At what point did the Southern Strategy begin?

[Fuzzy Bear]

The definitive book on this topic is The Vital South - How Presidents Are elected by Earl Black and Merle Black.  It was written in 1992, when Clinton was running, but it doesn't mention Clinton, so it was in the works beforehand.  It talks about the development of a Solid Democratic South (from 1880 to 1944), the Divided Democratic South (1948 to 1964) and the development of the Solid non-Democratic South that hardened into a Solid Republican South (1968-1988).

The basis for the Solid Democratic South was simple; it was the promise that the Democratic Party would support Democratic Presidential candidates in exchange for non-interference in the internal affairs of the Southern States.  It was the assurance that segregation would not be interfered with by the Federal Government.  The only exceptions in this period was 1920, when Warren Harding (to everyone's shock) carried Tennessee, and 1928, when VA, NC, TN, FL, and TX carried for Republican Quaker Herbert Hoover over Democratic Catholic Al Smith.  Hoover and Harding has no "Southern Strategy", however; the anti-Catholic sentiment and support for Prohibition simply allowed Hoover to carry the Border South (save Arkansas, whose Senior Senator, Joseph Robinson, was Smith's running mate).  (This manifested in situations such as Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), was probably the most vile racist in the history of the 20th century US Senate, having a record of down-the-line support for the New Deal.)  The only sign of unrest in all of this was when conservative Democrats in Texas nominated a slate of Democratic electors called the "Texas Regulars"; they were an independent slate of electors opposing FDR in 1944.  They received about 100,000 votes, nowhere enough to win.

1948 of course was the year of the Dixiecrat rebellion.  Numerous delegations from the Deep South bolted the 1948 Democratic Convention and nominated Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright as the candidates of the States Rights Democratic Party.  This was the first time the a candidate actively campaigned against a Democrat in the South and carried states.  This, however, bears some explanation.  In the states the Thurmond-Wright ticket won (SC, AL, MS, and LA), the Thurmond-Wright Ticket was on the ballot as the Democratic nominees, and the Truman-Barkley ticket was on as a third party.  In the states where the Democratic electors were pledged to Truman-Barkley the Democrats won; this was in the peripheral South, but it was also in GA, a Deep South state.  (Had Gene Talmadge not died, it is quite possible that the Georgia electors would have been pledged to the Dixiecrats and Georgia would have been added to that number.)

The end result of 1948 was that the Southern Democrats could not be assured that the Democratic Party would protect segregation.  It was at this point where the Eisenhower Republicans made a decision to campaign in the South.  The belief was that there was an opportunity.  Ike was a President who was, by today's standards, a racist; he was for Civil Rights, more or less, but he was also sympathetic to the concerns of White Southerners on the issue of integration, and he wanted Southern Democratic support in Congress for his policies.  Meanwhile, Southern Democrats were losing influence over the nomination of Democratic Presidential candidates.  They got nowhere with the candidacy of Richard Russell, but they were able to block Estes Kefauver's nomination in both 1952 and 1956.  (Kefauver was considered a scalawag and hated by his own region's politicos.)  Eisenhower and his advisers campaigned in the peripheral South and won TX, FL, VA, NC, and TN; he added LA in 1956 by siding with the oil states on the ownership of Tidelands Oil.  The tactic was simple; the GOP could compete in Southern states and carry at least some of them because they would be marginally less integrationist than the Democrats; they would go slower on the issue.  This became the GOP tack and they adhered to this.

The Southern strategy was the above up until 1964.  Goldwater changed all that, and he changed all of that because of how he got nominated and how he got elected.

The Presidential Election results in 1964 showing Goldwater winning the entire Deep South while losing the peripheral South.  This was true for a number of reasons, one of which was that Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This was a bigger concern for whites in the Deep South than whites in the peripheral South.  The other side of the coin here is that 1964 was the beginning of Southern influence growing WITHIN the GOP and at the Republican National Convention.  Republicans became the party which gave Southern conservatives progressively more leverage in their Presidential nominations, while Democrats were giving Southern conservatives less.  Black and Black detail the 1968 Democratic National Convention where a coalition of Southern conservatives (led by John Connally) joined with labor and the Big City delegations to nominate Hubert Humphrey (who hadn't entered a single primary).  After this, Humphrey turned the South down on the issue of the Vice Presidency, selecting Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-ME), who, the more I look at it, was an incredibly overrated candidate and a positively awful VP choice.  Meanwhile, Southern conservatives cinched the nomination for Nixon and were instrumental in the selection of Spiro Agnew as Nixon's running mate.

Black and Black point out that 1968 was the LAST time Southern conservatives played a major role in a Democratic Presidential nomination.  The McGovern-Fraser commission further diminished their power.  The demise of the seniority system in the Congress, beginning in 1975, was another step that diminished conservative influence in the Democratic party even further.  What this meant is that young conservative politicians in the South needed to consider that they had no future in the Democratic Party, whereas the GOP was providing them with a party option where they could not only be influential within the party; they could get elected in their states as well.  That was the REAL Southern strategy; the strategy to bring political LEADERS into the GOP.  The beginning of this was the Solid Republican South which emerged in 1972 (the Carter 1976 results were an abberation) while, simultaneously, the GOP was becoming a truly conservative party.  (Black and Black point out that Gerald Ford lost support when he picked Nelson Rockefeller as his VP because he didn't comprehend the degree to which the GOP had become a truly conservatively party.) 

The real Southern Strategy was on a number of levels.  After Black and Black wrote their book, the final step came, which was to show Southern voters that voting Democratic was voting liberal.  This, according to Michael Barone, was the driving force of the 1994 GOP Landslide, where the advent of the Clinton Administration brought out in the open the fact that the vast majority of people voted for Republicans or Democrats that said they were moderates or conservatives to Congress, but every year, Liberal legislation made it through Congress.  The conservative white South gets this now; and the South is now more Republican than it was Democratic in the 1980s. 

The Southern Strategy was more than Nixon's strategy to win an election; it was a course of action over time to where the GOP acted consciously to realign the South, politically, to support Republican conservatives at all levels of government.

[Fuzzy Bear]

IIRC, didn't Herbert Hoover pursue a "Lily-white" strategy in the Southern state GOPs as early as the 20s?

"Lily-White" was a term to describe the delegations of Republicans from Southern States to the Republican National Convention, and the general makeup of the party organizations.  The Southern GOP through 1948 was a "rotten borough" network of delegations with either Lily-White makeup or "Black and Tan" makeup ("Tan" referring to Whites who were willing to submit to Black leadership).  The purposes of these organizations was to obtain and distribute patronage from the National Republican Party.Hoover's support fromt the South at the 1928 Republican National Convention primarily came from Lily-White Southern Delegations.  The most prominent "Black and Tan" delegation was Mississippi, led by Perry Howard, who was, in the 1st four decades of the 20th century, the most influential Black political leader in the Soutn (and, perhaps, in America).  Hoover did not pursue a "Southern strategy" in the General Election, however; he basically lucked into the peripheral South (VA, NC, TN, TX, and FL) voting Republican, while the Deep South and Arkansas stayed loyal to the naitonal Democrats. 

Carrying these states was something that happened for Hoover; he was running against a Wet Catholic.  It was not until 1952, however, that the GOP honestly considered challenging the Democrats in the South as a means to break the Democrats' electoral lock on the Presidency.