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4 Dixiecrats, Dissenting Delegates, and the Dying Democratic Party Mississippi’s Right Turn from Roosevelt to Johnson Rebecca Miller Davis When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he famously concluded that he had lost the South to the Republican Party for a generation. This statement proved prophetic, as no presidential Democratic candidate has won the majority of white southern votes since 1964.1 LBJ’s landslide victory that year was a decisive moment for southern political culture and identity, as it signaled the southern “right turn.” It was the culmination of a defection twenty years in the making, however, not a singular event. In no state was this shift more pronounced than in Mississippi, often considered the deepest Deep South state. It is clear that Mississippi’s desertion from the Democrats began long before, seen in the intertwined issues of race and politics stretching back to the 1940s and gradually building over time, most evident in the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948, the Unpledged Elector movement in 1960, and finally the complete denunciation of the Democrats in 1964. In the process, Mississippi revealed how truly out-of-step it was with the rest of the nation, and sometimes even the rest of the South. The state’s willingness to attach itself to a losing cause reveals its role in the larger narrative on the inextricably linked issues of white backlash to the growing civil rights struggle and the resurgence of conservatism in America. To say that Lyndon Johnson “lost” the South in 1964 ignores nearly twenty years of political turmoil, because white Mississippians had left long before. Southern Democrats enjoyed nearly universal control of their politics dating back to the Redeemer governments following Reconstruction. The former Confederate states completely rejected the party of Lincoln, putting the South in the Democrats’ pocket for nearly a century. This one-party Mississippi’s Right Turn from Roosevelt to Johnson · 123 system stifled real progress in the region, limiting labor initiatives and industrialization , thereby separating it from the national political scene and leading to graft and corruption under such demagogues as Theodore Bilbo and James Vardaman of Mississippi, Gene Talmadge of Georgia, and Huey Long of Louisiana. Fissures within the party emerged in the early 1940s, however, as southern Democrats watched the Roosevelt administration put more emphasis on racial politics.2 As odd as it sounds, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the blue-blooded, Harvard-educated, native New Yorker—was, in many respects, a southerner at heart. As historian William Leuchtenburg points out, FDR spent so much time at his Georgia vacation home that he came to regard the state as his own, even thinking of himself as a native. A local reporter dubbed the president “neighbor Roosevelt,” explaining how southerners “‘took’ to this ‘Yankee’ who was part-time Georgia ‘Cracker,’” often seeing him as an “adopted son.” FDR embraced many aspects of southern culture, developing a penchant for barbeque, collard greens, possum hunts, coonhounds, and even a touch of white supremacy. The president at times sank to such racial epithets as calling blacks “semi-beast[s],” “darkies,” and “niggers,” making this highbrow Ivy Leaguer sound more like a lowbrow redneck.3 A Roosevelt White House, therefore, seemed amenable to white southerners , who believed they had an ally in Washington. The president catered to the South by avoiding the race issue altogether. He never advocated for civil rights legislation, allowed blatant racism and discrimination in New Deal programs, disregarded attempts to abolish the poll tax, and refused to back an anti-lynching bill. Ignoring racial inequality maintained his party’s firm grip on the “solid South,” but as the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority put it, this made the president “a prisoner” of southern Democrats. Any outright support of civil rights would jeopardize the party and his administration, and FDR therefore kept his distance. “Dixie is in the saddle on Capitol Hill, all right,” one Washington paper reported only a month after Roosevelt’s first inaugural, but his twelve years in office yielded significant shifts on race, which made some white southerners consider changing horses.4 Even though FDR never officially supported civil rights measures, his administration put wheels in motion that prompted momentous changes for African Americans. These shifts, Leuchtenburg explains, “shook established racial patterns” and, in the process, “stirred up resistance to the old order that would reverberate for decades to come.” The president selected many blacks for high-ranking positions in his administration, including [3.21.106.69] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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