1964 in East Tennessee

[tractorboy280]

As I understand it, east Tennessee had no slavery which lead to the area being heavily Republican from the Civil War, through the Jim Crow era, to the present day.

Because of this background, it seems like the kind of place you would expect LBJ to win in a landslide in 1964, but he didn't. My question is, what happened in the hundred years after the Civil War to turn east Tennessee from being pro-civil rights (or at least anti-slavery), to voting for Goldwater?

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

They were unionists but never anti-racist. The opposition to slavery was mainly for economic reasons but I don’t think they’re racial attitudes were ever really that much more enlightened then your average white southern Democrat and after a century in the political wilderness they had no reason to suddenly abandon their party just as it was becoming competitive.

Contrast that with ancestral copperhead counties in the north which mostly abandoned the Democrats in the 1920s as soon as they started seeing them as the party of big city immigrants.

[TDAS04]

East Tennessee has been very hostile toward the Democratic Party since in 1830s.  That has never changed, but perhaps their reasoning does.  Just because East Tennessee was staunchly Unionist during the Civil War doesn’t mean that they’d be pro-Civil Rights 100 years later.  In fact, representatives from East Tennessee voted against the CRA (including Howard Baker’s stepmother).   So it’s not surprising the region held for Goldwater (though he did underperform Nixon by quite a bit).

[NotSoLucky]

IIRC Johnson won Chattanooga and Knoxville but very narrowly lost the respective counties both are located in?

[TDAS04]

IIRC Johnson won Chattanooga and Knoxville but very narrowly lost the respective counties both are located in?

Probably.  I believe Biden also decisively carried those cities while handily losing the counties.

[mianfei]

East Tennessee has been very hostile toward the Democratic Party since in 1830s. That has never changed, but perhaps their reasoning does. Just because East Tennessee was staunchly Unionist during the Civil War doesn’t mean that they’d be pro-Civil Rights 100 years later. In fact, representatives from East Tennessee voted against the CRA (including Howard Baker’s stepmother). So it’s not surprising the region held for Goldwater (though he did underperform Nixon by quite a bit).

In fact, although not to the same degree as in Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia, Goldwater underperformed even Hoover and Landon in the most staunchly Unionist and Republican counties. Asenath Waite, you are right that East Tennesseeans were never anti-racist, but they were equally never pro-Goldwater. They disliked many aspects of what the Arizona Senator stood for, but according to Kevin Phillips most importantly his alliance with the “Cotton States”. His losses in these counties were a factor allowing Johnson to comfortably win Tennessee.

One could compare East Tennessee with the Great Plains States, which were settled by pro-Union whites. These mostly originated from the Ozarks, which in turn were settled from Appalachia. Plains whites were and are very anti-civil rights, I imagine more so than the voting records of local congressmen would imply. Like East Tennessee, the Plains strongly swung against Goldwater. What determined whether places like these held was, plainly, the margins the Republicans had had previously.

Contrast that with ancestral copperhead counties in the north which mostly abandoned the Democrats in the 1920s as soon as they started seeing them as the party of big city immigrants.

Actually, those “Copperhead” counties seldom abandoned the Democrats because of their association with big city immigrants. That would mean most abandoned them with Al Smith in 1928, but in fact the date when most did so was either when:

• they became perceived as too pro-war or anti-German during World War One, or
• they became perceived as too pro-urban (or perhaps insufficiently anti-black) during Roosevelt’s second term from 1937 to 1941

[Alben Barkley]

East Tennessee and South Central Kentucky shared a history as places that always voted Republican simply for the sake of voting Republican, out of a sense of loyalty and tradition more than for actual political reasons. They arguably voted against their best interests in the New Deal era, including 1964, and still do so today. The only difference is that many of the formerly Democratic areas of their states have caught up to them and now do the same, some voting even more fiercely Republican now than they do. If you understood just how much loyalty and tradition matters down here, this would make perfect sense to you, wouldn't be surprising at all. These people sincerely vote because of the way their daddy and his daddy before him voted, and it took a LONG time and a LOT of generational turnover for that line of thinking to finally be broken in the Democratic rural areas of these states. But even then, it isn't gone completely; part of the reason I myself am a Democrat is loyalty and tradition. My grandmother, in her 90s, who lives in a deep red rural Kentucky county, still is a staunch Democrat too. It's just the culture down here.