Bloggin' Dixie

In a post at the National Review entitled ‘The Party of Civil Rights’, Kevin D. Williamson presents a provocative but deeply flawed revision of American history, which casts the Republican Party as always being the defenders of civil rights for African-Americans and the Democratic Party as always the reverse. There are strong connections, he claims between Frederick Douglass and President Eisenhower, just as there are between the fire-eaters and LBJ.

Every student of American history knows the basic outlines of this story – the South, initially split in its partisan allegiances, began to vote monolithically Democratic in the 1830s or 1840s in response to the links between the rising abolitionist movement and the Whig Party. From there, the party was dominant in Dixie until 1) the rise of a white-collar middle-class in growing and industrialising southern cities, and 2) a backlash against national Democrats’ support for civil rights. Conversely, African-Americans were largely loyal Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans until the New Deal, and became firmly locked into the Democratic column as a result of the civil rights movement. It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the ideological descendants of the Dixiecrats found their way into the GOP, especially when they were the same people.

In order to make his argument, Williamson relies on some odd arguments and spurious claims – Lyndon Johnson’s desire to be seen as a champion of civil rights in the North and an opponent in the South is singled out as if it were abnormal behaviour for a politician. He tells us that General Eisenhower began desegregating the military before President Truman, but Ike had no partisan affiliation until around one year prior to his election, and actually considered taking a spot on the Democratic ticket in 1948. The old saw about Woodrow Wilson segregating the federal government is another half-truth: he completed a process begun under McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, Republicans all. And the Republican Party’s shifting and calculating positions on race are presented as one linear narrative from Lincoln to the 1957 Civil Rights Act – in fact, its willingness to pander to segregationist sentiment dates from the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction.

There is one aspect of the article on which Williamson is (mostly) right: the fact that the GOP had been growing in the South prior to the backlash against civil rights. Williamson throws out examples of pre-WWII Republican victories in southern congressional seats, seemingly without noticing that most of his examples would be in Appalachian districts, where a Whig/Republican political culture had been strong since the Jacksonian era. In 1960, for example, the Party of Lincoln held seven seats in the South: four were in Appalachia (eastern Tennessee [two], southwestern Virginia [one], and western North Carolina [one]) and three in middle-class suburban areas (Dallas [oil], Tampa [tourism and retirees], and northern Virginia [civil servants]). Other areas of Dixie with Republican voting patterns were explainable by factors which pre-dated the New Deal: sugar barons’ need for tariff protection in coastal Louisiana or the abolitionism of the pre-statehood German settlers of central Texas. Moreover, the Republican ascendancy drew its support from multiple sources. Take Georgia as an example: in 1960, Kennedy carried the state while Nixon carried Atlanta; four years later, the rural areas swung heavily to the Republicans and gave the state to Goldwater, while Atlanta voted for the pro-Civil Rights Act LBJ.

To dress up the modern-day GOP as the best friend of black America, Williamson has to perform a conscious mystification of congressional electoral history. He points out that the southern states which elected anti-civil rights Democrats to the Senate continued to do so after the national party began to support civil rights. As anyone who knows anything about American politics knows, the two major parties are the very definitions of ‘big tents’, and congressional seniority was also a reason that some of the old Dixiecrats hung on well into the 1970s and 1980s. Williamson jokes that “[t]hey say things move slower in the South – but not that slow”, as if congressional seniority, presidential voting patterns, and local factors didn’t tell us anything. Similarly, he reminds us that the majority of southern Representatives were Democrats until 1994, omitting that the Democrats had controlled the House since 1958, and that the South’s shift at the presidential and senatorial levels was already complete long before the Newtslide of 1994.

The article’s treatment of Barry Goldwater is also one of its blind spots. The Arizona Senator is described as not being “strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other”. In fact, he helped found the Cactus State’s chapter of the NAACP, a point which Williamson overlooks but which have helped his argument. Other 1960s-era GOP figures more friendly to African-American concerns (Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, John Lindsay) are also ignored, presumably because they aren’t conservative enough. In addition to the rise of a southern middle class, Williamson adds anti-communism and law ‘n’ order to the reasons for the South’s partisan shift, as if either were unrelated to questions of race. Anti-communism was a key feature of opposition to civil rights: reactionaries were always quick to seize upon the Soviet bloc’s condemnation of Jim Crow and upon the communist connections of prominent African-American figures such as Martin Luther King and Paul Robeson. As for law and order, we only need look at the Willie Horton ad to see its potential as a racist dog-whistle.

Littered throughout the article is the usual neoconservative stuff about welfare creating a culture of dependency – apparently a topic on which Williamson has a book forthcoming. To argue, as he does, that over nine-tenths of African-Americans vote for a party which deliberately denies them economic opportunity is little more than an inverse of the ‘false consciousness’/‘voting against their economic interest’ argument put forward by liberals such as Thomas Frank to condemn working-class white conservatives. Surely the best people to consult as to which party is the best defender of African-Americans are African-Americans themselves.

Lastly, there’s something missing from Williamson’s narrative of a GOP committed to civil rights from Reconstruction to the present – the various attempts by the party to court southern segregationist votes throughout that time. Just because these attempts were largely unsuccessful in ending the Democrats’ control of the Solid South doesn’t mean the Republicans were committed to civil rights throughout this time.

The Republican Party didn’t ignore the South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Rutherford Hayes appointed a southern Democrat as his Postmaster-General (then the most powerful position in Cabinet because of the patronage its occupant could dispense). Chester Arthur tried to exploit the emerging Greenback/Populist movement to split the South, but its antipathy to Republican economic policies was insurmountable. Although the party tried to legislate for federal enforcement of voting rights during the Harrison Administration, the GOP of the 1880s and 1890s gradually neglected its black and Appalachian southern voters in order to win over a larger share of the non-Appalachian white population there. By the early twentieth century, it was common for different sets of Republican delegates (one ‘lilywhite’ and one ‘black and tan’, i.e. multi-racial) to arrive at national conventions claiming to be the true Republicans of some southern state or other – it was credentials fights over these delegations, rather than care for the welfare of African-Americans that made it necessary for GOP leaders to pay homage to their concerns. (Hence Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, or the tentative support of Presidents Harding and Coolidge for anti-lynching bills.)

The party consciously courted the votes of white southerners attracted to its economic policies (tariffs, internal improvements) and to its interventionist foreign policy. (Anti-communism was added to the mix after the advent of the New Deal.) All the while, it took its African-American constituents for granted, to the point where they were ready to switch parties. The idea of a merger between the Republicans and the Dixiecrats was always being discussed, and came closest to fruition before the 1952 presidential poll – one wonders how this was at all conceivable if the Republicans hadn’t already made concessions to Jim Crow. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ lock on the South, their need to win African-American votes in big northern cities, and their infiltration by programmatic liberals enabled them to neglect the sentiments of southern whites and become the true Party of Civil Rights.