Southern Democrats ... I still don’t get it

[The Mikado]

Rino Tom is on the right boat here: up until the 1950s at earliest, outside of Tennessee there essentially WASN'T a Republican Party in the South and that forced people from liberal to damn-near-socialist on one end to ultra-reactionary on the other end into the Democratic Party. One party states had to fold the entire political spectrum into that party, so you did have quite a bit of variance amongst Southern Dems. Many were deeply reactionary, but it wasn't a unanimous thing. They were almost all white supremacists, at least outwardly. Stats like 19 out of 22 ex-Confederate state Southern Senators signing Strom Thurmond's segregationist hardliner Southern Manifesto in 1956 speaks volumes.

By the 1950s, things were just barely beginning to change, starting in 1948 as the national Democratic Party started to be associated more with Civil Rights. Dwight Eisenhower got unheard of numbers for a Republican in the South in 1952 while at the same time doing quite well with the black vote in the North, and actually won some Southern states (VA, TN, FL, and TX) for the GOP for the first time since 1928. By 1960, it was actually socially acceptable for well-heeled white Southerners to (gasp) vote Republican, especially in the cities. My state of Texas elected the first Republican to the Senate from the South in 40 years in 1961, with John Tower taking over the Senate seat LBJ vacated.



Tower was one of the first Republicans to realize the path to running in the South was to run as a racial conservative and his breakthrough inspired Republicans throughout the rest of the South through the 1960s. I always have felt that the Tower 1961 race doesn't get the credit it deserves in this story: he pioneered the path to statewide success for a Southern Republican three years before the Civil Rights Act even passed.