Southern Comfort. - 'The Rise of Southern Republicans' - book review

National Review, July 15, 2002 by Ralph Reed

The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black (Harvard, 384 pp., $29.95)

During the 1988 campaign, vice-presidential nominee Dan Quayle appeared at a North Carolina-South Carolina football game in Columbia, S.C. -- the kind of autumn festival that is, in the South, part athletic contest and part cultural event. As the teams briefly suspended play in honor of the dignitary in their midst, the game announcer welcomed Quayle to the press box over the stadium sound system. Spontaneously, 70,000 people rose to their feet to give him a standing ovation that lasted several minutes: The roar was full-throated and deafening. These southerners seemed to be saying of the man that the northern cultural elite ridiculed, "We're for him because he shares our values." Apparently, they were representative of their region, because nine weeks later, the Bush-Quayle ticket won every state in the South on the way to a landslide national victory.

This moment marked but one epiphany along the South's road from Democratic dominance to Republican ascendancy. It has been a remarkable transformation: In 1950, only two members of the entire House delegation from the South were Republicans; there were no Republican U.S. senators. By the 2000 elections, Republicans accounted for a majority of the representatives from the region, and 14 of its 22 senators. The rise of the southern Republicans is one of the most consequential developments in modern American politics: By changing the politics of the South, the GOP -- and conservatives in particular -- changed the politics of the nation.

This new book is a marvelous chronicle of this remarkable shift. Earl Black and Merle Black, brothers who teach political science at Rice University and Emory University respectively, are perhaps the most respected academic experts on the topic; they make a persuasive case that the emergence of the Republican party in the South is the primary reason for the modern Republican ascendancy at the national level, and also for the existence today of the most competitive national political environment since the 1880s.

The reason is simple and mathematical. After the 1946 elections, the Republicans briefly controlled the House of Representatives by holding 96 seats in the North, 82 in the Midwest, and 48 in the West -- but only 5 in the South. The arithmetic was on the side of the Democrats: With a solid South, Democrats needed to win only one-third of the remaining House seats in the nation to regain their majority. They did so in 1948 and held power (with a single two-year interruption) for nearly a half century.

After the 1994 elections, when Newt Gingrich of Georgia became the first Republican Speaker of the House in two generations, the GOP held 45 seats in the North, 51 in the Midwest, 78 in the West, and 61 in the South. It was the emergence of a strong Republican party in the South that made the national majority possible.

This was a dramatic break from the South's past. In 1952, four-fifths of white voters in the South were Democrats. So strong were their loyalties that in 1960 John F. Kennedy actually ran stronger in Georgia than he did in Massachusetts. During this period, the story of the GOP in the South is a tale of abject futility: Excluding a handful of mountain districts with a pro-Union heritage, Republicans won only 7 of 2,434 congressional elections in the South between 1900 and 1950. There was no party structure to speak of, and the few Republicans who labored on served primarily to control patronage during Republican presidential administrations.

How did all this change? How did the South become arguably the most naturally Republican region in the country? The Black brothers isolate four major factors. The first, as is so often the case in the tortured history of the South, is race. The crucial moment came in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. White southerners had long viewed the Democratic party as the guarantor of white supremacy. For many, Johnson's civil rights agenda was a betrayal of this devil's bargain. Barry Goldwater, one of only a handful of senators from outside the South to oppose the civil rights bill, laid the groundwork for a new Republican party. Goldwater carried six southern states in 1964 and his coattails swept in numerous Republican congressmen. This development was not without harmful side effects, for as white conservatives poured into the GOP, they displaced many longtime black loyalists, and the failure of the Republican party to win minority votes continues to this day.

The second factor was Ronald Reagan. If Goldwater was the midwife of the modern Republican party in the South, Reagan led it to maturity and legitimacy. His message of a strong military, anti-Communism, and limited government was well-suited to the South, the most openly patriotic and culturally conservative region in the country. The authors point to a 1980 poll in which 88 percent of Texans declared that they wanted the U.S. to have military superiority over the Soviet Union: This was one of the messages that Reagan embodied. Southern states also had large veteran populations, and boasted a disproportionate share of military bases. Though he came from the Midwest, by way of the West, Reagan adhered to the traditional values that many Southerners identified with. In his 1984 reelection, he carried an astonishing 69 percent of white southerners.