by Ann Coulter
In Nixon’s first inaugural address, in January 1969, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”
And then he started feverishly desegregating the schools, something his Democratic predecessors had refused to do. On a statistical basis, there was more desegregation of Southern schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period, before or after. Practically overnight, Southern schools went from being effectively segregated to being effectively integrated. To highlight the Democrats’ double-talk, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, famously said, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
While presiding over massive, voluntary desegregation of the schools, Nixon forbade his cabinet members to boast about it. But between his election in 1968 to the end of his second year in office in 1970, black students attending all-black schools in the South declined from 68 percent to 18.4 percent and the percentage of black students attending majority white schools went from 18.4 percent to 38.1 percent.30
Despite all this, when black agitator Julian Bond was asked about Nixon’s civil rights record, he said, “If you could call Adolf Hitler a friend of the Jews, you could call President Nixon a friend of the blacks.”31
If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty. Yes, racism must explain the Republicans’ sweep of the South.
Not only did Nixon desegregate the schools, but he broke the back of the discriminatory building trades in 1968 with his “Philadelphia Plan,” the first government affirmative action program. In response to aggressive racial discrimination by construction unions to keep wages high, Nixon imposed formal racial quotas and timelines in hiring on the building trades. Under Secretary George P. Shultz, Nixon’s Labor Department rode federal contractors hard, demanding results. Even back when he was Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had been recommending “a positive policy of nondiscrimination” for government contractors. When running for president in 1967—the zenith of his alleged “Southern Strategy”—he had said, “People in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.”
Most histories drone on and on about LBJ’s beneficence in having proposed a similar Philadelphia Plan, but LBJ completely abandoned it the instant his comptroller general vetoed the idea. Nixon, by contrast, overruled the comptroller and staged a full-throttle campaign to get congressional approval for his affirmative action plan. As he said, the Democrats “are token-oriented. We are job-oriented.”
Imposing racial quotas has generally not been seen as one of Nixon’s greatest moments by modern conservatives, who oppose all race discrimination. However, it has to be understood as a reaction to a century of Democratic obstructionism on civil rights. Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box—and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.
Black civil rights groups gave Nixon little credit for the plan, and white construction workers hated it. He knew the Philadelphia plan hurt him politically, but he did it anyway.32
Being a Republican, Nixon was not a demagogue. He had no interest in demonizing the South—as if that were the sole locus of discrimination in America. As Mitchell said, “Watch what we do.” Democrats were the exact opposite, demanding hallelujahs for every kind word they ever spoke to a black person, while doing very little to actually end racial discrimination.
In the 1960 campaign, for example, an exceedingly reluctant JFK was pressured by adviser Harris Wofford into placing a quick call to Coretta Scott King when her husband was in the Reidsville jail in Georgia—and then allowed that two-minute phone call to be wildly publicized in the black community.33 His opponent Nixon—who would go on to preside over the most massive desegregation drive the nation had ever seen as well as the country’s first affirmative action program—made no comment on King’s jailing.
But the Kennedy campaign played up that phone call for all it was worth. Pamphlets were printed up titled “No Comment” Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.34 The phone call even persuaded longtime Republican and Nixon supporter Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his support to Kennedy, saying, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion.” But now, he said, Kennedy “can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this.”35 MLK Jr. stayed neutral, while all the other leading black Baptist ministers “firmly” reendorsed Richard Nixon.
Democrats spent a hundred years enforcing legal discrimination against blacks, or—at best—dragging their heels on enforcing black civil rights, but then turned around and crowed for fifty years about a friendly phone call to Mrs. King. With a few symbolic gestures, the Democrats grabbed the civil rights mantle in 1960 and never let it go.
In fact, it was the Democrats’ obstructionism that created the environment for nonviolent—and then violent—civil rights protests in the first place. Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks’ civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law. If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.
Consider that Brown v. Board of Education, eliminating “separate but equal” in the public schools, was decided in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the decision. And then, from the end of his presidency until Nixon’s election in 1968, nothing much changed. Nixon came in and wiped out segregated schools in one year.
In 1976, the entire South—all eleven states of the Old Confederacy, except the great Commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back again and voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only a secret “Southern Strategy” of pandering to racists when Republicans win the South?
By 1980, Southerners as well as the rest of the country realized Carter was a complete nincompoop and voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. Carter and his vice presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, won only their own respective states of Georgia and Minnesota, plus Hawaii and West Virginia.
In 1984, Reagan won every state in the union, except Democratic candidate Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, which Reagan lost by only 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast—the closest presidential race in Minnesota history since 1916. Reagan’s margin in the popular vote was nearly 16.8 million votes, second only to Nixon’s 18 million popular-vote margin in 1972. It was the largest electoral vote total in history. (No one at the New York Times could bear to write the story on Reagan’s historic victory, so the article giving these figures is bylined “Associated Press.”)36
A party that attributes Nixon’s and Reagan’s landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad. Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize (Why can’t we be more like the Netherlands?). So they dismiss these “flyover” people as racists. The entire basis of liberals’ “Southern Strategy” myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist.
According to liberals’ theory, racists like Orval Faubus should have become card-ca
rrying members of the Republican Party once Nixon came along—or at least by Reagan’s time—and that’s how Republicans swept the South. In fact, however, Faubus never became a Republican. He was finally defeated for governor in 1966 by Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in a state with only 11 percent registered Republicans. Rockefeller’s “Southern Strategy” against Faubus involved running as a strong integrationist, and he immediately desegregated Arkansas schools and rapidly integrated the draft boards.
In addition to being a ferocious segregationist, Faubus was, naturally, a liberal, and an admirer of Socialist presidential candidates Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs, from whom he got his middle name, “Eugene.”37
Years later, Bill Clinton invited Faubus to his gubernatorial inauguration, where he warmly embraced Faubus, to the disgust of Southern Republicans. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Paul Greenberg, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials advocating racial integration and opposing George Wallace’s presidential candidacy, called it a shocking moment for those Arkansans “who had fought—not just for years but for decades—against all that Orval Faubus had stood for, this willingness to exploit racial hatred.”38
So what else might explain the South gradually voting more and more Republican, starting with Eisenhower in 1952? What else was going on in the last half century?
In the mid-sixties, the Worst Generation burst onto the scene and took over the Democratic Party.
That was the decade that launched legalized obscenity, the birth control pill, student riots, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Panthers. The crime rate skyrocketed as the courts granted ever more elaborate rights to criminals. Prayer and Bible-reading were banned from the public schools. The most privileged, cosseted generation in history began tearing apart the universities. One of every ten universities would be hit. The Aquarius generation turned into a drugged-out hippie cult of Manson family murderers.
In other words, the South began to go Republican about the same time as the Democratic Party went insane.
Another minor issue, even in the fifties, was the Cold War. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was growing admiration in the South for the Republicans’ belligerent approach to national security. Southerners are hawks: Sooner or later they were going to join the patriotic party. How long were Southerners going to tolerate a party that ran a peacenik like George McGovern for president in the middle of a war? Name a Southern university that’s ever banned ROTC before answering that question. (Even Duke has an ROTC program.)
Moreover, if it was hostility to civil rights that drove Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, that shift should have come to a screeching halt by the mid-seventies, when segregation was no longer an issue—thanks to Richard Nixon. But in fact, the South only gradually became Republican over the course of several decades, even flipping back to the Democrats to vote for fellow Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The South’s move to the Republican Party was as gradual as the Democrats’ shift from the party of Harry Truman to the party of Rosie O’Donnell.
Even the Wallace vote wasn’t exclusively a segregationist vote. Not everything was about the blacks. Cold War hawks thought Nixon would be soft on communism—correctly—and the Democrats were complete pansies. The great World War II general Curtis LeMay—“Old Iron Pants”—was Wallace’s running mate. LeMay supported integration 100 percent, but he didn’t trust Nixon to be tough enough with the Russkies, so he turned down Nixon’s offer to join his ticket and ran with Wallace instead. LeMay was a Reaganesque Cold Warrior. With the slogan “Bombs Away!,” he was as bellicose toward communism as Goldwater had been in 1964—which explains Wallace’s winning a lot of the same states Goldwater won.
Southerners were not the only demographic that shifted party registration in reaction to the turmoil created by the Worst Generation. In 1972, the whole country became the South. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was, in reality, a “landslide strategy.” If you look at the facts, Republicans have been so clearly right about everything, it’s frightening.
Now that the battle for civil rights has been won—the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to have to start placing monitors in people’s homes to ferret out an incident of racism—liberals have suddenly become mighty pugnacious on the matter of of racial equality. (The really great thing about yammering on and on and on, endlessly, day after day, year after year ad infinitum about race is that it pays such big dividends in easing tension between the races.) All these pretend-heroes of the civil rights movement self-righteously claim that any suggestion that size of government be cut is de facto racist. False, indeed preposterous, accusations of racism are just another way for liberals to whip up the mob.
Obama is hysterically defended from every little criticism as if liberals are at war with the Klan. You know, we could have really used them when Republicans actually were at war with the Klan. But back then, Democratic politicians were pandering to the segregationist mob. On the basis of—let’s see—nothing … liberals labeled the loose-knit group of Tea Partiers “racist.” They broadcast to America: You are not allowed to associate with Tea Partiers. We’ll let you off with a warning this time, but the next time you are caught agreeing with Tea Party people, you’re going to be called a racist, too.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, whose life history betrays little association with black people, fancies himself a hitherto unheralded hero of the civil rights movement. He is a scrupulous bean counter when it comes to the number of blacks at Tea Parties—as if some central Tea Party bureaucracy controls who shows up at their rallies. Inasmuch as blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic, you wouldn’t expect to see a lot of them at Tea Parties. Still, the Tea Parties are not as white as Chris Matthews’s staff. They’re not as white as a Jon Stewart audience. They are not as white as Janeane Garofalo’s fans.
But night after night, Matthews accuses conservatives of harboring secret racist views, asking, “What are the Tea Partiers really angry about? Health care reform or the fact that it was an African-American president and a woman speaker of the House who pushed through major change?”39 When Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico endorsed Obama, Matthews called it a “stunning picture” to have a very white but technically Latino governor endorsing the half-black Obama.40 In a special tribute to his own post-racial attitude, after Obama’s first State of the Union address, Matthews announced, “You know, I forgot [Obama] was black tonight for an hour.”41
So we know Matthews is down with the brothers. Needless to say, he sends his own kids to white-as-snow private schools. Washington, D.C., is majority black, whereas St. Albans is probably about 3 percent black. Matthews had to go to a lot of trouble to get his kids into a school like that. It’s not Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. So Matthews may not be the best person to be hectoring Tea Partiers, “How dare you not have black people at your rallies!”
The placid acceptance of glaring contradictions is the essence of mob behavior, according to Le Bon. Neither Matthews nor the rest of the herd grasp any inconsistency between Matthews’s personal behavior and his blustery public accusations against others. He is “in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.”42
Also on the Republican racism beat is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. (Because if a Jewish lesbian doesn’t speak for the black man, then I don’t know who does.) On September 21, 2009, Rachel Maddow introduced a video as if she were presenting a snuff film, saying, “Behold, a Missouri congressman, candidate for U.S. Senate, … telling what seems to be a really long, meandering, gut-churning racist joke.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Representative Roy Blunt (R, Missouri): Supposedly it’s the turn of the 19th century, the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, there was a group of British occupiers in a very lush, very quiet, very peaceful, very uneventful part
of India. And this group of British soldiers who were occupying that part of India decided they’d carve a golf course out of the jungle of India. And there was really not much else to do. So, for over a year, this was the biggest event going on getting this golf course created.
And they got the golf course done and almost from the day the first ball was hit on this golf course, something happened they didn’t anticipate. Monkeys would come running out of the jungle and they would grab the golf balls. And if it was in the fairway, they might throw it in the rough. If it was in the rough, they might throw—they might throw it back at you.
And I can go into great and long detail about how many things they did to try to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done. So finally, for this golf course and this golf course only, they passed a rule, and the rule was you have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time.43
(LAUGHTER)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
You could play that tape for the NAACP, and they would say, “I’m sorry, why are you showing us this?” Obviously, Blount was saying, This is how things work in Washington. It could be senators, representatives, government bureaucrats—or other Republicans—who are grabbing the balls. It actually tells you something about liberals that they instantly assume any mention of monkeys must be a reference to Obama.
Longtime New York Times blubberbutt Tom Wicker wrote endlessly about civil rights and racial reconciliation. Naturally, Wicker was another educational chicken hawk, sending his own children to elite, very white private schools and then retiring to Vermont, literally the whitest state in the nation.44 When asked about the glaring inconsistency of his kids’ white private schools, he said, “It gives me a lot of intellectual discomfort, but I am not going to disadvantage my children to win more support for my views.”45