From the Saturday Evening Post: The Civil Rights Act vs. States’ Rights

A look at the tension between the two.

- Click here for the article.

Goldwater recognized that the Civil Rights Act would split the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party. For years, the Democrats had been able to hold these two warring factions together, but as the liberal wing began supporting the growing civil rights movement, many white, conservative Democrats began withdrawing their support of the party their families had supported for generations.

The day would come, Goldwater predicted in a 1963 Post article, “The G.O.P. Invades the South,” when the region would vote solidly Republican. He noted that Republican candidates were already winning elections in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia. The South would shift its party allegiance, he said, because of “a profound evolution of political thinking and acting.”

It had nothing to do, he asserted, with white voters being angry with liberal Democrats’ support of integration. Southerners were leaving the party, he said, because they believed in “state’s rights,” and limiting the role of the federal government. They viewed the Civil Rights Act as an intrusion that, Goldwater argued, would eventually lead to “the creation of a police state.”

Civil rights were important, Goldwater believed, but they were “resolved more safely and soundly on the state or local level.”

But the local level, as Anthony Lewis wrote, was precisely where the problem lay. (“Goldwater Is Wrong On Civil Right” September 26, 1964) The law in southern states and towns was vigorously enforcing racist policies, using intimidation and violence to deprive African Americans of their rights.

The U.S. Government had tried Goldwater’s approach for nearly a century, Lewis argued. When states were left on their own to handle race relations, “the result was massive inequality, injustice, and cruelty that shocked the conscience of this nation…The law has been cynically manipulated to maintain white supremacy, in defiance of the most elementary rights of a citizen.”

Federal intervention was necessary, he said, to prevent state officials from enforcing racist politics

This Day in History: Harding publicly condemns lynching

The year is 1921. The story is from History.com, and it compliments our look at the shift parties took on civil rights issues - as well as the relationship between the national and state governments - over the 20th Century.

- Click here for the story.

On this day in 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers a speech in Alabama in which he condemns lynchings—illegal hangings committed primarily by white supremacists against African Americans in the Deep South.

Although his administration was much maligned for scandal and corruption, Harding was a progressive Republican politician who advocated full civil rights for African Americans and suffrage for women. He supported the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill in 1920. As a presidential candidate that year, he gained support for his views on women’s suffrage, but faced intense opposition on civil rights for blacks. The 1920s was a period of intense racism in the American South, characterized by frequent lynchings. In fact, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) reported that, in 1920, lynching claimed, on average, the lives of two African Americans every week.

During the 1920 presidential campaign, Harding’s ethnicity became a subject of debate and was used by his opponents to cast him in a negative light. Opponents claimed that one of Harding’s great-great-grandfathers was a native of the West Indies. Harding rebuffed the rumors, saying he was from white “pioneer stock” and persisted in his support of anti-lynching laws. Although the anti-lynching bill made it through the House of Representatives, it died in the Senate. Several other attempts to pass similar laws in the first half of the 20th century failed. In fact, civil rights for blacks were not encoded into law until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Harding’s public denunciation of lynching would appear insincere if one were to believe allegations that he had actually been inducted into the Ku Klux Klan while in office. In 1987, historian Wyn Wade published The Fiery Cross, in which a former Ku Klux Klan member claimed to have witnessed Harding’s initiation into the Klan on the White House lawn. Scholars have since pored over Harding’s papers, but have found no evidence to support this allegation.

 Wikipedia: Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.

From Frum Forum: Charles Whalen: Congressman Of The Real Majority

The author of the book discussed below wrote about the Republican member of Congress who seemed to most embody the liberal/moderate Republican who became the target of the more conservative members of the coalition.

- Click here for the article.
- Click here for the Wikipedia on Charles Whalen.

Here's a taste of the article:

In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his conservative aide Patrick Buchanan believed they had discovered a winning Republican formula. A recent book, The Real Majority by Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg, had argued that the prototypical American voter was a forty-seven-year-old machinist’s wife from Dayton, Ohio. The authors believed that Democrats could sway this pivotal voter by emphasizing economic issues, but Nixon and Buchanan realized they could counterattack by playing up social issues on which Democrats were vulnerable, including welfare, busing, crime, student radicalism, and drug abuse. Nixon wrote that this new conservative strategy would be aimed “primarily at disaffected Democrats, and blue collar workers, and at working class ethnics. We should set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year old Dayton housewife.”

But who in fact was the politician who won the votes of that Dayton housewife? For most of the 1960s and ‘70s it was Congressman Charles W. Whalen, Jr., who was usually considered among the most liberal Republicans in the House. Whalen was perhaps the GOP’s most successful vote-getter, racking up margins of over 70% in most of his elections and running unopposed in 1974, despite running in a district with a two-to-one Democratic registration margin. He was counted among the best and most effective Congressmen in multiple surveys, and even his opponents respected his intelligence and integrity. His heterodox positions angered his local Republican organization, however, and raised the question of how much divergence from a conservative agenda the party ought to tolerate.

It was easy to make the case that the former businessman and economics professor was a liberal. As a member of the Ohio state legislature from 1954 to 1966, Whalen had been an outspoken supporter of civil rights and author of the state’s first fair housing law. From the time of his first Congressional victory in 1966, he became a thorn in the side of the GOP leadership, opposing the military draft and the Vietnam War that the party supported, and calling for a reordering of national priorities to address issues such as air and water pollution, education, urban decay, hunger and welfare. He opposed most new weapons systems, including the Nixon administration’s proposal for an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense. In 1971, he co-authored an amendment to the defense procurement bill that would have prohibited new funds being spent on military involvement in Indochina. The measure failed, but offered the first indication of significant House opposition to the Vietnam War. Whalen also made early and controversial calls to offer diplomatic recognition to Communist China and reestablish ties with Castro’s Cuba.

Whalen himself felt that his advocacy of civil rights, education, and the environment were well within the Republican progressive tradition. His social liberalism was also balanced by a deep and sincere fiscal conservatism. His early battles with the GOP leadership came because of his opposition to tariffs, and indeed he proposed a world free trade association that would have eliminated trade barriers entirely. His belief that government needed to address social problems set him apart from Ohio’s mainly rural conservatives, while his conviction that the cost of government services had to be kept low set him apart from liberals who didn’t really seem to believe that government services had to be paid for.

How were moderate and liberal Republicans driven from the party?

When we start getting into political parties - in both 2305 and 2306 - we'll look at the history of party eras. The story varies slightly since we take a more in-depth look in 2305 and focus mostly at Texas in 2306. But we look at the recent shift from Democratic to Republican dominance in the states in both classes. I tend to spend more time looking at the Democratic side of the story, the national party's embrace of civil rights which drove southern Democrats away, as well as the shift in the Texas economy from an agrarian to business base.

I don't look at the Republican side of the story as much as I should. Just as progressives in the Democratic coalition drove out the Southern conservatives, ideologically driven conservatives in the Republican coalition did the same to moderate and liberal Republicans and redefined what it means to be a party member.

A recent book - Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party - tries to explain this shift with some detail.

Some recent reviews condense the story.

- Rule and Ruin: When and why did the Republican Party tip so far to the right?
- “Rule and Ruin” by Geoffrey Kabaservice.
- Ancient History.
- The GOP’s Reality-Based Community

- Click here for an interview with the author.

From the Nation: Why Today’s GOP Crackup Is the Final Unraveling of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’

We will be looking at the role the southern strategy played in helping the Republican Party reassert its strength following the New Deal. This author argues that the effort was only helpful in the short term.

- Click here for the article.

Here's a relevant chunk:

Nixon’s reconfiguration brought together “polar opposites among white Americans,” Lilly noted. The traditional wing of the party— “country club” Republicans, who include corporate leaders, financiers and investors—became partners with poor, rural, church-going voters, among them the Southern “segs” who had previously always voted for Democrats. Black Southerners didn’t count in the equation, since they were still mostly being blocked from voting.

After Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson confided to a White House aide, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Nixon’s new Republicans became a formidable national party, Lilly explained, but they always straddled the tension between rich and poor.

“The problem,” Lilly said, “is that this latter group has almost nothing in common with the country club wing.… The country clubbers don’t care about prayer in the public schools, gun rights, stopping birth control, abortion and immigration.” On the other hand, common folks don’t worry over marginal tax rates, capital formation, or subsidies for major corporations.

“If they ever fully understood that their more prosperous party brethren were contemplating deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid to pay for those policies, they would be in open rebellion,” Lilly observed.

From Politico: The Man Who Launched the GOP’s Civil War How a textile magnate turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump.

For our upcoming look at how the South went from being Democratic to Republican. I addition to racial issues, underlying hostility to labor unions by southern workers played a key role, as did the activities of a prominent political entrepreneur.

- Click here for the story.

Milliken’s name does not mean much to most anyone born after the Vietnam War, but he was the godfather to the first generation of modern conservatives. The owner of one of America’s largest private companies, a textile manufacturer he turned into a chemical-processing giant, Milliken used the profits from his staunchly antiunion mills to fund conservatism’s founding institutions, including the National Review and Heritage Foundation. Many of the facts we take for granted in politics today—that the GOP is a conservative party; that it counts on the solid support of white, male, working class voters in the South and West; and that big-money donors can pick and choose its candidates, even to the point of running themselves—were the fruits of his career.

From the NYT: G.O.P. Senator Courts Blacks in Mississippi Primary Race

Incumbent Senator broadens coalition in order to win election.

- Click here for the article.

Inside an abandoned grocery store-turned-church here, a dozen black pastors gathered to discuss a seemingly impossible task: persuading their congregations to vote Republican next week.

“In tough times, you’ve got to do some unusual things,” said Bishop Ronnie C. Crudup Sr., a pastor of the New Horizon Church International in Jackson.

Unusual is an understatement. Mississippi, with its painful history of Jim Crow laws, may have the most racially polarized electorate in the country. Blacks make up a higher percentage of the electorate here than in any other state — 36 percent in 2012, according to exit polls. But they are so overwhelmingly Democratic that they remain nearly invisible in Republican politics, with just 2 percent participating in the Republican primary in 2012.

Now, with Thad Cochran, the state’s senior Republican senator, fighting political extinction in next Tuesday’s primary, his campaign is taking the unlikely step of trying to entice black voters to help decide the most high-profile Republican contest in the country.

And it worked.

Here's commentary:

- Thad Cochran's run-off win is a victory for pork, not a racially diverse GOP.

Cochran ran partially on the idea that Mississippi needs the federal government. Haven;t that one in a while.

This is what party/ideological polarization in Congress looks like

This is mostly for 2305 - but it helps describe the shift in party dominance in Texas, which we touch on in 2306. The chart applies to the United States Congress - not the Texas Legislature.

Click here for the chart's source.



Notice that Republicans become increasingly conservative in the 95th Congress which was elected in 1976 - the first election following the Watergate scandal, and the election that brought Jimmy Carter to the White House. And also that the ideological drift is more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats.

The story that is commonly told about about the roots of ideological polarization is that it begins with (Texas Democrat) Lyndon Johnson's signature of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Doing so re-positioned the Democratic party - which had historically supported slavery and racial segregation - to being the party of desegregation and civil rights.

Republicans - notable Richard Nixon in 1968 - saw an opportunity to flip the south from being a Democratic stronghold - to a Republican one. The process for doing so was called the Southern Strategy and it involved a series of positions that indirectly touched on race, but mostly focused on the animosity southerners had towards a national government that was forcing them to change laws related to racial segregation.

The above graph reflects the gradual shift of the South - a conservative area of the country - from the Democratic to Republican party.

Note that these efforts - begin in the 1960s - have a delayed effect in Congress. There are many reasons for this, most having to do with the fact that Democrats dominated Congress until the election of 1994. They were the majority party for 40 uninterrupted years. Being a member of the majority party allows access to goodies that are then beneficial to the local constituencies.

But this would not happen for some time - so why do we see the shift occur when it does?

From Frontline: How Texas became a "Red" State

We will discuss political organizations in Texas soon enough and try to outlining the process by which Texas shifted from a solid Democratic state to a relatively solid Republican one.

Click here for a Frontline feature on the story.

We'll go over some of this material soon.

This Wikipedia entry on the Solid South might be helpful also. While Texas isn't exactly a southern state, it tends to vote in sync with the other states in the south east. This helps explain the politics associated with that tendency.

Is the South - state legislatures specifically - resegregating?

Here is an argument that is has.

The percentage of black legislators in positions of power in southern state legislatures is the lowest it has been since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The ability to draw legislative districts has been a key instrument in accomplishing this.

Here's a take on the strategy:

Republicans in control of redistricting have two goals: the defeat of white Democrats, and the creation of safe districts for Republicans. They have achieved both of these goals by increasing the number of districts likely to elect an African-American. Black voters are gerrymandered out of districts represented by whites of both parties, making the Democratic incumbent weaker and the Republican incumbent stronger.

Take Mississippi. In the state’s 2012 redistricting, all of the decisively black legislative districts – where 60 percent or more of the voters are African-American – have been preserved, and four new majority-black districts have been created. This, in turn, has allowed Republicans to reduce the percentage of blacks in districts where Republican incumbents had close contests in Mississippi’s 2011 off-year elections.

While increasing the number of blacks elected to state legislatures, Republicans have been effectively implementing their long-range goal of decimating the number of white Democrats. Depending on local demographics, this has been achieved in two ways.

Where possible, Republican redistricting strategists have reduced the number of blacks in white Democratic legislative districts in order to render the incumbent vulnerable to Republican challenge. In other areas of the state, where it has not been not possible to “bleach” a district, Republicans have sharply increased the percentage of blacks to over 50 percent in order to encourage a successful black challenge to the white Democratic incumbent.

In private discussions, Republicans in the South talk explicitly about their goal of turning the Democratic Party into a black party, and in many Southern states they have succeeded. African-American legislators make up the majority of state House and Senate Democratic caucuses in most of the Southern states.

Bob Perry (1932-2013)

Perry (no relation to the governor) owned Perry Homes and became a significant supporter of both the Republican Party (though he supported some Democrats) and various conservative causes. He played a significant role in Texas' political transformation from a Democratic to Republican state. Some detail: 

From Texas Tribune:

The self-made Houston homebuilder was one of the biggest bankrollers of conservative causes over the past two decades, a financier of politicians like George W. Bush, Rick Perry and Greg Abbott, of Super PACs like American Crossroads and Make Us Great Again, and of 527s that include, most famously, the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth. He gave $28 million to Texas candidates and causes between 2000 and 2010, and another $38 million over that period outside of Texas, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The Center for Public Integrity counted $23.5 million in contributions to super PACs during the last election cycle, among other contributions. 

. . Perry fits into a line of rich Texans involved in politics, a list of names that includes brothers Herman and George Brown, Dan Root, members of the Hunt family, Louis Beecherl, Fred Baron, Bernard Rapoport and a few dozen more, who gave big to both parties. They weren’t the only sources of political money in their times, but they were often the most important ones.

The New York Times:

Mr. Perry attracted wide attention as a national donor during Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign, in 2004, when he gave $4.4 million to a group known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for its attack ads accusing Mr. Kerry of overstating his military accomplishments in Vietnam and discrediting his former comrades in arms.

. . . Mr. Rove’s causes and candidates often benefited from Mr. Perry’s money. They worked together in Texas in the 1980s on limiting the liability of corporations in civil lawsuits, an effort known as tort reform.

Mr. Rove once said that Mr. Perry had contributed to Republicans in Texas when few others were “willing to write checks to Republican candidates.”

In 1986, Mr. Perry served as campaign treasurer for the successful campaign for governor of William Clements, a Republican, while Mr. Rove was a political consultant.

“He plays big, and he plays often,” Bill Miller, a Texas lobbyist, said of Mr. Perry in an interview with The Texas Tribune in 2010. “ ‘Small’ is not a word that’s in his vocabulary.”

The Dallas Morning News:

Rove tapped Bob Perry as a major donor for his super PAC, American Crossroads, in 2010 and 2012. In 2004, Perry was also one of three major contributors who launched Swift Boat Veterans, a group that targeted Democrat John Kerry and helped elect George W. Bush to a second term in the White House.

But Perry’s role as godfather of Texas political giving began years earlier as part of a small network of GOP donors who methodically backed Republican candidates in down-ballot races with hopes of eventually ending the long Democratic dominance in Texas.

“Karl Rove laid the groundwork. His donor list developed in Texas was the base when Bush first ran for president,” said Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit group that tracks campaign fundraising. “What we see now with the super PACs is that federal elections have been Texasized.”

Perry was one of the earliest contributors to the GOP effort to turn Texas red.

When Bill Clements ran in 1978 to become the first Republican governor in Texas in a century, Perry sent the campaign committee a check for $5,000 — a large sum at the time in state political races.

“Prior to 1978, all the big business money was going to conservative Democrats,” said Jim Francis, who was Clements’ campaign manager. “When Clements won the governorship in ’78, it became acceptable to give money to Republican candidates who might have a chance of winning.”

Clements won, then lost four year later. When he ran again in 1986, Perry was a major donor in a campaign where Rove headed direct-mail fundraising.

From The Daily Beast: When Did the GOP Get So White?

John Avlon comments on the Republican Party's increasingly monolithic complexion and reminds us that this was not always the case. The GOP was once the party of diversity and civil rights and many provided many minority groups their first opportunity to get elected to office. He speculates on what happened.

When we discuss political parties, we do the same. Both our major political parties went through major changes during the civil rights era in the 1960s - notably the consequence of the decision of a Texas Democrat to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Each saw opportunity in pilfering identifiers from the other. What has emerged is a diverse Democratic Party and a relatively Anglo Republican Party.

Avlon's article allows us to look at this a bit early.

If not us, who?

The NYT has a review of a book (so does the Washington Times) that should help students understand how the Republican Party became such an effective vehicle for the modern conservative movement. It was once a much more staid, establishment oriented party.

If not us, who? is subtitled: William Rusher, National Review and the Conservative Movement. It details the people and events that rallied behind Barry Goldwater's candidacy first in 1960, and then 1964, and would eventually promote Ronald Reagan's successful run for the White House. in so doing it would reshape and redefine the Republican Party.

For me the most interesting aspect of this story is the effort of Rusher to reorient the conservative movement from one that focused principally on elites, to one that had a populist flavor. Rusher apparently played a huge role in developing the Southern Strategy, which peeled poor southern whites away from their century and a half allegiance to the Democratic Party towards the party of Lincoln, Hoover and Wall Street. Prior to this the Republican Party did not care to connect to the "people" and was apologetically elitist. It promoted the interests of business classes, it did not promote an ideological agenda.

No mean feat. The consequences of their effort defines politics today.

- Wikipedia: William Rusher.
- Wikipedia: National Review.
- Wikipedia: Movement Conservatism. 

The Party of the South

That's what Daily Kos calls the Republican Party today.

When Nixon engineered the southern strategy to lure disaffected southern whites to the Republican Party in the mid-1960s did he know that these new Republicans would eventually take the party over and push moderates out?

Whither the South?

After dominating politics for generations, the influnce of the South, or at least the Old South, is waning. It may well be on the way out.

The NYT tells us that the only counties that voted more Republican than Democrat in 2008 as compared with 2004 are in the South, especially the Appalacian South:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

This is especially interesting: The Southern Strategy that helped the Republicans become a dominant party beginning in 1980 may be coming back to haunt the party since the souothern influence may be pulling the party too far to the right, making it uncompetitive nationally:

[This] could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.
“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”

Only four years ago Republicans were talking about dominating the next generation of elections. Funny how things change.

Elections: The Age of Helms

A great recent article in Salon outlines Jesse Helms' influence on politics. He gave the Southern oligarchy a quasi-populist face which allowed it to preserve its privileges:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.

Now after Helm's Republican Party has transformed the last three decades of politics, according to the author, the United States today, looks much like the South then:

So here's the real horror story. In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.

The Southern Stragegy

A controversy brewing among New York Times editorialists touches on the southern strategy which we've touched on in 2301. The controversy concerns whether Reagan's use of the term "states rights" before a crowd in Philadelphia, Mississippi at the beginning of his 1980 presidential bid was catering to the audience's racist views. Recall the town's history in order to understand the background.

A New Republic article places this controversy in historical context. Both parties spent time trying to lure southern racists. Democrats did so with Jim Crow in the late 19th Century, but gave it up when they nominated Al Smith in 1928. The article suggests that Republicans have yet to fully reject this group and points to Bush's 2000 primary race in South Carolina as an example.

It's a good overview of racial politics.

The Ghost of Strom Thurmond...

...rears its head twice this week.

It turns out that his ancestors owned Al Sharpton's ancestor's.

And it seems that Vice President Cheney was carried in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the belly of a plane called the Spirit of Strom Thurmond.

Faux Pax?

2301 students should recall that Strom Thurmond helped spur the South's transition from one party domination to Republican control.