In college I nearly got one of my history professors fired. At least that’s how he reacted when I told him how much I appreciated the way he taught his course on World War II. I wrote in my class evaluation that I learned so much about how the war turned on national leadership and military strategy. We studied how Stalin saved his country when he deferred to his great general, Georgi Zhukov. We read about France’s inept and unprepared leadership. We talked about how Hitler never acknowledged his weaknesses and misjudgments and trusted no one to share military command. Apparently these offenses can cost a young professor his shot at tenure.
The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (WALTER LYNWOOD FLEMING LECTURES IN SOUTHERN HISTORY)
Brand: Louisiana State University Press
668 pages
$6.51
This kind of history lives on in the wildly popular books of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. But you probably won’t find their titles on your local history professor’s shelves. Social and cultural history dominate there, the more obscure the topic the better. I never had a chance to study Napoleon or the U.S. Civil War, but opportunities abounded for in-depth research on queer history and feminist theory.
William Leuchtenburg knows he isn’t supposed to study politics and government, but he doesn’t care. In The White House Looks South, the distinguished historian and professor emeritus at North Carolina-Chapel Hill tells the story of how the South coped with poverty and reluctantly shed segregation. He heaps credit for the transformation on his three protagonists: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. Leuchtenburg’s account meticulously documents how these three men prodded the nation toward overdue justice, both racial and economic.
It’s difficult to overestimate the racism that permeated the nation, especially the South, for most of the 20th century. With institutionalized hatred firmly entrenched, leaders and ordinary folk alike openly blocked black equality. Indeed, neither Roosevelt nor Truman, with their party’s deep Southern roots, did much to directly advance civil rights. Roosevelt would not risk his New Deal by provoking stalwart Southern senators. He even declined to take action against lynching. The well-to-do New Yorker worried more about Southern poverty, which he observed during frequent recuperation trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, the village where he died in 1945.
At the same time, FDR’s four-term bandwagon portended the end of the South’s longtime grip on Roosevelt’s party. The South accounted for 93 percent of the Democrats’ electoral votes in 1924; 12 years later, in 1936, the region claimed just 24 percent. The math made it simple for subsequent Democratic leaders to spurn their former enablers. The new FDR coalition scared old-line Democrats, with one disaffected editor describing their “pigmented skin, thick accents, the smell of mine and factory about them, or the cultured pallor of the college classroom; new leaders with ideas as alien to Southern traditionalists as if they were from another planet.”
Despite the bluster, Roosevelt maintained wide Southern support by rallying populist angst against the business class that dominated small towns and cities alike. And they knew whom to thank for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which delivered jobs and electricity to isolated Southern hamlets.
Roosevelt adopted the South as his second home, and Truman represented a border state. But neither officially represented the South, once taken for granted as an insurmountable obstacle to the presidency. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson lost the 1960 nomination largely due to geography. True to his region, he had consistently voted against measures to stop lynching, secure voting rights, and eliminate segregation. That record torpedoed him with the emerging civil rights wing of the party, especially blacks in the industrial North. Most Southern politicians left for Washington to protect one thing—segregation. And Americans knew the South for one thing—segregation. They would not elevate any such leader to the White House.
Still, John F. Kennedy needed to shore up the Southern bloc for the 1960 campaign, so he tabbed Johnson as his running mate. Sure enough, Johnson carried Southern states not favorably disposed to the New Englander. Thus, when Johnson entered the Oval Office via the back door after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, many blacks feared he would stonewall civil rights. The new president of course did nothing of the sort. Johnson had learned the extent of injustice against blacks while heading the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. While traveling abroad, he saw how segregation sullied America’s reputation. Freed from any electoral obligation to the South, Johnson said, “Now I represent the whole country, and I have the power. I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it.”
True to his word, Johnson threw his full weight behind civil rights legislation. He waged a pitched battle against his former Senate colleague and mentor, Dick Russell of Georgia. Johnson asked Russell to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and warned him it would become law with or without the South. But Russell threatened Johnson right back: “Well, suh, you may very well do that, but if you do … you will lose the South forever.” Russell could not protect segregation, but he got his revenge. After Johnson won election in 1964, the president voiced only a tad more optimism: “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
Leuchtenburg agrees, with some evidence to back up the judgment. But he downplays other factors that contributed to a massive political realignment—not least, the internal strife over Vietnam, which turned the Democrats violently against each other. The hawk/dove debate still divides the party today—exemplified by the Ned Lamont-Joe Liberman face-off in Conneticut.
Throughout The White House Looks South, Leuchtenburg compiles abundant if selective contemporary quotations and pithy observations that support his contentions. He builds tension by drawing upon varied credible sources that illustrate crucial historical junctions. But the exhaustive research often chokes his narrative. His ability to repeatedly set up dire scenarios from which his protagonists inevitably escape will remind many readers of The West Wing.
Each year the Old South shrinks in history’s rear-view mirror. We need not argue that racism has disappeared in order to see how much the South has changed in only a couple generations. Those who now pine for the Old South think not of ugly reality—race-specific restrooms and crushing poverty—but rather an imagined society free from the adverse side effects of economic prosperity and cultural homogeneity. The South has gone suburban.
The South has also gone Republican, though the realignment foreshadowed by Roosevelt and commenced by Johnson was not complete until 1994. That year Republicans picked up 16 House seats in the South en route to capturing the chamber’s majority. For the first time, Republicans had earned a majority of seats from the South. And now, with a two-term Southern president following another two-term Southern president, we can scarcely remember when Americans considered Confederate credentials a liability, not a strength. Indeed, the only Democrats elected president since Kennedy all called the South home—Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Another Southerner, Al Gore, won the popular vote in 2000. If anything can stop Hillary Clinton’s ascent to the Democratic nomination, this may be it. Don’t expect former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, for example, to settle for the bottom of her ticket. Clinton can boast nothing to match a successful term as the popular governor of a Southern red state.
The South can thank Johnson for this return to power. After the Texan inflicted the death blow on segregation, the South could finally expand its political portfolio. Johnson envisioned this future, Leuchtenburg argues: “Quite apart from the pain it inflicted on blacks, to which [Johnson] was not insensitive, racism was an indulgence Southern whites could not afford if they expected to thrive in a global economy.”
But how many Southerners vote today with an eye toward the global economy? Issues have changed; voting patterns have not. The Southern bloc has long eschewed economic appeals in favor of cultural concerns, from segregation to abortion. The party that promises education, protectionism, and health care does not win most Southern votes. That’s because this pattern runs deeper than voting. Millions of Southerners mobilized in the Civil War to defend the planter economic system, which benefited but few of them. But they strongly resented any government attempt to tell them how to order their families and communities.
Southern Democrats, though a dwindling breed, cannot afford to indulge the liberal echo chamber that debilitates fellow party members on the national stage. To win elections, they must learn how to appease Southerners’ notorious distrust of government, which makes two exceptions: to protect their security and their way of life. Indeed, Southern realignment made possible the modern culture wars. Southerners sympathetic to militarism and traditional values loathed the Vietnam protests and eventually opposed Roe v. Wade. Even today, with the war in Iraq increasingly unpopular, President Bush draws his most reliable support from the South. And his appeals against abortion and gay marriage work most effectively south of the Mason-Dixon.
The modern Democratic Party has failed to regain dominance in the South precisely because its leaders have not learned how to woo constituencies that disagree with them on some key issues. But now, at least a few leading Democrats have grown desperate enough to consider new strategies. Of the three models presented by Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt offers the most powerful potential. Roosevelt doesn’t wow most historians with his reluctance to fight segregation, but that caution kept traditional Democrats in his camp. Johnson chased those Democrats away, but for a good cause. His party valiantly acted on their conscience and delivered justice to minorities. Activists today, though, have applied the moral authority of civil rights to affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage, among other causes. These appeals have created a potent, fervent party base—and lost many elections.
Democrats like to tout how they’re winning the battle of ideas. Recent polls confirm that more Americans trust Democrats on a host of topics, from the economy to Iraq to lobbying reform. While they’ve made gains during President Bush’s second-term slide, Democrats have actually claimed many such advantages for years (national security notwithstanding). So what’s the problem? Leuchtenburg’s political history reaffirms the leading role played by the South during mid-century Democratic dominance and late-century Republican supremacy. Would-be presidents need not hail from the South, but they cannot afford to ignore it.
Collin Hansen is an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine. He worked for a time on the staff of Congressman J. C. Watts.
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