It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  This brings us to the South.

  EATING PEAS

  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.”

  That story—and the resentment toward Republicans that goes with it—has been passed down in Barry’s family for five genera
tions. The first three generations were Democrats.

  The last two, Barry’s parents and Barry himself, are Republicans.

  GEOR-UDGE, I KNEW YOUR DADDY

  To my mind, the person who best represents the new, Republican Dixie is a friend of mine named Haley Barbour. Haley, fifty-one, a stocky, round-faced man with a big grin, grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. (If an invading force of Martians ever wanted a reliable way to tell northerners and southerners apart, all they’d have to do is mention Yazoo City. When they hear the name, northerners like me can’t help smirking. Southerners like Haley don’t see anything funny about it at all.) When he was a very young man Haley defected from the Democratic Party in which he had been raised to become active in the Mississippi Republican Party, and by the time he was in his twenties he had been elected chairman of the Mississippi GOP. At the same time, the early 1970s, climbing to the top of the Mississippi GOP seemed an improbable way to launch a career in politics. Democrats so dominated Mississippi that as far as I can discover there were only four lonely Republican officeholders in the entire state: two members out of 122 in the state assembly, and two members out of 52 in the state senate. Yet just over two decades later, Mississippi had a congressional delegation in which Republicans outnumbered Democrats, a Republican governor for the first time since Reconstruction, and a reputation for voting solidly Republican in presidential elections. Haley had a lot to do with the transformation—even after stepping down as chairman he remained one of the leaders of the Mississippi GOP. In Republican circles Haley became so famous that in 1992 President George Bush named him the chairman of the Republican National Committee, making Haley the highest-ranking Republican in the country after the president himself. Haley played a central role in the election of 1994, in which the GOP won back the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades, a feat the party accomplished in large part by picking up nineteen new seats in the South. After stepping down as party chairman, Haley opened a law firm in Washington. But he remains so devoted to the South that he commutes back to Yazoo City (that name again) every weekend. When I wanted to ask an expert how the old, Democratic South became the new, Republican South, I called Haley.

  Haley and I began our conversation the way we begin every conversation, with a few jokes about the event at which we first met. “That was one hail of a speech you wrote,” Haley said, chuckling. “Damn near got me elected.”

  The story is worth telling. It amounts, so to speak, to a snapshot of the South partway through its transformation.

  The year was 1982. Haley, then just 34, was running for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, John Stennis. On the staff of then Vice President George Bush, I was with the vice president when he flew to Jackson, Mississippi, to appear at an enormous rally on Haley’s behalf. Soon after I reached my room in the hotel in which the vice president and his party were staying, my telephone rang. It was the vice president’s press secretary, Pete Teeley. He was with the vice president. “Get down here right away,” Pete said. When I reached the vice president’s suite, Pete let me in. George Bush was seated with his feet propped on a coffee table. He looked grumpy. “The vice president would like to know why we’re in Jackson,” Pete said.

  This seemed an odd question. I was just twenty-six, the most junior member of the staff. My job was to take the speech assignments as they were given to me and do the best with each one that I could. I had nothing to do with putting events on the vice president’s schedule.

  “The vice president is here to give a speech for someone called Haley Barbour,” I said. “Barbour is running for the Senate.”

  Pete looked disgusted. “We know that much,” he replied. “But why?”

  I ransacked my memory. Had anyone back in Washington told me anything special about the stop in Jackson? All I could come up with was a conversation I’d had with John Morgan, who worked across the hall from me in the Old Executive Office Building. John was on the president’s staff, not the vice president’s, so strictly speaking there was never any reason for us to talk. But since our offices were so close we had become friends. John’s job was to provide the president’s staff with political advice. On the walls of his office hung a set of enormous maps of the United States. John had colored the maps by hand to show the county-by-county results of each presidential race going back more than a century. When I had stopped by John’s office to shoot the breeze not long before, I had happened to mention that the vice president would be flying to Mississippi to give a speech for the Republican Senate candidate. “Nobody can beat Senator Stennis,” John had replied. A member of the Senate since 1947, John explained, Stennis was a southern institution. “The only reason to go down to Mississippi is because Senator Stennis is old now. Bush will just be showing the flag for the local GOP, giving them a little moral support to tide them over until the day when Senator Stennis finally steps down.”

  John Morgan had just been engaging in casual banter, whereas I was being asked to brief the vice president of the United States. But the conversation I had had with John was all that I could come up with.

  “The vice president is just here to show the flag,” I said. Then I repeated the rest of what John had told me.

  George Bush and Pete Teeley exchanged looks of relief. Then the vice president told me what was going on.

  “I just got a call from Senator Stennis,” Bush said. He lapsed into a pretty good imitation of a Mississippi drawl. “ ‘Now Geor-udge,’ ” Bush said, quoting Stennis, “ ‘I used to know your daddy. He and I were good friends right heah in the Senate. [George Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, represented Connecticut in the Senate from 1952 to 1963.] Why, ah re-membuh your daddy fondly. And it huhts me to think that his son would go into my home state to campaign against me. Ah’m with y’all, Geor-udge. Ah’m with you an’ prez-dent Reagan. There’s no need for y’all to be sayin’ things against me. Not me who knew your daddy and has voted with you and prez-dent Reagan right along.’

  “So,” the vice president said, dropping the southern accent, “if I’m just here to show the flag, that’s all I intend to do.”

  Two hours later, in front of a crowd of several thousand cheering Mississippians, Haley Barbour introduced the vice president. George Bush strode to the lectern, relaxed and smiling. For the next twenty minutes he delivered the speech just as I had written it—with one difference. Since the vice president was there to speak on behalf of Haley Barbour, I had of course composed several paragraphs in praise of Haley, talking about Haley’s modest upbringing in Yazoo City, his rise to the chairmanship of the Mississippi GOP, his patriotism, his vision, his so on and so forth. The vice president dropped them. He never even mentioned Haley’s name. He went directly from the grand traditions of the South to the greatness of Ronald Reagan with no Haley Barbour in between. Haley stood next to the vice president throughout the speech. As he kept waiting to hear himself mentioned, his smile grew strained. When he heard the vice president close, saying, “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the great state of Mississippi,” it was all Haley could do to keep even a strained smile on his face. The vice president waved to the crowd, then left the stage before anyone could ask him to pose with Haley for photographs. Mississippi had given the 1980 Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the biggest plurality they received in any state. But in the person of Senator Stennis the old, Democratic South lived on, and not even the vice president of the United States cared to mess with it. On election day, Haley Barbour lost to John Stennis in a landslide.

  HOW THE SOUTH CHANGED

  “You want to know how the South turned Republican?” Haley asked. “Then go get a copy of the book by the Black brothers.” Earl and Merle Black are the authors of Politics and Society in the South. (Distinguished political scientists, the brothers are twins who grew up in the South. Their first names amount to another one of those tests that Martians could use to tell northerners and southerners apart
. To my Yankee ears, twins named Earl and Merle sound hopelessly hick. But when I tried to explain this to my southern friend Haley, he couldn’t understand what I meant.) I got a copy of the Black brothers’ book and worked my way through it. According to Earl and Merle Black and my friend Haley Barbour, the South went Republican because Yankees moved in, the economy of the South finally began to expand, and a new generation of southerners got sick of having Democrats run everything.