The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited (Part 2, 1968)

Despite Johnson's landslide victory, all was not well for the Democrats in 1964. The Convention had been marred by an embarrassing situation with the delegates from Mississippi. There was the official delegation, all white and elected under Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised blacks, and then there was the MFDP (photo, left), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was demanding representation.

Eventually a compromise was worked out but not before a number of delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out.

The core problem was this: Lyndon Johnson was bucking one hundred of years of southern history wherein the Democratic Party was the official party of racism and Jim Crow and Republicans were the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. Although the Republicans had effectively ended Reconstruction and black suffrage in 1877, when they negotiated a deal with Southern Democrats to fix the presidential election of that year, most blacks still voted Republican and virtually all Southern racists voted Democratic. That was all about to change.

By signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by sending the FBI to Neshoba County, Mississippi later that year to investigate the murder of three Civil Rights workers, Johnson was running the risk of permanently losing the Democratic Party base in the South and reshaping American politics.  To his credit, he did it anyway.

The events in Neshoba were fairly accurately dramatized in the movie Mississippi Burning.  Three civil rights workers - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney -were arrested by the Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a member of the KKK, as was his boss, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. They were "released" and then captured and summarily executed late in the evening of June 21, 1964.

FBI agents were on the scene the morning after the disappearance and by the end of the next day, there were at least 10 other agents in town working the case.  The military arrived on June 25 and the following week, J. Edgar Hoover himself came to town to announce the opening of the first F.B.I. office in Mississippi.

The investigation went nowhere until the FBI offered a large cash reward.  Informants soon came forward.

When their bodies were found on August 4,  the situation got even uglier. Indictments were handed down on December 4, 1964 and 17 men were arrested, including Sherrif Rainey and Deputy Price.

On February 24, 1965, Federal Judge William Harold Cox, a Kennedy appointee, threw out all of the indictments except those against Rainey and Price.  The photo below was printed in newspapers all over America and millions of people were confronted with and appalled by, what was going on in Mississippi.

 

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, who overturned it and returned it back to Judge Cox and the indictments were reinstated. There is a lot more to the story and it's quite interesting to read. You can find a much more full account here. Suffice it to say, it was a travesty of justice and I've gone through all of the facts, not to dwell on the horrors of Mississippi in the 60's, but because Neshoba will be critically important to the future of the Republican Party 16 years later.

This would all come to a head in 1968, an extremely traumatic year in American history. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April, Bobby Kennedy had been shot in June and the country had been beset by race riots for half the year in cities across America. The Vietnam War was going full-force and the counter-culture's anti-war riots were splitting the country in two. Or as it turns out, three.


Johnson declined to run for reelection and, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee chosen to run against the Republican contender, Richard Nixon. But there was an unexpected spoiler in the race - the Democratic governor of Alabama George Wallace, who was running as an independent.

So who was George Wallace and who voted for him? George Wallace had started out as a relative liberal, running for the governorship of Alabama in 1958 on an anti-Klan platform with the endorsement of the NAACP. He lost the Democratic primary to the Klan candidate, John Patterson and afterward, he vowed, "I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again." 

Wallace promptly switched sides, became the voice of white racism and segregation and won the 1962 governor's race easily. "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," Wallace said at his inauguration speech.

Wallace made the cover of Time in 1963 when he personally stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama and blocked the admission of a black student.

Wallace ran in 1968 under the American Independent Party banner, with retired General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. General LeMay, famous for being the creator of the phrase "bomb them back to the stone age," was interested in running to help dispel America's "phobia" about using nuclear weapons. Wallace's camp attempted to get LeMay to keep quiet about this with mixed results. (Below, Wallace supporters in Ohio.)

Nonetheless, Wallace polled just under 10 million votes. Moreover, George Wallace carried five states - Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. Wallace got 13.5% of the total popular vote. Besides segregation, Wallace was very much channeling white working-class anger and his platform called for increases in social security and medicaid spending as well. Most significantly, Wallace touched a raw nerve in both of the mainstream parties when he told his working class voters "there's not a dime's worth of difference between them."


The Southern Strategy
This phrase was popularized by Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book "The Emerging Republican Majority." The crux of Phillips prediction was this: Republicans didn't need and were not going to get a significant number of black votes ever again. But by encouraging the end of Jim Crow and the enfranchisement of black voters, they would be pushing previously Democratic racist voters in the South over to the Republican Party.

And that's exactly what happened.  Wallace ran again in 1972, but in May of that year, an attempted assassination took him out of the race.  Nixon ran against George McGovern and won every state except Massachusetts.

But the Southern Strategy wouldn't really reach its zenith until the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980.