Demonic (29 page)

Even after a federal district court struck down segregation on Montgomery’s buses, Gayle appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which also ruled against Gayle. That’s when the Montgomery buses were finally desegregated. But try searching Gayle on Google—try searching his name in the history books—and see if you can find his political party. Who’s the “dumb twat” now? (As Maher called Sarah Palin on his HBO show.)
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In fact, it was only when there was an electoral risk to their political careers that the entire Democratic Party made a big show of supporting civil rights. Even then, both Eisenhower and Nixon did a better job enforcing the Court’s color-blind rulings than Kennedy or Johnson did. The Democrat presidents were always dragging their feet, trying not to upset the segregationist Democrats, the same way today’s Democrats refuse to upset abortion-mad feminists. In a hundred years, liberals will rewrite the history of abortion to make pro-life Democrat Robert Casey Sr. the country’s sole defender of the unborn.

Nixon indeed had something called the “Southern Strategy,” but it had nothing to do with appealing to racial resentment. His idea was to force nice patriotic, churchgoing Southerners to recognize what a rotten, treasonous bunch the Democrats had become. It was a regional version of his appeal to the Silent Majority.

Nixon had worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which he
was personally thanked by Martin Luther King. He was a card-carrying member of the NAACP in 1960. His Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, was not.

After losing his race for governor of California in 1962, Nixon began his political comeback with a 1966 column proclaiming that the Republican Party stood for small government and a strong national defense and would leave it to the Democrats “to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” Nixon referred contemptuously to the Democrats as the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace”—all segregationists.

Not surprisingly, with an opening gambit like that, in the 1968 presidential election the segregationist votes went to Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, not Nixon. As Michael Barone notes, Nixon’s “status as a longtime supporter of civil rights in the Eisenhower administration and at the 1960 national convention, made it difficult for him to steal away Wallace’s votes.”
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Provably, Humphrey got the Wallace vote. At the outset of the campaign, Nixon was polling at 42 percent compared with Humphrey’s 29 percent. Meanwhile, segregationist George Wallace was polling at 22 percent. On Election Day, Nixon’s percentage remained virtually unchanged at 43.4 percent. Wallace’s had dropped to 13.5 percent. Where had the rest of the Wallace vote gone? It didn’t go to Nixon. Humphrey’s vote surged by about 12 percentage points—nearly as much as Wallace lost—giving him 42.7 percent of the votes cast on Election Day.
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Even if those Wallace voters stayed home, Nixon’s and Humphrey’s vote percentages ought to have increased by exactly the same factor. But Nixon’s percentage remained steady, while Humphrey’s skyrocketed.

And yet—just as with the Tea Partiers today—when Americans opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, liberals accused them of racism—of
really
opposing LBJ over civil rights. Here’s a thought: Maybe they were angry about the massive, wasteful government spending on expensive federal programs wrecking society. Or maybe they were upset about intrusive rulings out of the Warren Court having nothing to do with race but discovering new rights for pornographers, atheists, and criminals. Or maybe they were alarmed by the Democratic Party
transforming itself into the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion—as an anonymous Democratic senator told journalist Bob Novak in 1972.

But as Johnson’s popularity nosedived, liberals just kept patting themselves on the back and saying it was because he was pushing desegregation. Except he wasn’t. It took the Nixon White House to get the schools desegregated.

In Nixon’s first inaugural address, in January 1969, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”

And then he started feverishly desegregating the schools, something his Democratic predecessors had refused to do. On a statistical basis, there was more desegregation of Southern schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period, before or after. Practically overnight, Southern schools went from being effectively segregated to being effectively integrated. To highlight the Democrats’ double-talk, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, famously said, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

While presiding over massive, voluntary desegregation of the schools, Nixon forbade his cabinet members to boast about it. But between his election in 1968 to the end of his second year in office in 1970, black students attending all-black schools in the South declined from 68 percent to 18.4 percent and the percentage of black students attending majority white schools went from 18.4 percent to 38.1 percent.
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Despite all this, when black agitator Julian Bond was asked about Nixon’s civil rights record, he said, “If you could call Adolf Hitler a friend of the Jews, you could call President Nixon a friend of the blacks.”
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If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty. Yes, racism must explain the Republicans’ sweep of the South.

Not only did Nixon desegregate the schools, but he broke the back
of the discriminatory building trades in 1968 with his “Philadelphia Plan,” the first government affirmative action program. In response to aggressive racial discrimination by construction unions to keep wages high, Nixon imposed formal racial quotas and timelines in hiring on the building trades. Under Secretary George P. Shultz, Nixon’s Labor Department rode federal contractors hard, demanding results. Even back when he was Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had been recommending “a positive policy of nondiscrimination” for government contractors. When running for president in 1967—the zenith of his alleged “Southern Strategy”—he had said, “People in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.”

Most histories drone on and on about LBJ’s beneficence in having proposed a similar Philadelphia Plan, but LBJ completely abandoned it the instant his comptroller general vetoed the idea. Nixon, by contrast, overruled the comptroller and staged a full-throttle campaign to get congressional approval for his affirmative action plan. As he said, the Democrats “are token-oriented. We are job-oriented.”

Imposing racial quotas has generally not been seen as one of Nixon’s greatest moments by modern conservatives, who oppose all race discrimination. However, it has to be understood as a reaction to a century of Democratic obstructionism on civil rights. Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box—and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.

Black civil rights groups gave Nixon little credit for the plan, and white construction workers hated it. He knew the Philadelphia plan hurt him politically, but he did it anyway.
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Being a Republican, Nixon was not a demagogue. He had no interest in demonizing the South—as if that were the sole locus of discrimination in America. As Mitchell said, “Watch what we do.” Democrats were the exact opposite, demanding hallelujahs for every kind word they ever spoke to a black person, while doing very little to actually end racial discrimination.

In the 1960 campaign, for example, an exceedingly reluctant JFK was pressured by adviser Harris Wofford into placing a quick call to Coretta Scott King when her husband was in the Reidsville jail in Georgia—and
then allowed that two-minute phone call to be wildly publicized in the black community.
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His opponent Nixon—who would go on to preside over the most massive desegregation drive the nation had ever seen as well as the country’s first affirmative action program—made no comment on King’s jailing.

But the Kennedy campaign played up that phone call for all it was worth. Pamphlets were printed up titled
“No Comment” Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.
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The phone call even persuaded longtime Republican and Nixon supporter Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his support to Kennedy, saying, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion.” But now, he said, Kennedy “can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this.”
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MLK Jr. stayed neutral, while all the other leading black Baptist ministers “firmly” reendorsed Richard Nixon.

Democrats spent a hundred years enforcing legal discrimination against blacks, or—at best—dragging their heels on enforcing black civil rights, but then turned around and crowed for fifty years about a friendly phone call to Mrs. King. With a few symbolic gestures, the Democrats grabbed the civil rights mantle in 1960 and never let it go.

In fact, it was the Democrats’ obstructionism that created the environment for nonviolent—and then violent—civil rights protests in the first place. Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of
Brown v. Board of Education
. Redeeming blacks’ civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law. If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.

Consider that
Brown v. Board of Education
, eliminating “separate but equal” in the public schools, was decided in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the decision. And then, from the end of
his presidency until Nixon’s election in 1968, nothing much changed. Nixon came in and wiped out segregated schools in one year.

In 1976, the entire South—all eleven states of the Old Confederacy, except the great Commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back again and voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only a secret “Southern Strategy” of pandering to racists when Republicans win the South?

By 1980, Southerners as well as the rest of the country realized Carter was a complete nincompoop and voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. Carter and his vice presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, won only their own respective states of Georgia and Minnesota, plus Hawaii and West Virginia.

In 1984, Reagan won every state in the union, except Democratic candidate Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, which Reagan lost by only 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast—the closest presidential race in Minnesota history since 1916. Reagan’s margin in the popular vote was nearly 16.8 million votes, second only to Nixon’s 18 million popular-vote margin in 1972. It was the largest electoral vote total in history. (No one at the
New York Times
could bear to write the story on Reagan’s historic victory, so the article giving these figures is bylined “Associated Press.”)
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A party that attributes Nixon’s and Reagan’s landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad. Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize
(Why can’t we be more like the Netherlands?)
. So they dismiss these “flyover” people as racists. The entire basis of liberals’ “Southern Strategy” myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist.

According to liberals’ theory, racists like Orval Faubus should have become card-carrying members of the Republican Party once Nixon came along—or at least by Reagan’s time—and that’s how Republicans swept the South. In fact, however, Faubus never became a Republican. He was finally defeated for governor in 1966 by Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in a state with only 11 percent registered Republicans. Rockefeller’s “Southern Strategy” against Faubus involved running as a strong
integrationist, and he immediately desegregated Arkansas schools and rapidly integrated the draft boards.

In addition to being a ferocious segregationist, Faubus was, naturally, a liberal, and an admirer of Socialist presidential candidates Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs, from whom he got his middle name, “Eugene.”
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Years later, Bill Clinton invited Faubus to his gubernatorial inauguration, where he warmly embraced Faubus, to the disgust of Southern Republicans.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
’s Paul Greenberg, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials advocating racial integration and opposing George Wallace’s presidential candidacy, called it a shocking moment for those Arkansans “who had fought—not just for years but for decades—against all that Orval Faubus had stood for, this willingness to exploit racial hatred.”
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So what else might explain the South gradually voting more and more Republican, starting with Eisenhower in 1952? What else was going on in the last half century?