The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Revisited (Part 3, 1980)

On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And he talked about "states rights," a phrase he hadn't previously used in the campaign. 

A lot has been written about this since then with various apologias penned by Republican pundits.   Their story is that basically it was just "a coincidence" and he certainly didn't mean to imply anything about blacks, when addressing an all-white crowd at the scene of one of America's most notorious civil rights murders.

On October 18, 1980, the New York Times reported on Andrew Young's reaction:

Mr. Young was quoted as saying that Mr. Reagan's use of the term ''state's rights'' at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi on Aug. 3 ''looks like a code word to me that it's going to be all right to kill niggers when he's President.''

Plain words, but really, how else could you possibly take it?  In order to evaluate that, let's take a closer look at the seemingly innocuous phrase, "states rights."

A Brief Digression on the subject of "States Rights"
Even today, throughout the South, it is common to hear Southern partisans refer to the Civil Was as being about "states rights" and not about slavery.  This is a kind of revisionist attempt to build a justification for something that was completely unjustifiable, not to mention ahistorical.

The Civil War was about one thing and one thing only - slavery.  It started at the very founding of the country and continued throughout the early 19th century, the spokesman for the South made it very clear that maintaining slavery was their priority.

Alexander Stephens was the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America.  On March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, he gave what has come to be known as the "Cornerstone Speech."  Let's listen to what Stephens said: 

"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution - African slavery as it exists among us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.  This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.  Jefferson said the Union would split.  He was right.  What was conjecture to him is now a realized fact.  But whether he full comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.... (Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.  They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.  This was an error.... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery - subordination to the superior to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition."

Funny, he never mentions "states rights" even once.  After the Civil War, Stephens would write a two-volume history of the Civil War in which he barely mentioned slavery and only talked about the rights of the states to usurp the tyranny of the majority.  Confederate apologists have stuck with the same story ever since Stephens and have even managed to get this nonsensical, revisionist view of the Civil War (i.e., that it was about states rights and economics, not slavery) into many high-school history books.  What do today's apologists say about "The Cornerstone Speech?"  They say it was "taken out of context" and he "didn't mean it, it was just political."  Hmmmm.....


If you review the history of the United States between the passage of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, it is impossible to conclude that the Civil War was about anything other than slavery.  Slavery dominated the American political landscape for forty years and, from the time of the Compromise of 1850, it was virtually the only subject talked about in American politics.

As Henry Adams pointed out in 1882:

Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.

Starting in the 1830's, the South's strategy changed from preserving slavery in the current slave states to extending it to the new states of Texas and California.  John C. Calhoun, the preeminent Southern spokesperson, advocate for slavery and Secretary of State under John Tyler, wrote to the British Ambassador in an official correspondence and stated that the South's interest in Texas was in perpetuating slavery.  The idea was that Texas could be carved up into five slave states, giving the south 10 pro-slavery senators.

The South had been scheming to grab Cuba and had designs on Central America as well, envisioning a vast slave Republic arcing across the southern US and Caribbean.  After the Civil War, more than 10,000 ex-confederates actually moved to Brazil where they were known as "Confederados."  Brazil had cotton and slavery wouldn't be outlawed until 1888.

The South used federal power whenever possible - to maintain slavery.  Again, their interest was not in being "left alone" as the revisionists would tell you, but in forcing the free states to accept slavery as an institution.  What they were seeking was a moral validation of slavery.  This reached its culmination in the Dred Scott case in 1857, when Roger Taney's Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery because slaves were property, not people. 

After the Civil War and a few brief years of Reconstruction, the last federal troops were pulled out of the South in 1877 and the era of Jim Crow began - and lasted until 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education and President Eisenhower once again sent federal troops to the South to enforce the law.

The key point is this: the South had no issue with the federal government as long as the federal government supported its discriminatory policies.  They never gave a hoot about "states rights," they just wanted to continue their lifestyle and they wanted the Federal Government to support them in that endeavor. 

And for a long time, the Federal Government was there to help Jim Crow along.  Supreme Court heard the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which effectively overturned the 14th Amendment.  In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v Ferguson that segregation was just fine, thank you.  In both of these cases, the South had no issues with the Federal Government because the Federal Government was on their side, that side being racial discrimination and the disenfranchisement of blacks.

Harry Truman and the Dixiecrats
At the end of WW2, there were several horrendous cases involving black servicemen returning home to the South after being mustered out and being horribly beaten or killed.  Harry Truman was shocked by these events and in 1946, he signed Executive Order 9808, creating The President's Committee on Civil Rights.  After receiving their report (yes, there is racial discrimination in America) he signed Executive Orders 9980, desegregating the Federal Government's employees, and Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed forces.

At the Democratic National Convention of 1948, held in July of that year in Philadelphia, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout of the Southern Democratic segregationist.  They formed their own party - the "States Rights Democratic Party" -  and held a convention in Birmingham, Alabama, the original capital of the Confederacy.  They became known as the "Dixiecrats" and they had a one-issue platorm: maintain Jim Crow and continue segregation. That's Strom, spreading the love, on the right.

At their convention in Birmingham, they waved Confederate flags and nominated Strom Thurmond to be their presidential candidate. When it was Governor Thurmond's turn to speak, they played "Dixie" and he strode to the podium followed by the Confederate battle flag and a portrait of Robert E. Lee.  He tried to stick to the "states rights" story but he had a hard time staying on message, saying "There's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, schools and homes."  See Kari Frederickson's excellent "The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South" for more.

Throughout Mississippi, the press was thrilled with the walkouts and they saw it for exactly what it was. Fred Sullins, the editor of the Jackson Daily News wrote the following in the summer of 1948 which is exactly representative of local coverage of the Dixiecrats:

"We will not surrender our most sacred constitutional rights in order to placate a vicious minority that seeks to rupture race relations and establish social equity.  If damn fool Democrats in other sections want to eat, drink and sleep with Negroes, that is their business.  We can only deplore their degeneracy and declare that we will have none of it." 

Ronald Reagan's Neshoba County Speech

So in light of all of this are we really to believe that Ronald Reagan went to Neshoba County and gave one of his first speeches after receiving the Republican nomination and spoke about "States Rights" by accident?  What's interesting is that the Reagan defenders say the same thing that the Alexander Stephens apologists say, that it was "taken out of context" and that he "didn't mean it."

Here's the thing: in 1980, the murders of the three civil rights workers was only 16 years in the past - as close to them then as 1993 is to us now.  It wasn't ancient history.  It was something that had happened in the near past and it was the singular event that had made Neshoba County nationally famous. Everybody knew exactly what Reagan was talking about when he used the phrase "states rights."

In November of that year at a Reagan fundraiser in Jackson, Mississippi, Trent Lott would introduce Strom Thurmond by saying that if the country had elected him " 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." Strom himself said "we want the federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of of the states."  Reagan's message might have been opaque in Massachusetts but it was crystal clear in Mississippi.


Lee Atwater, Strom Thurmond and Ronald Reagan

Nobody understood the "Southern Strategy" and the value of racially-charged code words in grabbing southern voters better than Lee Atwater.  Atwater started out as an intern for Strom Thurmond, then became director of his 1978 re-election campaign and in 1980 was the director of Ronald Reagan's campaign in South Carolina.  He would go on to work in the Reagan administration and achieve some notoriety in 1988 when he was running George H.W. Bush's campaign and created the infamous "Willie Horton" ads.  Atwater was unusually candid about the issue of race in American political campaigns.

In an interview with author Alexander P. Lamis, for his book, The Two Party South, Atwater made the following statement:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.


And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.

Conclusions About the Southern Strategy
First of all, let's just admit the obvious about the Southern Strategy - it works!  In fact it works really well. You talk to the crowds, you use code words and later on, you act shocked (shocked!) when someone observes that your speech was taken in a racial context.  Perhaps you even accuse those people of cynically playing "the race card."  This is now a two-fer.  You get to make a racist statement and then turn around and accuse your opponents of seeing everything through the perspective of race.

I'm an American and I grew up in the South and I am a First Amendment absolutist. I think anybody should pretty much be able to say anything they want.  But please don't insult my intelligence by telling me that "states rights" has any other meaning than supporting institutionalized racism in the South.