boutons_deux
09-02-2010, 08:20 PM
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/02/haley_barbour_race_history/md_horiz.jpg
For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.
For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.
Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.
1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/02/haley_barbour_race_history/index.html
=========
Maddow tonight destroys Barbour's "Repug are post-racial, and were post-racial in the 1960s" fantasy.
For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.
For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.
Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.
1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/02/haley_barbour_race_history/index.html
=========
Maddow tonight destroys Barbour's "Repug are post-racial, and were post-racial in the 1960s" fantasy.