The Dixiecrat Myth
The left is quite annoyed that myself and others dare link the racist, segregationist past in this country to Democrats, at that flies in the face of everything they claim to champion, when it comes to civil rights, racial tolerance, etc.
The Democrats’ own website, to this day, attempts to take fraudulently credit for the civil rights movement and legislation, and when called on it, the recitation is the same: “we’ve grown” and “don’t forget about the Dixiecrats”.
Defensive liberals claim the Dixiecrats, as a whole, defected from the Democrat Party when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (no thanks to Democrats), and became Republicans which they claimed were more accepting of segregationist policies.
Well, I decided to get some opinions on the matter from some historians.
I contacted Professor Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton for advice. Larry and I worked on a documentary based on a chapter on Ronald Reagan from his best-selling book, A Patriot’s History of the United States.
The idea that “the Dixiecrats joined the Republicans” is not quite true, as you note. But because of Strom Thurmond it is accepted as a fact. What happened is that the **next** generation (post 1965) of white southern politicians — Newt, Trent Lott, Ashcroft, Cochran, Alexander, etc — joined the GOP.
So it was really a passing of the torch as the old segregationists retired and were replaced by new young GOP guys. One particularly galling aspect to generalizations about “segregationists became GOP” is that the new GOP South was INTEGRATED for crying out loud, they accepted the Civil Rights revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter led a group of what would become “New” Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore.
Larry also suggested I contact Mike Allen, Professor of History at the University of Washington, Tacoma (who also appeared in the Reagan documentary) for input.
There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but that doesn’t mean the birth of the souther GOP was tied to “white racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The confusion arises from GOP Barry Goldwater’s vote against the ’64 act. He had voted in favor or all earlier bills and had led the integration of the Arizona Air National Guard, but he didn’t like the “private property” aspects of the ’64 law. In other words, Goldwater believed people’s private businesses and private clubs were subject only to market forces, not government mandates (“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”) His vote against the Civil Rights Act was because of that one provision was, to my mind, a principled mistake.
This stance is what won Goldwater the South in 1964, and no doubt many racists voted for Goldwater in the mistaken belief that he opposed Negro Civil Rights. But Goldwater was not a racist; he was a libertarian who favored both civil rights and property rights.
Switch to 1968.
Richard Nixon was also a proponent of Civil Rights; it was a CA colleague who urged Ike to appoint Warren to the Supreme Court; he was a supporter of Brown v. Board, and favored sending troops to integrate Little Rock High). Nixon saw he could develop a “Southern strategy” based on Goldwater’s inroads. He did, but Independent Democrat George Wallace carried most of the deep south in 68. By 1972, however, Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and Nixon began to tilt the south to the GOP. The old guard Democrats began to fade away while a new generation of Southern politicians became Republicans. True, Strom Thurmond switched to GOP, but most of the old timers (Fulbright, Gore, Wallace, Byrd etc etc) retired as Dems.
Why did a new generation white Southerners join the GOP? Not because they thought Republicans were racists who would return the South to segregation, but because the GOP was a “local government, small government” party in the old Jeffersonian tradition. Southerners wanted less government and the GOP was their natural home.
Jimmy Carter, a Civil Rights Democrat, briefly returned some states to the Democrat fold, but in 1980, Goldwater’s heir, Ronald Reagan, sealed this deal for the GOP. The new ”Solid South” was solid GOP.
BUT, and we must stress this: the new southern Republicans were *integrationist* Republicans who accepted the Civil Rights revolution and full integration while retaining their love of Jeffersonian limited government principles.
I’m sure the more learned Democrats will have issues with these explanations.
Oh well.
March 19th, 2010 at 9:59 am
Thanks for that Bob! Very informative, and I love to have ammo like this for the inevitable arguments with liberals about racisim and party alliances.
March 19th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Well, the logical approach is good for us, because knowledge is power, but don’t expect the logical argument to have any effect at all on the average leftoid, for what they suffer from is a mental disorder and such will never respond to the logical argument, it only serves to entrench them deeper into their psychosis.
These are people who swear up and down that there can be more than one truth and that there can be no such thing as an absolute truth, after all.
March 19th, 2010 at 11:02 am
That’s true Machine, I often make the mistake of believing I may be able to get through to a lefty.
My hubby says I am an incurable romantic, whenever I am “surprised” at the behaviors of some of the liberals we know.
I just keep thinking that logic and common sense are natural occurrences, while apparently there are those among us who were not endowed with those traits!
March 19th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Can the Democrats claim they have changed if they never admit they had a problem? For the last few decades they have been promoting a Goebbels-type propaganda campaign aimed at making people believe that the two parties magically changed places sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. The most recent example of this was Reid’s quote criticizing the Republicans’ opposition to the health care bill by comparing it to those who opposed slavery and civil right, saying the Republicans wouldn’t want to be on “the wrong side of history” again.
I am a Texas Republican and man, do I get sick of the racist label. Especially since the only open, n-word using racists I have ever met were all Democrats. In fact, the only case of job discrimination that I am personally aware of, where a man (a Gulf War vet, no less) was fired because of his race, was perpetrated by a Yankee, ponytailed liberal Democrat.
March 19th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Find me a shrill shill Democrap race-baiter that is “learned”. Go ahead. I’m waiting.
In the meantime we have to be patient with them. Sheesh!
Good luck with the “logic” thing, Machine. It’s like hitting your head with a hammer – it feels sooooo good when you stop.
Igor
March 19th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
do you think you could put this in the “special stuff” category on the right hand side of the site? I think more people need to know about this stuff
March 19th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
oh also, I remember you said back on february 1st I believe “not much has changed..”. That’s a good thing for most Republicans, as we STILL don’t and never will see skin color as a merit of worth, as it’s part of our upbringing (it was for me). Hell currently, I have a thing for a gorgeous conservative republican woman that I know, which speaks to my colorblind nature. For the most part, one of the points we’ve mentioned periodically is that if you ever want to know what a liberal is guilty of, listen to their criticism of conservatives
March 19th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
@nicolas
She is very pretty!!
March 19th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
I have had this argument so many times that I’m going to quote the whole thing outright, and link to it, of course.
March 20th, 2010 at 12:03 am
The devil is always in the details. We would like to think about the future, but the past is always present to haunt us. This will be one less issue to think about.
Thank you, Bob, for doing the research.
March 20th, 2010 at 11:18 am
I remember when my high school government teacher (also an office-holding Democrat) told us that Nixon did more for Civil Rights than JFK ever did. Oh, the shock and horror!
March 21st, 2010 at 1:22 am
I was recently having a Youtube comment war with a lib on this subject. He had no clue, of course. Didn’t even know MLKJ was a Republican, said he was a Democrat. Even thought Lee Harvey Oswald was a conservative. This guy was a good deal older than me. How long have they been teaching this crap in the government schools?
March 21st, 2010 at 2:13 pm
[...] (and others) went through was horrible, no doubt, but there is irony in that he now advocates for the same party which oppressed him during the civil rights era – it was the Democrats who set a record 83-day filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, by the way. [...]
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:11 pm
[...] (and others) went through was horrible, no doubt, but there is irony in that he now advocates for the same party which oppressed him during the civil rights era – it was the Democrats who set a record 83-day filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, by the way. [...]
April 5th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
[...] I’m tired of the recitation that Southern Democrats became racist Republicans and took those tendencies with them. It didn’t take the Clintons and Barack Obama (Democrats) [...]
April 14th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
To the idea that Southern segregationists moved to the GOP and that the GOP has subsequently been detrimental to the South, let me pass along two words:
“Atlanta, Detroit”
Tells you about all you need to know, eh?