Republican Populist by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

5

DIXIE’S FAVORITE

Agnew and the Southern Strategy

In April 1972, as the presidential election season was kicking into gear, Congressman William Dickinson, a Republican from Alabama, invited Spiro Agnew to attend the upcoming Independence Day celebration in Montgomery. Dickinson’s election to Congress in 1964, when he defeated a long-standing Democratic incumbent, was part of the growing success of the Republican Party in encouraging conservative white southerners to abandon the party of their ancestors.1 Dickinson made headlines his first year in office when he accused the organizers of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery of engaging in biracial sex parties. “Drunkenness and sex orgies were the order of the day,” he proclaimed. A collection of “human flotsam—adventurers, beatniks, prostitutes, and similar rabble . . . engaged in an all-night session of debauchery within the church itself,” Dickinson charged, adding, “Only by the ultimate sex act with one of another color can they demonstrate they have no prejudice.”2 Now in 1972, as part of the effort to transform the white south into the Republican Party’s conservative base, Dickinson knew that Agnew could help the cause. Therefore it was not just the usual political flattery when Dickinson wrote, “Mr. Vice President, Alabamians love Spiro Agnew.”3

By 1969 the national press had already recognized Agnew’s strength in growing the GOP in the southern states. In December the New York Times reported that an Arkansas Democrat had conceded, “It used to be that at a Democratic meeting of any kind, you were safe to lead off with a Spiro Agnew joke. But no longer.” The vice president, the article continued, “is one of the most popular men in the South” and “the new leader in the drive to expand Republican strength in the South.”4 By 1971 Agnew was being hailed as “Dixie’s favorite.”5 Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond’s right-hand man, recalled that “Agnew became not only a beloved household name in the South, but even to many he became ‘Spiro, Is My Hero.’”6 By the end of his first term some southern conservatives even voiced a preference for Agnew over Richard Nixon. Political analysts Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg relayed the sentiments of one southern politician who said “he was voting for Agnew in 1972, and if that means voting for Nixon, so be it.”7

That Agnew would emerge as a key figure in the transformation of the white South into a Republican bastion would have come as a great surprise to the political pundits of just a few years earlier. Agnew, after all, came out forcefully against George Wallace when the Alabama governor campaigned in Maryland during the 1964 Democratic primary. Kevin Phillips didn’t mention Agnew in his sweeping analysis of the 1968 election, The Emerging Republican Majority, which includes an examination of the party’s success in the South. Agnew’s nomination as Nixon’s vice presidential candidate was largely seen as a compromise to placate competing regional and ideological factions, although it is significant that the leading southern Republican of the day, South Carolina’s Thurmond, played a key role in the final selection.

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