On August 14, , Richard Nixon treated New Orleans, a city keen on parades, to a campaign-style motorcade. With Nixon standing and waving through the sunroof, his limousine moved slowly down wide Canal Street, then through narrow Chartres Street. Thousands of people lined the sidewalks to cheer and be near the President of the United States. A photograph taken that day sits on a bookcase in my home office. At the edge of the frame, there I am, standing on the sidewalk, hands in pants pockets, tan sport coat open.
That business had to do with school desegregation. Nixon, who had served as vice president when President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock in , met in New Orleans with the co-chairs of seven state advisory committees to tell them he wanted a peaceful opening of public schools.
Indeed, in his campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters. Nixon tried to install two so-called strict-constructionist conservatives, Clement F.
Haynesworth Jr. Flash back fifty years to the election, which featured a three-candidate presidential race that Nixon won with a modest plurality. In popular votes, Nixon finished with The bulk of new members were liberals from the North, eager to do something meaningful about civil rights. Frustrating their efforts, however, were seniority rules that greatly benefited the Southerners.
Southern Democrats had largely escaped losses in the elections and thus gained considerable seniority , becoming chairmen of many important committees for the next several decades. They also installed one of their own, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, as Senate majority leader in As all of this was happening, the dynamics within the Republican Party were changing in ways that made it even more accommodating to Southern conservatives.
The key was the rise of the West and its increasing political power as the population of Western states skyrocketed after World War II. Unlike Eastern Republicans, whose history was defined by opposition to slavery, Western Republicans had long held racial views toward Asians and Native Americans similar to those of Southern Democrats toward African Americans.
To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged, by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races. Arthur, which formed the basis for all subsequent efforts to restrict immigration based on race and ethnicity.
Further bringing the Westerners and Southerners together was a shared attitude toward the federal government on economic issues. Southerners had long favored small government in Washington to keep it from interfering with segregation.
This meant keeping taxes and spending low and unions out. As Richardson explains:. Mythology tells us that the theme of the American West was freedom, but the opposite was true. Like the antebellum South, society in the West was hierarchical according to race, class, and gender. When Americans moved there after the Civil War, they kept alive the same vision of the world that had inspired Confederates. The US president has even refrained from directly condemning the actions of a teenager charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Yet as tensions over police and protests have increased across America, Trump has increasingly made these arguments the centerpiece of his campaign in the closing months of the election. The southern strategy was the plan used effectively by Nixon to increase voting among white voters in the south. Critics argued the language used in this strategy was a thinly veiled appeal to racists and an ugly response to the successes of the civil rights movement.
Nixon was fiercely criticized for this approach in , but nonetheless won the election. He and the segregationist George Wallace, running as an independent, carried all the states in the south except Texas, while the Democrat vice-president Hubert Humphrey won just 13 states — most of them in the north-east. That has been his focus now for several weeks.
And there was a lot of speculation that when he did that, that would work to his benefit and drive the election there. The public is still primarily focused on the central issue in their life which is the virus.
0コメント