How the South became Republican.

The South has now shifted from being the conservative Democratic stronghold to a Republican base and southern politicians bring the baggage of excessively conservative social and greedy irresponsible economic policies into the Republican fold. Interestingly, it was the Republican Abraham Lincoln’s presidential elections in 1860 and 1864 and the Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s election to the White House a century later in 1964 that rallied the Southern politicians to enforce their conservative and segregationist stronghold. Race has always been at the core of Southern politics and the South has always closed ranks against any efforts for equality. This, in spite of the fact that it was a "white" Democratic southern politician, Lyndon Johnson, who passed the most important civil rights legislation in the country’s history.

Let’s look back to the end of the Civil War.  Having lost that war, the South went through a period of reconstruction in which the federal government tried to bring the fruits of citizenship to the newly freed slave population. The federal government sent federal troops into the South to implement the reconstruction program.  There was a sudden end of that reconstruction period in 1877. In order to bring closure to the tightly fought and bitterly contested election of 1876, in which a Democrat and a Republican came to a virtual tie–does this sound familiar?–a resolution got done in a back room.

There were certain southerners in Congress who were going to have the deciding vote in who was going to win that election and made the compromise that they would support the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, if they could get their governments back, f they could end federal reconstruction… That "Compromise of 1877" marked the beginning of a conflict that goes on to this day because the Southerners got the federal government to get off their backs so they could go on and create a new form of slavery called "segregation"–so called "separate but equal" that was always separate but never equal.

Through the first half of the 20th century, southern Democrats were all segregationists and all white, all male with very few exceptions. There were a few Blacks who got elected to Congress from the South up until about 1904 following reconstruction–but by 1904 segregation was the law of the land in the South. And the north was willing to look the other way and let that happen. It is one of the countries dirty little secret.

Following WWII there was the beginning of a drive for equality for black citizens. Blacks had fought in two world wars and could not be considered full citizens…. Not just in the South, but in other parts as well. Their rebellion against that was beginning to come to a head in the late 1940′s and in to the 1950′s. The 1948 election was a time that Harry Truman decided to run for a full term, having succeeded Franklin Roosevelt (who died in the 1945). Along comes Strom Thurmond, and he and others bolted from the Democratic Party when Truman was nominated and tried to form the "Dixiecrat Party" to pull all the southern white segregationists together in a party that would be for all time against any equality for Blacks.  Southern Democrats opposed, among others, Truman’s integration of the armed forces and his embrace of policies to protect minority rights in employment.

Truman won the election in 1948. The Southerners who had seniority in Congress and members of the Senate and House were in open revolt against Harry Truman and the Democratic Party. That was the beginning of the transformation in the South from a Democratic Party base to a Republican base. And most of them changed not by changing parties–they remained Democrats for a long, long time–but they changed simply by showing their true colors. They were segregationists and they would go to the mat to keep the South that way.

So we come to 1963 and John Kennedy’s been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson, southern Democrat from the hill country of Texas, a former member of the House of Representatives, then Senate and then Vice President under Kennedy–became president by virtue of assassination.

When he successfully passed these Civil Rights Acts he said to his aid Bill Moyers that I may have turned the South over to the Republican Party for the next generation., I don’t think he could possibly have known just how prophetic that statement was.

It was in 1964 that Strom Thurmond finally switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party that began this avalanche of "coming out" parties where all these Democrats, who were really closet Republicans, came out of the closet to present themselves as what they truly were, which was super conservative and still segregationists….

The Democrats have, since the Civil War, been attempting to bend over backwards to accommodate the interests and concerns of the conservative southern Democrats that has resulted in them diluting their social and economic policy agenda.

Remember it has been the progressive Democrats that have given us policies and laws that have protected and expanded or access to the rights given to us under the Constitution.  The Republican Party, for the most part has championed segregation not only between Black and white but between the elite and the working and poor class. This concept will lead me to my next post “Arrogance and Ignorance”