and white lines showed tightly around his mouth as he related every black male’s demand that a White woman be placed as a partner with him on the work benches. . . . The White worker in Detroit has lost his freedom[;] he talks in whispers; he seldom attends a movie, “because I’ll not subject my wife and family to the obscene talk of the


negroes attending;” he has lost control of his government. He has reached his back to the wall position by allowing the politician to control him, as the politico adheres to the constant pressure group of communists and negroes.5 This depiction is precisely the kind of writing that Carter put into George Wallace’s speeches, and later into his fiction to elicit populist rage against African Americans and both political parties.6 The council and the journal also functioned as a front for an underground vigilante group Carter founded (against what he called the “establishment” Klan) called the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. This cadre was known for extreme brutality, including the onstage assault of Nat “King” Cole during a Birmingham concert for an all-white audience; the beating of civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and the stabbing of his wife; and the castration of a randomly chosen, mentally disabled black man as a warning to civil rights activists.7 A popular figure among whites in Birmingham, Carter ran for police commissioner in 1957 but lost to incumbent and fellow segregationist Eugene “Bull” Connor. George Wallace was impressed by Carter’s ability to draw Birmingham workers to council rallies when Wallace himself was having trouble getting labor to turn out even at AFL-CIO sponsored events. In 1962, Wallace hired Carter to work for his gubernatorial campaign as chief speechwriter. When his aides questioned the inclusion in Wallace’s inaugural speech of the openly racist defiance of the federal government, Carter insisted on keeping it in, pointing to the “Segregation now” finale, telling Wallace, “Here’s the lines that are gonna catch everybody.” As Wallace’s rhetorical voice, Carter became instrumental in shaping the former’s particular brand of racial populism and indignant opposition to federal intervention that would galvanize support both regionally and nationally. While the Carter-penned Wallace speeches recall the explicit white supremacy of his earlier work in The Southerner, they also anticipate the more general antigovernment sentiment in Carter’s later novels.8 In 1970, however, Carter broke with Wallace and ran against him briefly in that year’s gubernatorial race, accusing the latter of selling out to blacks and Communists. Soon after, Carter moved to Texas and began writing fiction as Bedford Forrest Carter, naming himself after his hero, Nathan

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Bedford Forrest. In 1975 Carter sent a self-published copy of his first novel, Gone to Texas, to Clint Eastwood, who he thought would be perfect for the title role in a film version of the story. Eastwood was taken with this western about a fugitive Confederate guerrilla and made it into the film The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which he was both director and star.9 Although Carter was often drunk and occasionally violent during his dealings with Eastwood’s production company, no one knew his former identity as a white supremacist until just after the film was released. Revelations about Carter’s past made a brief splash in the press while he was publishing his second Josey Wales novel but were largely forgotten by the time he published his third and by far best-selling book, The Education of Little Tree, the story of a Cherokee orphan in eastern Tennessee that Carter claimed was autobiographical. Little Tree became popular for its criticisms of bureaucracy and government hypocrisy, as well as for its sentimental and pro-ecological portrayal of Indian spirituality. Carter then went on to deepen his indigenous identification by writing Watch for Me on the Mountain, a novel about the Apache war shaman Geronimo and his people’s struggle against both the Mexican and American governments. Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, said about the book that Carter had “probably come as close as any writer ever will to recreating the real Geronimo.” The book jacket of Watch for Me on the Mountain even claims Carter as storyteller-in-residence to the Cherokee Nation. As a result of these novels, which moved increasingly toward support of Indian sovereignty and condemnation of white government, Carter had developed a reputation as an important indigenous author by the time of his death in 1979.10 Controversy over Carter erupted again in 1991, when Little Tree was awarded the American Booksellers Association’s ABBY Award and topped the New York Times best-selling paperback list. Southern historian Dan T. Carter, who had come across new information about him while writing a biography of Wallace, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times claiming that Forrest Carter (to whom he happened to be distantly related) was no more than a con man and a gun-toting racist who had swindled the public by peddling New Age spirituality while falsely posing as an Indian. As a result, the Times moved the title from its nonfiction bestseller list to the fiction list. Delacorte Press, which had published the first edition of


Little Tree, scrambled to present a softer image of Carter’s former career, playing down his Klan affiliation. University of New Mexico Press, which had published the second edition, argued on behalf of the authenticity of his Cherokee heritage.11 Regardless of whether Carter could truthfully claim Cherokee ancestry, in identifying with indigenous peoples, he was able to uphold his old Klan politics because he believed he had found commonality with another group that had been victimized by the federal government. But for Carter the struggles of native people were not valued outside of his own particular politics—a politics based on the denial of civil and political rights for African Americans. Thus, Carter’s own heritage is less relevant than the role that indigenous people play for him symbolically, where they can act only as a mirror of his own white supremacist identity and thereby mask other impulses to racial domination.

The Frontier Myth White identification with indigenous peoples through violence is not unique to Carter’s writing. In fact, it is an important thread running through the history of American identity since before the founding. In the nineteenth century, westward expansion was authorized by a frontier myth in which European men move into the wilderness, dress and act as “savages,” and then become white Americans through the slaughter of Indians. This is the story of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstockings, of Filson’s Daniel Boone, and of the Davy Crockett almanacs. In the late nineteenth-century work of Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier myth is turned into social science with his description of the continual return to “primitive conditions” that generate the “vital forces” behind American institutions. In the twentieth century, the narrative of regenerative violence through racial boundary-crossing is evident everywhere in both the Western dime novel and film genres. Racial “cross-dressing” in American social history has also been a way to attack economic or political elites on stage or in the streets under the safe psychological guise of racial otherness.12 This history of racial identification and violence in American political culture provides a critical link between New Left and New Right politics.

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The New Left had generated its own antigovernment rhetoric in the 1960s, from the early participatory democratic politics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society, to the localist “intercommunalism” of the Black Panther Party and the decentralist principles of the ecology movement. In the midst of these more overtly political movements, a largely white counterculture often identified itself symbolically with people of color, and particularly with indigenous people, by wearing beads, growing long hair, living communally, and going “back to the land.” In this sense, Carter’s work in the Josey Wales novels and Little Tree seems more like white countercultural appropriation than either southern white supremacy or a deeper political solidarity with Native Americans. While Carter’s identification with indigenous people may have been born of white supremacist commitments, he began writing in the context of New Left politics and culture, and against the backdrop of actual indigenous uprisings such as the occupation of Alcatraz by members of the American Indian Movement and the siege at Wounded Knee. These struggles, while not reflected in the Josey Wales novels or in Little Tree, do seem to have influenced Watch for Me on the Mountain, the book on Geronimo. Thus Carter’s oeuvre ultimately seems to reflect elements of all three political positions: racist states’ rights, New Left ecological and communal sensibility, and a deeper identification with the political struggles of indigenous people. Nevertheless, none of these positions brings him to question, let alone relinquish, the antiblack sentiment that was his political origin. By 1976 a Republican President had been forced to resign over his abuse of the power of the executive office, and the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam that seriously marred the American frontier myth. In the wake of these events a Democrat was elected president, but the New Left itself had long since gone into decline. It was in this political context that the film The Outlaw Josey Wales was made. The film condemns the U.S. military’s role in native genocide, for which an easy parallel can be made with American involvement in Vietnam. However, it is not quite the antiwar reverse-frontier myth of the early 1970s such as films like Little Big Man and Billy Jack. These counter-myths expressed antiwar sentiments during the Vietnam War by inverting the traditional frontier valorization


of American imperial expansion. Although these new narratives inverted the frontier myth, they kept its form intact through unambiguous relationships of good and evil enacted by the killing of women and children.13 Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, the hero of which is a white man raised as an Indian, acts as a commentary on the U.S. role in Vietnam by depicting the military slaughter of Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek. Similarly, the 1971 film Billy Jack brings together the figure of the U.S. soldier and the American Indian by making its hero a “half-breed” ex-Green Beret who, having committed My Lai-like atrocities in Southeast Asia, comes home to redeem himself through a campaign of violence against local white authorities on behalf of an Indian school and its counterculture allies (again represented primarily by women and children). Here an indigenous protagonist can be heroically depicted as a violent defender, but only insofar as he stands liminally between Indian-ness and whiteness, protecting women and children—a racial inversion of Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett. Outlaw Josey Wales, rather than acting as a reverse frontier myth, draws from both left and right in a way that preserves the regenerative role of frontier violence while upholding old forms of racial domination.14

Josey Wales, the Avenging Outlaw Outlaw Josey Wales begins in an act of brutality at the dawn of the Civil War, as Federal soldiers descend on the Waleses’ poor Missouri homestead, torching their home, killing Josey’s wife and son. The scene evokes nothing so much as the image of marauding Klansmen on a night ride, except that the victims here are not southern blacks but southern whites. So begins what will be a series of politically ambiguous role reversals throughout the story. As the opening credits of the film roll, Josey, the lone survivor of the attack, joins up with Confederate guerrillas to wreak vengeance throughout the Missouri/Kansas theater of war. The story really begins when the war ends and, unlike his comrades, Josey refuses to surrender his arms to the Reconstruction government. Carter writes of the rage that drives Josey’s political convictions. “His obligation was to the feud. . . . His family had been wronged. . . . No people, no government, no king, could ever repay. . . . He only felt the generations of the code handed down from the Welsh and Scots clans and burned into his being. If

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there was nowhere to go it did not mean emptiness in the life of Josey Wales. That emptiness was filled with a cold hatred and a bitterness that showed when his black eyes turned mean.”15 Like Carter’s angry white Detroit autoworker, Josey is an aggrieved innocent whose family has been violated and who has no honest government to turn to for help. He has no choice then, but to fight back. Josey’s resistance to state authority establishes his position both as an outlaw and a representative of his people. Social historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his work on banditry, demonstrates the symbolic role of outlaws as peasant figures who attempt to avenge their community for wrongs done them by a lord or the state. They emerge at moments of social crisis and potential breakdown to defend against intrusions that threaten to overturn a traditional way of life, or act as “primitive rebels” who call for a redistribution of wealth. Bandits, according to Hobsbawm, are without family, functioning as dangerous figures on the margins of society, who nevertheless live according to an exacting moral standard, never killing except in self-defense. Hobsbawm describes the mythic role of these Robin Hood figures as “men who establish their right to be respected against all comers . . . by standing up and fighting—and in so doing automatically usurp the social role of their ‘betters’ who . . . have the monopoly of fighting.”16 The universality of the agrarian rebel myths that Hobsbawm describes is questionable, but they have had prominence in many communities that have faced the invasive disruptions of modern state-building and encroaching markets. As Anne Norton argues, outlaws hold particular mythic status in American political culture, where they are held up as an expression of popular resistance to rational legal authority in a regime where legitimacy is based on the notion of continuous popular consent. Moreover, the status of outlaws as singular actors takes on added importance in a liberal culture where the freedom of the individual is heralded as paramount.17 Wales is a liminal figure in his kinlessness and his daring, noble moral conduct. He defends a racist agrarian order in the midst of social breakdown from what is seen as an intrusive, modern, carpet-bagging state. Individual and popular resistance to the state come together in the figure of Josey, described in promotional posters for the film as “an army of one.” The mythic power of such an outlaw is made significant again in the mid1970s at the tail end of an era of social and political upheaval in which white


Americans, and white men in particular, faced a challenge to their authority and primacy as the unquestioned representatives of American national identity. The South, representing white victimhood, was a strong metaphor for such feelings.

A Young Rebel in a Time of Blood and Dyin’ In the story, Josey’s decision to defy Union orders turns out to be justified on practical as well as principled grounds, for as his compatriots go to turn in their arms they are ambushed and nearly all cut down by Union soldiers. The two survivors of this bloodbath are a teenage boy, Jamie, and a former Confederate turned government agent named Fletcher. Like the operatives of the notorious FBI Counterintelligence Program that became known to the American public in the early 1970s, Fletcher had betrayed his fellow rebels by leading them to slaughter and was well-paid for his intelligence-gathering and influence among them. Working on behalf of the federal government, an ambivalent Fletcher stalks Josey for the rest of the film. Jamie, in contrast, is a young idealist who, although mortally wounded, vows to ride and fight alongside Josey. His parents have been killed in the war, and he takes Josey for a father figure; the older man in turn attempts unsuccessfully to save the boy’s life as they escape their Union hunters. Jamie, who evokes the counterculture youth of the 1960s, is nevertheless a different kind of rebel. When he dies, Josey eulogizes him, stating dolefully that “this here boy . . . was brung up in a time of blood and dyin.’ He never looked to question na’ar a bit of it. Never turned his back on his folks ’ner his kind. He has rode with me, and I got no complaints.” Having been informed on, lied to, and murdered by the state for his political convictions, Jamie is in one sense a sympathetic character to veterans of the New Left. But being brought up “in a time of blood and dyin’,” without questioning the reasons for it, and never turning his back on “his kind” marks him off from the white youth of both the New Left and the counterculture. Jamie’s character then opens up the imaginative possibility of being both a young idealist and an antigovernment rebel who can eschew ideologies on the Left and embrace those of the Right.18

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Politics in Redface Continuing his journey, Josey then meets Lone Watie, an old Cherokee whose family has also been killed by the Union Army. In the book, Watie is himself an ex-Confederate rebel and a relative of the historical Stand Watie, leader of the Cherokee faction that fought for the Confederacy and the last general to surrender to the Union. In the film, however, Lone Watie, played by Chief Dan George, is merely a “civilized Indian” who has lost his Indian skills from having lived too long by EuroAmerican cultural habits. Josey finds him dressed like Lincoln, a style, Lone Watie explains, meant to endear his band of Cherokee to the Republican government. In the presence of this last Confederate fighter, however, Lone Watie begins to realize his own hatred for the U.S. government and soon burns his stovepipe hat and long black coat, replacing them with indigenous garb. The novel’s depiction of Lone Watie as a Cherokee Confederate creates the possibility of white supremacist empathy for Indians, because these Cherokee fought for the South and were a slave-owning society. In the film version, the confused Cherokee can find his authentic self only through the white rebel. Watie is meant to evoke sympathy for the plight of indigenous peoples, but only through the lens of white victimization. It is Confederate partisanship through which Carter constructs a mirrored image of himself in redface. Josey, he writes, preferred the mountains to remain wild . . . free, unfettered by the irritating hypocrisy of organized society. His kinship, therefore was closer to the Cherokee than to his racial brothers of the flatland who strained mightily at placing the yoke of society upon their necks. . . . Their code was the loyalty of the mountain man with his clannishness, and therefore Lone Watie merited his trust. He was of his kind. When the War Between the States had burst over the nation, the Cherokee naturally sided with the Confederacy against the hated government that had deprived him of his mountain home.19 The move to indigenous identification thus allows Carter to begin to shift his investment in a purely biological white supremacist politics to a


more consciously ideological antipathy to centralized authority—one that masks the racism of his earlier politics by demonstrating the more generally nefarious results of intrusive government. But there is a double move here. By identifying with the slave-holding Cherokee, Carter creates a unity of whites and Indians against blacks. Yet his description of the Cherokee as “wild,” “free” and opposed to “organized society” is an inaccurate depiction of a tribe that began engaging in slavery as they became agrarian and “civilized” by white standards. Thus, Carter’s wish for an identification with indigenous peoples against blacks is one that keeps them in a primitive mode of anarchic freedom. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued, depicting Indians as overly independent and African Americans as overly dependent has been a key triangulation in the construction of an American white identity. In this way, Carter avoids addressing the issue of the racialized domination of African Americans that he advocated for most of his adult life by calling for the same politics in redface. Here Indians both contrast with blacks by being noble and autonomous, and stand in for them as a form of cross-racial political commitment that was the legacy of the New Left.20 In the story, Lone decides to throw in his lot with Josey, and the two ride together to Mexico to seek out a peaceful existence. Soon after they leave the Indian Nations, the story becomes an inverse captivity narrative when Josey saves a Cheyenne woman from rape by white trappers. The rescue devotes her to Josey, and she decides to join them. Although this shift toward indigenous identification leaves Josey’s former white community further behind, it in no way challenges his own racial status. This status is in fact enhanced, for Josey’s relationship with his two native companions develops not as a community of equals, but rather as a white male protagonist and racial subordinates who follow his lead. Race also shapes gender as these others contrast not only with his whiteness, but his masculinity.21 The story then takes the form of a traditional captivity narrative as Josey confronts a gang of Comancheros, a multicultural group of Anglos, Mexicans, and Indian bandits who have kidnapped an old white woman and her young adult daughter. Josey engages and kills all of the Comancheros, saving the white women from certain sexual defilement and perhaps death. The rescued captives, grateful for their release and ready to trust the outlaw and his Indian companions, invite them to come along west to occupy the ranch of their late son and brother. Josey’s group joins the two women

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on their journey, and in so doing they create their own multicultural clan, which provides Josey with a love interest in the young white woman. Thus the two forms of multiculturalism are made distinct—an aggressive one represented by the Comancheros that respects neither property nor white female chastity; the other a peaceful, productive and stratified one that safeguards white women from the threat of miscegenation.

Hippie Commune or Militia Compound? Josey delivers his followers to the abandoned ranch to begin life anew, creating a home that will redeem past violence and look forward to a peaceful future. In scenes reminiscent of the communes of the 1960s and early 1970s, Josey and his new clan fix up the little ranch house, they begin farming, and in the evenings they sing, play instruments, and dance. Living on a self-sufficient commune outside the reach of government authority speaks to the utopian dreams of the 1960s counterculture. But doing so under armed, white, patriarchal rule looks forward to the contemporary reality of the militia movement. The shift between commune and armed compound becomes starker when the farm, situated on the border between Texas and Mexico in a valley that is effectively Comanche territory, comes under threat. This dilemma builds toward the climax of the story, as the group is faced with a final battle against the Comanche band that aims to massacre the new inhabitants. Hoping to avert catastrophe, Josey turns the ranch house into a fortress, arms all of its occupants, and rides off alone to confront the legendary Comanche chief Ten Bears.22 Upon meeting Ten Bears, Josey finds that the Comanche leader has heard of this “Gray Rider” who refused to make peace with the “Bluecoats.” Out of his respect for a warrior with a common foe, Ten Bears offers to allow Josey alone free passage from the valley. Josey refuses the proposition, both because he must protect his new clan and because he wants to stop running. He offers Ten Bears a counterproposal, one both personal and political. His speech to the chief sums up the message the narrative is meant to convey. “What ye and me cares about has been butchered . . . raped. It’s been done by them lyin,’ double-tongued snakes thet run guv’mints. Guv’mints lie . . . promise . . . back-stab . . . eat in yore lodge and rape yore women and kill when ye sleep on their promises.


Guv’mints don’t live together . . . men live together. From guv’mints ye cain’t git a fair word . . . ner a fair fight. I come to give you either one . . . ’er to git either one from ye.”23 Josey goes on to offer to “live under the sign of the Comanche” and to provide a yearly tribute to the tribe. Ten Bears, impressed by the courage and honesty of the Gray Rider, accepts the offer and allows the clan to live in peace. Thus Josey moves from one kind of (untenable) resistance to the federal authorities to another form that is still beyond the reach of the U.S. government. In doing so, however, he has reconciled himself and his clan to a new political arrangement with the Comanche, whom they will have to accept as sovereign and to whom they must pay taxes. The story has closure when the lawmen who are tracking Josey also decide to allow him to live his new life under an assumed name and in peace. This act of state forbearance recalls President Ford’s 1974 granting of clemency and President Carter’s 1976 offer of full pardon to draft evaders. Fletcher, Josey’s old comrade-turned-nemesis, explains the redemption, saying, “I guess we all died a little bit in that war.”

“Big Daddy Government” For a public caught between the militancy of the antiwar movement and the emerging Right in the 1970s, the reconciliation between Josey, the antigovernment outlaw, and Fletcher, the government official, could be an easing of the political tensions of the era. But this is only possible insofar as blacks are made completely absent from the story. Such an absence is peculiar and seems forced in a historical depiction of a journey from Missouri to Texas at the onset of Reconstruction. But the introduction of just one black character (or even an extra) would call into question for the contemporary audience in the wake of the civil rights movement the heroism of a protagonist who fought not just against an oppressive government that had indiscriminately wronged his family, but also for a society that was defined by its devotion to slavery. The absence of African Americans constitutes a presence in the logic of racial coding. The Reconstruction government stands in for black people as villains in the same way that the modern Right learned to couch race in the language of welfare, taxes, and states’ rights.

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That the antigovernment rhetoric of Outlaw Josey Wales has varied historical strands can be seen in Clint Eastwood’s own commentary on the film. When promoting the film, Eastwood always mentioned Vietnam and Watergate, and the kind of profound distrust that had developed toward government at the time. But his sentiment was not just that of an opponent of the war and the Nixon administration; he was openly, angrily antistatist in a way that blamed not only the government but impoverished recipients of government assistance. As he told one audience, “Today we live in a welfare-oriented society, and people expect more from Big Daddy Government, more from Big Daddy Charity. That philosophy never got you anywhere. I worked for every crust of bread I ever ate.”24 Eastwood’s seemingly contradictory responses—on the one hand a critic of Vietnam and Nixon, on the other an opponent of New Deal liberalism—point to a larger political and cultural ambivalence in the wake of the 1960s. Although Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, the Democratic Party ceased to command the loyalty of American voters it had enjoyed before 1964. On the other side, the Republican Party had just been strongly discredited in the eyes of the public and was itself internally divided between an older style of moderate Republicanism and a hard new conservatism represented by the Reagan faction. The fragmentation in both parties began over race and spread to other divisive issues throughout the 1960s, opening the door for novel political possibilities as growing numbers of voters called themselves independent and felt increasingly alienated from the political system by the early 1970s.25 However, a broad historical political realignment in the following decade could not be achieved handily. Americans who had believed in the principle of a strongly interventionist government and had benefited from it materially would have to support a conservative agenda. In order to create a hegemonic populism of the Right, a new form of political subjectivity had to be constructed that would oppose both political elites—seen as corrupt and irresponsible with their power—and groups perceived as calling for “special rights” and acting as parasites on the social body. For modern conservatives, this would mean building on the legacy of the Dixiecrats, Goldwater, Wallace, and Nixon, while drawing, as we have seen, on elements the Right claims to oppose.

7 BETWEEN POLITICAL ORDER AND CHANGE: THE CONTINGENT CONSTRUCTION OF THE MODERN RIGHT In his presidential farewell address in January 1989, Ronald Reagan reflected on the historic political transformation he helped to produce. “They called it the Reagan Revolution and I’ll accept that,” he said, “but for me it always seemed more like the Great Rediscovery: a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.” For the fortieth president, the word “revolution” was less appropriate than “rediscovery” because while the former denotes overthrow and subsequent establishment of a new regime, the latter is an embrace of the founding commitments that make up the true American identity—a natural expression of who we are. Political theorist Antonio Gramsci argued that the power of hegemonic rule rests in its ability to define common sense. This is how, as the Reagan quote reminds us, the contemporary Right came to dominate the political center in the United States. Its power is not lodged solely, or even fully, in governing institutions, but rather the ability to define the very horizon of credible politics. The purpose of this book has been to explain how conservatives achieved this goal. Explaining the shift from the New Deal to the modern Right raises questions about how to identify and explain substantive political change more generally. Critical realignment theory, a well-used instrument in the political science toolbox, is one method. Developed out of the midcentury insights of V. O. Key, Walter Dean Burnham, and other scholars of American politics—and first popularized by none other than Kevin Phillips—this theory emerged as the leading framework through which to

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analyze political continuity and change. In its most general terms, realignment divides American political history into stable party-system eras that are punctuated by intervening moments of electoral upheaval, which result in the creation of new party systems, governed by the imperatives of the new ruling party. While it is still a popular framework for explaining fundamental changes in the polity, realignment theory has come under criticism both empirically and theoretically in the past two decades. Most recently, some scholars have turned their attention from broad party systems to the relatively autonomous operation of many governing institutions. Indeed, many institutionalists have begun to argue that ambiguity, multiplicity, and competing agendas mark U.S. politics far more than order and coherence.1 I take seriously the critiques of political order that do not account for contingency and multiplicity. And yet at a moment when the main political imperatives of one party dominate the political center, it is difficult to say that U.S. politics is marked by disorder and multiplicity more than by unified political rule. But if political change is not lodged solely in party identification and cannot be measured by tidy, rhythmic electoral shifts, are there other ways of identifying and critically evaluating broad, historical political transformation? In their book The Search for American Political Development, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have attempted to hold onto the study of political order and change as the central enterprise in the study of American political development while jettisoning the mechanistic, homogenizing, and teleological baggage of earlier notions. They define political development as a “durable shift in governing authority” which for them makes a shift in “the direction of control” as well as a fundamental redistribution of political authority among groups and individuals. While Orren and Skowronek fully acknowledge that language and culture can play an important role in political transformation, for them it can be measured only at the level of governing institutions. This approach to order and change is an advance over earlier theories, but as Victoria Hattam and I have noted elsewhere, the government-centered measure of change here is perhaps too constrained to capture key dynamics of political change. By the time one measures institutional shifts in governing authority, much—maybe all— the real work of change has been accomplished.2


In the case of the modern Right, the shift in the direction of political control began long before the Reagan Revolution. Yet gauged by such institutional indicators as control of Congress, the presidency, and the courts, by successful legislative or policy initiatives, or even by conservative control of the Republican Party, the modern Right failed as a political development in the three decades prior to 1980. Taken separately, the Dixiecrat Revolt, the Goldwater candidacy of 1964, the presidential campaigns of George Wallace, and Nixon’s attempt to construct a New Majority through two presidential terms are all stories of miserable defeat in institutional terms. Taken together, however, these interventions proved to have been decisive in producing conservative triumph. To be clear: these episodes were not simply a discursive precursor for a durable political development that began in 1980. These events and the new racial conservative discourse they produced were the shift. Reagan could look back and talk about a rediscovery of values and common sense precisely because the important political work had already taken place—work that in fact made it possible for an archconservative to be elected president. Analyzing this shift requires that we attend to the micropolitics of political change.3 Political interests are an artifact of political identity. Who we are determines what we want. And the question of who we are begins with how we experience and interpret the contexts we inhabit. Because we interpret the world through words, it is in language that we must begin the search for both the basis of regime stability and the locus of change. Those who seek to oppose and replace regimes in American politics must articulate interests that can exploit differences, split alignments, create new coalitional possibilities, and discredit the old order. In doing so they incorporate diverse constituencies in a redefinition of the political center. However, in order to be successful, regime builders must transform coalitions into more deeply held collective political identities. This requires actors to synthesize diverse political ideas into seemingly natural frameworks over a long span of time. In the case of the modern Right, nothing necessarily links the positions of states’ rights, more punitive sentencing, opposition to welfare, neoliberal economics, and “family values” into one political identity. Actors began articulating these themes into an associative chain in opposition to the New Deal order. Over time and through continual attempts to recombine

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political elements in ways that would have traction among voters, the regime builders of the modern Right successfully crafted a coherent political identity (or “worldview” to use the term preferred by National Review publisher William Rusher). This new political identity had valence to the degree that different groups came to share a sense of common opposition to the existing political regime as such. In this sense, a regime is more than a ruling coalition of distinct elements: it is rather a shared sense of commonality that defines the scope of credible politics.4 The positions listed above came together as an abstraction under labels that reflected the evolving status of the modern Right as a majoritarian signifier: among them the Forgotten Americans, the Silent Majority, and finally, Middle America. All were meant to describe a people under attack by an invasive federal government, threatened by crime and social disorder, discriminated against by affirmative action, and compromised by moral and cultural degradation. Another abstraction embodied pure negation for this identity: the liberal state, itself a racial synecdoche for what conservatives considered an unholy alliance of liberal elites, people of color, the urban poor, and others claiming “special rights.” Thus were nation and state set against each other in the logic of the modern Right.5 The claim that race was key to the rise of the Right raises the deeper question of when and under what conditions white racism becomes politically salient. As one of the oldest political identifications in the United States, race has, in ever-changing forms, continued to provide a contingent ranking of social relations and the group boundaries they induce. As Rogers Smith and Desmond King have forcefully argued, racial politics are deeply embedded in the institutional history of the nation and indeed have been constitutive of political orders since the founding. But how do these racial political orders come into being? And how are they transformed? Answering this question requires an account of how actors dissolve old political identifications and create new ones. Language is key to this process. Extant linkages between ideas, interpretations and interests must be taken apart and put together in new ways to in order to build new political orders.6 I do not want to reduce the emergence of the modern Right to either historic determinacy or a radical contingency of the political moment. It is the product of both, and it is continually shaped by both, so older political


identifications and new political events must be studied together in order to understand the way that this regime emerged. In this book I analyzed the meaning and effects of the speeches, writings, and private correspondence of actors in relation to the distinct political and institutional contexts in which they emerged, particularly the mediating institution of party. This approach, which foregrounds the discursive basis of institutions, provides a way of understanding how political regimes are created, altered, occasionally dismantled, and replaced by agents in new political conditions. A focus on discourse foregrounds the real work of change that happens at the micro level. It also demonstrates the mobility of language as it gets deployed and redeployed to both respond to and then reshape political realities on the ground. This process lays bare the contingency of the various assemblages we come to call political order.7 In each major moment in the rise of the modern Right, key actors articulated new discursive combinations in party-building or party-splitting efforts. Charles Collins was not simply a party strategist who urged Southern Democratic leaders to use electoral mechanisms to force a crisis in the 1948 election. He also tried to alter politics through attempts to shatter longstanding associative chains and to forge new ones. In his writings we see his efforts to disassemble extant political associations, like historic white southern identification with the Democratic Party, devotion to FDR, and enthusiasm for New Deal polices to raise the region’s standard of living through federal redistribution of wealth. We also see Collins’s efforts to reassemble other political elements, such as white supremacy, states’ rights, individual rights, and economic conservatism into a new compelling and coherent framework. The rending of the fabric of the Democratic Party by the Dixiecrats opened up opportunities for conservatives outside the South who were also in search of allies in opposition to the New Deal. The Goldwater piece of the emergent associative chain was developed at the National Review, among other places, where new discursive combinations were explored, debated, promoted, and sometimes abandoned in the search for language that could connect distinct political elements. Republican organizers in the South in the 1950s began building a new party apparatus in the region, but they gained real traction only when they had a national candidate who could translate conservatism into a racialized politics in opposition to the

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Brown decisions. Accounts that give economic conservatism primacy over race in the rise of southern Republicanism separate the two notions in a way that candidates on the ground did not. Goldwaterites helped renarrate the political upheavals of the 1960s, but they lacked the populist appeal necessary to reach Democratic loyalists outside the South. George Wallace drove a wedge into the national Democratic Party precisely because in his candidacies he performed a populist antistatism that could appeal to white southerners and urban ethnics—a feat his populist forebears and Republican contemporaries had failed to achieve. Nixon, in turn, was able to create a winning coalition because he gained the allegiance of a diverse array of voters by articulating a clear set of resentments with which they could all identify, and by bestowing national legitimacy on this chain of associations through the signifier of the Silent Majority. In doing so he redefined the center of American politics. That this Right was not yet able to exercise national political power immediately after Watergate only demonstrates that what was invented and claimed as the emerging Republican majority was still very much in contingent formation. The sharp divisions of the 1960s became less intelligible in the 1970s as political elements associated with the left and counterculture were combined in new ways. While Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, the victory did not herald the return of New Deal liberalism, let alone the McGovernite insurgency of 1972. Carter was a moderate Democrat, a southerner, and a born-again Christian. George Wallace even endorsed him in the election. Like Wallace, Carter painted himself as a southern, rural populist and an outsider to Washington. Finally in 1980, a more accurate representative of both the Goldwater and Wallace legacies was elected president. Reagan’s 1980 campaign kick-off was organized by Trent Lott in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town notorious as the place where civil rights workers James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. There, Reagan pointedly assured supporters that he, like them, believed in “states’ rights.” Reagan could now seamlessly combine conservatism, racism, and antigovernment populism in a majoritarian discourse —and with it founded the modern Republican regime. Conservative legitimacy requires the fable that the rise of the Right was the inevitable return to first principles—as opposed to the eventual tri-


umph of a particular coalition achieved through bitter conflict. In this way the backlash narrative of the rise of the Right fails to disclose a key feature of the Right’s eventual triumph. The making of new political orders is a disruptive process that requires the successful definition of myriad others as threatening to the nation. The act of defining the outside often exceeded the boundaries of normal politics and depended on the real and symbolic uses of demonization and even violence. Thus, as we have seen, political excess, upheaval, and ideological positioning outside the mainstream of American political culture were by no means the sole province of the antiwar movement, black power militants, and radical feminists. Reagan’s gauzy farewell address serves only to underscore the political necessity of forgetting. By offering a new account of the modern conservative regime, I do not seek only to foreground the role of the South in its emergence, or to demonstrate the complex linkage of race and economic conservatism in its success. I also aim to show that it was not an inevitable result of social movements on the left in the 1960s. I hope that this account has shown it to be a contingent phenomenon that morphed as it grew over time, that it could have happened differently, and that it was not an ineluctable response to the black liberation movement and other aspects of—to use the language of the time—the social question. At stake here then is not simply a reckoning of the founding violence of modern conservatism, but an assertion about the contingency of politics more generally. As the foregoing account of the rise of the Right shows, political interests, beliefs, and commitments do not reflect preexisting identities such as race or economic class position. On the contrary, politics is the arena in which interests, beliefs, and commitments are crafted. I hope that the foregoing account can do more than challenge the backlash narrative of the right, because the political worldview of many liberals is governed by that same story. Far too many intellectuals, institutional actors, and activists are burdened by the belief that the American public will be put off by stances that violate the perceived boundaries of acceptable political discourse. This has resulted in the steady retreat from antiracist political agendas in the past three decades, and with it a more general decline of egalitarian and democratic politics. This need not be the case. The recent history of the Right analyzed here shows us that political identities

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are not cast in stone; indeed, they can undergo quite startling changes when actors find ways to develop compelling alternatives. This fact should remind us that just as the triumph of modern conservatism was not inevitable, the creation of a more egalitarian future is not impossible. The potentialities of politics are never determined in advance. What determine them are our actions.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Beyond the Backlash Thesis 1. Thomas B. Edsall, “Lott Decried for Part of Salute to Thurmond, GOP Senate Leader Hails Colleague’s Run as Segregationist,” Washington Post, December 7, 2002, p. A6; Robert Novak, “Lott’s Feeding Frenzy,” www.townhall.com, Heritage Foundation, December 16, 2002. 2. The one notable exception was Representative J. C. Watts (R-Oklahoma), who quickly excused Lott. Daryl Fears, “Black Conservatives, GOP Visibility Panels to Discuss Ways to Make African Americans More Integral to Party,” Washington Post, January 5, 2003, p. A5. For Bush’s remarks, see Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, “Divisive Words: The Republican Leader; Bush Rebukes Lott over Remarks on Thurmond,” New York Times, December 13, 2002, p. A1. 3. Interview with Lott, Larry King Live, CNN, December 11, 2002. 4. Indeed, the former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman has repeatedly acknowledged and apologized for the Republican “southern strategy” of the past forty years. See, for instance, “RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman Addresses African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church Convention in Houston, Texas, Tuesday, July 26, 2005,” http://www.gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID5679, and “RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman Remarks to The National Association of Black Journalists 30th Anniversary Convention, Thursday, August 04, 2005,” http://www.gop.com/News/ Read.aspx?ID5710. On Rice’s comments, see Bob Deans, “Rice Saw Terrorism in Segregated South; Remarkable Path; Child Prodigy Ascends to Top Tier of Power,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 8, 2004, p. 1A; and Corky Siemaszko, “Sweetness and Strife: Rice Transformed by Horrors of 9/11 and Childhood Bombing,” New York Daily News, November 16, 2004, p. 6. 5. Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1968); Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991), for

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quote, see p. 4; Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by the Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); and The Intellectuals and the Flag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Other conservative versions include Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: National Review Books, 1993). For other leftleaning versions of this argument, see Michael Kazin, “A Patriotic Left,” Dissent, Fall 2002; Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 6. See, for instance, Numan Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980, History of the South, vol. 11 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Kees Gispen, ed., What Made the South Different (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle, eds., The South as an American Problem (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952); John C. McKinney and Edgar T. Thompson, The South in Continuity and Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 7. For accounts privileging the role of economic class in the politics of the postwar South, see Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 8. This claim immediately raises the question of what I mean by such a broad notion of “the South” as a singular political or geographic entity. Writing in 1949, V. O. Key warned that “the richness and diversity of the [South] make an attempt to present a panoramic view more an act of brashness than of boldness.” V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), p. 1. I define the South geographically as the group of states where racial equality and political enfranchisement was most contested: the eleven states of the former Confederacy— Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, and Virginia. 9. Douglass Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); National Urban League, The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male (Silver Spring, Md: Beckham Publishing Group, 2007); Naomi Murakawa, “Electing to Punish: Congress, Race, and the Amer-


ican Criminal Justice State,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1, 551 U.S. (June 28, 2007). 10. See for instance, W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1995); Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren, “Introduction,” in Lowndes, Novkov, Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development (New York: Routledge, 2008); Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995); and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1995).

Chapter 2. “White Supremacy Is a Political Doctrine” 1. Charles Wallace Collins, Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations (New Orleans: Pelican Press, 1947), p. vii. References to his central role appear in Numan Bartley, The New South, p. 36; Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 141; Robert Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941–1948 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 236–237, 291; Matthew Hoffman, “The Illegitimate President: Minority Dilution and the Electoral College,” Yale Law Journal, 105, no. 4 (January 1996), p. 10; and Richard Hofstadter, “From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats,” Social Research, 16 (June 1949), p. 143. 2. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 166. 3. Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 37. See also Michael K. Brown, “Race in the American Welfare State: The Ambiguities of Universalistic Social Welfare Policy Since the New Deal,” and Dennis R. Judd, “Symbolic Politics and Urban Policies: Why African Americans Got So Little from the Democrats,” in Adolph Reed, ed., Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999); Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly, 108, no. 2 (1993); Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line; Douglass S. Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). As historian Dewey Grantham notes about FDR’s efforts, “Conservative officeholders, institutions, and attitudes were too firmly entrenched at the state and local levels to be dislodged by the president’s reform policies.” Grantham, The South in Modern America, p. 125. 4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: 1935 –1936, The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 423.

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5. These two Court decisions, both handed down on May 27, 1935, were Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602; and Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495. The first case denied the president the power to remove appointees from independent regulatory commissions. The second denied the moving of discretionary authority from Congress to the early New Deal’s leading economic agency, the National Recovery Administration. Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2002, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1999), p. 280. 6. Other coauthors included Warren Austin (R-Vt.), Harry F. Byrd (D-Va.), Peter Gerry (R-R.I.), and Millard Tydings (D-Md.). See also John Robert Moore, “Senator Josiah W. Bailey and the ‘Conservative Manifesto’ of 1937,” Journal of Southern History, 31, no. 1 (February 1965), pp. 21–39; 75th Congress, 2nd sess., 1, Congressional Record (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 20, 1937), pp. 934–940. The Liberty League was a proto-fascist conspiratorial organization set up to overthrow Roosevelt in the early 1930s. 7. Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, p. 119. 8. John Temple Graves, The Fighting South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p. 114; Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 73. 9. Papers of Charles Wallace Collins, Archives and Manuscripts Department, University of Maryland Libraries, “Guide to the Papers,” p. 1; National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York, J. T. White, 1970), vol. 51, pp. 296–298. 10. Charles Wallace Collins, The Fourteenth Amendment and the States: A Study of the Restraint Clauses of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1912); Collins Papers, “Guide to the Papers,” p. 2. 11. Collins, Whither Solid South? p. 181. 12. Ibid., p. 285. 13. Ibid. 14. Roosevelt made the declaration in announcing the activation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Japanese military unit, February 1, 1943. Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 148; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap, 2004), pp. 1–21. 15. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, volume 1: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), introduction; Steven Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 23. 16. Steinberg, Turning Back, p. 48. See also David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 37.


17. Collins, Whither Solid South? p. 57. 18. Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, p. 138. 19. Collins, Whither Solid South? pp. 76–77. 20. Ibid., p. 306. 21. Ibid., p. 80; Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 7. 22. Collins, Whither Solid South? p. 67. 23. Ibid., pp. 68–69. 24. Ibid., pp. ix–x. 25. Ibid., p. x. 26. Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, pp. 20–22; Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, pp. 280–281; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, pp. 274–278. 27. See Charles W. Eagles, Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations: The Evolution of a Southern Liberal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), pp. 83–120. On Republican opposition to state-level FEPCs, see Anthony Chen, “The Party of Lincoln and the Politics of State Fair Employment Practices Legislation in the North, 19451964,” American Journal of Sociology, 112, no. 6 (May 2007). 28. Collins, Whither Solid South? p. 64. 29. Ibid., p. 241. 30. Ibid., p. 181. 31. Ibid., pp. 227, 257. 32. Ibid., p. 235. 33. Ibid., p. 278. 34. Ibid., pp. 258–279. 35. Truman quoted in Kari Frederickson, “The Dixiecrat Movement and the Origin of Massive Resistance: Race, Politics ad Political Culture in the Deep South, 1932– 1935,” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996, p. 98; President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947). 36. Bartley, The New South, p. 78; Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, p. 225; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, p. 475; Frederickson, “The Dixiecrat Movement and the Origin of Massive Resistance,” p. 98. 37. Eastland, quoted in Frederickson. On Collins, Frederickson writes, “States’ Rights Democrats based their strategy on the ideas of . . . Charles Wallace Collins,” whose book “had become a ‘must-read’ among southern leaders.” Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968, p. 141. See also Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980, pp. 36–37; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, p. 420; Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2006), pp 230–231; Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, pp. 233– 237; and Hofstadter, “From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats,” p. 143. 38. Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, pp. 2, 39. 39. Ibid., p. 276; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, p. 296. Eisenhower’s family

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moved to Kansas when he was an infant. On McCorvey’s plan, see “Correspondence from Collins to McCorvey, July 13, 1948,” “Correspondence from McCorvey to Collins, July 14, 1958,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Frank Murray Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History. See also Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, p. 271. 40. Frank Dixon was the nephew of Thomas Dixon, author of (among other things) The Clansman, the book on which D. W. Griffith based his film Birth of a Nation. “Correspondence from Dixon to Collins, July 14, 1948,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 41. Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, p. 283; Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 137. 42. Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 240; Bartley, The New South, p. 87. 43. Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 242. 44. “Correspondence from Dixon to Collins, August 9, 1948,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 45. Bartley, The New South, p. 89. 46. Thurmond quoted in Bartley, The New South, p. 82. See also Garson, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, pp. 285–286; Gibson quote from The Montgomery Advertiser, July 2, 1948. 47. Numan Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 36. 48. “Correspondence from Collins to Merritt H. Gibson, November 8, 1948,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 49. Ibid. 50. “Correspondence from Collins to Gibson, November 8, 1948,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 51. Report of the Jackson Meeting—National States Rights Committee, Jackson, Mississippi, May 10, 1949, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 2, Folder 11; and “Constitution and Declaration of Principles, National States Rights Committee,” Papers of J. Strom Thurmond, Special Collections, Clemson University Libraries, Clemson, South Carolina. 52. Graves, The Fighting South, p. 115. See also Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, p. 492; Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 191. 53. On meeting to discuss the founding of a states’ rights institute, see “Correspondence from Frank Dixon to John U. Barr, January 19, 1949,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History; “Correspondence from Dixon to Wallace Malone, February 10, 1949,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History. See also Bartley, The New South, p. 98; and Heard, A Two-Party South? pp. 164–165.


54. “Correspondence from Collins to Frank Dixon, January 24, 1949,” Charles Wallace Collins Papers, Series II, Box 155. 55. “Southern Representatives”: “Letter from James Murphy to Strom Thurmond, January 31, 1949,” J. Strom Thurmond Papers; “We must therefore organize”: “Correspondence from Collins to Dixon, January 24, 1949,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History (emphasis in original). 56. Bartley, The New South, p. 39; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, p. 556. 57. Wright quoted in Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 222. 58. “Correspondence from Collins to Graves, June 27, 1951,” Collins Papers, Series II, Box 3. 59. Margaret E. Armbrester, “John Temple Graves II: A Southern Liberal Views the New Deal,” Alabama Historical Review, 32, no. 3 (July 1979), pp. 204–205. 60. Heard, A Two-Party South? p. 165. Gabrielson quoted in Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, p. 227. 61. Bartley, The New South, p. 50. 62. Jackson Daily News, April 18, 1951, from Karl E. Mundt Archives, Dakota State University, Madison, S.D., Record Group VII, Document Box 1116, File Folder 3, 1951; News Release from the Office of Senator Karl E. Mundt (May 19, 1951), Mundt Archives, Record Group VII, Document Box 1116, File Folder 3, 1951. 63. Birmingham Post Herald, May 12, 1951. 64. New York Times, January 22, 1950, January 20, 1951; “Correspondence from McCorvey to Mundt, October 30, 1952,” Mundt Archives, Record Group VII, Box 4, 1952. 65. Byrnes quoted in New York Times, April 17, 1952; Texas Resolution quoted in Bartley, The New South, p. 102. 66. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 406–409; Chester J. Pach, Jr., and Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), pp. 135– 138; David Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), p. 98. 67. Southern School News, February 3, 1955, p. 9. 68. Herbert O. Reid, “The Supreme Court Decision and Interposition,” Journal of Negro Education, 25, no. 2 (Spring 1956), pp. 109–117. For extended discussions of the legacy and theory of interposition, see Reid; also George Kateb, “The Majority Principle: Calhoun and His Antecedents,” Political Science Quarterly, 84, no. 4 (December 1969), pp. 583–605; and Robert Brisbane, “Interposition: Theory and Fact,” Phylon, 17, no. 1 (1956), pp. 12–16. Calhoun quoted in Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 166. 69. Southern School News, January 1956, p. 5. Charles Wallace Collins, The Race Integration Cases (Birmingham, Ala.: American States’ Rights Association, 1954), p. 8. 70. Reprinted in the Dallas Morning News, April 12, 1956, quoted in Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, pp. 126–127.

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71. Reprinted in Southern School News, January 1956, p. 5. 72. Bartley, The New South, p. 198; Reid, “The Supreme Court Decision and Interposition,” p. 112. 73. 84th Congress, 2nd sess., Congressional Record, 102, part 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 12, 1956), pp. 4459–4460. 74. Chappell, A Stone of Hope, pp. 153–178. 75. Collins, “Correspondence from Collins to Gibson, November 8, 1948,” Dixiecrat Correspondence Series, Dixon Papers, Large Private Records 33, Box 3, Folder 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

Chapter 3. “Goldwater Was the Horsepower” 1. Robert Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 273; Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 292; Herbert S. Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 73–82. 2. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 24; Pach and Richardson, Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, pp. 138–139. 3. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, pp. 98, 131. 4. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President, pp. 410–420; Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 356; Russell quoted in Ambrose, pp. 421–422; and Pach and Richardson, Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, p. 157. 5. “Republicans Begin a Drive for South,” New York Times, June 11, 1964, p. 10; Marvin L. Arrowsmith, “Dixie ‘Stone-age’ Laws Hinder GOP, Ike Told,” Washington Post, June 14, 1957, p. A2. See also Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees 1956–1993 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 57; Richard L. Lyons, “Arkansas GOP Hears Pep Talk,” Washington Post, October 8, 1957, p. A6. William C. Harvard, ed., The Changing Politics of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), p. 25. 6. Klinkner, The Losing Parties, p. 52; Benjamin Muse, “Rarely Has Party Label Meant Less,” Washington Post, October 26, 1958, p. E2; Lyons, “Arkansas GOP Hears Pep Talk”; Raymond Lahr, “Fewer Will Make Race for GOP in Deep South,” Washington Post, September 8, 1958, p. B2. 7. Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 12. 8. Jerome Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 55–60; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 147. 9. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1988), p. 185; Richard Weaver,


“The Regime of the South,” National Review, June 8, 1957, pp. 541–543; Editorial, “The South Clears Its Throat,” National Review, November 26, 1955, pp. 5–6. 10. Editorial, “The South Clears Its Throat,” National Review, November 26, 1955, pp. 5–6; Sam M. Jones, “Down South in Georgia,” National Review, November 26, 1955, pp. 8–9; Isabel Patterson, “The Southern Breakthrough,” National Review, December 21, 1955, pp. 9–12. 11. “The South Girds Its Loins,” National Review, February 29, 1956. 12. “Return to States’ Rights,” National Review, April 18, 1956. 13. Ibid. 14. William F. Buckley, Jr., “Why the South Must Prevail,” National Review, August 24, 1957. 15. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, pp. 6–13; and Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, pp. 202–243. 16. L. Brent Bozell, “The Open Question,” National Review, September 7, 1957. 17. James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation (New York: Cromwell-Collier, 1962). 18. John Crowe Ransom et al., I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, By Twelve Southerners (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Anthony Harrigan, “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” National Review, September 10, 1960. 19. Anthony Harrigan, “The South Is Different,” National Review. The South: 1958, March 8, 1958. 20. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 138; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 10–13; Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 117. 21. Perlstein, Before the Storm, pp. 14, 44, 115. 22. Ibid., p. 48. 23. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, p. 138, Perlstein, Before the Storm, p. 15; Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative (New York: Hillman Books, 1960), p. 1. 24. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, p. 32. 25. Ibid., p. 37. 26. “GOP Chief Sees Gains in South,” Washington Post, July 13, 1960, p. A13. 27. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 154. 28. Perlstein, Before the Storm, p. 93. The Louisiana delegate is quoted in Klinkner, The Losing Parties, pp. 52–53. 29. Klinkner, The Losing Parties, p. 43. 30. Ibid., pp. 43, 47. 31. Ibid., pp. 53–55; Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 169. Goldwater’s remark on the Supreme Court is from George McMillan, Washington Post, November 26, 1961, p. E1. 32. F. Clifton White with William J. Gill, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (Ashland: Ashbrook Press, 1992), pp. 23–24; Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and

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Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 53–54; Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 179; Perlstein, Before the Storm, pp. 177–179. 33. Perlstein, Before the Storm, p. 188. 34. “The New Breed,” Time, July 13, 1962, p. 12; Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 169. 35. Klinkner, The Losing Parties, p. 58, Hedrick Smith, “GOP in South Sees Hope for ’64 in Vote Gains,” New York Times, November 9, 1962, p. 39. Goldwater quoted in Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945, p. 168. 36. Hedrick Smith, “GOP Is Attacked for Its Aid to Segregationists in the South,” New York Times, November 6, 1962, p. 23. 37. I. Lee Potter, “GOP’s Southern Drive,” letter to the New York Times, May 2, 1963, p. 29. 38. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 136–137. 39. Clifton White quoted in Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans, p. 56. Grenier quoted in Theodore White, Making of the President, 1964, p. 137. 40. William Rusher, “Crossroads for the GOP,” National Review, February 12, 1963, pp. 109–112 (emphasis in original). Perhaps the cartoons are simply meant as a kind of iconic shorthand to depict southerners in political battle. But the choice of Confederate soldiers points both to the racial identity of these southern Republicans and to the central issue over which the Civil War was fought. 41. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, pp. 154–155. 42. White with Gill, Suite 3505, p. 158. 43. Klinkner, The Losing Parties, p. 58. 44. White with Gill, Suite 3505, p. 174. 45. Stewart Alsop, “Can Goldwater Win in ’64?” Saturday Evening Post, August 24–31, 1963. Letters to Goldwater cited in Robert Novak, The Agony of the GOP (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 240. 46. White with Gill, Suite 3505, p. 216. 47. “Correspondence from Thomas W. Benham, Vice President of Opinion Research Corporation to White, October 15, 1963,” Papers of F. Clifton White, No. 2006, Box 9. Archived at Cornell University Libraries Rare Books and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, N.Y. 48. William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Play Against Goldwater,” National Review, July 16, 1963, p. 13. 49. The next issue featured a lengthy editorial called “Goldwater and the Race Issue,” which again defended Goldwater against charges of racism from both Democrats and Republican liberals. “Mr. Goldwater’s popularity in the South,” the editorial stated, “is based on factors which if it cannot be said to transcend the Negro problem, at least do not converge directly upon it—except to the extent that Mr. Goldwater has said he’s not in favor of depriving the states of powers they now have.” National Review, July 30, 1963, p. 46.


50. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., pp. 191–192, 212–213. 51. Novak, The Agony of the GOP, p. 179. 52. Quoted in White with Gill, Suite 3505, p. 402. 53. Ibid., p. 403. 54. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Concession to the South,” Washington Post, July 19, 1964, p. E7. 55. “GOP Moderates Score Goldwater,” New York Times, July 5, 1964, p. 31. 56. White, The Making of the President, 1964, p. 220. 57. “Television address of Senator Strom Thurmond to the People of South Carolina on the 1964 Presidential Race, September 16, 1964,” Papers of F. Clifton White, No. 2006, Box 4. 58. Ibid. 59. Papers of F. Clifton White, No. 2006, Box 2, 1952–1970. 60. Ibid. 61. Charles Mohr, “Goldwater Hunts a Winning Tactic,” New York Times, October 6, 1964, p. 29. Goldwater quoted in White, The Making of the President, 1964, p. 332. 62. White with Gill, Suite 3505, p. 387; White, The Making of the President, 1964, note, pp. 332–333. 63. Goldwater would have won four other states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, where he had the white majority, except for the great increase in black voting. Interestingly, that year turnout rose slightly over 1960, but was actually down everywhere but the South. There, hundreds of thousands of newly enfranchised black voters went to the polls, but were outmatched by even greater numbers of white voters, bringing the regional gross vote up by 20 percent. White, The Making of the President, 1964, p. 380.

Chapter 4. “You Are Southerners Too” 1. See, in particular, Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), and Kazin, Populist Persuasion, pp. 221–244. 2. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 1981), pp. 77, 99, and The Discourses, trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1970), pp. 132, 134. 3. In Kazin’s words, “As a metaphor, Middle America evoked, simultaneously, three compelling meanings: the unstylish, traditionalist expanse that lay between the two coasts; an egalitarian social status most citizens either claimed or desired; and a widespread feeling of being squeezed between penthouse and ghetto—between a condescending elite above and scruffy demonstrators below.” Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 253. 4. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 109. 5. “Speech of Governor George C. Wallace at University of Alabama, January 14,

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1963,” Microfilm, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 6. Ibid. 7. A few days before his inauguration, Wallace told a group of state senators, “I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state, and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” Marshal Frady, Wallace (New York: Dutton Adult, 1968), p. 143. 8. “Wallace Inaugural Speech, January 14, 1963,” George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder No. 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 9. As his Connecticut campaign chairman would say in 1968, “Alabama is part of the United States and soon the United States will become part of Alabama.” Carol Miller, The Day, New London, Conn., June 29, 1968. 10. Interview with former Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers in the PBS documentary film George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, 2000. Wallace quote from Meet the Press, NBC-TV, June 2, 1963, Microfilm Transcript, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder No. 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 11. “Speech of Governor George C. Wallace at University of Alabama, June 11, 1963,” Microfilm, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder 3, Alabama Department of Archives and History. See also Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 210. 12. “Speech Prepared for Delivery by George C. Wallace, Governor of Alabama, Organization Against Communism, Cleveland Ohio, June 11, 1964,” Microfilm, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History. See also Stephen Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), p. 273. 13. Lesher, George Wallace, p. 280. 14. Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 213. 15. Ibid., p. 142. 16. On the complex relationship of race and ethnicity in twentieth-century American politics, and particularly of Southern and Eastern Europeans from the second great wave of immigration, see Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow of Race: Ethnic Politics in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For a very different account, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 17. Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 200; also Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness: The Wallace Campaigns for the Presidency, 1964–1976 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 35. As the southern intellectual and Dixiecrat leader Charles Wallace Collins said, “The white Southerner has been able to preserve his Anglo-Saxon heritage to a remarkable degree.” Collins, Whither Solid South? p. 4. 18. Machiavelli asserts in The Discourses that violence has great capacity to found as well as shatter and dissolve political identifications. On violence in American political culture, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). See also


Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 143–184. 19. Bill Jones, The Wallace Story (Northport, Ala.: American Southern Publishing, 1966), p. 188. 20. Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 108–109. 21. Ibid., p. 93. 22. George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Folder No. 11, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 23. Carter, The Politics of Rage, pp. 203–206. On the Liberty Amendment movement see Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), p. 158. 24. On the perceived marginality of the American Right in the 1960s, see essays in Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2001). On the presence of far-right groups in Wallace’s campaigns, see Interview with Ed Ewing, Tape 2, Ewing Papers, Box 3, folder No. 2, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 25. Ben A. Franklin, “Hate Groups Back Wallace Bid,” New York Times, May 14, 1964, p. 24. 26. Asa Carter, The Southerner, 1, no. 2 (April-May 1956). See also Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 210. 27. Or as he once disingenuously said on Meet the Press, “I am an anti-Nazi. I fought Nazism in World War II, and I think it was one of the worst philosophies ever engendered in the world. I repudiate the support of anyone who says he wants to return to Nazism.” Meet the Press, NBC-TV, April 23, 1967, Microfilm Transcript, George C. Wallace Governor’s Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. See also Tom Wicker, “George Wallace: A Gross and Simple Heart,” Harper’s, April 1967. 28. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Beyond the Backlash,” Encounter, 23 (November 1964), p. 1; Lipset, Political Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), pp. 119–123; Charles W. Gregg, “Fundamental Principles of Democracy,” Journal of Politics, 22 (Spring 1960), pp. 276–294; G. H. Smith, “Liberalism and Level of Information,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 39 (1948), pp. 65–82. On Wallace’s middle-class backing, see Michael Rogin, “Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 30, no. 1 (Spring 1966), pp. 98–108. 29. See Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Demonstrations and Race Riots,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 32, no. 4 (Winter 1968–69), pp. 696–703. 30. Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner Books, 1997), p. 78. 31. Wallace quoted in Carlson, George C. Wallace, p. 129. 32. Wallace quoted in Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 222. On Wallace’s support among northern workers, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 428.

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33. “A Voter’s Lexicon of ‘Wallacisms,’” New York Times, August 25, 1968. In his study of culturally liminal figures, Victor Turner highlights the role of the jester as a privileged arbiter of a kind of communitas against the reigning stratifications of a given social and political structure. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), p. 110. 34. Boston Herald Traveler, October 9, 1968, p. 3. 35. “Statement of Governor George C. Wallace, Montgomery, Alabama, June 5, 1968.” Ewing Papers, Box 3, Folder 2, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 36. Witcover, The Year the Dream Died, p. 162. 37. Ben A. Franklin, “Hate Groups Back Wallace Bid,” New York Times, September 2, 1968. 38. Tape 2, Interview with Ed Ewing, Ewing Papers, Box 3, Folder 2, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 39. Cited in Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, “The Extreme Right Invasion of the 1968 Campaign” (New York, 1968), p. 469. 40. Carmines and Stimson, Race and the Transformation of American Politics, p. 95. 41. Turnipseed quote from PBS documentary George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, 2000. 42. Ewing Tapes. Ewing Papers, Box 3, Folder 2, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 43. Ewing Papers, Box 2, Folder 4, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 44. Ibid. See also David M. Halbfinger, “Anthony Imperiale, 68, Dies; Polarizing Force in Newark.” New York Times, December 28, 1999, p. C4. 45. Ewing Papers, Box 2, Folder 4, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 46. Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, p. 477; Ted Pearson, “Extremists from Both Sides Influence Wallace Decision,” Birmingham News, September 8, 1968. 47. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority. 48. Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 117. 49. William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn from Nixon to Clinton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 13–14. 50. “Speech by George C. Wallace, Governor of Alabama, to National Press Club.” Washington, D.C., December 6, 1971, Microfilm, George Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 51. Meet the Press, NBC-TV, August 22, 1971, Microfilm Transcript, George C. Wallace, Governor’s Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 52. In 1969 the various groups that had worked in the Wallace campaign split into two factions. One group, which Wallace endorsed, was made up of several prominent Birchers and close Wallace aides. This largely communist-focused organization established itself as the American Party. The other faction, united under the American Independent Party banner, was angry about Wallace’s domination over the 1968 campaign and opposed his liberal social security and farm policies. Both included former members of violent racist groups. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 145. 53. Ibid., pp. 200, 417. 54. Wallace quoted in Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 457.


55. On violence and forgetting, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 57– 60; Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 41– 55; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1994), p. 6; and Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Cardozo Law Review (1990), p. 919.

Chapter 5. “The South, the West, and Suburbia” 1. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 25. 2. Nixon quoted in Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 32; Jules Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), p. 108. 3. Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, pp. 109, 111, 120. 4. Ibid., pp. 147–148. 5. “I will go to any state”: ibid., p. 148; “Strom is no racist”: Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 77. 6. On the racial production of the “crime” issue as a GOP strategy in the 1960s, see Naomi Murakawa, “Electing to Punish: Congress, Race and the American Criminal Justice State,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005. 7. White, The Making of the President, 1968, p. 52. 8. Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 81. 9. White, The Making of the President, 1968, p. 137; Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 83. 10. Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, p. 184. 11. Herbert S. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 509. See also Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 93. 12. Text of speech from The Essential America, Electronic Reserves, www.wwnorton .com/college/history/essusa/ereserves/ch34.htm. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 60–62; Nixon speech quote in PBS, “The American Experience,” Vietnam: A Television History, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/vietnam/series/pt_10.html. 17. Account of Parmet interview with Nixon in Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 326. 18. Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, p. 261. On Buchanan’s strategy argument see Safire, Before the Fall, p. 80. 19. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, p. 347. 20. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 524.

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21. Safire, Before the Fall, p. 309. 22. Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1968, p. 20. 23. Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 21. 24. Nixon quoted in Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 110. See also Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 363. 25. Cited in Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 115. 26. For revisionist views of Nixon, see Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1990); also Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 27. Schell, The Time of Illusion, p. 17. 28. Ibid. 29. Moynihan quoted in Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 543. The Negro Family was published by the Office of Policy and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965. The notion of the “damage thesis” is articulated by Daryl Michael Scott in Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 30. Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999), p. 188; H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994), p. 53; and Safire, Before the Fall, p. 309. See also Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, p. 123; and Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 181. 31. Schell, The Time of Illusion, p. 49; Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, p. 127. 32. Eileen Boris, “When Work Is Slavery,” in Gwendolyn Mink, ed., Whose Welfare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 47; Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, p. 188. 33. Quoted in Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, p. 188. 34. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, pp. 598–599. 35. Schulman, The Seventies, p. 25. 36. Ibid., p. 28. 37. Ibid. 38. “Correspondence to Harry Dent from Peter O’Donnell, March 25, 1969.” White House Special Files, Harry S. Dent Files, Box 8, Nixon Presidential Materials, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA; Carter, The Politics of Rage, pp. 390–391. 39. Harlow quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President, pp. 330–338; Nixon quoted in Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, p. 170. 40. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President, p. 364. 41. Leon Panetta and Peter Gall, Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), p. 92. 42. Memorandum for the president from Harry Dent, re: “Southern Reaction to Guidelines Statement,” July 8, 1969. Dent Box 2, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. Articles circulated included one from the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “Still Segregated . . . Segregationists Take Heart as Nixon Administration Eases Inte-


gration Efforts.” September 25, 1969. Dent, Box 8, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. Also, “correspondence from Nixon to Panetta, February 10, 1970,” White House Special Files, Ehrlichman, Box 8, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. 43. Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, p. 137; quote from Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 603. 44. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 603. 45. An RNC poll taken right after showed nearly 75 percent believed they belonged to silent majority. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 578. 46. Schell, A Time of Illusion, pp. 67–68; Safire, Before the Fall, p. 178. On the plebiscitary presidency, see Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 55. 47. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 602. 48. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 471. 49. Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970). 50. Memorandum for Harry Dent from Ken Cole, October 6, 1969; Memorandum for the President, from Harry Dent, October 13, 1969, Dent, Box 8, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. 51. Memorandum for Henry Cashen from Richard Nathan, Subject: “The Forgotten American,” November 3, 1969, Dent, Box 8, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. 52. Washington Post, Friday, September 25, 1970, p. A25. 53. White House Special Files, Ehrlichman, Box 23, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. 54. Memorandum from Nixon to Colson and Haldeman, August 9, 1972, President’s Personal Files, Box 4, White House Special Files, Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA. 55. Safire, Before the Fall, p. 80. Buchanan quoted in Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1972 (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 220. 56. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President, p. 580; Safire, Before the Fall, p. 309. 57. Quoted in John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 222. 58. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, p. 596. 59. White, The Making of the President, 1972, p. 342. 60. Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make, p. 43. 61. Ibid., p. 44.

Chapter 6. “Guv’mints Lie” 1. On distrust of American government, see Wills, A Necessary Evil; and “Deconstructing Distrust: How Americans View Government” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 1998). On the anti-authoritarian and antistatist politics of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

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sity Press, 1981). On the participatory democratic politics of Students for a Democratic Society, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987). On the localism of the Black Panther Party, see Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1999). On the decentralization, localism, and even anarchism of the antinuclear movement, see Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), and Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 2. For my understanding of the relationship between culture and politics, I draw from Norton, Reflections on Political Identity; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” Journal of American History, 79 (1992); and George Shulman, “American Political Culture: Prophetic Narrative and Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Political Theory, 24 (May 1996), pp. 295–96. 3. Forrest Carter, republished as Gone to Texas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). 4. Glen T. Eskew, But for Birmingham (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 114 –117; Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 99; Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), pp. 100–101; The Southerner, Birmingham, Ala., vol. 1, nos. 1, 3, 7, 1956, microfilm, New York Public Library. 5. “Councils Move Toward National Scope,” The Southerner, 1, no. 2 (April–May 1956), p. 1. 6. The article goes on to describe “accounts” of two grisly rapes of little white girls by black men in newly integrated neighborhoods in Detroit. Interracial rape—or the threat thereof—recurs in his work, particularly in the Josey Wales novels, whether it be black on white, Indian on white, or white on Indian as a form of ultimate racial violation. 7. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, p. 107; Eskew, But for Birmingham, p. 115. 8. Asa Carter quote recounted by Dan T. Carter in PBS, “The American Experience,” George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ wallace/peopleevents/pande01.html; and entry for Asa Earl Carter in “The Handbook of Texas Online,” http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/ view/CC/fcaak.html; McWhorter, Carry Me Home, p. 161; Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, pp. 2–3; Eskew, But for Birmingham, p. 117. 9. Richard Schickel, Clint Eastwood: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 318–338. 10. Forrest Carter, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (1976; reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); The Education of Little Tree (1976; reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Watch for Me on the Mountain


(New York: Delacorte Press, 1978). Carter’s identity was first revealed by Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw and reported in the New York Times, August 26, 1976. 11. See Dan T. Carter, “The Transformation of a Klansman,” New York Times, October 4, 1991. Eleanor Freide, editor and co-publisher of Delacorte Press, stated, “Yes, now I know that Forrest Carter was Asa Carter, and that for some time in his life he was a political activist in his home state of Alabama, that to support his family he wrote speeches for a number of politicians including Governor George Wallace, that he gave speeches for hire for a number of groups, some of which may have been Klan related. He was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . And yet biographical details of an author no longer alive to defend himself are being brutalized by an investigator who is comparing past political activities to some form of contemporary political correctness.” Press release, Delacorte Press, October 31, 1991. Elizabeth Hadas, director of the University of New Mexico Press, argued that Carter’s political background should not lead to charges of fraudulence concerning his indigenous identity. Press release, University of New Mexico Press, November 1, 1991. See also “Widow of ‘Little Tree’ Author Admits He Changed Identity,” Publisher’s Weekly, October 25, 1991. 12. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, in her study of Revolutionary-era American political culture, demonstrates how violence against and selective identification with native people helped construct a white American subject both alienated and cathected with desire. Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789.” For a good contemporary psychoanalytic account of the relationship between race and American national identity, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 3–18. The wilderness, according to Turner, takes the European American “from the railroad car and puts him in the birchbark canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. . . . He shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in the orthodox Indian fashion.” But he does not remain an Indian: “Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe. . . . Here is a new product that is American.” Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996), p. 4. On blackface and white class resistance, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (London: Oxford University Press, 1995); Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1996). For a thorough analysis of indigenous masquerade in American history, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 10–37. 13. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 578–623. 14. Ibid., pp. 630, 631. Interestingly, Tom Laughlin, who played the character Billy Jack, ran as an independent “Populist” candidate in the 1988 U.S. presidential election. A review in Variety that year condemned the film as being “extraordinarily violent,” and “nothing more than a prairie Death Wish.” Cited in Boris Zmijewsky and Lee Pfeiffer, The Films of Clint Eastwood (New York: Carol Publishing, 1996), p. 190. 15. Carter, Gone to Texas, p. 11.

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16. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 13, 46. 17. Norton, Reflections on Political Identity, pp. 158–161. 18. Carter, Gone to Texas, p. 49. 19. Ibid., pp. 58–59. 20. Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789”; Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, pp. 19–44. On the Cherokee and civilization, see Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), pp. 201–202; Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 215; and William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renaissance in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 335–348. 21. As historian Edmund Morgan has shown, American political notions of freedom have been enhanced by the presence of people of color who are seen as unfree. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. Similarly, Toni Morrison argues that the presence of nonwhites has traditionally structured American literary works in a way that bestows a sense of independence and authority on white men. See Morrison, Playing in the Dark. 22. On contemporary white supremacist armed compounds, FBI assaults on them, and the way these events are interpreted by the Far Right, see Chip Berlet, ed., Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash (Boston: South End Press, 1995), pp. 169, 229, 231, 237, 357; and Michael Novick, White Power, White Lies: The Fight Against White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 263–265. 23. Carter, Gone to Texas, p. 178. 24. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 318, 322. 25. See James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1983), pp. 376–411.

Chapter 7. Between Political Order and Change 1. V. O. Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, 17, no. 1 (February 1955); Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review, 59, no. 1 (1958); Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System. For a history of the career of realignment theory, see David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). The major political upheaval that took place in the 1960s created what appeared to be the timely conditions for a major realignment from the old Democratic order. Yet such assertions appeared to work better as analyses of the downfall of the New Deal than at predicting a new, enduring electoral alignment. See John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For arguments about the autonomy or incoherence of institutions, see among others Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek,


“Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a ‘New Institutionalism,’” in Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994); and Adam D. Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development, 17 (Fall 2003), pp. 185–203. 2. Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes, “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Language, Culture and Political Change,” in Stephen Skowronek, ed., Formative Acts: Reckoning with Agency in American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 3. The term “associative chain” was coined by Victoria Hattam. It builds on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of chains of equivalence, which describes the way that diverse political elements are linked together in a unifying political logic. Hattam’s use of the term “association” is meant to suggest a process that involves subconscious appeals at work in the building of such linkages. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996). Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow of Race: Ethnic Politics in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4. In Michael Kazin’s words, “As a metaphor, Middle America evoked, simultaneously, three compelling meanings: the unstylish, traditionalist expanse that lay between the two coasts; an egalitarian social status most citizens either claimed or desired; and a widespread feeling of being squeezed between penthouse and ghetto—between a condescending elite above and scruffy demonstrators below.” Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 253. 5. See Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren, “Introduction” in Lowndes, Novkov, Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development; Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Press, 1993); and Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. King and Smith’s “racial orders” thesis in Rogers Smith and Desmond King, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 75–92. 6. For a more extensive theoretical examination of the role of language and institutions in political order and change, see Hattam and Lowndes, “The Ground Beneath Our Feet.” 7. See, for instance, Shafer and Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism.

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INDEX

Advance, 64 Agnew, Spiro, 112–13, 116, 128, 130, 131 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 121–22 Alcorn, Meade, 47 Alsop, Stewart, 68 American Dilemma (Myrdal), 18–21 American Independent Party, 93–100, 115, 116, 118–19, 125–26, 176n. 52 American Party, 103 American political development, 156–62 antigovernment sentiment, 4–5, 9, 140– 41, 142–50, 152–54. See also antistatism antistatism: antigovernment sentiment and, 154; conservatism and, 9, 77–79, 140–41; Goldwater and, 71; National Review and, 49; New Deal and, 154; Nixon and, 117–18; North and, 84–86; populism and, 77–79; race and, 71, 77– 79, 84–86; Republican Party and, 117– 18; Wallace and, 77–79, 84–86. See also antigovernment sentiment; statism Ashbrook, John, 62 associative chain. See chain of association backlash, 3–5, 68–70, 92–93, 160–62 Bailey, Josiah, 14 Baker, Howard, 68 Baker, Newton T., 18 banditry, 148

Barr, John U., 40 Bartley, Numan, 29 Billy Jack, 146–47 Black, Earl, 45 Black, Merle, 45 Bliss, Ray, 108 Boas, Franz, 19–20 Bozell, L. Brent, 53, 56–57, 66, 70 branchheading, 95–96 Bremer, Arthur, 103–4 Brennan, Peter, 135 Brewer, Albert, 126 Brown, Dee, 144 Brown, Edmund G. “Pat,” 110 Buchanan, Pat: new majority and, 136; silent majority and, 133, 134; speeches and, 130, 131; Wallace and, 107, 116 Buckley, William F., 48–49, 52–53, 70 Bush, George W., 1 Byrd, Harry, 15, 39, 46 Byrnes, James, 35, 38, 46 Calhoun, John C., 40–41 Calloway, Bo, 127–28 Carmines, Edward, 89 Carswell, G. Harrold, 126–27 Carter, Asa: antigovernment sentiment and, 142–45, 147–50, 152–54; The Education of Little Tree, 144–45, 146; generally, 9, 141–45; Gone to Texas, 9, 141,

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Carter, Asa (continued) 144, 146–54; race and, 142–47, 148– 49, 150–52, 153; Wallace and, 81, 91, 143; Watch for Me on the Mountain, 144, 146 Carter, Dan T., 144 Carter, Jimmy, 105, 154, 160 Cashen, Henry, 133 centralization, 16–17, 22–24, 117–18 chain of association, 4, 81, 157–58, 159– 60, 183n. 3 Chain Reaction (Edsall and Edsall), 3 change, 9–10, 155–62 Chappell, David, 43 Choice, 75 citizen activists, 89–93, 105 Citizens’ Councils, 39–40, 42, 141–42 civil rights: democracy and, 17; Democratic Party and, 58; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 26–31, 32–33; Eisenhower and, 39, 46–47, 47–48; freedom and, 74– 75, 82–83; Goldwater and, 6, 57, 58– 61, 66, 71–76, 110; Johnson and, 71, 93; Nixon and, 58–60, 106, 107, 111–12, 120, 124, 135; North and, 68–70; Republican Party and, 58–61, 70–76, 110; states’ rights and, 32–33, 57; Truman and, 26–27; Wallace and, 84, 93. See also civil rights movement; desegregation civil rights movement, 5, 7, 21–22, 22–23, 77. See also desegregation class, 5 Clifford, Clark, 27 Clinton, Bill, 3 Cole, Nat “King,” 143 Collins, Charles Wallace: background of, 15–16; conservatism and, 35–36; on desegregation, 41, 44; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 35– 36, 37; influence of generally, 7–8; political order and, 159; on white supremacy, 16, 19–26, 80–81, 86; Whither Solid South? written by, 11–12, 16 Colmer, William, 2 Colson, Charles, 135–36, 136–37 Committee on Civil Rights, 26–27

communes, 152–53 communism, 49, 84 Congress, 108–10 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 143 The Conscience of a Conservative (Goldwater), 56–57 conservatism: antigovernment sentiment and, 4–5, 9, 140–41; antistatism and, 9, 77–79, 140–41; backlash account of, 3–5; Collins and, 35–36; Democratic Party and, 109, 154; desegregation and, 49–54; discourse and, 106–7, 157; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 32–33, 35–36; economy and, 122–23; Goldwater and, 56–76, 106–7, 107–8; institutions and, 124–25; Jim Crow and, 53; National Review and, 49–54, 62; new majority and, 135–39; Nixon and, 9, 106–8, 110–11, 113–14, 122–23, 124–25, 135– 39; North and, 8, 44, 52–54, 68–70; populism and, 4–5, 77–79, 106–7; race and, 4–5, 6–7, 35–36, 43–44, 52–54, 65–76, 77–79, 106–7, 113–14, 124, 133–39, 157, 161; Republican Party and, 48, 50–51, 56–57, 58–76, 77, 104–5, 154; Right and, 3–5, 104–5; segregationism and, 7–8, 49–54; South and, 6, 52–54, 59–68, 70–76, 161; states’ rights and, 32–33, 49–54; violence and, 161. See also economic conservatism; Republican Party; Right; social conservatism Conservative Coalition, 14–15 Conservative Council, 89–90 culture, 9–10, 141 Davidson, Donald, 53–54 “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” 43 Delacorte Press, 144–45, 181n. 11 democracy, 16–17, 41, 52–54, 80–81 Democratic Party: civil rights and, 58; conservatism and, 109, 154; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 27–31, 36, 37–39; Federal Employment Practices Commission and, 24–25; Jim Crow and, 13, 67–68; National Review and, 50; New Deal

INDEX

and, 12–15, 24, 67–68, 106; Nixon and, 107, 119; North and, 8–9, 12–13, 28, 106; political order and, 11–12; race and, 12–15, 24–26, 106, 134–35; segregationism and, 67–68; South and, 8–9, 12–13, 24, 27–31, 67–68; states’ rights and, 2; Wallace and, 93, 100–105. See also Left; liberalism Dent, Harry: desegregation and, 127, 128; silent majority and, 132–33, 134; South and, 111–12, 116, 118–19, 125 desegregation: civil rights movement and, 5; Collins on, 41, 44; conservatism and, 49–54; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 39–40; Eisenhower and, 46–47, 47–48; Goldwater and, 63–64; interposition against, 40–44; Kennedy and, 63–64, 83–84; massive resistance to, 39–44; National Review and, 8, 44, 49–54; New Deal and, 3; Nixon and, 101, 111–12, 127–29, 137; North and, 68–70, 84–85; Republican Party and, 44; states’ rights and, 39–44, 49–54, 57; by Supreme Court, 34–35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 137; Thurmond and, 106; Wallace and, 81–85, 100–101. See also resegregation; segregationism Dewey, Thomas, 32, 45 discourse: conservatism and, 106–7, 157; culture and, 141; institutions and, 158– 59; interposition and, 41–42; Nixon and, 106–7; political order and, 78–79, 158–60; populism and, 78–79, 106–7; race and, 106–7, 157, 161–62; Republican Party and, 76; Right and, 158–60, 161–62. See also language Dixiecrat Revolt: Carter in, 141–42; civil rights and, 26–31, 32–33; Collins and, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 35–36, 37; conservatism and, 32–33, 35–36; Democratic Party and, 27–31, 36, 37– 39; desegregation and, 39–40; economic conservatism and, 32–33; as national movement, 31–34; North and, 28, 31–34; political order and, 159; race and, 7–8, 26–31, 32–33, 34–39; reflection upon, 1–2; Republican Party and,

34–39, 50–51; South and, 27–31, 31– 34; states’ rights and, 30–31, 31–34; statism and, 31–32; Truman and, 31, 32; Whither Solid South? (Collins) in, 11, 27, 29, 30 Dixon, Frank, 28, 29, 30, 34 Dorn, William Jennings Bryant, 55 Dudziak, Mary, 17 Eastland, James, 27, 30, 40 Eastwood, Clint, 9, 141, 144, 154 economic conservatism: backlash account and, 4–5; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 32–33; National Review and, 49; Nixon and, 114, 118, 121–25; race and, 5, 94, 118, 160, 161; South and, 11–12; states’ rights and, 32–33; Wallace and, 94, 101–2; white supremacy and, 16 economy, 13, 101–2, 114, 121–25. See also economic conservatism; New Deal Edsall, Mary, 3 Edsall, Thomas, 3 The Education of Little Tree (Carter), 144– 45, 146 Ehrlichman, John, 120, 122, 126, 134–35 Eisenhower, Dwight: civil rights and, 39, 46 – 47, 47– 48; in election of 1948, 28; elections of, 35 – 39, 45 – 46; Manion in administration of, 55; South and, 115 elections, 25–26, 47–48. See also individual candidates The Emerging Republican Majority (Phillips), 3, 100, 117, 132 employment, 23–24, 121–24 Ewing, Ed, 98–99 Family Assistance Program (FAP), 121–24 Faubus, Orval, 46, 55, 56 Federal Employment Practices Commission, 23–25, 34–35 Federation for Constitutional Government, 39–40 Finch, Robert, 127, 128 Fino, Paul, 117 Flanagan, Peter, 128 Folsom, James, 42

201

202

INDEX

Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 142, 143–44 freedom, 74–75, 82–83 Freide, Eleanor, 181n. 11 frontier myth, 145–47 Gabrielson, Guy, 36–37 Garson, Robert, 29 gender, 151–52 Geronimo, 144, 146 Gibson, Merritt, 30, 31 Gitlin, Todd, 4 Goldwater, Barry: antistatism and, 71; Bozell and, 53, 56; civil rights and, 6, 57, 58–61, 66, 71–76, 110; conservatism and, 56–76, 106–7, 107–8; desegregation and, 63–64; liberalism and, 106–7; Nixon and, 108; North and, 68–70; political order and, 159–60; presidential candidacy of, 72–76; race and, 57, 61, 65–76; South and, 8, 55– 57, 64–68, 115; states’ rights and, 57, 67; Suite 3505 group and, 61–70, 73; Wallace and, 93 Goldwater Cigars, 73–74 Gone to Texas (Carter), 9, 141, 144, 146, 146–54 Graham, Frank, 35 Gramsci, Antonio, 155 Graves, John Temple, 15, 33, 35–36, 37 Great Rediscovery, 155 Greenberg, Paul, 1 Grenier, John, 64, 65 Griffin, Mickey, 103 Gruber, Bronko, 86 Hadas, Elizabeth, 181n. 11 Haldeman, H. R., 122, 123 Haley, J. Evetts, 42 Hall, Leonard, 46 Hamlin, Stuart, 119 Harlow, Bryce, 126 Harrigan, Anthony, 54 Hattam, Victoria, 156, 183n. 3 Haynsworth, Clement F., 126 hegemony: backlash and, 3–4; Collins and, 32; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 40, 41–

42; Johnson and, 120; populism and, 154; Wallace and, 78, 88 Herbstreith, Dolores, 90 Herbstreith, Lloyd, 90 Hickenlooper, Bourke, 72 Hill, Lister, 64, 66 Hill, T. Arnold, 23 Hobsbawm, Eric, 148 Hoffa, Jimmy, 136 Hofstadter, Richard, 92 housing, 125 Hughes, Richard, 99 Humes, Theodore, 68–69 Humphrey, Hubert H., 28, 108, 115, 116, 118–19 identity, 21–22, 144–47, 148–49, 150– 52, 157–62 Imperiale, Anthony, 99 income tax, 90 institutions: American Independent Party and, 97–100; conservatism and, 124– 25; culture and, 9–10; democracy and, 17; discourse and, 158–59; New Deal and, 17; Nixon and, 124–25, 138–39; political order and, 156–57, 158–59; Republican Party and, 65, 76; Right and, 90–92, 97–100, 156–57, 158–59; Wallace and, 90–92, 97–100 interposition, 40–44 Iraq war, 2–3 Issue Evolution (Carmines and Stimson), 89 Jackson, Cecil, 98–99 Javits, Jacob, 63 Jefferson, Thomas, 40 Jim Crow: conservatism and, 53; Democratic Party and, 13, 67–68; dismantling of, 5, 7, 44; Eisenhower and, 46; Goldwater and, 74; populism and, 77; Wallace and, 87 Johnson, Lyndon: civil rights and, 71, 93; economy and, 114; election of, 75, 77; Vietnam War and, 118; violence and, 94 Johnston, Olin D., 63

INDEX

Jones, Bill, 88 judiciary. See Supreme Court Katzenbach, Nicholas, 83–84 Kazin, Michael, 183n. 4 Kennedy, John F., 63–64, 65, 69, 71, 83– 84 Kennedy, Robert, 66, 96 Key, V. O., 6, 15, 45, 164n. 8 Kilpatrick, James Jackson, 41, 44, 53, 121, 123 King, Desmond, 158 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 96, 115 Kleindienst, Richard, 112 Krauthammer, Charles, 1 Krogh, Bud, 132–33 Krol, Cardinal, 135 Ku Klux Klan, 91–92, 97–98, 142, 143 labor, 135–36 Laclau, Ernesto, 183n. 3 language, 95–96, 99–100, 102–3, 115– 16, 143, 157–59. See also discourse LaRue, Fred, 110, 112, 119 Laughlin, Tom, 181n. 14 law and order: Nixon and, 114, 115, 134– 35; Wallace and, 87–88, 93–95, 96– 97, 98–99, 103–4. See also violence Lee, Robert E., 142 Left: antigovernment sentiment and, 140– 41, 145–47, 149; backlash account and, 3–4; liberalism and, 35–36; Nixon and, 107, 113; race and, 145–47, 151; violence and, 136, 145–47. See also Democratic Party; liberalism liberalism: antigovernment sentiment and, 140; economy and, 121–25; Goldwater and, 106–7; Left and, 35–36; New Deal and, 12–15, 154; Nixon and, 106–7, 113, 120–25, 131–32, 135, 136; race and, 7– 8, 17–19, 80, 142; Republican Party and, 77; violence and, 136; white supremacy and, 17–19. See also Democratic Party; Left Liberty Amendment, 90 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 92

Little Big Man (Penn), 146–47 Logan, Rayford, 21 Lott, Trent, 1–3, 4, 160 Machiavelli, 2 Madison, James, 40 Manion, Clarence, 55–56 Martin, James, 61, 64, 66, 67 Marvica, John, 99 massive resistance, 39–44 McCorvey, Gessner, 28, 29, 30, 38 McGovern, George, 103, 105, 135, 137 McGrath, Howard, 28 McNary, Charles, 14 Meany, George, 124, 136 Mehlman, Ken, 163n. 4 metropolitan bourgeoisie, 6 micropolitics, 157 militias, 98–99, 152–53 Miller, William, 60 Milliken, Roger, 56, 62 Mills, C. Wright, 54 Mitchell, John, 116, 117, 128 moderates: in Republican Party, 48, 50, 58–64, 72, 106, 154; Wallace as, 100– 105 Morton, Thruston, 58 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 121, 122, 123– 24 Mundt, Karl E., 37, 38 Murakawa, Naomi, 7 Murphy, James, 33–34 Myrdal, Gunnar, 18–21, 80, 92 Nathan, Richard, 133 National Review: antistatism and, 49; conservatism and, 49–54, 62; democracy and, 52–54; Democratic Party and, 50; desegregation and, 8, 44, 49–54; economic conservatism and, 49; mission of, 48–49; political order and, 159–60; race and, 50–51, 52–54, 70– 71; Republican Party and, 50, 62; social conservatism and, 49; South and, 8; on states’ rights, 51–54; on voting rights, 52–53

203

204

INDEX

The Negro Family (Moynihan), 121, 122 new alignment, 117–18, 121. See also new majority New Deal: antigovernment sentiment and, 154; backlash account and, 3; centralization and, 16–17, 22–24; Conservative Coalition and, 14–15; criticism of, 12–15, 16–17, 22–24; democracy and, 16–17; Democratic Party and, 12–15, 24, 67–68, 106; desegregation and, 3; economy and, 13; institutions and, 17; liberalism and, 12–15, 154; Nixon and, 106, 107, 120–25; race and, 3, 4, 6, 12– 15, 23–24; realignment and, 3; Republican Party and, 14–15; segregationism and, 6, 67–68; South and, 6, 12–15, 24; Truman and, 24; Wallace and, 8–9. See also economy new majority, 106–7, 117–18, 123–24, 135–39. See also silent majority New York Times, 144 Nixon, Richard: antistatism and, 117–18; centralization and, 117–18; civil rights and, 58–60, 106, 107, 111–12, 120, 124, 135; conservatism and, 9, 106–8, 110– 11, 113–14, 122–23, 124–25, 135–39; Democratic Party and, 107; desegregation and, 101, 111–12, 127–29, 137; discourse and, 106–7; economic conservatism and, 114, 118, 121–25; elections of, 2, 6, 9, 25, 100, 111–19, 135–37; institutions and, 124–25, 138–39; labor and, 135–36; language of, 115–16; law and order and, 114, 115, 134–35; Left and, 107, 113; liberalism and, 106–7, 113, 120–25, 131–32, 135, 136; new alignment and, 117–18, 121; New Deal and, 106, 107, 120–25; new majority and, 106–7, 117–18, 123–24, 135–39; political order and, 137–39, 160; populism and, 9, 106–7, 130–31, 136–37; race and, 9, 100, 106–7, 109–10, 113–14, 115–16, 117, 118, 122, 124, 130–39; segregationism and, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 111–12; silent majority and, 106–7, 113– 14, 129–35; South and, 107–19, 122– 23, 125–29, 133–35, 137; Supreme

Court and, 126–27; Vietnam War and, 129–30 North: antistatism and, 84–86; backlash in, 68–70; civil rights and, 68–70; conservatism and, 8, 44, 52–54, 68–70; Democratic Party and, 8–9, 12–13, 28, 106; desegregation and, 68–70, 84– 85; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 28, 31–34; Goldwater and, 68–70; race and, 32, 52–54, 68–70, 80–81, 82, 84–86; Republican Party and, 68–70; in silent majority, 133–34; states’ rights and, 8; Wallace and, 80–81, 82, 84–86 Norton, Anne, 148 Novak, Robert, 1, 71 nullification, 40–44 O’Donnell, Peter, 64, 110, 112, 125 Operation Dixie, 47–48, 58, 59, 60–61, 63–64 Orren, Karen, 156 Otto, Fred, 99 The Outlaw Josey Wales, 9, 141, 144, 146– 54 Panetta, Leon, 127–28 Parmet, Herbert, 115 Patterson, Isabel, 50 Penn, Arthur, 146–47 Pepper, Claude, 35 Perez, Leander, 33–34, 38 Philadelphia Plan, 124 Phillips, Kevin: The Emerging Republican Majority, 3, 132; new majority and, 124; Nixon election and, 25, 100, 116–17; silent majority and, 133–35; voting rights and, 128 Phillips, Rubel, 61 political order: American political development and, 156–62; Carter and, 160; change and, 9–10, 155–62; Collins and, 159; culture and, 141; Democratic Party and, 11–12; discourse and, 78–79, 158– 60; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 159; Goldwater and, 159–60; identity and, 157–62; institutions and, 156–57, 158–59; language and, 157–59; National Review

INDEX

and, 159–60; Nixon and, 137–39, 160; race and, 158; Reagan and, 160; realignment and, 7–8, 16, 25, 155–56; Right and, 155–62; Wallace and, 160 populism: antigovernment sentiment and, 141; antistatism and, 77–79; backlash and, 4–5; conservatism and, 4–5, 77– 79, 106–7; discourse and, 78–79, 106– 7; hegemony and, 154; Jim Crow and, 77; Nixon and, 9, 106–7, 130–31, 136– 37; race and, 77–79; Right and, 8–9, 78–79, 154; South and, 6; Wallace and, 77–79, 107, 116, 143 Potter, I. Lee, 47, 48, 58, 59, 60, 64 Price, Lloyd E., 29 Price, Raymond, 115 Quadagno, Jill, 123 race: antigovernment sentiment and, 141, 145–47, 148–49, 153; antistatism and, 71, 77–79, 84–86; backlash and, 3–5, 92–93; Carter and, 142–47, 148–49, 150–52, 153; class and, 5; concept of, 6– 7; conservatism and, 4–5, 6–7, 35–36, 43–44, 52–54, 65–76, 77–79, 106–7, 113–14, 124, 133–39, 157, 161; democracy and, 17, 41, 52–54, 80–81; Democratic Party and, 12–15, 24–26, 106, 134–35; discourse and, 106–7, 157, 161–62; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 7–8, 26–31, 32–33, 34–39; economic conservatism and, 5, 94, 118, 160, 161; economy and, 13, 121, 122, 124; employment and, 23–24; gender and, 151–52; Goldwater and, 57, 61, 65–76; identity and, 144–47, 148–49, 150–52, 158; Iraq war and, 2–3; law and order and, 114; Left and, 145–47, 151; liberalism and, 7–8, 17–19, 80, 142; National Review and, 50–51, 52–54, 70–71; New Deal and, 3, 4, 6, 12–15, 23–24; new majority and, 135–39; Nixon and, 9, 100, 106–7, 109–10, 113–14, 115–16, 117, 118, 122, 124, 130–39; North and, 32, 52–54, 68–70, 80–81, 82, 84–86; Operation Dixie and, 61; political order

and, 158; populism and, 77–79; Republican Party and, 2–3, 4, 13, 24–26, 36– 37, 38–39, 47, 61, 65–71, 117, 118, 133– 35; Right and, 3–5, 11–12, 91–92, 141, 145–47, 153, 158; Roosevelt and, 13, 23; science and, 19–20; silent majority and, 130–35; social conservatism and, 7; South and, 5–6, 24–26, 32, 34–37, 52–54, 65–68, 70–71, 80–84, 109– 10, 141; states’ rights and, 7–8, 32–33, 50–51; statism and, 22–23; Supreme Court and, 34 – 35; Truman and, 25; violence and, 93 – 95, 98 – 99, 109–10, 145 – 47; voting rights and, 52– 53; Wallace and, 8 – 9, 77–79, 80 – 86, 91– 93, 94 – 95, 97–101, 107, 116, 118 – 19, 143 racial coding, 81, 99–100, 152 Randolph, A. Philip, 23 Reagan, Ronald: in election of 1968, 111, 112; elections of, 3, 9, 110; political order and, 160; presidency of, 140, 155 realignment: antigovernment sentiment and, 154; New Deal and, 3; political order and, 7–8, 16, 25, 155–56; silent majority and, 133–34 The Real Majority (Scammon and Wattenberg), 132, 134 Rehnquist, William, 74–75 Renan, Ernest, 2 Republicanism, 2 Republican Party: antistatism and, 117–18; backlash and, 4; centralization and, 117– 18; civil rights and, 58–61, 70–76, 110; conservatism and, 48, 50–51, 56–57, 58–76, 77, 104–5, 154; desegregation and, 44; discourse and, 76; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 34–39, 50–51; Federal Employment Practices Commission and, 24–25; institutions and, 65, 76; liberalism and, 77; moderates in, 48, 50, 58– 64, 72, 106, 154; National Review and, 50, 62; New Deal and, 14–15; Nixon election and, 2; North and, 68–70; race and, 2–3, 4, 13, 24–26, 36–37, 38–39, 47, 61, 65–71, 117, 118, 133–35; Right and, 104–5; South and, 2, 6, 8, 45–48,

205

206

INDEX

Republican Party (continued) 55–57, 59–68, 70–76, 107–19, 125– 29, 133–35, 137; states’ rights and, 2; Thurmond and, 55–56, 73, 109; white supremacy and, 67. See also conservatism; Right resegregation, 7 Rice, Condoleezza, 2–3 Rieder, Jonathan, 116 Right: antigovernment sentiment and, 140, 145–47, 149, 153–54; backlash account of, 3–5, 160–62; conservatism and, 3–5, 104–5; discourse and, 158– 60, 161–62; identity and, 157–62; institutions and, 90–92, 97–100, 156–57, 158–59; language and, 157–59; political order and, 155–62; populism and, 8–9, 78–79, 154; race and, 3–5, 11–12, 91–92, 141, 145–47, 153, 158; Republican Party and, 104–5; South and, 141; violence and, 78, 145–47. See also conservatism; Republican Party Ripon Society, 64, 72 Rizzo, Frank, 135 Rockefeller, Nelson, 58, 66, 72, 111, 112, 117 Rockwell, George Lincoln, 91 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: death of, 24; democracy and, 17; elections of, 11, 15; race and, 13, 23; South and, 15; Supreme Court and, 14 Roosevelt, Theodore, 48 Rusher, William: Goldwater and, 62, 65– 66, 76; National Review and, 49, 71; Reagan and, 112; on worldview, 49, 158 Russell, Richard, 47 Safire, William, 116, 117–18, 130, 131, 136 Scammon, Richard, 132, 134 Schlafly, Phyllis, 112 Schmitz, John, 103 Schulman, Bruce, 125 science, 19–20 Scranton, William, 72 The Search for American Political Development (Orren and Skowronek), 156 To Secure These Rights, 26–27

segregationism: conservatism and, 7–8, 49–54; Democratic Party and, 67–68; massive resistance movement for, 39– 44; National Review and, 49–54; New Deal and, 6, 67–68; Nixon and, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 111–12; North and, 68–70; South and, 5–6; states’ rights and, 49– 54; Wallace and, 81–85, 100–101. See also desegregation; resegregation Shelton, Robert, 91, 100 Shorey, Gregory, 56, 62 Shultz, George, 128 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 143 silent majority, 106–7, 113–14, 129–35. See also new majority Skowronek, Stephen, 130, 138, 156 Smith, Rogers, 158 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 151 social conservatism, 4, 7, 49 social issue, 132, 134–35, 136 South: class in, 5; conservatism and, 6, 52–54, 59–68, 70–76, 161; definition of, 164n. 8; Democratic Party and, 8– 9, 12–13, 24, 27–31, 67–68; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 27–31, 31–34; economy and, 11–12, 122–23; Eisenhower and, 115; in elections generally, 25–26; Federal Employment Practices Commission and, 24–25; Goldwater and, 8, 55–57, 64–68, 115; metropolitan bourgeoisie, 6; National Review and, 8; New Deal and, 6, 12–15, 24; Nixon and, 2, 107– 19, 122–23, 125–29, 133–35, 137; populism and, 6; race and, 5–6, 24–26, 32, 34–37, 52–54, 65–68, 70–71, 80–84, 109–10, 141; Republican Party and, 2, 6, 8, 45–48, 55–57, 59–68, 70–76, 107–19, 125–29, 133–35, 137; Right and, 141; Roosevelt and, 15; segregationism and, 5–6; in silent majority, 133–34; states’ rights and, 79–84; voting rights and, 52–53, 66; Wallace and, 79–84, 118–19 Southern Challenge, 60–61 The Southerner, 142 sovereignty, 40–44 Sparkman, John, 38

INDEX

states’ rights: civil rights and, 32–33, 57; conservatism and, 32–33, 49–54; Democratic Party and, 2; desegregation and, 39–44, 49–54, 57; Dixiecrat Revolt and, 30–31, 31–34; economic conservatism and, 32–33; Goldwater and, 57, 67; as national movement, 31–34, 37, 39–40; National Review on, 51–54; North and, 8; race and, 7–8, 32–33, 50–51; Republican Party and, 2; South and, 79–84; Wallace and, 79–84; white supremacy and, 37; Whither Solid South? (Collins) and, 11. See also Dixiecrat Revolt States’ Rights Institute, 32–33, 39–40 statism, 22–23, 31–32. See also antistatism Steinberg, Stephen, 18 Stevenson, Adlai, 38 Stimson, James, 89 Suite 3505 group, 61–70, 73 Supreme Court: desegregation by, 34–35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 137; Nixon and, 126–27; race and, 34–35; Roosevelt and, 14 Taft, Robert, 45, 46 Talmadge, Herman, 35, 50 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 68 Thurmond, Strom: desegregation and, 106, 127; in Dixiecrat Revolt, 27–31, 33; Lott controversy over, 1–2, 4; Nixon and, 109, 112, 119; Republican Party and, 55–56, 73, 109 Tower, John, 72, 110, 112 Truman, Harry S., 15, 24, 25, 26–27, 27– 31, 32 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 145 Turnipseed, Tom, 98, 119 University of Alabama, 81, 83–84 University of Mississippi, 63–64, 82, 83 University of New Mexico Press, 145, 181n. 11 Vandenburg, Arthur, 14 Vaughn, George, 38 Vietnam War, 93–94, 118, 129–30, 146– 47, 154

violence: antigovernment sentiment and, 145–47; conservatism and, 161; Johnson and, 94; Left and, 136, 145–47; liberalism and, 136; race and, 93–95, 98– 99, 109–10, 145–47; Republicanism and, 2; Right and, 78, 145–47; Wallace and, 78, 87–88, 93–95, 96–97, 98– 99, 103–4. See also law and order voting rights, 52–53, 66, 128 Wallace, George: in American Independent Party, 93–100, 115, 116, 118–19, 125–26; antistatism and, 77–79, 84– 86; campaigns of generally, 6, 8–9; citizen activists and, 89–93, 105; civil rights and, 84, 93; Democratic Party and, 93, 100–105; desegregation and, 81–85, 100–101; economic conservatism and, 94, 101–2; on freedom, 82– 83; Goldwater and, 93; institutions and, 90–92, 97–100; language of, 95–96, 99–100, 102–3, 143; as moderate, 100– 105; New Deal and, 8–9; North and, 80–81, 82, 84–86; political order and, 160; populism and, 77–79, 107, 116, 143; race and, 8–9, 77–79, 80–86, 91– 93, 94–95, 97–101, 107, 116, 118–19, 143; shooting of, 103–4; South and, 79–84, 118–19; states’ rights and, 79– 84; violence and, 78, 87–88, 93–95, 96–97, 98–99, 103–4 Wallace, Gerald, 104 Wallace, Henry, 15, 27 The Wallace Stand, 102–3 war, 75. See also Iraq war; Vietnam War Watch for Me on the Mountain (Carter), 144, 146 Watergate scandal, 137–38, 154 Wattenberg, Ben, 132, 134 Watts, J. C., 163n. 2 Weaver, Richard, 49 Weiss, Nancy, 13 West, 133–34 What the Negro Wants (Logan), 21 White, F. Clifton: Goldwater and, 62–63, 64–65, 66–68, 68–70, 73, 74, 75; Reagan and, 110, 111, 112

207

208

INDEX

White, Theodore, 73 White, Walter, 23, 28 white supremacy: Collins on, 16, 19–26, 80–81, 86; democracy and, 52–54; economic conservatism and, 16; interposition and, 41; liberalism and, 17–19; as political doctrine, 19–26; Republican Party and, 67; states’ rights and, 37 Whither Solid South? (Collins), 11–12, 16, 19–26, 27, 29, 30

Wilkinson, Horace, 29, 33–34 Wills, Garry, 70 Witcover, Jules, 96 Workman, William, 61, 63, 64 World War II, 21–22 Wright, Fielding, 27, 29, 30, 35 Wright, W. W., 33–34 Yerger, Wirt, 71 Young Republicans, 65

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