In the last post, we saw how Democratic Party national unity, which was occasionally tenuous, depended on Northerners’ willingness to look the other way on Jim Crow segregation. But in 1946, Harry S. Truman became the first Democratic President to look it squarely in the eyes.
That was the year Truman appointed a commission on civil rights. In 1947, it issued a report entitled To Secure These Rights, which condemned segregation, particularly in the armed forces. Truman followed up with an executive order desegregating the military in early 1948. Even though the move did not directly affect the South, such a challenge to the legitimacy of segregation was too much for many Southern Democrats to stomach.
Truman faced a revolt within his own party as he ran for re-election during 1948. The Solid South fractured. South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond formed a third party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats, and ran against Truman on a single-issue platform of segregation. “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation,” he roared
Thurmond to stole nearly 40 Southern electoral votes, though Truman still managed to hold on against Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. But the lesson had been learned, and Democrats would make few moves against segregation for nearly twenty years. When the Civil Rights Movement finally forced Democratic President John F. Kennedy to take action, he did so slowly and cautiously.
Ironically, it would be his successor, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who helped strike the coup de grace against Jim Crow. The first Southern president since Andrew Johnson (who’d also inherited the office), LBJ helped shepherd the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The two bills finally knocked the legs out from underneath America’s apartheid.
It was the beginning of the end of the old Solid South.
Thurmond abandoned the Democrats for good after the Civil Rights bill was passed. When asked why he was leaving, he responded: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me.” And Alabama Governor George Wallace, one of Jim Crow’s most forceful advocates, had recently thundered against the supposed indecency of integration at his 1963 inauguration speech.
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!
Like Thurmond before him, Wallace broke from the Democrats to run his own third party presidential campaign in 1968. He raged through the South, capturing Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. The rest of the region went to Republican Richard Nixon. It was the first time ever that a Democratic presidential candidate hadn’t won any Southern states.
Nonetheless, strong party organization throughout the South allowed Democrats to continue dominating local and state elections. For years to come, Southern Democrats not only controlled Southern statehouses but also helped the party maintain control of Congress. However, Democratic natio
nal unity, forged along regional lines, was in a state of irreversible decay.
Nixon shrewdly capitalized on the fissure during his 1972 re-election campaign when he implemented what his team referred to as the “Southern Strategy.” Employing only a modicum of discretion, he appealed to white Southerners still bitter about the decline of Jim Crow. It worked. Nixon swept the entire region.
The Democrats were able to temporarily staunch the bleeding when Georgia’s Jimmy Carter captured the party’s nomination in 1976. Pride for a Native son helped Carter win every Southern state except Virginia, and become the first Southerner since Zachary Taylor in 1848 to gain win the presidency without inheriting it first. His victory fostered the illusion of a repaired Solid South. But hard reality would set in just four years later.
Ronald Reagan’s professionally honed charisma and righteous jingoism struck such a deep chord with the nation that it wasn’t just Southerners who left the Democrats behind. Dispensing first with Carter, and then Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan temporarily plundered so many voters from the opposition party that they came to be known as “Reagan Democrats.” But by now, the pattern was also starting to look familiar: the South was fertile ground for Republicans in national elections, though still largely Democratic at the local level. However, even that would not hold for long.
While the political right turn ushered by Reaganism may not have been permanent in the North, it was part of a larger trend reshaping the South. Beyond lingering undercurrents of anti-black hostility, Southern culture and politics had long featured militarism, religiosity, and conservative social values, all of which were increasingly finding a home in the Republican Party. And as they did, the Republican Party increasingly found a home in the South. During the 1980s, state and local elections began to pivot substantially in their direction for the first time ever. Thus, when George Bush, Sr. won every Southern state in 1988, it wasn’t just about running on Reagan’s coattails.
The Democrats made one last, desperate effort to salvage the Solid South in 1992 when they placed the young Southern tandem of Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee) atop their ticket. It worked twice, although those victories owed far more to Clin
ton’s personal brilliance as a politician, the vagaries of economic fluctuations that drove voters to him, and Texas billionaire Ross Perot’s potent third party candidacy, which siphoned millions of votes from Bush and later from Bob Dole, than it did to any remaining loyalty white Southerners might have felt for the Democratic Party. The Solid South was not reborn in Clinton. It was merely recalled upon wistfully.
By the time George Bush, Jr. triumphed at the dawn of this century, the South was throughly dominated by Republicans at the local level as well as in national elections. His rise illustrated the Solid South’s ultimate fluctuation from Democrats to Republicans. In 2000, Southern Democrat Al Gore failed to win even one electoral vote in the South.
By 2008, the South’s Republican turn was complete. Despite storming to victory by campaigning against a weak candidate, an unpopular war, and a spiraling economy, Democrat Barack Obama made only the slightest dent in the region. All he could capture were Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, the three Southern states that have been most dramatically transformed by the influx of Northern emigrés. And at the local and state level, the conversion is now also complete. From among the thirteen former Confederate states, Democrats currently claim only 5/26 U.S. Senators, along with a smattering of seats in the House of Representatives, and just two governorships.
What is old shall be new again. The Solid South is reborn. And it is a Republican bastion.
The Party of Lincoln has becoming the Party of Dixie.