Few
names conjure the recalcitrant South, fighting integration with
fire-breathing fury, like that of George Wallace. The central image of
this “redneck poltergeist,” as one biographer referred to him, is of
Wallace during his inauguration as governor of Alabama in January 1963,
before waves of applause and the rapt attention of the national media,
committing himself to the perpetual defense of segregation. Speaking on a
cold day in Montgomery, Wallace thundered his infamous call to arms:
“Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath
to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the
Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland … we
sound the drum for freedom. … In the name of the greatest people that
have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the
gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say … segregation now …
segregation tomorrow … segregation forever!”
The story of dog
whistle politics begins with George Wallace. But it does not start with
Wallace as he stood that inauguration day. Rather, the story focuses on
who Wallace was before, and on whom he quickly became.
Before that
January day, Wallace had not been a rabid segregationist; indeed, by
Southern standards, Wallace had been a racial moderate. He had sat on
the board of trustees of a prominent black educational enterprise, the
Tuskegee Institute. He had refused to join the walkout of Southern
delegates from the 1948 Democratic convention when they protested the
adoption of a civil rights platform. As a trial court judge, he earned a
reputation for treating blacks civilly—a breach of racial etiquette so
notable that decades later J.L. Chestnut, one of the very few black
lawyers in Alabama at the time, would marvel that in 1958 “George
Wallace was the first judge to call me ‘Mr.’ in a courtroom.” The custom
had been instead to condescendingly refer to all blacks by their first
name, whatever their age or station. When Wallace initially ran for
governor in 1958, the NAACP endorsed him; his opponent had the blessing
of the Ku Klux Klan.
In
the fevered atmosphere of the South, roiled by the 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education decision forbidding school segregation, the moderate
Wallace lost in his first campaign for governor. Years later, the victor
would reconstruct the campaign, distilling a simple lesson: the
“primary reason I beat [Wallace] was because he was considered soft on
the race question at the time. That’s the primary reason.”4 This lesson
was not lost on Wallace, and in turn, would reshape American politics
for the next half-century. On the night he lost the 1958 election,
Wallace sat in a car with his cronies, smoking a cigar, rehashing the
loss, and putting off his concession speech. Finally steeling himself,
Wallace eased opened the car door to go inside and break the news to his
glum supporters. He wasn’t just going to accept defeat, though, he was
going to learn from it. As he snuffed out his cigar and stepped into the
evening, he turned back: “Well, boys,” he vowed, “no other
son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”
Four years later,
Wallace ran as a racial reactionary, openly courting the support of the
Klan and fiercely committing himself to the defense of segregation. It
was as an arch-segregationist that Wallace won the right to stand for
inauguration in January 1963, allowing him to proclaim segregation
today, tomorrow, and forever. Summarizing his first two campaigns for
governor of Alabama, Wallace would later recall, “you know, I started
off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I
couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers—and they
stomped the floor.”
Wallace was far from the only Southern
politician to veer to the right on race in the 1950s. The mounting
pressure for black equality destabilized a quiescent political culture
that had assumed white supremacy was unassailable, putting pressure on
all public persons to stake out their position for or against
integration. Wallace figures here for a different reason, one that
becomes clear in how he upheld his promise to protect segregation.
During
his campaign, Wallace had vowed to stand in schoolhouse doorways to
personally bar the entrance of black students into white institutions.
In
June 1963, he got his chance. The federal courts had ordered the
integration of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and US Deputy
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach flew down from Washington, DC, to
enforce the order. More than 200 national reporters and all three of the
major broadcast networks were on hand for the promised confrontation.
From behind a podium, Wallace stood in the June heat and raised his hand
to peremptorily bar the approach of Katzenbach. Then he read a
seven-minute peroration that avoided the red-meat language of racial
supremacy and instead emphasized “the illegal usurpation of power by the
Central Government.” In footage carried on all three networks, the
nation watched as Wallace hectored Katzenbach, culminating with Wallace
declaiming, “I do hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and
unwarranted action by the Central Government.”8 It was pure theater,
even down to white lines chalked on the ground to show where the
respective thespians should stand (Katzenbach approached more closely
than expected, but ultimately that only heightened the drama). Wallace
knew from the start that he would back down, and after delivering his
stem-winder, that is what he did. Within two hours, as expected, the
University of Alabama’s first two black students were on campus.
Over
the next week, the nation reacted. More than 100,000 telegrams and
letters flooded the office of the Alabama governor. More than half of
them were from outside of the South. Did they condemn him? Five out of
every 100 did. The other 95 percent praised his brave stand in the
schoolhouse doorway.
The nation’s reaction was an epiphany for
Wallace, or perhaps better, three thunderbolts that together convinced
Wallace to reinvent himself yet again. First, Wallace realized with a
shock that hostility toward blacks was not confined to the South. “He
had looked out upon those white Americans north of Alabama and suddenly
been awakened by a blinding vision: ‘They all hate black people, all of
them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great god! That’s it! They’re all
Southern. The whole United States is Southern.’” Wallace suddenly knew
that overtures to racial resentment would resonate across the country.
His
second startling realization was that he, George Wallace, had figured
out how to exploit that pervasive animosity. The key lay in seemingly
non-racial language. At his inauguration, Wallace had defended
segregation and extolled the proud Anglo-Saxon Southland, thereby
earning national ridicule as an unrepentant redneck. Six months later,
talking not about stopping integration but about states’ rights and
arrogant federal authority—and visually aided by footage showing him
facing down a powerful Department of Justice official rather than
vulnerable black students attired in their Sunday best—Wallace was a
countrywide hero. “States’ rights” was a paper-thin abstraction from the
days before the Civil War when it had meant the right of Southern
states to continue slavery. Then, as a rejoinder to the demand for
integration, it meant the right of Southern states to continue laws
mandating racial segregation—a system of debasement so thorough that it
“extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and
drinking … to virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports
and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and
ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries.” That’s what
“states’ rights” defended, though in the language of state-federal
relations rather than white supremacy. Yet this was enough of a fig leaf
to allow persons queasy about black equality to oppose integration
without having to admit, to others and perhaps even to themselves, their
racial attitudes.
“Wallace pioneered a kind of soft porn racism
in which fear and hate could be mobilized without mentioning race itself
except to deny that one is a racist,” a Wallace biographer argues. The
notion of “soft porn racism” ties directly to the thesis of “Dog Whistle
Politics.” Wallace realized the need to simultaneously move away from
supremacist language that was increasingly unacceptable, while
articulating a new vocabulary that channeled old, bigoted ideas. He
needed a new form of racism that stimulated the intended audience
without overtly transgressing prescribed social limits. The
congratulatory telegrams from across the nation revealed to Wallace that
he had found the magic formula. Hardcore racism showed white supremacy
in disquieting detail. In contrast, the new soft porn racism hid any
direct references to race, even as it continued to trade on racial
stimulation. As a contemporary of Wallace marveled, “he can use all the
other issues—law and order, running your own schools, protecting
property rights—and never mention race. But people will know he’s
telling them ‘a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into
your neighborhood.’ What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind
of shorthand, a kind of code.”
Finally, a third bolt of lightening
struck Wallace: he could be the one! The governor’s mansion in
Montgomery need not represent his final destination. He could ride the
train of revamped race-baiting all the way to the White House. Wallace
ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1964, and then again in
1968, 1972, and 1976. It’s his 1968 campaign that most concerns us, for
there Wallace ran against a consummate politician who was quick to
appreciate, and adopt, Wallace’s refashioned racial demagoguery: Richard
Nixon. We’ll turn to the Wallace-Nixon race soon, but first, another
set of weathered bones must be excavated—the remains of Barry Goldwater.
The Rise of Racially Identified Parties
The
Republican Party today, in its voters and in its elected officials, is
almost all white. But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, in the decades
immediately before 1964, neither party was racially identified in the
eyes of the American public. Even as the Democratic Party on the
national level increasingly embraced civil rights, partly as a way to
capture the growing political power of blacks who had migrated to
Northern cities, Southern Democrats—like George Wallace— remained
staunch defenders of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, among Republicans, the racial
antipathies of the rightwing found little favor among many party
leaders. To take an important example, Brown and its desegregation
imperative were backed by Republicans: Chief Justice Earl Warren, who
wrote the opinion, was a Republican, and the first troops ordered into
the South in 1957 to protect black students attempting to integrate a
white school were sent there by the Republican administration of Dwight
Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard Nixon. Reflecting the roughly
equal commitment of both parties to racial progress, even as late as
1962, the public perceived Republicans and Democrats to be similarly
committed to racial justice. In that year, when asked which party “is
more likely to see that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing,”
22.7 percent of the public said Democrats and 21.3 percent said
Republicans, while over half could perceive no difference between the
two.
The 1964 presidential election marked the beginning of the
realignment we live with today. Where in 1962 both parties were
perceived as equally, if tepidly, supportive of civil rights, two years
later 60 percent of the public identified Democrats as more likely to
pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so identified the
Republican Party. What happened?
Groundwork for the shift was laid
in the run-up to the 1964 election by rightwing elements in the
Republican Party, which gained momentum from the loss of the
then-moderate Nixon to John F. Kennedy in 1960. This faction of the
party had never stopped warring against the New Deal. Its standard
bearer was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and heir to a
department store fortune. His pampered upbringing and wealth
notwithstanding, Goldwater affected a cowboy’s rough-and-tumble persona
in his dress and speech, casting himself as a walking embodiment of the
Marlboro Man’s disdain for the nanny state. Goldwater and the
reactionary stalwarts who rallied to him saw the Democratic Party as a
mortal threat to the nation: domestically, because of the corrupting
influence of a powerful central government deeply involved in regulating
the marketplace and using taxes to reallocate wealth downward, and
abroad in its willingness to compromise with communist countries instead
of going to war against them. Goldwater himself, though, was no racial
throwback. For instance, in 1957 and again in 1960 he voted in favor of
federal civil rights legislation. By 1961, however, Goldwater and his
partisans had become convinced that the key to electoral success lay in
gaining ground in the South, and that in turn required appealing to
racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black support. As
Goldwater drawled, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in
1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
This
racial plan riled more moderate members of the Republican
establishment, such as New York senator Jacob Javits, who in the fall of
1963 may have been the first to refer to a “Southern Strategy” in the
context of repudiating it. By then, however, the right wing of the party
had won out. As the conservative journalist Robert Novak reported after
attending a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Denver
during the summer of 1963: “A good many, perhaps a majority of the
party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be mined in
the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White
Man’s Party. ‘Remember,’ one astute party worker said quietly . . .
‘this isn’t South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in
this country.’ ” The rise of a racially-identified GOP is not a tale of
latent bigotry in that party. It is instead a story centered on the
strategic decision to use racism to become “the White Man’s Party.”
That
same summer of 1963, as key Republican leaders strategized on how to
shift their party to the far right racially, the Democrats began to lean
in the other direction. Northern constituents were increasingly
appalled by the violence, shown almost nightly on broadcast television,
of Southern efforts to beat down civil rights protesters. Reacting to
the growing clamor that something be done, President Kennedy introduced a
sweeping civil rights bill that stirred the hopes of millions that
segregation would soon be illegal in employment and at business places
open to the public. Despite these hopes, however, prospects for the
bill’s passage seemed dim, as the Southern Democrats were loath to
support civil rights and retained sufficient power to bottle up the
bill. Then on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. His vice
president, Lyndon Johnson, assumed the presidency vowing to make good on
Kennedy’s priorities, chief among them civil rights. Only five days
after Kennedy’s death, Johnson in his first address to Congress implored
the assembly that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently
honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of
the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” Even under these
conditions, it took Johnson’s determined stewardship to overcome three
months of dogged legislative stalling before Kennedy’s civil rights bill
finally passed the next summer. Known popularly as the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, it still stands as the greatest civil rights achievement of
the era.
Indicating the persistence of the old, internally divided
racial politics of both parties, the act passed with broad bipartisan
support and against broad bipartisan opposition—the cleavage was
regional, rather than in terms of party affiliation. Roughly 90 percent
of non-Southern senators supported the bill, while 95 percent of
Southern senators opposed it.
Yet, heralding the incipient emergence of
the new politics of party alignment along racial lines, Barry Goldwater
also voted against the civil rights bill. He was one of only five
senators from outside the South to do so. Goldwater claimed he saw a
looming Orwellian state moving to coerce private citizens to spy on each
other for telltale signs of racism. “To give genuine effect to the
prohibitions of this bill,” Goldwater contended from the Senate floor,
“bids fair to result in the development of an ‘informer’ psychology in
great areas of our national life—neighbor spying on neighbor, workers
spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen.” This all seemed a
little hysterical. More calculatingly, it could not have escaped
Goldwater’s attention that voting against a civil rights law associated
with blacks, Kennedy, and Johnson would help him “go hunting where the
ducks are.”
Running for president in 1964, the Arizonan strode
across the South, hawking small-government bromides and racially coded
appeals. In terms of the latter, he sold his vote against the 1964 Civil
Rights Act as a bold stand in favor of “states’ rights” and “freedom of
association.” States’ rights, Goldwater insisted, preserved state
autonomy against intrusive meddling from a distant power—though
obviously the burning issue of the day was the federal government’s
efforts to limit state involvement in racial degradation and group
oppression. Freedom of association, Goldwater explained, meant the right
of individuals to be free from government coercion in choosing whom to
let onto their property—but in the South this meant first and foremost
the right of business owners to exclude blacks from hotels, restaurants,
movie theaters, and retail establishments. Like Wallace, Goldwater had
learned how to talk about blacks without ever mentioning race.
No
less than Wallace, Goldwater also demonstrated a flair for political
stagecraft. A reporter following Goldwater’s campaign through the South
captured some of the spectacle: “to show the country the ‘lily-white’
character of Republicanism in Dixie,” party flaks filled the floor of
the football stadium in Montgomery, Alabama, with “a great field of
white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom, gorgeously arrayed.” To
this tableau, the campaign added “seven hundred Alabama girls in long
white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the
field.”
Onto this scene emerged Goldwater, first moving this way and
then that way through “fifty or so yards of choice Southern womanhood,”
before taking the stand to give his speech defending states’ rights and
freedom of association. If these coded terms were too subtle for some,
no one could fail to grasp the symbolism of the white lilies and the
white-gowned women. Much of the emotional resistance to racial equality
centered around the fear that black men would become intimate with white
women. This scene represented “what the rest of his Southern troops—the
thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and
New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately
believed they were defending.” Goldwater made sure white Southerners
understood he was fighting to protect them and their women against
blacks.
How would Goldwater fare in the South? Beyond his racial
pandering, that depended on how his anti-New Deal message was received.
The Great Depression had devastated the region, which lagged behind the
North in industry. Federal assistance to the poor as well as major
infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
that brought electricity for the first time to millions, made
Southerners among the New Deal’s staunchest supporters. Yet despite the
New Deal’s popularity in the South, Goldwater campaigned against it.
While he was willing to pander racially, Goldwater also prided himself
on telling audiences what he thought they needed to hear, at least as
far as the bracing virtues of rugged individualism were concerned. Thus
he made clear, for instance, that he favored selling off the TVA, and
also attacked other popular programs. As recounted by Rick Perlstein, a
Goldwater political biographer, at one rally in West Virginia, Goldwater
“called the War on Poverty ‘plainly and simply a war on your
pocketbooks,’ a fraud because only ‘the vast resources of private
business’ could produce the wealth to truly slay penury.” Perlstein
singled out the tin-eared cruelty of this message: “In the land of the
tar-paper shack, the gap-toothed smile, and the open sewer—where the
‘vast resources of private business’ were represented in the person of
the coal barons who gave men black lung, then sent them off to die
without pensions—the message just sounded perverse. As he left, lines of
workmen jeered him.”
Another factor also worked against
Goldwater: he was a Republican, and the South reviled the Party of
Lincoln. If across the nation neither party was seen as more or less
friendly toward civil rights, the South had its own views on the
question. There, it was the local Democratic machine that represented
white interests, while the GOP was seen as the proximate cause of the
Civil War and as the party of the carpetbaggers who had peremptorily
ruled the South during Reconstruction. The hostility of generations of
white Southerners toward Republicans only intensified with the
Republican Eisenhower’s decision to send in federal troops to enforce
the Republican Warren’s ruling forbidding school segregation in Brown.
Most white Southerners had never voted Republican in their lives, and
had vowed—like their parents and grandparents before them— that they
never would.
Ultimately, however, these handicaps barely impeded
Goldwater’s performance in the South. He convinced many Southern voters
to vote Republican for the first time ever, and in the Deep South,
comprised of those five states with the highest black populations,
Goldwater won outright. The anti-New Deal Republican carried Louisiana,
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states in which
whites had never voted for a Republican president in more than miniscule
numbers. This was a shocking transformation, one that can only be
explained by Goldwater’s ability to transmit a set of codes that white
voters readily understood as a promise to protect racial segregation. It
seemed that voters simply ignored Goldwater’s philosophy of governance
as well as his party affiliation and instead rewarded his hostility
toward civil rights. In this sense, Goldwater’s conservatism operated in
the South less like a genuine political ideology and more like
Wallace’s soft porn racism: as a set of codes that voters readily
understood as defending white supremacy. Goldwater didn’t win the South
as a small-government libertarian, but rather as a racist.
If in
the South race trumped anti-government politics, in the North
Goldwater’s anti-civil rights attacks found much less traction. Opposing
civil rights smacked too much of Southern intransigence, and while
there was resistance to racial reform in the North, it had not yet
become an overriding issue for many whites. That left Goldwater running
on promises to end the New Deal, and this proved wildly unpopular. To
campaign against liberalism in 1964 was to campaign against an activist
government that had lifted the country out of the throes of a horrendous
depression still squarely in the rear view mirror, and that had then
launched millions into the middle class. More than that, though, to
campaign against liberalism in 1964 was to attack government programs
still largely aimed at whites—and that sort of welfare was broadly
understood as legitimate and warranted.
Goldwater’s anti-welfare
tirades produced a landslide victory, but for Lyndon Johnson. Voters
crushed Goldwater’s last-gasp attack on the New Deal state. Outside of
the South, he lost by overwhelming numbers in every state except his
Arizona home. Voters were offended by his over-the-top attacks on
popular New Deal programs as well as by his penchant for saber rattling
when it came to foreign policy. Goldwater especially suffered after the
release of “Daisy,” a Johnson campaign ad that juxtaposed a little girl
picking the petals off a flower with footage of a spiraling mushroom
cloud, sending the message that Goldwater’s militarism threatened
nuclear Armageddon. In the end, the Democrats succeeded in making
Goldwater look like a loon. “To the Goldwater slogan ‘In Your Heart, You
Know He’s Right,’ the Democrats shot back, ‘In Your Guts, You Know He’s
Nuts.’ ” The country as a whole, it seemed, had solidly allied itself
with progressive governance, and big-money/small-government conservatism
was finally, utterly dead.
Or at least, this was the lesson most
people took from the 1964 election. But like the clang of a distant
alarm barely perceptible against the buzzing din of consensus, a warning
was rising from the South: racial entreaties had convinced even the
staunchest Democrats to abandon New Deal liberalism. If race-baiting had
won over Southern whites to anti-government politics, could the same
work across the country?
Richard Nixon
Notwithstanding
the emerging racial strategy initiated by Goldwater, when Richard Nixon
secured the Republican nomination in 1968, the new racial politics of
his party had not yet gelled, either within the party generally, or in
Nixon himself. Indeed, the moderate Nixon’s emergence as the party’s
presidential candidate reflected the extent to which the Goldwater
faction had lost credibility in the wake of their champion’s disastrous
drubbing. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the presidential race would
quickly push Nixon toward race-baiting. Nixon’s principal opponent in
1968 was Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But running as an
independent candidate, George Wallace was flanking Nixon on the right.
By October 1, just a month before the election, Wallace was polling more
support in the South than either Humphrey or Nixon. Nor was his support
limited to that region. Wallace was siphoning crucial votes across the
country, and staging massive rallies in ostensibly liberal strongholds,
for instance drawing 20,000 partisans to Madison Square Garden in New
York, and 70,000 faithful to the Boston Common—more than any rally ever
held by the Kennedys, Wallace liked to crow. Republican operatives
guessed that perhaps 80 percent of the Wallace voters in the South would
otherwise support Nixon, and a near-majority in the North as well.
Late
in the campaign, Nixon opted to publicly tack right on race. He had
already reached a backroom deal with South Carolina Senator Strom
Thurmond— an arch-segregationist who had led the revolt against the
Democratic Party in 1948 when it endorsed a modest civil rights plank,
and who switched to become a Republican in 1964 to throw his weight
behind Goldwater. Nixon bought Thurmond’s support during the primary
season by secretly promising that he would restrict federal enforcement
of school desegregation in the South. Now he would make this same
promise to the nation. On October 7, Nixon came out against “forced
busing,” an increasingly potent euphemism for the system of transporting
students across the boundaries of segregated neighborhoods in order to
integrate schools. Mary Frances Berry pierces the pretense that the
issue was putting one’s child on a bus: “African-American attempts to
desegregate schools were confronted by white flight and complaints that
the problem was not desegregation, but busing, oftentimes by people who
sent their children to school every day on buses, including mediocre
white private academies established to avoid integration.” “Busing”
offered a Northern analog to states’ rights. The language may have
referred to transportation, but the emotional wallop came from defiance
toward integration.
Nixon also began to hammer away at the issue
of law and order. In doing so, he drew upon a rhetorical frame rooted in
Southern resistance to civil rights. From the inception of the civil
rights movement in the 1950s, Southern politicians had disparaged racial
activists as “lawbreakers,” as indeed technically they were. In the Jim
Crow regions, African Americans had long pressed basic equality demands
precisely by breaking laws mandating segregation: sit-ins and freedom
rides purposefully violated Jim Crow statutes in order to challenge
white supremacist social norms. Dismissing these protesters as criminals
shifted the issue from a defense of white supremacy to a more
neutral-seeming concern with “order,” while simultaneously stripping the
activists of moral stature. Demonstrators were no longer Americans
willing to risk beatings and even death for a grand ideal, but rather
criminal lowlifes disposed toward antisocial behavior. Ultimately, the
language of law and order justified a more “quiet” form of violence in
defense of the racial status quo, replacing lynchings with mass arrests
for trespassing and delinquency.
By the mid-1960s, “law and order”
had become a surrogate expression for concern about the civil rights
movement. Illustrating this rhetoric’s increasingly national reach, in
1965 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denounced the advocacy of nonviolent
civil disobedience by civil rights leaders as a catalyst for lawbreaking
and even violent rioting: “‘Civil disobedience,’ a seditious slogan of
gross irresponsibility, has captured the imagination of citizens. … I am
greatly concerned that certain racial leaders are doing the civil
rights movement a great disservice by suggesting that citizens need only
obey the laws with which they agree. Such an attitude breeds disrespect
for the law and even civil disorder and rioting.” This sense of growing
disorder was accentuated by urban riots often involving protracted
battles between the police and minority communities. In addition, large
and increasingly angry protests against the Vietnam War also added to
the fear of metastasizing social strife.
Exploiting the growing panic
that equated social protest with social chaos, one of Nixon’s campaign
commercials showed flashing images of demonstrations, riots, police, and
violence, over which a deep voice intoned: “Let us recognize that the
first right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I
pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” A caption
stated boldly: “This time. . . . vote like your whole world depended on
it … NIXON.”
Nixon had mastered Wallace’s dark art. Forced
bussing, law and order, and security from unrest as the essential civil
right of the majority—all of these were coded phrases that allowed Nixon
to appeal to racial fears without overtly mentioning race at all. Yet
race remained the indisputable, intentional subtext of the appeal. As
Nixon exulted after watching one of his own commercials: “Yep, this hits
it right on the nose . . . it’s all about law and order and the damn
Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”
Nixon didn’t campaign
exclusively on racial themes; notably, he also stressed his opposition
to anti-war protesters, while simultaneously portraying himself as the
candidate most likely to bring the war to an end. Nevertheless, racial
appeals formed an essential element of Nixon’s ’68 campaign. Nixon’s
special counsel, John Ehrlichman, bluntly summarized that year’s
campaign strategy: “We’ll go after the racists.” According to
Ehrlichman, the “subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always
present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”
Nixon’s Southern Strategy
Nixon
barely won in 1968, edging Humphrey by less than one percent of the
national vote. Wallace, meanwhile, had captured nearly 14 percent of the
vote. Had Nixon’s coded race-baiting helped? Initially there was
uncertainty, and in his first two years in office Nixon governed as if
he still believed the federal government had some role to play in
helping out nonwhites. For instance, Nixon came into office proposing
the idea of a flat wealth transfer to the poor, which would have gone a
long way toward breaking down racial inequalities. But over the course
of those two years, a new understanding consolidated regarding the tidal
shift that had occurred.
On the Democratic side, in 1970 two
pollsters, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, published The Real
Majority, cautioning their party that “Social Issues” now divided the
base. “The machinist’s wife in Dayton may decide to leave the Democratic
reservation in 1972 and vote for Nixon or Wallace or their ideological
descendants,” Scammon and Wattenberg warned. “If she thinks the
Democrats feel that she isn’t scared of crime but that she’s really a
bigot, if she thinks that Democrats feel the police are Fascist pigs and
the Black Panthers and the Weathermen are just poor, misunderstood,
picked-upon kids, if she thinks that Democrats are for the hip drug
culture and that she, the machinist’s wife, is not only a bigot, but a
square, then good-bye lady—and good-bye Democrats.” How, then, could the
party get ahead of these issues? Scammon and Wattenberg were frank:
“The Democrats in the South were hurt by being perceived (correctly) as a
pro-black national party.” The solution was clear: the Democratic Party
had to temper its “pro-black stance.”
On the Republican side, a
leading Nixon strategist had come to the same conclusion about race as a
potential wedge issue—though, predictably, with a different
prescription. In 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican
Majority, arguing that because of racial resentments a historical
realignment was underway that would cement a new Republican majority
that would endure for decades. A young prodigy obsessed with politics,
Phillips had worked out the details of his argument in the mid-1960s,
and then had gone to work helping to elect Nixon. When the 1968 returns
seemed to confirm his thesis, he published his research—nearly 500
pages, with 47 maps and 143 charts. Beneath the details, Phillips had a
simple, even deterministic thesis: “Historically, our party system has
reflected layer upon layer of group oppositions.” Politics, according to
Phillips, turned principally on group animosity—“the prevailing
cleavages in American voting behavior have been ethnic and cultural.
Politically, at least, the United States has not been a very effective
melting pot.”
As to what was driving the latest realignment,
Phillips was blunt: “The Negro problem, having become a national rather
than a local one, is the principal cause of the breakup of the New Deal
coalition.” For Phillips, it was almost inevitable that most whites
would abandon the Democratic Party once it became identified with
blacks. “Ethnic and cultural division has so often shaped American
politics that, given the immense midcentury impact of Negro
enfranchisement and integration, reaction to this change almost
inevitably had to result in political realignment.” Phillips saw his
emerging Republican majority this way: “the nature of the majority—or
potential majority—seems clear. It is largely white and middle class. It
is concentrated in the South, the West, and suburbia.”
The number
crunchers had spoken. The Southern strategy, incipient for a decade,
had matured into a clear route to electoral dominance. The old
Democratic alliance of Northeastern liberals, the white working class,
Northern blacks, and Southern Democrats, could be riven by racial
appeals. Beginning in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the politics of
racial division wholeheartedly. He abandoned the idea of a flat wealth
transfer to the poor. Now, Nixon repeatedly emphasized law and order
issues. He railed against forced busing in the North. He reversed the
federal government’s position on Southern school integration, slowing
the process down and making clear that the courts would have no help
from his administration. But perhaps nothing symbolized the new Nixon
more than his comments in December 1970. Reflecting his initially
moderate position on domestic issues, early in his administration Nixon
had appointed George Romney—a liberal Republican and, incidentally, Mitt
Romney’s father—as his secretary of housing and urban development. In
turn, Romney had made integration of the suburbs his special mission,
even coming up with a plan to cut off federal funds to communities that
refused to allow integrated housing. By late 1970, however, when these
jurisdictions howled at the temerity, Nixon took their side, throwing
his cabinet officer under the bus. In a public address, Nixon baldly
stated: “I can assure you that it is not the policy of this government
to use the power of the federal government . . . for forced integration
of the suburbs. I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not
in the national interest.”41 That dog whistle blasted like the shriek of
an onrushing train.
In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many
Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into
the White Man’s Party. The following year, Goldwater went down in
crushing defeat, winning only 36 percent of the white vote. Even so,
less than a decade later, the racial transmogrification of the
Republicans was well underway. In 1972, Nixon’s first full dog whistle
campaign netted him 67 percent of the white vote, leaving his opponent,
George McGovern, with support from less than one in three whites.
Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern neatly summed it up: “What
is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor
stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes
and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose
every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few—and in
return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a
few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the
‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your
labor and your industry.”42 McGovern erred in supposing that the
Southern strategy pertained only to the South. Nixon had already learned
from Wallace, and then later from the number crunchers, that coded
racial appeals would work nationwide. Other than that, especially in its
class and race dimensions, McGovern had dog whistle politics dead to
rights.
Excerpted from “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class”
by Ian Haney López. Copyright © 2014 by Ian Haney López. Reprinted by
arrangement with Oxford University Press, a division of Oxford
University. All rights reserved.
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