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Chapter 2 Race, Region, and the Shadow of the New Deal Timothy N. Thurber a merican politics in the early twenty-first century has become a mirror image of what it was a century ago. one reversal relates to region. The South, once overwhelmingly Democratic, constitutes the most loyal base of the republican Party. During the presidency of george w. Bush, the conservative, southern, evangelical Christian wing of the goP set the rhetorical tone and policy directions in the executive and legislative branches. Moderate northern republicans felt marginalized and feared for the future of the goP in their states. a second reversal relates to race. african americans, who supported the republicans for nearly seventy years following the Civil war, now strongly favor the Democratic Party. richard nixon won approximately 32 percent of the african american vote in 1960, and since then no republican presidential candidate has garnered more than 15 percent. Few goP candidates for Congress, or at the state and local level, have done much better.1 Scholarly and popular conventional wisdom about the relationship of the republican Party to the South and to race often focuses on Senator Barry goldwater of arizona, the party’s 1964 presidential nominee. goldwater suffered a tremendous loss, but he supposedly charted a new, more conservative course for the republicans on race through his vote against the 1964 Civil rights act and his focus on winning the support of white southerners—and, to a lesser extent, that of workingclass whites in the north, who likewise harbored racial hostility toward african americans. The “party of Lincoln” allegedly disappeared that year and has not been seen since; according to some observers, republicans discovered in the mid-1960s that they could exploit a white backlash over race to win elections and have been using that formula ever since. in this characterization, 1964 marks a clean break between the party that existed before goldwater and the party that developed afterward.2 while there is much in this analysis that is persuasive, the republican Party ’s struggle to build an electoral majority, one that is rooted chiefly in the white South and largely bypasses african americans, is marked by more contingency and a deeper history than the conventional wisdom suggests. Though the goldwater 32 campaign was indeed significant, the influence of 1964 should not be overstated. instead, we must broaden our focus to understand more fully the dynamics of the politics of race, and the development of the republican Party, in the post–world war ii era. Concepts such as “white backlash” and a focus on the South did not suddenly emerge in the 1960s in response to race riots in the north or struggles for voting rights and equal access to public accommodations and schooling in the South. race and the role of the South stood at the center of a twenty-five-year debate within the goP over just what type of party it wanted to be. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, republicans regularly wrestled over how they should deal with the South and civil rights issues. Battles raged between northern liberals such as Senator jacob k. javits of new york, who favored government taking a relatively active role in addressing racial inequality, and conservatives such as goldwater, who wanted a more limited role for government in this area. These were policy debates over the role of the state in social, economic, and political affairs, but they were also sharp disagreements over electoral strategy. Both sides offered prescriptions for how to rebuild the republican Party into a political force in the aftermath of the new Deal and the emergence of race as a national issue. in addition, assumptions about the goP as the party of Lincoln prior to 1964 collapse under close scrutiny. aside from a few liberals, republicans in the pre-1964 period were largely indifferent or opposed to most civil rights legislation. The post-goldwater period is, on the other hand, more ambiguous regarding civil rights, at least through the early 1970s. nixon, as several scholars have recently shown, took a more liberal approach to civil rights policy in some respects than contemporary critics acknowledged. to set the context for debates within the goP during the post–world war ii period, we need to look back to an earlier era. From 1896 to 1928, the republicans won six presidential elections; the Democrats won two. From 1895 to 1933, the republicans controlled the Senate for all but six years. The goP enjoyed a...

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