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June 17, 1854The Republican Party is officially founded as an abolitionist party to slavery in the United States.

October 13, 1858 During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “If  you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into  the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on  an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to  serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln  and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of  the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every  form. I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe  it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their  posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white  men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon  negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.

April 16, 1862 President Lincoln signed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. In Congress, almost every Republicanvoted for yes and most Democrats voted no.

July 17, 1862 Over unanimous Democrat opposition, the Republican Congress passed The Confiscation Actstating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”.

April 8, 1864 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition.

January 31, 1865 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. House with unanimous Republican supportand intense Democrat opposition.

November 22, 1865

Republicans denounced the Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting the “black codes”which institutionalized racial discrimination.

February 5, 1866 

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens(R-PA) introduced legislation (successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson) to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks. 

May 10, 1866 

The U.S. House passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 100% of Democrats vote no.

June 8, 1866

The U.S. Senate passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment  guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all  citizens. 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rightsto blacks in the District of Columbia.

July 16, 1866 The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s vetoof legislation protecting the voting rights of blacks.

March 30, 1868 Republicans begin the impeachment trialof Democrat President Andrew Johnson who declared, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government of white men.”

September 12, 1868 Civil rights activist Tunis Campbelland 24 other blacks in the Georgia Senate (all Republicans) were expelled by the Democrat majority and would later be reinstated by the Republican Congress.

October 7, 1868 Republicans denounced Democrat Party’s national campaign theme: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.”

October 22, 1868 While campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. Rep. James Hinds  (R-AR) was assassinated by Democrat terrorists who organized as the Ku  Klux Klan. Hinds was the first sitting congressman to be murdered while  in office.

December 10, 1869 Republican Gov. John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the FIRST-in-nation law granting women the right to vote and hold public office.

February 3, 1870 After passing the House with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition, Republicans’ 15th Amendmentwas ratified, granting the vote to ALL Americans regardless of race.

February 25, 1870 Hiram Rhodes Revels(R-MS) becomes the first black to be seated in the United States Senate.

May 31, 1870 President U.S. Grant signed the Republicans’Enforcement Act providing stiff penalties for depriving any American’s civil rights.

June 22, 1870 Ohio Rep. Williams Lawrence created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard the civil rights of blacks against Democrats in the South.

September 6, 1870

Women votedin Wyoming in first election after women’s suffrage signed into law by Republican Gov. John Campbell.

February 1, 1871

Rep. Jefferson Franklin Long (R-GA) became the first black to speakon the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

February 28, 1871

The Republican Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871providing federal protection for black voters.

April 20, 1871

The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawing Democrat Party-affiliated terrorist groups which oppressed blacks and all those who supported them.

October 10, 1871

Following warnings by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting, Republican civil rights activist Octavius Cattowas murdered by a Democrat Party operative. His military funeral was attended by thousands.

October 18, 1871

After violence against Republicans in South Carolina, President Ulysses Grant deployed U.S. troopsto combat Democrat Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

November 18, 1872

Susan B. Anthonywas arrested for voting after boasting to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she voted for “Well, I have gone and done it — positively voted the straight Republican ticket.”January 17, 1874

Armed Democrats seized the Texas state government, ending Republican efforts to racially integrate.

September 14, 1874

Democrat white supremacists  seized the Louisiana statehouse in attempt to overthrow the  racially-integrated administration of Republican Governor William  Kellogg. Twenty-seven were killed.

March 1, 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875,  guaranteeing access to public accommodations without regard to race,  was signed by Republican President U.S. Grant and passed with 92%  Republican support over 100% Democrat opposition.

January 10, 1878

U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment  for women’s suffrage. The Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it four  times before the election of a Republican House and Senate that  guaranteed its approval in 1919.

February 8, 1894

The Democrat Congress and Democrat President Grover Cleveland joined to repeal the Republicans’ Enforcement Actwhich had enabled blacks to vote.

January 15, 1901

Republican Booker T. Washingtonprotested the Alabama Democrat Party’s refusal to permit voting by blacks.

May 29, 1902

Virginia Democrats implemented a new state constitution condemned by Republicans as illegal, reducing black voter registrationby almost 90%.

February 12, 1909

On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, black Republicans and women’s suffragists Ida Wells and Mary Terrellco-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

May 21, 1919

The Republican House passed a constitutional amendmentgranting women the vote  with 85% of Republicans and only 54% of Democrats in favor. In the  Senate 80% of Republicans voted yes and almost half of Democrats voted  no.

August 18, 1920

The Republican-authored 19th Amendment giving women the right to  vote became part of the Constitution. Twenty-six of the 36 states needed  to ratify had Republican-controlled legislatures.

January 26, 1922

The House passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer(R-MO) making lynching a federal crime. Senate Democrats blocked it by filibuster.

June 2, 1924

Republican President Calvin Coolidgesigned a bill passed by the Republican Congress granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

October 3, 1924

Republicans denounced three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryanfor defending the Ku Klux Klan at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.

June 12, 1929

First Lady Lou Hoover invited the wife of black Rep. Oscar De Priest(R-IL) to tea at the White House, sparking protests by Democrats across the country.

August 17, 1937

Republicans organized opposition to former Ku Klux Klansman and  Democrat U.S. Senator Hugo Black who was later appointed to the U.S.  Supreme Court by FDR. Black’s Klan backgroundwas hidden until after confirmation.

June 24, 1940

The Republican Party platform called for the integration of the  Armed Forces. For the balance of his terms in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt(D) refused to order it.

August 8, 1945

Republicans condemned Harry Truman’s surprise use of the atomic  bomb in Japan. It began two days after the Hiroshima bombing when former  Republican President Herbert Hooverwrote that “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

May 17, 1954

Earl Warren, California’s three-term Republican Governor and 1948  Republican vice presidential nominee, was nominated to be Chief Justice  delivered the landmark decision “Brown v. Board of Education”.

November 25, 1955

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administrationbanned racial segregation of interstate bus travel.

March 12, 1956

Ninety-seven Democrats in Congress condemned the Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision and pledged (Southern Manifesto)to continue segregation.

June 5, 1956

Republican federal judge Frank Johnson ruled in favorof the Rosa Parks decision striking down the “blacks in the back of the bus” law.

November 6, 1956

African-American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathyvoted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President.

September 9, 1957

President Eisenhower signed the Republican Party’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

September 24, 1957

Sparking criticism from Democrats such as Senators John Kennedy  and Lyndon Johnson, President Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne  Division to Little Rock, AR to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubusto integrate their public schools.

May 6, 1960

President Eisenhower signed the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1960, overcoming a 125-hour, ’round-the-clock filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

May 2, 1963

Republicans condemned Bull Connor, the Democrat “Commissioner of Public Safety” in Birmingham, AL for arresting over 2,000 black schoolchildrenmarching for their civil rights.

September 29, 1963

Gov. George Wallace (D-AL) defied an order by U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson(appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower) to integrate Tuskegee High School.

June 9, 1964

Republicans condemned the 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Actby U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who served in the Senate until his death in 2010.

June 10, 1964

Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticized the  Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act and called on  Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964  was introduced and approved by a majority of Republicans in the Senate.  The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom  were proud segregationists — one of them being Al Gore Sr. (D).  President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen,  the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.

August 4, 1965

Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) overcame Democrat attempts  to block 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ninety-four percent of Republicans  voted for the landmark civil rights legislation while 27% of Democrats  opposed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and  other measures devised by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting, was  signed into law. A higher percentage of Republicans voted in favor.

February 19, 1976

President Gerald Ford formally rescinded President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order 9066authorizing the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII.

September 15, 1981

President Ronald Reagan established the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universitiesto increase black participation in federal education programs.

June 29, 1982

President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extensionof the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

August 10, 1988

President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988,  compensating Japanese-Americans for the deprivation of their civil  rights and property during the World War II internment ordered by FDR.

November 21, 1991

President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991to strengthen federal civil rights legislation.

August 20, 1996

A bill authored by U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-NY) to prohibit racial discrimination in adoptions, part of Republicans’ “Contract With America”, became law.

July 2, 2010

Clinton says Byrd joined KKK to help him get elected

Just a “fleeting association”. Nothing to see here.

Only a willing fool (and there quite a lot out there)  would accept and recite the nonsensical that one bright, sunny day  Democrats and Republicans just up and decided to “switch” political  positions and cite the “Southern Strategy”  as the uniform knee-jerk retort. Even today, it never takes long for a  Democrat to play the race card purely for political advantage.Thanks to the Democrat Party, blacks have the distinction of being  the only group in the United States whose history is a work-in-progress.

The idea that “the Dixiecrats joined the Republicans” is not  quite true, as you note. But because of Strom Thurmond it is accepted as  a fact. What happened is that the **next** generation (post 1965) of  white southern politicians — Newt, Trent Lott, Ashcroft, Cochran,  Alexander, etc — joined the GOP.So it was really a passing of the torch as the old  segregationists retired and were replaced by new young GOP guys. One  particularly galling aspect to generalizations about “segregationists  became GOP” is that the new GOP South was INTEGRATED for crying out  loud, they accepted the Civil Rights revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter  led a group of what would become “New” Democrats like Clinton and Al  Gore.

There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but  that doesn’t mean the birth of the southern GOP was tied to “white  racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern  GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were  the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not  John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block  desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the  Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those  acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous  filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The confusion arises from GOP Barry Goldwater’s vote against  the ’64 act. He had voted in favor or all earlier bills and had led the  integration of the Arizona Air National Guard, but he didn’t like the  “private property” aspects of the ’64 law. In other words, Goldwater  believed people’s private businesses and private clubs were subject only  to market forces, not government mandates (“We reserve the right to  refuse service to anyone.”) His vote against the Civil Rights Act was  because of that one provision was, to my mind, a principled mistake.This stance is what won Goldwater the South in 1964, and no  doubt many racists voted for Goldwater in the mistaken belief that he  opposed Negro Civil Rights. But Goldwater was not a racist; he was a  libertarian who favored both civil rights and property rights.Switch to 1968.Richard Nixon was also a proponent of Civil Rights; it was a CA  colleague who urged Ike to appoint Warren to the Supreme Court; he  was a supporter of  Brown v. Board, and favored sending troops to  integrate Little Rock High). Nixon saw he could develop a “Southern  strategy” based on Goldwater’s inroads. He did, but Independent Democrat  George Wallace carried most of the deep south in 68. By 1972,  however, Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and Nixon began to tilt the  south to the GOP. The old guard Democrats began to fade away while a new  generation of Southern politicians became Republicans. True, Strom  Thurmond switched to GOP, but most of the old timers (Fulbright, Gore,  Wallace, Byrd etc etc) retired as Dems.Why did a new generation white Southerners join the GOP? Not  because they thought Republicans were racists who would return the  South to segregation, but because the GOP was a “local government, small  government” party in the old Jeffersonian tradition. Southerners wanted  less government and the GOP was their natural home.Jimmy Carter, a Civil Rights Democrat, briefly returned some  states to the Democrat fold, but in 1980, Goldwater’s heir,  Ronald Reagan, sealed this deal for the GOP. The new “Solid South” was  solid GOP.BUT, and we must stress this: the new southern Republicans were  *integrationist* Republicans who accepted the Civil Rights revolution  and full integration while retaining their love of Jeffersonian limited  government principles.

Oh wait, princess, I am not done yet.

Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow  Wilson re-segregated the U.S. government and had the pro-Klan film  “Birth of a Nation” screened in his White House.  

Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of the Old Confederacy all six  times they ran, when Southern blacks had no vote. Disfranchised black  folks did not seem to bother these greatest of liberal icons.  

As vice president, FDR chose “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who played a  major role in imposing a poll tax to keep blacks from voting.

Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who  claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him  that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.  

Black’s great achievement as a lawyer was in winning acquittal of a man  who shot to death the Catholic priest who had presided over his  daughter’s marriage to a Puerto Rican.

In 1941, FDR named South Carolina Sen. “Jimmy” Byrnes to the Supreme  Court. Byrnes had led filibusters in 1935 and 1938 that killed  anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was necessary “to hold in  check the Negro in the South.”  

FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law.  

“This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s  country,” said Jimmy. Harry Truman, who paid $10 to join the Klan, then  quit, named Byrnes Secretary of State, putting him first in line of  succession to the presidency, as Harry then had no V.P.  

During the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Gov. Orval  Faubus used the National Guard to keep black students out of Little Rock  High. Gov. Ross Barnett refused to let James Meredith into Ole Miss.  Gov. George Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, to  block two black students from entering.

All three governors were Democrats. All acted in accord with the “Dixie  Manifesto” of 1956, which was signed by 19 senators, all Democrats, and  80 Democratic congressmen.  

Among the signers of the manifesto, which called for massive resistance  to the Brown decision desegregating public schools, was the vice  presidential nominee on Adlai’s Stevenson’s ticket in 1952, Sen. John  Sparkman of Alabama.

Though crushed by Eisenhower, Adlai swept the Deep South, winning both  Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.  

Do you suppose those Southerners thought Adlai would be tougher than Ike  on Stalin? Or did they think Adlai would maintain the unholy alliance  of Southern segregationists and Northern liberals that enabled Democrats  to rule from 1932 to 1952?  

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and  segregation, of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and the KKK. “Bull” Connor, who  turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the  Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.  

And Nixon?

In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, “America  can’t afford the cost of segregation.” The following year, Nixon got a  personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the  Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.

In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book “The Greatest Comeback:  How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” out July  8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of  political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”  

Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ‘66 and called on LBJ,  Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None  did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.”  And so were they all – good Democrats.  

While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor  south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.

In Nixon’s presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800  percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An  Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to  minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.  

Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights –  he never did – but because he shared the patriotic values of the South  and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.

When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated.

When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent.  Richard Nixon desegregated the Southern schools, something you won’t learn in today’s public schools.

Not done there yet, snowflake.

1964:George Romney, Republican civil rights activist.  That  Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a  symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away  with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a  pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and  Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of  conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th  century.  

Perhaps  even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their  Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and  their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of  civil-rights legislation for a century.  

Republicans  may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the  coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth  nonetheless.  

Even  if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the  1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there  is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the  political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an  implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in  the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.  

That  is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in  the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far  more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era,  and had been for a century.  

There  is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From  abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the  Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to  the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that  is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless  connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  

And  from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from  Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth  Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of  1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting  John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson.  

Supporting  civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional  Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the  Democrats.  

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.

In  the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist  constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than  the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the  New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his  views.  

Never  mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had  consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black  Americans from lynching.  

As  a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil  Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed  to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement  provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.  

Johnson’s  Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of  staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for  24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill.  

The  reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of  the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a  record-setting filibuster.  

In  both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern  Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage  while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken  the teeth out of the legislation.  

Johnson would later explain his thinking thus:  “These  Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem  for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the  political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do  something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just  enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”  

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo.  

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment.  

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment.  

Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.  

Dwight  Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the  military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason  either had to act was that President Woodrow Wilson, the personification  of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated  federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for  me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)  

Klansmen  from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions  in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic  Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.  

Johnson  himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the  “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In  fact, nothing.  

President  Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few  popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began  losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they  were picking up votes from northern blacks.  

The  Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a  political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but  the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the  country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the  House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was  a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove  New Deal critics to the Republican Party.  

Likewise,  adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is  never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would  later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become  especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson  committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).  

The  tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the  backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.  

Republicans  would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s  all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its  first Republican.  

Kentucky  elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while  Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined  by another in 1932.    

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal,  began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not  send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s  election of John Tower.

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress.

Many  of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less  resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to  ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and  that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the  Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic  development, and organic social change rather than through a second  political confrontation between North and South.  

As  late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of  any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education,  as well as of equal rights under law.”  

The  conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was  backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.  

And  their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican  support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the  two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.

Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.  

This  fact was recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard  Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and  Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Which  is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with  the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked  the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations  and anti-Communism.  

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.  

As  Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself  from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise  to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.  

This  class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best  represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites,  however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black  populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.  

This  was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in  Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was  the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling  tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill  (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in  Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.  

There  is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to  pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace.

That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign.  

But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect.  

The  conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a  western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial  issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964  act and its extension of federal power.  

Goldwater  had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and  Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a  75-page brief from Robert Bork.  

But  far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he  named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller,  who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the  1950s.  

The  Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of  the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just  aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his  refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most  needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities  to Negro citizens.”

Other  planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes  adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative  or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for  whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to  discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.”

And  Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full  implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,  and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and  opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog  whistle.  

Of course there were racists in the Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic Party.  The  case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical  panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t  have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”),  and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those  dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn  country club? Not once”).  

But  the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party  platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide  Republican about-face on civil rights.  

Neither does the history of the black vote.  

While  Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late  1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among  whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.  

By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North.  This  development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great  Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the  benefit of the Democratic Party.  

Unlike  the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying  upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the  face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure  politics.  

Johnson’s  War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining  for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment  rate was less than 5 percent.  

Congressional  Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent  elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the  elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent  demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average  wealth.  

Democrats  such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J.  Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among  the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed  merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support  to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political  heirs.  

In  the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected  civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and  more like an attempt to make clients of them.  

If  the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one  would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years  following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.  

Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties.  

Nor  did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats  throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be  elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats.  

It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican.  If  southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law  passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and  early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not  that slow.  

Republicans  did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases  segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of  civil-rights Republicans.  

One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy.  

Dowdy was a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms.  

He  declared the reforms “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s  office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his  oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as  Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people.  

Dowdy  went on: “I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most  people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing  he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political  rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)  

Dowdy  was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable  record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H.  W. Bush.  

It  was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of  the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the  Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics.

Eisenhower  warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in  truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the  interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party over what remained  of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.  

The  Republican Party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the  post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters  to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its  satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the  “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.  

By  the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current  in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism —  especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism  abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go  but the Democratic Party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the  Democratic Party was not his alone.  

The  schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the  subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat  George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old  Confederacy but carried only five states.

Republican  Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act  through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North  Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he  carried.  

Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas.  

Mindful  of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson  informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that  “those states may be lost anyway.”  

Subsequent  presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in  1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976,  Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less  occupy the South like Sherman.  

Bill  Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests,  and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably  Virginia and Florida.  

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with several factors:  The rise of the southern middle class,  The increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state,   The Vietnam controversy,  The  rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban  chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and  The incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party.  

Individual  events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic  convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the  Republican Party.  Democrats  might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime —  are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism.  However,  this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real  saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both  parties for decades.  Indeed,  Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are  those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in  much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was  practicing.  Johnson  informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great  Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two  hundred years.”  Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.  

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