Prelude to Surprise Stop in 1960
There’s probably a book worth reading within Zell Miller’s A National Party No More, if someone could just edit out the damned hopefully affected folksy metaphors and aphorisms. If nothing else, Miller stands before us with a particularly insidious conventional wisdom that demands to be cut through. I wonder about that which is Historical Amnesia, and to what extent it inflicts myself.
The biggest problem with the party leadership is that they know nothing about the modern South. They still see it as a land of magnolias and mint juleps, with the pointy-headed KKK lurking in the background, waiting to burn a cross or lynch blacks and Jews.
Let’s leave aside for a moment our occasional “Ain’t this a Riot” news-stories of Segregated High School Proms. Or Bob Jones University’s controversial policies, and what exactly his namesake was all about. (Feel free to consult my entry on the 1928 presidential election.) You don’t have to stray far from Zell Miller’s career to see that his “Profile in Courage” was a stand against the Georgian flag’s Confederate Flag emblem. His book features his “State of the State” address where he spends the 75% of his time pleading Georgians to allow the flag to be changed. He nearly lost his re-election of 1994 because of the issue, and that the great Democratic break through for the state in 2002 came on behest of this same damned racial “Confederate Flag” wedge issue.
And, as always, the question for Trent Lott : Just what problems were you referring to with “We wouldn’t have had all these problems” had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1944? (Feel free to consult my entries on Strom Thurmond’s 1944 campaign.) By the way, renaming an organization from “White Citizens Council” to “Christian Citizens Council” doesn’t do any good, because the acronym “CCC” is this creepy soft-case version of the acronym “KKK”.
None of this is to say that “The North” has its racial problems, but in this equation I have to say I could care less about the “magnolias and mint juleps” factor, and I fixate on the other factor of the equation. And, yes, Zell Miller, I am aware that the economy of Atlanta, Georgia is more advanced than the economy of Portland, Oregon. I also find the following passage kind of interesting.
Gone are the days when Japanese Americans were herded into camps because we were at war with Japan. Gone are the days when African Americans in my state of Georgia were denied access to lunch counters.
Nay. We just herd some Muslims into Guantanamo based on spurious claims by spurious tribesmen in Afghanistan — out to make a fast buck or out to settle a score with an old enemy. And we just figure out ways to throw African Americans off the voter roll. History is not working in a vacuum. When Zell Miller says that “Jefferson and Jackson would sue the modern Democratic Party” for libel if they saw what it had become, I wonder if he doesn’t realize he’s echoing the sentiments of 1948 (and 1964, and as I’ll show you even 1960), when we have the Dixiecrat bolters shout out to audiences of Dixiecrats entreating “all true White Jeffersonian Democrats”, and when mindful that there are border states watching they carefully left out the “white” part of the phrase.
I never managed to get the quote down from Zell Miller (as I started to merely skim through the book), but he suggests that “Franklin Roosevelt knew this was a ‘big tent party’.” who “understood that 70, 80, 90% was better than none.” Perhaps Roosevelt said something to that effect… I imagine after his unsuccessful purge attempt at non-New Deal Democrats in 1938… the Conservative Democrats who were starting to have a problem with the Centralization of Government… read: the Southern Democrats. I ponder something, and it’s something that makes it a laugh-riot when somebody like Zell Miller says that they are Democrats in the Spirit of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy (and I’ll get to Kennedy in a moment). In 1940, Roosevelt selected Henry Wallace as his running mate. And, indications are he would have done the same thing again, if not for the cries from more Conservative forces in the Democratic Party. Harry Truman was deemed acceptable. Wallace than ran to Truman’s left on a Party that was… um… subsidized by the Soviet Union… probably. And the Southern Democrats who brought Truman to power bolted from Truman. Think about that. There’s a weird parable there that I can’t quite put into words.
In 1960, the state of Georgia gave the Democratic nominee, John F Kennedy, a higher percentage of its vote than John F Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts. “You can look it up,” as Casey Stengel used to say. Only the percentage in Rhode Island was greater. And Georgians were not disappointed in Kennedy’s performance as a chief executive. He stared down the Russians over Cuba and he cut taxes in a significant way that stimulated the economy. Had he not been assassinated, he could have carried Georgia a second time.
The conventional wisdom is that Kennedy was the last Democratic Presidential, and certainly the last Democratic Northern Presidential Candidate, that the South took to naturally… that something in his make-up (he not being oh-s-liberal liberal liberal) drove the South to love and revere him. Let the Record show that he did not pick up the bulk of the Southland easily, and let the record show that for most of the presidential campaign the polls were showing that Nixon was going to pick up the Southern States that went to Eisenhower, and let the record show that the Democratic and Republican platform on the issue of Civil Rights was… kind of close to identical. And let the record show also that the Nixon – Lodge ticket botched their one effort to pick up the anti-segregation vote.
Take a look at the 1960 Presidential Election map. Somebody named “Byrd” won the states of Mississippi and Alabama. The presidential ballot for the state of Mississippi had on it Kennedy, Nixon, and “Unrestricted Democratic Slate”. The last ticket won. Nobody won Mississippi. I’ll have to check Alabama. And there’s a curious footnote here in how Mississippi and Alabama’s electors attempted to, post election, convince the rest of the South to Rise Up and convince the Republican electors to cast their lot with… Senator Byrd of Virginia.
And I will get to that post at a later time.