Hoover to Nixon
In 1928 the Democratic candidate for president was Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic and opponent of prohibition. Republican Herbert Hoover defeated him as Republicans carried the former Confederate states for the first time since Reconstruction. Republicans resisted government intervention in the economy in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Voters held them responsible for the dire economic straits, and in the election of 1932 -- another “critical election” -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats swept into power where successive Republican presidential candidates (Landon, Wilkie, and Dewey) couldn’t unseat them.
With Roosevelt’s untimely death a few months after being elected to a fourth term, his Vice President Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency. Truman presided over the end of World War II and the transition to peacetime on the homefront. During World War II labor unions had made a no-strike pledge, and with war’s end pent-up labor unrest erupted into what has been called the Strike Wave of 1946. Over 1 million workers were on strike at one time or another, from coast to coast, and across a wide range of industries. Voters held Truman and the Democrats responsible for the strikes, as well as rising inflation, and in 1946 Republicans won 55 Congressional seats, regaining control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Hoover administration.
Truman’s civil rights initiatives -- including the establishment of a Civil Rights Commission, urging Congress to enact a variety of civil rights legislation, and issuing an executive order to desegregate the military -- contributed to a split within the Democratic party and formation of the States’ Rights Democratic party. The so-called Dixiecrats nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond to run against Truman in the election of 1948. Truman faced defections from the left, as well, when his secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, decided to run against him as the Progressive Party candidate. Polls and commentators predicted that Republican Thomas Dewey would win handily, but in what is acknowledged as one of the great electoral upsets, a coalition that included organized labor, farmers, African Americans, and Jews, secured the victory for Truman with 303 electoral votes and 49.6 percent of the popular vote.
In 1952 both Democrat and Republican parties were divided. Democratic presidential candidates included William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kerr, Averell Harriman, Georgia Senator Richard Russell, Vice President Alben Barkley, and Massachusetts Governor Paul Deaver. Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson emerged from a contentious convention as the nominee.
Among the Republicans Senator William Taft of Ohio led the conservative faction, advocating the abolishment of Roosevelt’s welfare state domestically, along with an isolationist foreign policy. New York governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Thomas Dewey led the liberal wing, which accepted the welfare state and supported an interventionist foreign policy as a way to combat the spread of Communism. Taft, California Governor Earl Warren, and former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen expressed interest in running, but the Dewey faction sought a compromise candidate, eventually choosing General of the Army and former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower, as the Hoover Institution’s Kori Schake observes, was “widely admired but not considered a politician.”
Like the Democratic convention would be, the Republican convention was rancorous, with the Eisenhower faction accusing the Taft faction of “stealing votes,” and Taft supporter Everett Dirksen denouncing the party’s liberal wing in his closing speech. Despite Eisenhower’s lackluster campaign in which he refused to denounce Communist-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy, tried to distance himself from his vice-presidental candidate Richard Nixon when Nixon was accused of taking bribes, and called Senator Taft “a very stupid man,” Eisenhower won overwhelmingly, with 442 electoral votes. Significantly, Eisenhower won Tennessee, as well as Florida, Texas, and Virginia -- states previously considered reliably Democrat. He won again in 1956, losing Missouri, but picking up Kentucky, Louisiana, and West Virginia.
In 1957 the US entered a recession as the federal government raised short-term interest rates in an effort to combat inflation, but prices continued to rise. The recession was worldwide, but the strong dollar led to a trade deficit in the US. At its peak, over 7 million people were unemployed. The economic downturn came to be known as the “Eisenhower Recession,” and Republicans, who controlled Congress, were widely blamed.
The nomination of Richard Nixon as the Republican candidate for president in 1960 was the first time since 1836 that an incumbent vice president was nominated. Eisenhower did little to support Nixon’s candidacy, however. Asked during a press conference what decisions Nixon had participated in, Eisenhower replied “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Eisenhower did not endorse Nixon or help with fundraising until after Nixon was nominated.
The Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy, was the first Catholic presidential candidate since Al Smith in 1928. In The Making of a Catholic President Shaun A. Casey writes
… [I]n order to win an offsetting percentage of Protestants to balance Catholic bloc voting for Kennedy, Nixon had to win a large percentage of conservative white southern voters…. Nixon could simply not be perceived as progressive on race and have any chance at these voters, who historically voted Democratic.
The Nixon campaign embarked on a systematic effort to woo Protestant -- and particularly Evangelical -- voters, writing, for example, to members of the Southern Baptist Convention of “our concern over the candidacy for the president of the United States of one who would indisputably be under pressure of his church to break down the wall of separation.” In fact, as Casey recounts, this kind of rhetorical separation of church and state was an attempt at covering what was essentially anti-Catholic bigotry.
In 1960 there were 17 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, however. Protestants defecting from the Democratic party were apparently more than offset by Catholics and other voter demographics supporting Kennedy. The election was close, but the Kennedy campaign’s superior organization, the candidate’s prowess on the campaign trail, the advantage in party affiliation, and the association of the Republicans with the recession were among the factors that carried Kennedy to a narrow victory.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson, assumed office and was the Democratic nominee in the 1964 election.
As chronicled by Darren Dochuk in From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, between 1910 and 1970 millions of people migrated from the South to other locations in the US. Driven both by “unforeseen crisis and unanticipated opportunity,” what Dochuk calls “yeomen,” i.e. farmers who cultivate their own land, had been periodically relocating since before the Civil War. The economics of tenant farming reached a crisis in the 1920s when approximately 250,000 inhabitants of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and to a lesser extent Missouri and Louisiana moved to California in pursuit of a better life. The migration continued into the 1930s and 40s, but now, as Dochuk relates in a joke from the Texas panhandle “the rich ‘uns’ had pulled up and gone to California to starve,” while “the ‘poor folks’ just stayed hungry where they were.”
In 1964 then-Governor George Wallace of Alabama appeared on the Democratic primary ballot in several northern states. Wallace, an ardent segregationist, had declared in his 1962 inauguration speech written by Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Earl Carter “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Among the network of religious organizations that Southern evangelicals had introduced across the midwest during their exodus, one in particular -- the Baptist Bible Fellowship -- was a major source of support for the Wallace campaign. Christian entrepreneur and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell “regularly featured segregationists Lester Maddox and George Wallace on his Old Time Gospel Hour television program” in the early 1960s.
Under Wallace’s influence the Alabama Democratic primary elected “unpledged electors,” meaning that they were not committed to the eventual nominee of the party. At the time of the primary in May Wallace was considering running for president himself, but by July had decided against that and released the electors from any obligation to vote for him.
A consequence of the electors being unpledged was that Johnson did not appear on the presidential ballot in Alabama. Ahead of the 1964 Republican convention Wallace met with Alabama Republican party leaders to lobby for making repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which eventual nominee Barry Goldwater had voted against, part of the Republican platform. Wallace also reportedly offered to switch parties if Goldwater made Wallace his running mate. (Goldwater declined.)
During the 1964 presidential campaign, the editors of Fact magazine surveyed more than twelve thousand psychiatrists, asking if they believed Goldwater to be “psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States.” Responses included speculation that Goldwater suffered from chronic psychosis, megalomania , grandiosity masking feelings of inadequacy, and paranoid schizophrenia. Goldwater was compared to Mao Tse-tung, as well as “Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders.” Some respondents expressed surprise that professionals would undertake a diagnosis without a personal examination, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) declared the survey to have “no scientific or medical validity whatsoever.” Goldwater sued Fact for libel and was awarded over $1 million in damages. The episode led the APA to adopt the so-called “Goldwater rule” in 1973, declaring it “unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination,” and was authorized to make a public statement.
Johnson went on to win over 61% of the national popular vote, which was the largest share since the election of 1820. (The election of 1824 was the first in which a large majority of electors were chosen by popular vote, rather than being appointed by state legislatures.) As President Johnson was able to parlay his sweeping electoral victory into a series of political achievements including the Economic Opportunity Act (part of the so-called “War on Poverty”), and the Voting RIghts Act. But the Vietnam War overshadowed Johnson’s presidency, and in the 1968 New Hampshire primary he received only 48 percent of the vote, with challenger Eugene McCarthy receiving 42. On March 31 Johnson stunned the nation by declaring “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Less than a week later, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, TN. On April 27 Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy for president, joining Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. A little over a month later on June 5, having won the South Dakota and California presidential primaries, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, CA.
Humphrey did not compete in primaries, but sought to win delegates in states where they were selected by party officials. At the Democratic convention Kennedy’s delegates did not coalesce behind a single candidate, but split between McCarthy and Senator George McGovern. The convention took place against the backdrop of anti-war protests and a heavy-handed response from Chicago police, but in the end Humphrey won the nomination easily.
Having famously declared “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” after his 1962 loss to Edmund Brown in the California gubernatorial race, two years after losing the presidential election to John F. Kennedy, observers were surprised that in 1968 Richard Nixon once again undertook to run for president. Ostensibly having returned to private law practice in ‘62, Nixon remained active in Republican politics, campaigning actively for Goldwater in 1964 and “delivering hundreds of speeches for any GOP candidate who asked,” in the 1966 presidential campaign. Thanks largely to Nixon’s efforts Republicans picked up 47 seats in Congress, “enough to partner with conservative Southern Democrats and halt … Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ program.”
Nixon established himself as the “law and order” candidate. His team created a sophisticated media campaign, with young TV producer Roger Ailes playing a central role. (Ailes went on to hold similar positions in the Reagan and George W. Bush presidential campaigns, became CEO of Fox News in 1996, and served as chairman from 2005 to 2016.) A key device employed by Nixon’s media team was the faux town meeting, in which Nixon appeared to be answering impromptu questions, but in reality the entire event had been tightly choreographed. The Nixon campaign enjoyed a substantial budget advantage over the Humphrey campaign, and deployed a series of ads that capitalized on voter fears and insecurities without showing Nixon himself. In contrast to Humphrey who campaigned in person nonstop, Nixon held only one or two rallies a day, marshaling his energies for television interviews. Nixon’s speeches were full of vague generalities. Yet as the general election season began in September 1968 he led Humphrey by double digits in public opinion polling.
Meanwhile, George Wallace mounted a quixotic but significant third party campaign. Using coded language to avoid appearing overtly racist, Wallace spoke of defending the “integrity” of neighborhoods and neighborhood schools, but “everyone was aware he was talking about white neighborhoods, or defending white schools,” says Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter. By late September 1968 polls showed Wallace with 21 percent of the vote. Media commentators ridiculed Wallace and his campaign, but he was a regular feature of their broadcasts.
Wallace chose for his running mate retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who had directed the nuclear bombing of Japan in World War II. In his only press conference, LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Support for the Wallace campaign subsequently declined, and in the end Wallace received 13.5% of the vote. But Nixon’s “law and order” stand and opposition to “forced busing” were clear echoes of Wallace’s rhetoric.
The election of 1968 is widely regarded as a “realignment election.” Journalist Michael A. Cohen credits Wallace with creating much of the now-familiar anti-government rhetoric associated with self-identified conservatives in the US. In a 2016 interview in the Washington Post Cohen describes Wallace’s anti-elitist populist message focused on the working class, albeit white working class, and his amplifying white anxiety about civil rights and integration. Nonetheless Cohen insists Wallace was not a small “c” conservative. “Wallace was actually a New Deal liberal except on race,” Cohen says.
In the 1950s and 1960s a so-called liberal consensus largely prevailed in US national politics, although Cohen regards its attractiveness as “overstated.” The liberal consensus in general combined anti-Communism in foreign affairs with vestiges of New Deal government policies at home. After 1968 the Republican anti-government populist narrative emerged, and while its popularity, too, was overstated, in Cohen’s view, significantly politicians seemed to believe that it was popular with voters. The biggest divide after 1968 according to Cohen was race, and white fears of “the price they would have to pay for integration.” The crime rate did increase in the 60s, and according to Cohen Democrats did not know how to respond. They didn’t want to take too hard a line for fear of alienating blacks and liberals, but also were very focused on the Vietnam war ”at the expense of domestic issues.” Republicans conflated their criticisms of crime, big government, and integration, arguing that Democrats were foisting integration on white middle-class Americans, paying for anti-poverty programs with tax dollars from white citizens, and “coddling” criminals. As Cohen notes, this message resonated with voters, particularly in the South.
Ironically, though, while the narrative shifted, the practice of government didn’t much. In fact the “welfare state” expanded under Nixon and Reagan. The Supplemental Security Income program, providing financial support for people with mental and physical disabilities was enacted during the Nixon administration. The Food Stamp program was expanded to include the so-called “working poor,” and made mandatory for all states. Social Security payments were increased 20% and indexed to inflation. And Nixon pioneered the use of “block grants,” providing federal funds to local governments.
The Nixon campaign acknowledged the changes the South had undergone since World War II. Economically it was now primarily a service economy, including high-tech and defense industries; geographically it now often sprawled out from the edge of cities rather than so many sharp divisions between urban and rural populations. Politically the area favored limits on government interference with capitalism, along with what Darren Dochuk calls “[t]he myth and ethic of self-help and independence,” and “the culture of localism and community protectionism that grew alongside it.” Nixon adopted his advisor Harry Dent’s approach of defining his political strategy not as “Southern,” but as a national strategy that included rather than excluded the South.
In fact, as Dochuk observes, the strategy was as much Southern Californian as Southern, especially in its outreach to evangelical Christians as exemplified by support from evangelical celebrity and longtime Nixon ally Billy Graham. With his California associates and supporters Graham organized “Honor America Day,” which took place on July 4, 1970 in Washington, DC. Oil baron J. Howard Pew was a big contributor to the event, and had met earlier that year with fellow funders of right-wing causes Richard Scaife and Henry Salvatori on Nixon’s yacht in the Potomac River. Through Graham’s influence Clinton Murchison, Jr., founding owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and finance chair of Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, also contributed to the Nixon campaign.
In his chronicle of the Republican Party since the mid-20th century, historian Geoffrey Kabaservice (now at the Niskanen Center) identifies the period from Nixon to Reagan, or roughly 1970-1980, as one of decline for moderate Republicans – and even the idea of moderate Republicanism. Nixon had spoken of “positive polarization” and the “silent majority.” His campaign recast Goldwater’s “Southern strategy,” calling for “law and order” which his supporters understood as code for putting an end to civil rights protests, and the “war on drugs,” which stoked race-based fears of crime. With Democrats retaining majorities in the House and Senate, Nixon realized that his attempted polarization had backfired, prompting him to tack to the political center. Referring to Republican progressives, he wrote “Don’t read people out of the party at this point. We’re going to need every one of them with us in 1972.”
In typical Nixonian fashion, not all of his gestures of moderation were grounded in his actual support for what the measures accomplished. Kabaservice observes, for instance, that Nixon’s support for anti-pollution environmental initiatives was mostly a pragmatic acknowledgement that the public demanded government environmental action. And despite other actions that political moderates supported, such as rapprochement with China, Republican progressive NYC Mayor John Lindsay defected to the Democrats in August 1971, citing Nixon’s failure to end the Vietnam War, and what Lindsay saw as repression of civil liberties.
A few months later, fellow New York progressive Republican Ogden Reid also defected to the Democrats. Prior to holding public office Reid had been president of the New York Herald Tribune, which Kabaservice characterizes as “the leading organ of moderate Eastern Republicanism.” Like Lindsay, Reid opposed the Nixon administration’s actions (or lack thereof) on civil liberties, and the delay in withdrawing from Vietnam.
Nixon’s re-election in 1972 only exacerbated the struggles of moderate Republicans, who became increasingly divided. George Gilder, editor of the centrist Ripon Forum wrote an editorial in January 1972 supporting Nixon’s veto of a bill supporting increased federal funding of daycare centers for children. The funding increase was supported by members of the women’s liberation movement who saw it as a way to enable more women to enter the labor force. Gilder countered that it would harm poorer families by increasing competition for low-skilled jobs, and “making families less dependent on a male provider….” Moderates also challenged the Republican formula for apportioning convention delegates to states, something that had plagued the party since the Teddy Roosevelt days. The centrist Ripon Society determined that the formula gave a delegate advantage to Sunbelt states. Low representation of women, minorities, and young people further disadvantaged moderates. Moderates also sought to change arcane rules that appeared to disproportionately advantage smaller states. A lawsuit by the Ripon Society arguing that the rules violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment eventually failed when the Supreme Court declined to take up an appeals court ruling in favor of the party.
Conservatives within the Republican party used the Ripon Society’s lawsuit to argue that progressives and moderates did not belong in the party. “One does not sue members of one’s own family,” one state official put it. Conservatives also used the lawsuit to argue that the moderates were “people from Harvard looking down on America.”
Nixon beat McGovern in 1972 by the largest margin of any Republican president, winning more votes and states than any president had previously, but Democrats retained control of Congress. The rightward shift of the Republican party continued, however, with Nixon’s largest margin of victory coming in Mississippi, several moderate Republicans losing, and others switching parties or leaving for retirement. The realignment of the parties into liberal Democrat and conservative Republican, which would continue for decades, was not confined to Republican defections, as, for example, former Texas Governor John Connally – who Nixon had appointed Treasury Secretary in 1971– and Virginia Governor Mills Godwin switched affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1973. Connally was something of a square peg in a round hole. While his hawkish foreign policy aligned with the Republicans, his home state’s dependence on government investment in the defense, agriculture, and petroleum industries put him at odds with the cadre of “free market” Republicans.
Nixon’s victory was of course eventually overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. To the extent that public outrage over Watergate was directed at the Republican party, it appeared to be primarily aimed at the conservative wing with which Nixon was associated based on his rhetoric, despite his centrist policy tendencies. Watergate soured public opinion of government generally, and contributed to lower voter turnouts. This in turn contributed to increasing polarization of the political parties as the more committed party members were more likely to vote.
While the flashy aspects of the scandal, including the burgling of Democratic National Committee headquarters to wiretap phones and using government agencies to investigate political opponents, are what tend to be remembered, the solicitation and provision of illegal corporate political contributions is at least as important. Nixon campaign officials solicited and received millions in illegal corporate campaign contributions, threatening companies with IRS audits if they didn’t cooperate. (Parenthetically, congressional attempts to regulate corporate political spending largely failed, first as the Supreme Court struck down campaign spending limits in Buckley v Valeo, and more recently in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.)
The Watergate revelations, including Nixon’s vulgarities on tape, disillusioned Evangelicals who had supported Nixon – although some had done so reluctantly. William Banowsky who was vice-president of Pepperdine University (a self-styled “Christian” institution) declared his community “shocked and sick” at the abuses of power, and that Nixon and the Republican party should seek forgiveness from the public.