HomeNixon FoundationNixon Center

Debunking the Myth of the Nixon “Southern Strategy”

September 3, 2009 by Bob Bostock | Filed Under American Politics, Civil rights, History, Nixon Administration, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, education 

I agree with nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker more often than not. Her column today, Can the GOP Speak to Blacks?, makes some excellent points about why the Republican Party has failed to attract support from African-American voters over the past 45 years.

Unfortunately, in analyzing the GOP’s alienation from black voters, Parker repeats the old canard that the African-American exodus from the GOP began in 1968 in response to what she describes as, “Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy,’ which tried to harness votes by cultivating white resentment toward blacks.” At quick glance at a little history refutes this persistent and pernicious myth.

For its first 70 years , the Republican Party – the Party of Lincoln – was the home of the vast majority of African-American voters. FDR was the first Democratic president to win the support of a majority of black voters. Nevertheless, Republican presidential candidates in every election through 1960 could expect to receive the support of roughly one-third of black voters. Indeed, in 1960, about one in every three African-Americans voters voted for Richard Nixon.

It wasn’t until 1964 that African-American support for the GOP fell off the cliff. Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, ironically, was supported by larger proportions of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress) drove black voter supporter for the GOP standard-bearer down below ten percent. In the years since, it has rarely climbed much above that mark and has never come close to the level RN received in 1960.

Goldwater, of course, carried much of the Deep South in 1964 (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina), all five of which the Democrats had carried in 1960. But, with the exception of his home state of Arizona, that’s all he won. New York Senator Jacob Javits, writing in early 1966 about the electoral debacle of 1964, blamed it squarely on “the Goldwater-Miller ill-fated ‘Southern Strategy.’”

Over the years, however, RN’s critics have blamed him for creating a “Southern Strategy” designed to win white votes by exploiting racial tensions.   If that had been his aim, the results of the 1968 election suggest he failed at it miserably. In 1968, RN lost four of the five Southern states that Goldwater had carried. George Wallace carried the rest of the Goldwater Southern bloc – Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. And of those four states, RN ran third, behind both Wallace and the Democrat’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, in three of them.

Once in the White House, President Nixon’s actions can hardly be called those of a president seeking to inflame racial tensions. Nothing illustrates that better than the historic progress his administration achieved in finally ending the practice of segregating the races in “separate but equal” schools in the South. When RN took office in 1969, 68 percent of black Southern students attended segregated schools. Within five years, that number had been cut to 9 percent. As Tom Wicker wrote in his biography, One of Us, “The Nixon administration did more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the sixteen previous years, or probably since.”

Of course, beginning in 1972, the Democrat’s once Solid South turned reliably red at the presidential level, except when a Son of the South was running for president (Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992). The lock the Democrats had on Southern Senate and House seats also began to erode during the Nixon years.

The reasons for this change are many. Chief among them is RN’s success in occupying the middle ground in American politics and thus attracting the support of Silent Majority, not just in the South, but also in every part of America. Attributing the Republican Party’s success in breaking the Democrat’s hold on the South to a cynical, Nixon-devised  “Southern Strategy” based on creating and then exploiting racial division is not only simplistic, it’s also contradicted by the record.



Comments

5 Responses to “Debunking the Myth of the Nixon “Southern Strategy””

  1. Beth K. on September 3rd, 2009 9:06 pm

    A very thoughtful and insightful article. It took an aspect of the 1968 Nixon campaign that has been simplified and showed its complexity.

  2. MK on September 4th, 2009 5:03 am

    I, too, find Kathleen Parker interesting to read. I wonder to what extent she is referring to Nixon’s Southern Strategy in a sort of shorthand and to what extent she views it simply as what her statement implies.

    I agree with you that it is a mistake to oversimplify or attribute direct appeals to outright racism to a Nixonian Southern strategy.” But I also think that Nixon calibrated and took racial views into account during the 1968 and 1972 campaigns, as he did other views among voters on a range of issues that were attracting public attention. Jonathan in his posting, “More on the Southern Strategy” myth, refers to James Rosen’s biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man. I, too, recommend Rosen’s book for its account of the path that Nixon walked in the late 1960s and early 1970s in dealing with a very complicated mix of racial matters, including those affecting the South and desegregation.

    Prior to the Northern and Western urban riots of the mid and late 1960s and the debate on job opportunities and open housing, the focus of news stories about racial matters in the U.S. had been voting rights and segregation of schools and public facilities down South. As books such as Gene Roberts excellent The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation show, many citizens throughout the nation reacted with dismay at scenes of peaceful demonstrators led by the courageous John Lewis being beaten and dispersed by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama in 1965. Or, in 1963, at the news of a terrible church bombing that killed four little black girls in Birmingham.

    Things changed in the latter half of the Sixties. Rick Perlstein notes in an article,”1966—When Everything Changed,” the impact of the Watts riot in Los Angeles and the public reaction to open housing legislation in northern cities such as Chicago. Perlstein found vivid accounts of public opinion in his archival research, which he covered at
    http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/meaning-box-722 . Chuck Percy, a Republican, beat out longtime officeholder Paul Douglas in Illinois in 1966 to win a Senate seat.

    The civil rights movement began to splinter. John Lewis was voted out of his leadership position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as some movement activists moved away from the concept of the “blessed community” and embrace of non-violence towards a more militant stance. In the run up to the 1968 elections, voters were seeing stories in the press which suggested a nation in turmoil: the rise of the Black Panther party, urban riots, proposed open housing legislation, court ordered busing to achieve desegregation, rising crime rates in cities such as New York City, and increasing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. As Nixon understood, law and order would be an effective slogan during his campaign. It was a phrase which various voters could interpret in somewhat differing ways, depending on how they viewed turmoil.

    By the 1968 election, it was clear to political observers that progressives on civil rights issues would be drawn to vote for the Democratic party and those who were not progressive, across a wide spectrum from racists and reactionaries to simple conservatives, would not. The question was, for whom would they vote? In 1968, some went for third party candidate George Wallace, some for Nixon. In my then mostly white high school in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., Wallace won the mock election. Among the students, many of whom might be labeled rednecks, Nixon (whose campaign in the school I headed) came in second, Humphrey third and last.)

    Nixon’s challenge with Southern voters in some senses was a negative one – not to make it impossible for them to vote for him. And at the same time, also not making it impossible for white ethnics opposed to open housing in cities such as Chicago, who once had voted Democratic, not to vote for him. Not taking positions that absolutely precluded such people from voting for him was very different and much more challenging than appealing to them on grounds that resonated with the old Confederacy, as Wallace did. Some of the most difficult moral choices for politicians occur when in their hearts they recognize some ugly themes in public thinking and have to decide whether to confront such thinking, and lose, or dance around it in hopes of surviving politically.

    The need to attract votes from potential Wallace-ites in the South and elsewhere in 1968 and 1972 is what kept Nixon from being able to have a Sister Souljah moment on racism. (His private and public views on race seem complicated and in any event, released White House tapes show no tendency to go for a Sister Souljah moment.) The need to court some of Wallace’s supporters meant that Nixon couldn’t condemn Wallace and racism, as William F. Buckley did Robert Welch and extremism in the John Birch Society on the Republican side during the Kennedy administration. I think that silence — what Nixon didn’t say and do more so than what he did — and the hope that some Wallace-ites would vote for him, along with more moderate voters, is what many present day writers oversimplify into a Nixonian Southern Strategy. Silence can leave a void into which people project what they want. And even carefully chosen and calibrated words don’t always mean what people think they mean. John Mitchell understood this when as Attorney General he famously cautioned supporters of civil rights, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

  3. simateak on January 12th, 2013 5:39 pm

    you definitely love prada handbags outlet YPcqEkgY [URL=http://pradaoutlet0.surftownlabs.se/]prada outlet online[/URL] and get big save lNyFrQzT http://pradaoutlet0.surftownlabs.se/

  1. More On The “Southern Strategy” Myth : The New Nixon: News and Commentary about the President, his Times, and his Legacy
  2. More On The “Southern Strategy” Myth : The New Nixon: News and Commentary about the President, his Times, and his Legacy

Got something to say?