There’s an old joke about a man who moved to a small town in Maine when he was two weeks old and lived there all of his life. When he died his friends and neighbors put the following inscription on his tombstone: “He Was Almost One of Us”.
The essay of Andrew Sullivan’s in the New Yorker to which I referred yesterday is now on online. It’s interesting as many of Mr. Sullivan’s writings are. I have a couple of quibbles with it.
First, I disagree with his characterization of American politics in the 1960s:
The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote.
Mr. Sullivan is too young to remember the period and in my opinion he has swallowed the popular wisdom on the presidential election of 1964 hook, line, and sinker. Goldwater had little to do with Johnson’s ability to solidify black support around the Democrats to a greater degree than ever before. The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with it. Fun fact: a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1965 than Democrats. More Southern Whites, almost all of whom were Democrats, voted for Johnson than for Goldwater.
The strategy that yielded the Democrats 90%+ of the black vote was the nasty, deceitful campaign against Goldwater and the Republicans conducted by Lyndon Johnson. You’ve probably heard about the “Daisy” political advertisement. Yes, Lyndon Johnson warned about the danger of electing Goldwater president while building up our forces in Vietnam to three times the size of the D-Day invasion force and preparing to drop more bombs on the Vietnamese than were dropped on the Japanese during World War II.
You probably don’t remember this ad, in which an implied link between Goldwater and the KKK was created. Goldwater was Jewish, a libertarian and strict constructionist, and probably didn’t have a racist bone in his body. It was just a smear campaign and it worked. The “Southern strategy” came later, in the 1970s.
I didn’t vote for Goldwater and I’m a Democrat but I can identify a nasty political campaign when I see one.
My other quibble is with Mr. Sullivan’s use of the word “tribe”. Tribes have bonds of kinship, of blood. You can’t just sign up to be a member of a tribe. You’ve got to be adopted.
Historically, becoming an American or a member of an American political party was more like joining a religion like Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. If you subscribed to the religion’s beliefs and performed the religion’s rites, you were a member.
I think the word that Mr. Sullivan is looking for is “clique” rather than tribe.
Sullivan is cherry-picking the stats on African-American votes. Yes, 39% of African-Americans voted for Eisenhower in 1956, but this was the highwater mark for a Republican President from the 1920s to present. Eisenhower got 21% of the black vote in 1952.
Basically African-Americans voted Republican (when they could vote) over 90% Republican through the early 20th century. By the 1920s they were splitting votes and Black leadership emphasized this and the benefits of being a swing constituency. So, in Indianapolis in 1920, 75% of blacks voted for Harding, while in 1924, 36% of blacks voted for Coolidge. Hoover would subsequently employ a Southern strategy to woo middle class Southern whites with minimal success. But the racial realignment started before the Great Depression, and was capitalized on by FDR.
African-Americans are not voting for Republicans in 1964 and are not important swing votes by that time.
Tribalism isn’t a perfect word but it gets the point across. Perhaps factionalism or sectarianism is better.
Regardless we are progressing toward an atomized society lacking in coherent civic virtue. Since that is he main commonality holding our country together, it bodes ill for the future.
That’s how I see it, too. I don’t think he’s cherry-picking so much as he doesn’t have much real knowledge of American political history and little instinct for it, so buys an explanation that suits his preconceived notions.
Cherry-picking may be a bit harsh; we don’t have estimates of racial voting going much further back and there is reason to suspect the meaningfulness of black vote estimates prior to 1964 anyway.
But I think the way Sullivan states it, as do many American commentators, is basically wrong because it conflates two different events. One was blacks leaving the Republican Party in the 20s and 30s, and the other is Southern white majorities beginning to vote Republican in the 80s and 90s.
Lets not sanitize Goldwater too much. He was more than willing to accept the support of the Birchers. The anti-Semitic, anti-fluoride, racist, “Eisenhower was a Communist” Birchers. (My father was a Bircher and I handed out Goldwater bumper stickers at campaign events.)
Steve
I’ll go with Steve here. My recollection of things …. Black political savvy was a lot higher than most white folks really understand in the 1940s. Fighting Nazi Germany did NOT persuade most black political figures that the USA was absolutely perfect from a racial standpoint, and Truman got a lot of credit for ending racial classification in the US military. Strom Thurmond’s presidential run in 1948 also helped; pretty clearly, Democrats who shunned the States Right Party were not diehard-style segregationists. In priniciple, Republicans as “the Part of Lincoln” might have been expected to draw heavy black support, but Dewey and Eisenhower did not make such an effort, possibly for fear of alienating older white voters, perhaps from their own lack of interest. Richard Nixon was a newcomer from California back then — it was the young activist types like him who went to NAACP conferences to speak up for Republicans.
But, come the 1960 election, Kennedy probably looked better to most blacks than Nixon. Kennedy was photogenic, with a pretty wife. Nixon failed in the looks department. Moreover, Nixon failed to have civil rights credibility — There’d been Faubus and Little Rock and sending in the troops and all the rest of the late 1950’s civil rights activism, but it wasn’t Dick Nixon who had a role in any of that, on TV and radio and in the papers it was all Dwight Eisenhower. And finally, Kennedy was a Catholic, running against an American establishment that rather famously didn’t like Catholics. Granted, civil rights didn’t quite seem to be his thing either, bit a win for Kennedy was a token of change, of a better day someday for blacks.
So, come 1964, the civil rights issue might have been a wash, a relatively equal split of black votes for Goldwater and LBJ. BUT. There had been a civil rights bill in Congress that year, presented — no doubt with malice aforethought — virtually as a memorial to JFK. Most Republican Senators supported the bill, but Goldwater took exception to it, voting against it as something with which the Federal government shouldn’t concern itself. This was a matter of conscience, he proclaimed. Civil rights should be left to the states.
So in 1964, that seemed Bold and Determined and Forthright. Fifty years later …. The people standing up for states rights just don’t seem to be universally all that noble and heroic and saintly. The applause level has fallen some. Goldwater was a businessman and an Air Force General before he became a senator; I think he had the smarts to look at his allies and supporters and guess what was in their hearts, and if it gave him doubts it didn’t show in his rhetoric.