How the South Became Republican: It?s About Race » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
How the South Became Republican: It’s About Race
by HEATHER GRAY
The South has now shifted from being the conservative Democratic stronghold to a Republican base and southern politicians bring the baggage of excessively conservative social and greedy irresponsible economic policies into the Republican fold. Interestingly, it was the Republican Abraham Lincoln’s presidential elections in 1860 and 1864 and the Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s election to the White House a century later in 1964 that rallied the Southern politicians to enforce their conservative and segregationist stronghold. Race has always been at the core of Southern politics and the South has always closed ranks against any efforts for equality. This, in spite of the fact that it was a "white" Democratic southern politician, Lyndon Johnson, who passed the most important civil rights legislation in the country’s history.
The following are excerpts of the Monday, December 6, 2004 interview with "white" southern writer and dissenter John Egerton. A recent contributor to the book Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent (2004), Egerton was winner of the Lillian Smith Award in 1984 for Generations: An American Family. Other books include The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America and Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Gray: John, the south has now shifted from a Democratic stronghold to that of being Republican. I want to ask you how that happened and do to that let’s go back to the time of the Civil War.
Egerton: In essence, the Civil War was fought by (the majority of the) people in the South who wanted to retain the right to conduct the "social contract" on their own terms. They wanted to have slavery, to keep it, and to be the sole judge of how it should be done…. They were in opposition to the federal government which, at that time of the Civil War, was in the hands of (Republican) president Abraham Lincoln. The (presidential) campaign of 1860 was fought over this issue–the right to extend slavery to the western territories. Compromises had been attempted in the 1850′s and had failed and so we fought this horrible war. So horrible now that it’s difficult to even look at figures of those who died and the civilian losses that were sustained…We had a Civil War here in which tens of hundreds of thousands of people died, from the tip of Florida to the tip of Maine. The Union won. That should have settled for all time the question of whether "inequality" could be legislated separately by the States.
So having lost that war, the South went through a period of reconstruction in which the federal government tried to bring the fruits of citizenship to the newly freed slave population. (Note: The federal government sent federal troops into the South to implement the reconstruction program). (There was) a sudden end of that (reconstruction) period in 1877. In order to bring closure to the tightly fought and bitterly contested election of 1876, in which a Democrat and a Republican came to a virtual tie–does this sound familiar?–a resolution got done in a back room.
There where certain southerners in Congress who were going to have the deciding vote in who was going to win that election and made the compromise that they would support the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, if they could get their governments back. If they could end the federal reconstruction… That "Compromise of 1877" marked the beginning of a conflict that goes on to this day because the Southerners got the federal government to get off their backs so they could go on and create a new form of slavery called "segregation"–so called "separate but equal" that was always separate but never equal.
Through the first half of the 20th century, southern Democrats were all segregationists and all white, all male with very few exceptions. There were a few Blacks who got elected to Congress from the South up until about 1904 following reconstruction–but by 1904 segregation was the law of the land in the South. And the north was willing to look the other way and let that happen.
There were no Republicans in the South the first half of the 20th century…save for the handful–more black than white–who had been Republicans in opposition to the South’s succession against the nation. And those so-called Lincoln Republicans–black and white–were the only Republicans in the entire South up until (later in the century).
Gray: Storm Thurmond played a critical role didn’t he? Tell us about his run for president in 1948.
Egerton: Yes. Well, here’s this guy (Strom Thurmond) from South Carolina. Like so many other southern politicians at that time, he was a Democrat and a segregationist. (Note: Thurmond was the governor of South Carolina at the time and ultimately a U.S. Senator).
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This kind of reality-denying liberal must be visiting from Bizarro-World.
