How The Democrats Lost Dixie, Part 1: The Rise of The New South

 

It's treated as gospel by the far left that after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the South immediately started going Republican. They will point to how Strom Thurmond changed parties in 1964 and helped deliver South Carolina to Goldwater, one of five southern states that went Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.

Two things need to be pointed out. It is true that the South began turning Republican consistently in the next three elections and indeed the Republicans began to make gains in Dixie in a way they had never done before. But it didn't happen overnight and the effects weren't seen in the Senate or even gubernatorial levels for years and even decades to come in many states. And in 1964 it was barely seen in the Senate even in some of the states Goldwater either did well in or carried out right.

In Mississippi no Republican even tried to challenge John Stennis. Harry Byrd won his sixth consecutive term in Virginia and Robert Byrd (no relation) won his first reelection campaign  in West Virginia. Albert Gore Senior struggled slightly but did win reelection in Tennessee and Stuart Symington won reelection in Missouri. Even in Maryland where George Wallace had come perilously close to winning in his renegade campaign against LBJ for President, Joseph Tydings trounced Republican incumbent Glenn Beall to take that seat back for the Democrats.

Two years later with the Vietnam War starting to damage LBJ's landslide victory the Democrats lost ground in the house but not in the senate. And not in any of the states that Goldwater had carried. To be sure Arkansas senators John L. McClellan and Richard Russell ran unopposed but the GOP couldn't match much of an assault against John Sparkman of Alabama or Richard Eastland of Mississippi. Allan Ellender was unopposed in Louisiana. And while Thurmond did win his seat in South Carolina another Democrat managed to narrowly take the second seat in that state Fritz Hollings.

To be sure there were some signs of Republican gains in the South particularly in Tennessee when Howard Baker would win. But throughout the rest of Dixie the Democrat order still held and still by margins that had to be considered landslides. The other two Republican wins were Mark Hatfield in Oregon and Charles Percy in Illinois.

This pattern mostly held during all of the elections during Nixon win and reelection: even as the Republican Party was beginning to sweep the South on the electoral map (with Wallace splitting the region in his third party run in 1968) by and large Democrats were holding it, particularly in the Senate even as the old guard segregationists began to retire or die. Herman Talmadge and William Fulbright kept their seats even as Wallace took Georgia and Arkansas in 1968 while Hollings won his first full term even as Nixon took South Carolina by a huge majority. Republicans managed to make gains in the Senate in 1970 but with the exception of Bill Brock defeating Al Gore in Tennessee none were in Dixie. And in what was the biggest demonstration of Nixon's lack of coattails in his 1972 landslide the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate and the biggest differences were in the five states he'd had his biggest margins of victory.

In Alabama John Sparkman easily won reelection as did John McClellan in Arkansas. J. Bennett Johnson took a Democratic seat in Louisiana. James Eastland easily won reelection in Mississippi. And in Georgia Sam Nunn won election in the seat that Richard Russell had once occupied. There were some signs of growth in Dixie – William Scott won in Virginia by a narrow margin over William Spong and Jesse Helms became the first Republican to ever win a Senate seat in North Carolina. But that significant victory was likely negated when for the first time in 26 years a Democrat Walter Huddleston won an election in Kentucky.

This went against what many Southern Republicans had been sure would happen in the aftermath of Nixon's election. After desegregation had been moved into the courts Southerners such as Thurmond were sure that the Southern strategy that had propelled Nixon to the White House would play out. Campaign strategist Kevin Philips had written that Republicans should 'stop going after the black vote and enforce the Voting Rights act in the South. "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are."

However in 1970 Thurmond through his weight behind Albert Watson for the Governor under the Republican banner to challenge the Democrat governor Robert McNair. McNair had ascended to the governorship in 1965 and had already been reelected twice. In January of that year McNair went on statewide TV to deliver a historic address in the state that had been argued the hardest against integration.

"We have run out of courts and we have run out of time," McNair said in this address. "We must admit to ourselves that we have pretty well run the legal course and the time has come for compliance or defiance. In South Carolina, we have always followed the law. We will continue to do so. We will comply with the court rulings."

This appalled the die hard segregationist Thurmond who openly said that integration was against South Carolina's decency. But two months later outside the high school of the small town of Lamar, when integration was supposed to begin two hundred white parents, many carrying makeshift weapons attacked several buses and overturned them. The presence of police stopped the riot before things became out of hand.

That night all three networks carried reports of the violence in Lamar with NBC broadcasting an extended clip from Governor McNair's press conference in which we denounced the 'unspeakable acts'. He also decried 'those who helped create the type of dangerous and inflammatory public attitude which made such an attack possible" making it clear he meant men like Thurmond and Watson.

The day after the Washington Post excoriated Thurmond who tried to deny responsibility: "These men…have been playing with matches in public for some time now, and yet they want us to know immediately and for the record if there's one thing they deplore its fire."

One of Thurmond's campaign officials pointed something out: "Up until 1970 Southern conservatives like Thurmond and Watson and others could rant and rave about school integration and fight and oppose it – and it really hadn't happened. Suddenly, instead of stopping something from happening, the segregationists, myself included, were in the position of when we ranted and raved about something, it had already happened; it was a fait accompli."

Put another way after decades of arguing that the sky would fall if integration in schools took place, the opposite had happened. With white parents overturning school buses and knocking down black schoolchildren with bricks, the politics of law and order that men like Thurmond had campaigned for in terms of Nixon looked very different. That year Watson lost the governor's race to Democrat John West. As Hollings would point out the politics of the three p's – 'passion and prejudice and polarization' wasn't playing in the South any more.

During this period Republicans were now being challenged by a new generation of moderate Democrats. Democrats had a monopoly on the black vote and the more Republicans ran to the right, the more it energized the base. Typically Democrats needed little more than a third of the white vote to ensure victory. These Democratic candidates gave high-minded but measured speeches about racial progress that flattered the prejudices of southern voters about how much the South had changed and combined with the Democrat's New Deal heritage, they had easy entrée to working class whites and accused Republicans of being the country club set. Men like Hollings, Sam Nunn and in Arkansas Dale Bumpers and David Pryor would become fixtures in the Senate for years and decades to come.

This was a better illustration of 'the New South' then the election of African-American Maynard Jackson of Atlanta in 1974. A moderate white Democrat had a far easier time of winning in the South then the kinds of Republicans during this period. It was little noted in the aftermath of Nixon's reelection, mainly because far more was going on to stun the nation.

Within months of Nixon's reelection Watergate had begun to cripple the White House. The hearings, led by North Carolina's Sam Ervin, slowly picked apart the scandal within. Spiro Agnew, Nixon's vice president who had been along with Thurmond his most adamant rabble rouser, had been forced to resign due to a kickback scandal. House minority leader Gerald Ford became the first Vice President to be confirmed under the 25^th Amendment. Thurmond would be one of those to stick with Nixon to the bitter end and would be in the White House with him when he resigned on August 9^th 1974.

By the time the midterms were over many people didn't think the Republican Party would exist much longer. The Democrats gained 49 seats in the House during that year and while the Senate elections were bad for Republicans (they would lose four seats and the Democrats margin went to 61) it could have actually been far worse. Bob Dole won reelection by the slimmest margin he would have in his entire career in the Senate, winning by less than 2 percent points. Milton Young of North Dakota only won reelection by less than a tenth of a percentage point. Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma won reelection by less than half a percentage point. Louis Wyman of New Hampshire needed to survive two recounts and only won by two votes. And it was only because Paul Laxalt barely emerged victorious in Nevada (narrowly beating a young Democrat named Harry Reid) for the only real Republican gain. The Republicans actually lost some of the gains they'd made in the South in the last few elections. Edward Gurney who'd won in Florida retired and the Republican who took over was defeated by Democrat Richard Stone. Marlow Cook of Kentucky was defeated by Wendell Ford.

As it was many conservatives did think Watergate had effectively killed the Republican party. Abraham Viguerie thought as much and in the aftermath of the midterms reached out to the recently retired Governor of California Ronald Reagan and asked him to head a new conservative party as President. Reagan spent several weeks seriously considering this but eventually turned down Viguerie. He would spend much of 1975 considering whether or not to challenge the incumbent President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.

While this was going on the Democrats were more or less preparing for what they assumed would be a restoration to the White House and a return to the liberal order that many assumed McGovern had laid to waste in the aftermath of the 1972 election. Many wanted Senator Ted Kennedy to lead it, despite his continued denials and the shadow of Chappaquiddick which still hung over him five years after the events. However in September he issued a statement that not only would he not run but that he would not accept the nomination and would refuse a draft. Just as surprising to some was the decision of Walter Mondale who after going through the preliminaries said that he couldn't face another year of 'sleeping in Holiday Inns."

As a result several Democrats began to make runs for the nomination. The overwhelming majority were considered liberals and many of them were from the Senate: Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho and the more middle of the road Henry Jackson.

Overshadowing all of them was the spectre of George Wallace, the man who even though confined to a wheelchair and increasingly hard of hearing was still a symbol to many of the nation's discontent. Slowly he began to rise in the polls as the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination, though eventually Hubert Humprhey the 1968 Democratic nominee began to overtake him and would lead the polls well into the start of the campaign season.

No one gave any thought to the current governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter who in 1972 was so unknown headlines were written saying "Jimmy Who?" That he'd been planning even after Nixon's reelection to begin his long trip to the Democratic nomination was basically unknown at the time and even as the primaries began, no one thought he had a chance in hell.

In the next article I will deal with how so much of the liberal wing of the party and so many other aspects of it had major issues with Jimmy Carter from the start of his arrival on the scene and how they never truly went away even after he won the White House.