Punishing Race by Tonry Michael

Author:Tonry, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY

The Republican Southern Strategy is commonly said to date from the 1960s and Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) is generally described as its basic text. Both things are true. The term of art was used to characterize Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and Phillips was a strategist in Nixon’s 1968 campaign who later published a book making a case for it. Both statements, however, are oversimplications. The foundations were laid two decades earlier.

Proposals that southern segregationist Democrats combine with Republican conservatives were first seriously promoted in the 1940s, when civil rights advocates began to win legal and political victories and white supremacists began to worry. On June 25, 1941, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which established the Federal Employment Practices Commission. The order forbade racial discrimination by federal contractors and empowered the FEPC to investigate complaints. After Roosevelt’s death segregationists hoped Harry S. Truman would be more sympathetic. Truman had been a U.S. senator from Missouri, a border state with an almost Southern history of troubled race relations. Many southerners hoped he would be more sensitive to segregationist concerns than Rossevelt had been. Instead, within two months of taking office, he proposed legislation to make the FEPC permanent. Truman later appointed a biracial Committee on Civil Rights which, in To Secure These Rights (1947), recommended enactment of antilynching, anti–poll tax, and fair employment legislation. The Committee also proposed prohibition of discrimination in interstate transportation and desegregation of the armed forces. In his January 7, 1948, State of the Union address Truman announced his intention to carry out the Committee’s proposals (Lowndes 2008, chap. 2).

Segregationist southern Democrats were stunned. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi declared, “The South we know is being swept to its destruction.” Southern governors convened to denounce Truman’s desegregation effort and approved a resolution mostly written by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina warning that the South would not “stand idle and let all of this happen” (Lowndes 2008, 27). Among the results were opposition to Truman’s bid for reelection and the nomination of Thurmond as the “Dixiecrat” candidate for president in 1948. He received 20 percent of the southern vote and carried Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

I stop retelling the story at that point and skip to the 1960s. A number of fine books tell it in detail and carry it forward from the 1940s (Carter 1996; Black and Black 2002; Murakawa 2005; Lowndes 2008). My aim in going back to the 1940s is to show that what became widely known as the Southern Strategy had its roots in earlier efforts by segregationists to maintain white supremacy in the South.

Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaigns first for the Republican nomination and then for the presidency were the first national campaigns in which Republicans openly played the race card. The Republican National Committee since 1961 had been pouring money into “Operation Dixie,” an effort to reach out to conservative and segregationist southern Democrats, and recruiting segregationist candidates. Goldwater trod a fine line.

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