"Dixie is no longer in the bag": South Carolina Republicans and the Election of 1960

Oh, Dixie is No longer in the Bag
Oh, Dixie is No longer in the Bag
It's a hundred odds to ten
That the South will rise again
For Dixie is No longer in the Bag.

—"Here Comes Nixon," 1960¹

In 1961, Barry Goldwater took the stage in the Solid South stronghold of Atlanta, Georgia, and made a prototypically bold statement. "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968," he told his Republican colleagues, "so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are."² Scholars Jack Bass and Walter DeVries trace the development of the "southern strategy" generally associated with Richard Nixon's 1968 election back to this statement, arguing that it marked the beginning of a conscious outreach to the white southern electorate on the part of the Republican party.

Goldwater's unabashed declaration of racial priorities certainly fed the white backlash movement that would contribute to his victory in five southern states in 1964. Focusing only upon race, however, obscures longer and more significant trends in postwar southern politics. As early as the 1950s, the Republican party began to undertake efforts to gain support in the states of the Solid South, and by 1960 a native party organization was beginning to develop. Race mattered to these nascent Republicans, but the complete story of GOP development in the South is far more complex.³

As early as the 1920s, economic conditions and concerns about what pundits have since termed "social issues" challenged the integrity of the Democratic Solid South. In the wake of plummeting cotton prices and Republican candidate Warren Harding's declaration that he was "highly sympathetic to Southern problems," the GOP carried Tennessee in 1920 and gained 40 percent of the vote in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.⁴ Protestant dissatisfaction with the Democrats' selection of Catholic, "wet" New York Governor Al Smith in 1928 also brought southerners into the GOP fold, although as political strategist and author Kevin Phillips has pointed out, large-scale defections were limited primarily to the outer South and were attributable in part to economic concerns.⁵ The 1944 election marked the last year Democrats received over 70 percent of the regional vote for president. Even before World War II, conservative southern Democrats had begun to form a voting bloc with conservative Republicans in Congress, with several signing a bipartisan "Conservative Manifesto" in 1937.⁶ Postwar, the relatively liberal civil rights planks in the Democratic platform of 1948 spawned the well-known backlash of the Dixiecrat movement.

With the sudden and massive growth of the urban South during and after World War II, city-dwelling southerners gradually began to identify their economic interests as resting with the Republican party.⁷ Depending on the civil rights climate and which candidate was deemed more acceptable to segregationists, black-belt counties were also developing a tendency to vote Republican.⁸ By 1952, the immensely popular Dwight Eisenhower was able to carry four southern states, and even after the Eisenhower administration's racial policies—and especially Brown v. Board of Education—had soured some voters on the Republican, Adlai Stevenson actually lost ground, with five states going for Ike.⁹ Cole Blease Graham and William Moore argue that the greatest gains for Eisenhower between 1952 and 1956 came from African American wards, where the administration's enforcement policies on racial issues won favor.¹⁰ Given the persistent disenfranchisement experienced by many black southerners, however, Eisenhower had to have retained significant white support. Donald Strong's 1960 study of Republicanism in the urban South indicates that with a few exceptions, white support held steady and in some cases even increased.¹¹ Despite the continuing myopia of contemporary intellectuals like historian Clinton Rossiter, who stated in 1960 that "the South, which becomes more of a minority every year in terms of both interests and numbers, wants to remain Democratic," a transformation of southern politics was under way.¹²

The history of South Carolina is almost a caricature of all that has...