The South, the GOP and America

When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.

The Southernization of the GOP has been a long time coming, but it has now truly arrived. In the first congressional elections of the New Deal era, in 1934, there were virtually no Republicans from the South or West; 90 percent of the Republicans in the 74th Congress came from the northern tier. As late as 1946, the GOP gained control of the House on the basis of votes from New England and the Atlantic, Great Lakes and Plains regions. By 1984, however, more than 50 percent of the Republicans in the Senate were from the South and west of the Mississippi.

These shifts aren't just at the federal level, either. Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has increasingly been able to elect governors, other state officials and legislators in the South, although local and county machines still tend to be Democratic. Last November, the gains were particularly dramatic, from Texas, where George Bush Jr. beat out Ann Richards, to Florida, where only the votes of elderly retirees (many from the Northeast) saved Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles from defeat at the hands of another Bush scion, Jeb. This local depth, in turn, has given the Southern Republicans what they had, until recently, lacked: a large pool of able, experienced politicians at lower levels who can be recruited to run for more important offices. Their ranks have been augmented by the defections of conservative Democratic "boll weevils," such as Bob Stump, a representative from Arizona, who joined the GOP in 1982, and Phil Gramm, who converted in 1983 after he was thrown off the House Budget Committee by Democratic leaders.

The foundations of November's Republican victories in the South, and in Washington, are now familiar. They were established in the 1960s by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, with some help from George Wallace. In 1964, Goldwater's opposition to federal civil rights legislation made him the hero of white supremacists. Though he lost his presidential bid, Goldwater mortally wounded the older Northeastern Republican establishment. William Rusher, the former publisher of National Review and one of the architects of the Goldwater campaign, has written that it "turned the Republican Party over--permanently, as matters turned out--to a new and basically conservative coalition based on the South, the Southwest and the West, ending the long hegemony of the relatively liberal East in the GOP's affairs." Significantly, five of the six states Goldwater carried were south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The success of Goldwater, and of George Wallace in his independent 1968 presidential bid, inspired Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" (which had its manifesto in Kevin Phillips's 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority). Nixon's plan to substitute ex-Democrat John Connally for Spiro Agnew as vice president so Connally could run for office in 1976 as the candidate of the new Republican majority party, was wrecked by Watergate and the temporary revulsion for the GOP. Under Reagan, Bush and Clinton, however, the long-term trend toward Republican growth in the South and West resumed, with the result that today the stereotypical reactionary Southern senator with a drawl is more likely to be a member of the Republican congressional leadership than a Dixie Democrat.