It's My Party (6 page)

Q
UESTION
: What do you call the hillbillies who appeared in
Deliverance?

A
NSWER
:    Fellow Republicans.

I
n the last several decades a curious event took place in American politics. It might be termed the Big Switch. The Republican
Party, which used to be based in the North, has swapped bases with the Democratic Party, which used to be based in the South
and the Rocky Mountains. The Big Switch was so pronounced that, as the map indicates, voting patterns in the presidential
elections of 1896, before the Switch began, and of 1996, after the Switch was complete, amount to mirror images of each other.
The change in the South has been especially dramatic: Dixie, which used to be the most reliably Democratic region in the nation,
has become rock-solid for the GOP.

After learning that the region in which I grew up, the North, used to be the stronghold of the GOP, it made sense to look
next at the region that is the stronghold of the GOP today. You might think that Republicans would be delighted to have conquered
the Old Confederacy. Yet it turns out that there are some very shrewd Republicans who almost wish the Democrats had kept the
South to themselves.

The transformation of the South into Republican territory is actually the last part of the Big Switch. The North went Democratic
first. The trend in the North began more than a century ago, during the great wave of immigration to the United States from
Europe that lasted roughly from the 1880s until the enactment of strict quotas in 1924. Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Slavs,
Scandinavians, and other immigrants settled in the cities of the Northeast and, to a lesser extent, the Midwest. By 1910,
three-quarters of the inhabitants of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston were first- or second-generation immigrants.
As far back as the eighteenth century the Democratic Party had attracted the support of workers in northern cities. Now the
numbers of workers in northern cities expanded dramatically. It often took one or two generations for the new immigrants to
become regular voters. But when they did vote, they voted Democratic. The North went Democratic simply because so many Democrats
moved in.

The Rocky Mountain states participated in the Big Switch by going Republican during the last several decades, at roughly the
same time as the South. The region’s original inhabitants were of two kinds. The first was farmers and ranchers. The second
was silver miners. Both voted Democratic because the Democrats—notably under the three-time Democratic presidential candidate,
William Jennings Bryan—sought a currency based on silver rather than gold. A silver regime would have required the federal
government to make massive new purchases of silver, thereby profiting the miners, while in effect inflating the currency,
thereby profiting debtors, such as the farmers and ranchers, who borrowed heavily to bring livestock and equipment into the
region. When the Rockies were developed after the Second World War, the population of the region expanded. Quickly outnumbering
the thin Democratic population, the new arrivals tended to come more often from the Midwest and South, the first of which
was already Republican, the second of which would soon be Republican, than from the urban Democratic strongholds of the Great
Lakes and the Northeast. When they reached the Rockies, they found a constellation of special circumstances that nurtured
Republican loyalties. Much of the land in the Rockies, for example, was, as it still is, owned by the federal government—in
Idaho and Utah the proportion of land owned by the federal government is well over half. This prompts resentment of the federal
government and a correspondingly favorable outlook on the anti-big government GOP. Hunting, to name a second example, is popular
throughout the Rockies. This leads to high rates of gun ownership and, once again, a favorable outlook on the GOP, which through
the years has devoted a great deal of energy to beating back Democratic gun control proposals. Add a growing Mormon population—Mormons,
whose beliefs stress traditional morality, represent the most Republican religious denomination in the country—and you end
up with a Republican stripe running from Idaho to Arizona.

This brings us to the South.

To understand why the South became Republican, you need to understand why it was Democratic in the first place. The answer,
of course, is the Civil War.

At an event not long ago I found myself seated next to Marianne Gingrich, the second wife of former Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich. (She is now the former wife of the former Speaker, but when this took place Newt Gingrich had not yet divorced Marianne.)
A striking, dark-haired woman, Marianne mentioned that she had grown up in Ohio. I asked what it had been like to move to
the South in the early 1980s when she married Gingrich, who at the time represented a suburb of Atlanta. She replied that
it had proven a shock.

“In Ohio,” Marianne said, “you had the big cities—Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus—where people voted Democratic. But then you
had other cities that were mixed—Cincinnati was more Republican, and Canton wasn’t too Democratic. And then you had the countryside,
where the farmers lived, and that was very Republican. When I moved to Georgia I found out that where you lived didn’t matter.
It just didn’t matter. You could live in a city or you could live on a farm, and you were a Democrat either way.

“I know people who still can’t pick up a Republican registration form,” Marianne said. “I mean, the physical act is beyond
them. It would be a betrayal of their parents and grandparents. The Civil War was alive and well when I moved to Georgia,
I can tell you that.”

The Civil War, alive and well in Georgia as recently as the early 1980s? When I grew up in upstate New York twenty years earlier,
the Civil War was just one more topic in history class. What accounted for the difference? To the extent that I had thought
about it, I realized, I had always assumed the Civil War lingered in southern memory simply because the South had lost. Losers
are always engaging in wistful examinations of the ways things might have turned out differently. Then I spent some time back
in the library. “Wistful,” I learned, was the wrong word for the way that southerners felt about the Civil War. Right up until
the most recent one or two generations of southerners, better words would have been “embittered” and “irate.”

It is a truism that the Civil War was harder on the South than on the North. But as truisms go, this one is especially true.
Whereas most of the states in the North never caught so much as a glimpse of a confederate army—minor raids aside, no confederate
action ever penetrated any farther north than Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—all eleven states in the South saw Union invasions.
The destruction in the South was staggering. Miles of railway line were ripped up. Swaths of countryside were denuded. Virtually
every major southern city came under attack. Charleston was bombarded. Vicksburg was starved into submission. Richmond was
besieged, then ransacked. Atlanta was burned to the ground. As a proportion of its white population, the South suffered more
than two-and-a-half times as many men killed and wounded as did the North. For decades afterward the southern countryside
was littered with ghostly plantation houses and hamlets to which men had never come home. The Civil War inflicted on the South
a catastrophe of the proportions of an Old Testament plague or a medieval epidemic.

Then came Reconstruction.

The South was divided into military districts and occupied by federal troops. The troops stayed for more than a decade. Overriding
the wishes of President Andrew Johnson, who, himself a southerner, was disposed to treat the South leniently, Congress imposed
new constitutions on the southern states, then passed one law after another intended to eradicate all that remained of the
old South while creating a new South intended to look just like the North. Officeholders in the new state governments were
almost entirely of just three kinds: freed slaves, carpetbaggers (northerners who had moved South to exploit southerners),
and scalawags (southern collaborators).

Invaded and devastated during the Civil War. Occupied and humiliated during Reconstruction. Whom was the South to blame? That
was an easy one. The Republican Party. The Republican Party had made Lincoln president and done his bidding in pursuing the
Civil War. (For a time during the Civil War itself, the Republican Party renamed itself the Union Party. A bid for the support
of pro-Union Democrats, the ploy fooled no one and was soon dropped.) Then, acting through its majority in Congress, the Republican
Party had imposed a vengeful, draconian Reconstruction. If you were a white southerner in the last couple of decades of the
nineteenth century, calling yourself a Republican would have been like spitting on the grave of every southern boy who had
fallen to a Yankee bullet and every southern woman who had starved to death after the Yankees freed her slaves. You had no
choice. You called yourself a Democrat.

Only two groups insisted on calling themselves Republicans instead. One was made up of whites in the Appalachian back country.
They worked small farms on marginal land. Seldom slave owners, they had little in common with the planters of the coastal
South and had opposed secession—indeed, opposition to secession had proven so fierce in the back country of Virginia that
Lincoln had been able to split dozens of counties from the state, recognizing them in 1863 as the new state of West Virginia.
The other group was of course made up of freed slaves. Looking on the Republican Party with understandable gratitude, black
people became Republican en masse. Since restrictions imposed by the Republican Congress denied the vote to tens of thousands
of whites—in some locations, half of white voters found themselves disenfranchised—the black vote enabled Republicans to dominate
state governments throughout the South.

How did the Democratic white majority deal with these two groups of dissidents? During Reconstruction, it took the law into
its own hands. Since it saw its own state governments as mere puppets for the Republicans in Congress, it considered itself
justified in doing so. White southerners formed organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia,
intimidating black people and pressuring back-country whites to conform with the white majority.

When, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops in 1877, Reconstruction at last ended, the white establishment reasserted
itself, swiftly reclaiming political power. While in 1872 nine of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy had Republican
governors, by 1880 eleven of eleven had Democratic governors. To the crude informal means of controlling their political opponents
that the Klan and the Knights represented, the white establishment now added crude formal means, enacting poll taxes and literacy
requirements that effectively removed the vote from black people and poor whites alike.

Throughout the Old Confederacy, the Democratic Party thus became a monolith, the sole acceptable outlet for political life.
In the words of the historian W. J. Cash, the Democratic Party

ceased to be a party
in
the South and became the party
of
the South, a kind of confraternity having in its keeping the whole corpus of Southern loyalties, and so irresistibly commanding
the allegiance of faithful whites that to doubt it, to question it in any detail, was
ipso facto
to stand branded as a renegade to race, to country, to God, and to Southern Womanhood.

The Solid South. Loyalty to the Democratic Party was handed down from parent to child along with the family photograph albums
and the Civil War mementos.

A friend of mine, Barry Germany, has lived nearly all his life in Meridian, Mississippi. When I telephoned to ask him about
the Civil War and Reconstruction, Barry immediately replied with some family history. (I have some family history involving
the Civil War, too—a great-great-uncle of mine fought for the North—but I never even knew it until I started asking my mother
questions for this book. Yankees that we were, we never paid much attention to the Civil War.) “My mother’s great-grandmother
was born in 1845,” Barry told me. “After Sherman destroyed Meridian in 1863, her children had nothing to eat. Some slaves
found peas in a field. The children were given the immature peas to eat. The grown-ups boiled and ate the pods. Those were
very hard days. Down here, there’s not a family that doesn’t remember them.”