Of course, Nixon and Reagan did sweep the entire South in their 1972 and 1984 reelections. Also the Midwest, the Colorado Mountains, the windswept prairies, the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands. Nixon walloped his opponent, George McGovern, in every state of the union except Massachusetts. The same thing happened in 1984, when Reagan won forty-nine states, losing only his opponent Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota—and Dutch nearly took that. A political party that attributes such landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad.
Revealing what intellectuals really thought at the time, as late as 1972, liberal luminary Arthur Schlesinger Jr. openly acknowledged in the pages of the New York Times that the segregationists would be voting for McGovern—not Nixon—writing that “voters hesitate between McGovern and George Wallace.” Note that he did not say voters hesitated between Nixon and Wallace.
So firmly were the segregationists in the Democratic fold, that Schlesinger went on to praise them for their integrity. The Wallace votes in the primaries, Schlesinger said, showed that voters cared deeply about—I quote—“integrity.”8 That’s what liberals said before they decided to do a complete historical rewrite.
And of course, McGovern gave an obligatory tribute to the segregationist Wallace in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention that year.9 This was in 1972, the exact midpoint between Goldwater and Reagan, when the imaginary “southern strategy” should have been complete, according to the fevered propaganda of the left.
It wasn’t until 1988, a quarter century after Goldwater’s run, that a Republican presidential candidate finally won all five of his southern states in anything other than forty-nine-state Republican landslides. Bush won only a forty-state landslide that year.
In addition to Goldwater’s states, Bush also won California, Maine, Vermont, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Delaware. And yet no one talks about Republicans’ secret strategy to appeal to Ben & Jerry’s lesbians to explain their Vermont triumph in 1988.
Four years later the South would flip right back and vote for Clinton, who carried six southern states, including two Goldwater states.
Not only that, but from the moment of LBJ’s woe-is-me prediction in 1964 that Democrats had lost the South forever, Democrats continued to win a plurality of votes in southern congressional elections every two years for the next thirty years, right up until 1994.10 Republicans didn’t win the Dixiecrat vote—the Dixiecrats died. If the Republicans were scheming to capture southern racists—of which there is no evidence—it didn’t work.
In presidential elections for forty years, between 1948 and 1988, Republicans never won a majority of the Dixiecrat states, except in two forty-nine-state landslides. Whatever turned the South away from the Democrats—their enthusiasm for abortion, gays in the military, Christian-bashing, springing criminals, attacks on guns, dovish foreign policy, Save the Whales/Kill the Humans environmentalism—it wasn’t race.
By contrast, Democrats kept winning the alleged “segregationist” states right up to the 1990s. In 1976, Carter won all the Goldwater states. Even as late as 1992, Clinton carried two of the southern states won by Goldwater: Georgia and Louisiana.
Were these southerners voting for Goldwater out of racism, but supporting Clinton for other, noble reasons? If anything, it was the opposite. Clinton’s mentor was J. William Fulbright, a vehement foe of integration who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At his gubernatorial inauguration, Clinton publicly embraced Orval Faubus, the man who stood in the schoolhouse door in Little Rock rather than comply with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling.11 (That’s when Republican Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce civil rights in Arkansas.)
Goldwater didn’t vote against the 1964 act because he supported segregation—he had long since desegregated his family’s department stores, as well as the Arizona National Guard. He was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Goldwater voted against the 1964 act because he was a libertarian opposed to the act’s restrictions on private property, which he believed to be beyond Congress’s powers under the commerce clause of the Constitution. Unlike the Democrats who voted against the act, Goldwater had supported every other civil rights bill until that one. Much of this was finally admitted by the Washington Post—in Goldwater’s obituary.12
It’s bad enough to cite some gaseous remark by a politician as if it proves something. But for liberals to keep citing Johnson’s self-serving blather when the subsequent facts completely contradict it requires either raw mendacity or Chris Matthews–level of stupidity.
Democrats have had a stronger hold on Massachusetts for the last half century than Republicans have had on the South. How do we know they’re not using code words to appeal to Puritan witch-hunters?
It’s amazing the lengths liberals have gone to in order to hide the truth.
In any discussion of who the segregationists were, liberals switch the word “Democrats” to “southerners.”13 But it wasn’t southerners opposing civil rights; it was Democrats. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example, was supported by all forty-three Republicans in the Senate, but only twenty-nine Democrats. It was opposed by eighteen Democrats, including northerners such as Wayne Morse of Oregon, Warren Magnuson of Washington, James Murray of Montana, Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.14
There were also plenty of southern integrationists: They were Republicans.
When a Republican in the South was as rare as one in Hollywood today, these brave conservatives battled Democrat segregationists. But their lonely fight has been meticulously excised from the historical record by the left.
In 1966, pro-integrationist Republican Winthrop Rockefeller became the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction, replacing rabid segregationist Democrat (and Bill Clinton pal) Orval Faubus. Rockefeller pushed for integration of the schools and appointed the first African American to a cabinet level position. Rockefeller’s win carried another Republican integrationist, Maurice Britt, into the lieutenant governor’s office.
Also in 1966, Republican Howard Baker ran on an integrationist platform, taking his campaign “directly to blacks” to become the first Republican senator from Tennessee since Reconstruction.15 Years later, Baker would serve as the Republican majority leader in the Senate and President Reagan’s chief of staff.
Both Baker and Rockefeller won statewide southern elections as Republicans championing civil rights two years after Goldwater won his supposedly game-changing victory in four Dixiecrat states by sneakily appealing to racists.
Also in 1966, Republican and civil rights supporter Bo Calloway ran against a virulent racist Democrat, Lester Maddox, for governor of Georgia. While Calloway was in Congress backing Voting Rights Act of 1965,16 Maddox was in Atlanta, chasing blacks from his segregated restaurant with a shotgun. Maddox eventually closed the restaurant rather than serve black people.
In the governor’s race, Maddox was endorsed by future president Jimmy Carter. The vote was too close to call, so the Democratic state legislature gave it to Maddox. Calloway appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the legislature’s decision—with the vote of former KKK member Justice Hugo Black—who was appointed by Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt.
Republican Charles Pickering of Mississippi spent the sixties literally risking his life to prosecute the powerful Democratic Ku Klux Klan. From its inception, the Klan was—as liberal historian Eric Foner writes—“a military force, serving the interests of the Democratic Party.…”17
Republican Spiro Agnew wasn’t in the South, but—again—not all segregationists were southern: All segregationists were Democrats. In 1966, Agnew ran against Democratic segregationist George Mahoney for the Maryland governorship. Four years earlier, as Baltimore County Executive, Agnew had enacted some of the first laws in the nation that outlawed race discrimination in public accommodations.18 In a specific rebuke to fair-housing laws, Mahoney’s campaign slogan wa
s “your home is your castle—protect it.” Running for governor, Agnew vowed to enact a state fair-housing law and to repeal Maryland’s antimiscegenation statute. He developed a close working relationship with black leaders, meeting with them frequently during the campaign and while in office.
Even back in the fifties, Republicans were battling Democratic segregationists in the South. Republican Horace E. Henderson took on the segregationist “Byrd machine” in Virginia by running for lieutenant governor as a pro–civil rights Republican—and losing. He brought a lawsuit to challenge the legality of the Democrats’ discriminatory poll tax, a position that prevailed in the Supreme Court.
There are more proabortion Republicans today than there were Republican segregationists in the twentieth century. The segregationists were Democrats, just as they are the proabortion party today.
When not calling Democrat segregationists “southerners,” liberals call them “conservatives”—much like the media label the most extreme Soviet communists or Islamic jihadists “conservatives.” Brave integrationist stances taken by southern Republicans, putting their lives in danger, are labeled “moderate” positions, even “liberal.” Liberals lie about history by manipulating words.
Thus, a Harvard Crimson article on Agnew’s strong integrationist views in the 1960s is titled: “Earlier Agnew Took Moderate Stances.” A Web site on American presidents amazingly refers to Agnew’s sterling civil rights record as “to the left of his Democratic challenger”—a segregationist.19 Even David Hackett Fischer capitulates to the standard phraseology, writing: “Truman managed to be liberal on race and conservative on property.…” 20
Liberals simply take everything that is good in history—which they generally fought against at the time—and retroactively label it “liberal.” Everything bad—which they generally supported—is branded “conservative.” Reagan wanted to smash communism, Carter warned Americans not to have “an inordinate fear of communism.”21 So in what Alice-in-Wonderland lingua franca are hardened communists “conservatives”? In another twenty years, history books will be describing Reagan’s aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union as the “progressive” stance and calling Jimmy Carter’s appeasement strategy the “conservative” position.
There is no sense in which race discrimination is “conservative.” Liberals were for race discrimination in the fifties; liberals are for race discrimination today. (As long as their kids still get into a good college.) There was never a period of time when race discrimination was a Republican policy, except maybe briefly when Nixon imposed affirmative action on the building trades doing business with the government in the sixties, but they deserved it. (A policy for which LBJ is showered with praise for thinking about—but never actually implementing.)
When journalists and historians are forced to admit some Democrat was a segregationist—something that often slips their minds—the news is delivered amid a blizzard of excuses.
The appalling civil rights record of liberal hero and lifelong Democrat Sam Ervin is explained away on Wikipedia: “Defenders of Ervin argue that his opposition to most civil rights legislation was based on his commitment to the preservation of the Constitution in its pristine formulation that he repeatedly stated encapsulated civil, human and equal rights for all. There is little if any evidence that he engaged in the racial demagoguery of many of his Southern colleagues.”
Ervin’s precious commitment to the Constitution seemed to leave him when it came to big, government-spending programs. As for racial pandering, Robert Caro reports that Ervin said of the 1957 civil rights act: “We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something” and “We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”22 This quote will surely be excised from future editions of Caro’s book.
The only reason anyone knows that recently departed Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a member of the Klan is because conservatives kept screaming it from the rooftops in response to liberals’ monumental lies about who the segregationists were. Byrd was no mere segregationist; he was an officer with a racist vigilante group.
Liberal journalist John Nichols wrote fondly of the former Klanner in the Nation: “I covered Byrd during much of that last quarter century and, like the vast majority of his fellow senators, developed an appreciation for the sincerity of the man’s rejection of the past.”23
The Washington Post lies outright, describing Senator William Fulbright (in their lingo) as “a progressive on racial issues.” Fulbright was a full-bore segregationist. He voted against the 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills. He was a signatory to the Southern Manifesto.24
It helps that liberals refuse to learn any history and instead endlessly repeat popular liberal folktales.
In November 2008, Adam Nossiter wrote in the New York Times that Virginia and North Carolina “made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama.”25
To review some first-grade history, the Confederates were Democrats and the Union, led by Abraham Lincoln, was Republican. Thus, to be “breaking from their Confederate past,” Virginia and North Carolina would have to vote for a Republican, not a Democrat. North Carolina and Virginia first broke “from their Confederate past” in 1928, when both states went for Herbert Hoover.
If Mr. Nossiter is rewriting history to switch sides in the Civil War, both Virginia and North Carolina have voted for Democrats for president more than a dozen times since the end of the war. Most recently, Virginia went for LBJ in 1964 and North Carolina voted for Carter in 1976.
If instead Nossiter is using “Confederate” to mean “segregationist” or “Barry Goldwater-supporting,” neither Virginia nor North Carolina voted for either Thurmond or Goldwater.
If Mr. Nossiter is referring to the fact that two southern states had miraculously voted for a black to be president, it was the first time for the rest of the country, too.
Moreover, if he thinks it’s amazing that two Southern states voted for any black person, then he must be unaware that the former Confederate states were the first to send blacks to Congress. This is missing from liberal history books because the dozens of black politicians elected to Congress after the Civil War were all Republicans. The first black governor in the country was P. B. S. Pinchback, acting governor of Louisiana in 1872. (The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson claimed in 2008 that “in the nation’s history we’ve had only two black governors—Douglas Wilder in Virginia and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts.”26 He forgot Pinchback, a Republican.)
The first black lieutenant governor in the nation was Oscar James Dunn, elected in Louisiana in 1868, who was, of course, a Republican. Two years later, black Republican Alonzo J. Ransier was elected lieutenant governor in South Carolina.
The nation’s first black governor since Reconstruction was elected not merely in the South but in one of the two states Adam Nossiter specifically cited as “breaking from [its] Confederate roots” to vote for a black man. Virginia made Douglas Wilder the country’s first elected black governor in 1989.
What on earth is Nossiter talking about? What could he possibly mean by saying Virginia and North Carolina “made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama”? Liberals have submerged themselves so deeply in their self-flattering fantasies about racist Republicans and heroic Democrats that it’s impossible to make any sense of what they say. They don’t read history books. Liberals only read books about cats.
One thing that’s clear is that Nossiter intended to praise Virginia and North Carolina for voting for Obama. He went on to explain that Obama’s victory in those states could be attributed to “an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years.” Liberals seem to imagine the entire South—the first region of the country to send lots of blacks to Congress—is an English-speaking Taliban in need of instruction by white liberals.
Most of the time, liberals are at least smart enough to steer clear of any details
in order to avoid making inane statements, like Nossiter. Note the complete absence of facts in this outburst from Joe Klein: “Traditionally—at least since Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’—Republicans have been truly despicable on race, and there are more than a few stalwarts who continue to bloviate disingenuously in support of a ‘colorblind’ society, by which they mean a tacit relapse into segregation.”27
I’m sorry—was Joe Klein some hitherto unacknowledged hero of the civil rights movement? Was he with King? Why does he get to play the Freedom Rider, while some thirty-year-old Republican is suddenly on Team Bull Connor? Contrary to Klein’s suggestion, it seems highly unlikely that Republicans are trying to bring back segregation inasmuch as that was a Democratic policy, never supported by the Republican Party. Having endlessly perseverated these nonsense fairy tales to themselves and the public, liberals turn around and race-bait Republicans to advance Democratic policies having nothing to do with blacks.
In 2002, liberals were exultant when Senator Trent Lott toasted Senator Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party, saying: “I want to say this about my state: 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.”
Liberals leaped on the meaningless praise at an old-timer’s birthday party to remind everyone that Thurmond had run for president on a segregationist platform! This led to a new round of racism accusations against the Republican Party—which Thurmond joined sixteen years after his 1948 segregationist presidential run.