Why did Yankees move in? To escape the snowy winters and high cost of living of the North, to serve in the armed forces at one of the dozens of military bases located in the South, and to manage the new factories that were turning the land of cotton into the land of manufactured goods. They arrived in such large numbers that while in 1920 the proportion of white southerners born outside the South—in a word, Yankees—was under one in ten, by 1980 the proportion had risen to one in five. Now, it happens that the three kinds of Yankees who moved South—retirees, members of the military, and managers—are as Republican as any three demographic groups you could name. The Old Confederacy might as well have established a border patrol, permitting only Republicans to enter. Of the three groups, the managers are Haley’s favorites. They get involved in party activities. They give money to GOP candidates. They’re not just Republicans, they’re useful Republicans.
“We had a whole lot of managers and executives move down South,” Haley told me. “Look at the suburbs of Atlanta. You show me a neighborhood so new that the grass hadn’t come up yet in the yard and I’ll bet you those people are going to be Republican. That’s the way it is all over the South. You’ll find the best and most useful Republicans where there’s the newest grass.”
While the Yankees were moving in, the southern economy was expanding. The expansion took the form of almost entirely industrial growth. While in 1920 agriculture accounted for half of jobs in the South but only a fifth of jobs outside the South, by 1970 the South had roughly the same rate of agricultural employment as the rest of the country. Industry had moved in. As the South became industrial, the old, landed white families that had formed the core of the Democratic establishment grew unimportant. A new middle class arose. In the North, many of these new middle-class workers would have joined unions, which are overwhelmingly Democratic. In the South, there were scarcely any unions to be found. An outgrowth of industrial development, which the region had never before experienced, unions had failed to become established in the South. Now that industrial development was at last taking place, southern workers, who knew why they were being given a chance at industrial jobs—“Hell,” Haley explained, “getting away from unions is why industry went down there”—were content to remain unorganized. Without unions to tie the southern middle class to the Democratic Party, the southern middle class votes Republican.
This brings us to the third trend. While Yankees were moving in and a new, industrial economy was springing up, young southerners were getting sick of the old Democratic system. A generation of hotheads arose, just as intent on causing trouble as their great-grandfathers had been when they went raiding with Jeb Stuart. Haley found himself at the center of this trend, no doubt because he did so much to foment it. “Folks my age joined the Republican Party because it was the reform party, the party of change, the party of kickin’ out the folks who’d been runnin’ things down at the courthouse for generations.” In Mississippi this group included not only Haley himself but Trent Lott, who was elected to the Senate in 1988 when John Stennis at last retired and has served the last four years as Senate majority leader. Haley quoted his old friend Trent. “Trent used to say—now, this was twenty years ago, and you’d never catch him saying it today—Trent used to say, ‘Hell, if the Republicans had been in office down here for a hundred years, I might’ve become a Democrat just to run them off.’ ”
One question had to be asked. When the South went Republican, what role had race played?
“Just about none,” Haley replied.
The GOP has scrupulously avoided any taint of racism. “No Republican candidate could get elected in the South if he was perceived as a racist,” Haley said. “No way. Not a chance. There is just a huge part of the GOP that runs away from a candidate if there are any charges that he’s a racist.” When the racist David Duke announced that he intended to run for governor of Louisiana as a Republican, for instance, prominent Republicans across the South denounced him. “Our party,” Haley continued, “is real middle class.” The GOP does not belong to rednecks and bigots, in other words, but to young managers like those you see trying to get their grass to grow outside Atlanta.
If Haley and the Black brothers had a theme, it was change. The New South was just that, new. The South had become Republican because it had become more industrial, more middle class, more Yankee-fied. Yet I thought I saw a second reason. The South had become Republican because it hadn’t changed.
HOW THE SOUTH REMAINED THE SAME
Yankee-fication? Millions of Yankees have indeed moved south. But they have tended to cluster together. In northern Virginia, there are so many Yankees among the government workers who commute across the Potomac each morning to Washington, D.C., that if you picked the region up and put it down someplace else, most of the residents would feel more at home in New Jersey or Connecticut than elsewhere in Virginia. In South Florida, Yankees outnumber the natives, and in the long coastal crescent from Key West to Miami to West Palm Beach you’re more likely to hear the accents of the Midwest or New York than of Dixie. But outside these Yankee clusters genuine southerners still predominate. As recently as 1981, Yankees made up less than a tenth of the population in 750 of the Old Confederacy’s 1,145 counties.
Industrialization? True, the South is a great deal more industrial today than it was as little as one or two decades ago. Yet even now much of Dixie remains heavily agricultural. Put yourself in the middle of the most industrialized, Yankee neighborhood in the South that you can find. You still won’t have to drive more than an hour to find a place where farming continues to be the main source of income and Yankees remain rare. (Even in Yankee clusters, it’s a good question whether the northerners have more influence on the southerners who surround them or the other way around. My cousin, Tom, and his wife, Marsha, moved from New York to a suburb of Memphis when their children were little. Now adults, all three children speak with a Tennessee accent and root for Ole Miss.)
In spite of all the changes it has undergone, the South remains a place set apart, possessed of its own culture, different from every part of the country. I suspect that two distinctively southern traits in particular had a lot to do with the region’s entry into the Republican fold. I learned about the traits from books, not firsthand experience. But they fit with everything I know about the South. Both traits go back—far back. According to David Hackett Fischer, the author of Albion’s Seed, a study of colonial America, they date from at least the seventeenth century. The first is a love of the military.
As Fischer explains, the first settlers in the South were comprised of two groups. One was aristocrats, displaced after the Puritans defeated Charles I. The other was border-country people, inhabitants of the fierce, lawless regions between England and Scotland. Each brought with it a military tradition. They bequeathed their love of the military to the entire region.
While at the outbreak of the Civil War the North possessed few military academies, the South was dotted with them (including the Virginia Military Institute, or VMI, which became famous a few years ago when a court ordered it to go co-ed and it at first resisted). And during the Civil War itself, as Fischer writes, “the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic.” When a Yankee like me looks at Pickett’s charge, the exposed Confederate advance across open fields at Gettysburg, he sees only slaughter. Plenty of southerners I know see gallantry.
Even today the southern military tradition remains powerful. The nation’s armed forces draws a disproportionately large number of officers from the South, and at one point during the 1980s the South boasted an astonishing ninety-one military bases, more than any other region. When the Democratic Party adopted a dovish stance during the Vietnam War, southerners found the stance offensive—George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, lost worse in the South than in any other region—while finding the Republican emphasis on national strength correspondingly attractive.
The second trait is regional pride.
Derived, like love of the military, from the first settlers in the South, this trait precipitated the Civil War. Even after he was elected president, after all, Lincoln promised to protect slavery where it already existed, merely preventing its expansion into new territory. If it had accepted these terms, the South could have preserved its way of life, conceivably for decades. Yet, as Fischer writes, “The Republican victory [of Lincoln] was seen… as an affront to southern honor.”
A century later the affront to southern honor arose from forced integration, rising taxes, proliferating federal regulations—in a word, from the Democratic Party and its Great Society. (The Great Society may have been launched by a southerner, President Lyndon Johnson of Texas, but the principal support for the program came from up North.) The South disliked getting pushed around by northern liberals almost as much as it had disliked getting pushed around by northern abolitionists.
Steeped in military tradition and a sense of regional honor, the culture of the South is thus a conservative culture. Southerners still put their hands over their hearts when they sing the national anthem. For that matter they still know the words to the national anthem. They look up to veterans and down on federal bureaucrats. They’ve gotten used to hearing the rest of the country snicker at them, resigning themselves to it as the price they have to pay to preserve their ways. But let the rest of the country start ordering them around, in the person of a federal judge or an official of the Environmental Protection Agency, and southerners will bristle. Sooner or later people like that were bound to start voting Republican.
My friend Barry Germany summed it up. When I told him about all the changes in the South that Haley and the Black brothers cited, Barry replied, “That may all be true. But the reason the South went Republican seems simpler to me. The Democratic Party just got to be too liberal for folks down here.”
* * *
Although at the state and local level, the South remains largely Democratic—the legislatures of nine of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy remain in the control of Democrats—in national politics, the South has been reliably Republican for nearly three decades. The Old Confederacy has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968 except one, the election of 1976, when it voted for the southerner, Jimmy Carter, over the northerner, Gerald Ford, but even then by a modest margin. From 1980 onward, the South has given Republican presidential candidates larger margins than has any other region of the country, including the Rocky Mountains. Even in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee was Bob Dole, the least compelling Republican candidate since Alf Landon, the South stuck with the GOP, permitting Dole to sweep the region, not that it did him much good. In Congress, too, the GOP reflects the disproportionate support it receives from its southern base. Although the South accounts for just 20 percent of the country’s population, in 1998 it sent to Congress 39 percent of all House Republicans.
If when I was a boy the GOP’s favorite anthem was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” today the GOP is whistling “Dixie.”
Not everyone cares for the tune.
DIXIE CONTRA MUNDUM
Journal entry:
Today I played a word-association game with a friend who, because he has in-laws in the South, wishes to remain anonymous. I named regions of the country He replied with the first few words or phrases that came to mind.
“New England,” I said.
“Foliage in the fall,” he replied. “Covered bridges. Maple syrup.”
“The Midwest.”
“Farmland,” he replied. “Good-hearted, plain-spoken people.”
“The West.”
“Palm trees,” he answered. “Beaches. High tech. Hollywood.”
“The South.”
“The South?” my friend said. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Big fat motorcycle cops with mirrored sunglasses, waiting to pull guys over. Televangelists ripping off widows by getting them to send in their Social Security checks. Hillbillies so inbred they have six fingers on each hand. Girls with big hair, big boobs, and no brains. You want me to keep going?”
It amounted to a concise illustration of the problem.
There is a school of thought that the South is bad for the GOP. The South, this school holds, is too pro-gun and pro-military, produces abrasive leaders in Congress, such as Congressman Dick Armey and Tom DeLay of Texas and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and generally accents its politics the way it accents its speech—in a way that jars on everybody outside the South. Worst of all, the South is the home of the religious right.
The argument was best stated in an article that appeared not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly. The article disturbed me, partly because it was entitled “Why the GOP is Doomed,” and partly because it was written by the journalist Christopher Caldwell, whom I know to be an astute political observer. “There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a Midwestern or a California, base,” Caldwell wrote.
Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed the “tipping point” and begun to alienate voters from other regions.
The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values—particularly Christian ones—at the center of politics… [Non-southerners] are put off to see that “traditional” values are now defined by the majority party as the values of… denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls.
Televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority may now be defunct—Falwell shut down the controversial organization in 1996—but the majority in the South still likes to think of itself as moral. When that attitude gets mixed up with politics, the anti-southern school believes, it strikes everybody outside the South as sanctimonious.
I grant the observation—Republicans in the South do indeed place moral values smack in the middle of their politics. On the Web site of the Republican Party of Texas, for example, you’ll find a page that contrasts the beliefs of Republicans with those of Democrats. “Republicans,” the page asserts,
believe the traditional family and the values it fosters are the foundation of American society and their preservation is essential to our Nation’s continued success. Democrats believe American society must redefine its values and the role of the family to fit new lifestyle concepts, which have resulted from the 60s counter-culture movement.
If “good people” had been substituted for “Republicans,” while “sinners,” “reprobates,” or “degenerates” had been substituted for “Democrats,” that passage could have been preached from any one of a thousand pulpits across the South. As a mandate for policy, the passage is so vague that it can be read as calling for everything from revisions in the federal tax code (an end to the marriage penalty, perhaps, or an extension of the child care credit to mothers who remain at home) to new state laws regulating divorce (an attempt to strengthen the institution of marriage by repealing no-fault divorce statutes). Yet its moral stance is clear. The correct setting in which to raise children is that of a marriage between a man and a woman. Same-sex marriages, the adoption of children by homosexuals—these are to be opposed. This stance does indeed make many outside the South—even many Republicans—queasy. In California as I write, signatures are being gathered to place the Protection of Marriage Initiative on the ballot. The initiative would define marriage as a strictly heterosexual union. Yet although the California Republican Party has endorsed the measure, leading members of the Party, including Congressman Tom Campbell, who is running for the Senate, have denounced it.
“Republicans,” the Texas GOP asserts further down the Web site page, “believe human life is sacred and worthy of protection. Democrats believe there should be no restrictions on abortion.”
This passage, too, leaves a great deal to conjecture. Does it represent a call to outlaw abortion outright? Or to make exceptions in cases of rape and
incest? Yet the passage’s pro-life tenor is of course unmistakable. It is also out of keeping with opinion—even Republican opinion—in much of the country outside the South. In the Northeast, Republican governors George Pataki of New York, Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, John Rowland of Connecticut, and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania are all pro-choice, as is Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor of California, in the West.
I grant, as I’ve said, that Republicans in the South place moral values smack in the middle of their politics. Yet the more I think about it, the more I admire them for doing just that.
Journal entry:
A synopsis of the evening:
Edita [my wife] tried to get the three boys to bed on her own while I sat on the piano bench next to our eight-year-old daughter, listening to her practice the C-major scale, her tiny fingers, their fingernails encrusted with dirt, working their way up and down the keys. The boys refused to settle down. Edita asked me to put my head in their room. I found the two-and-a-half-year-old attempting to climb the bunk bed to disturb the six-year-old, pulled the two-and-a-half-year-old off the bunk bed to place him, wriggling, in his own bed, then noticed that the four-year-old, in the bottom bunk, was gesturing to me, bent to put my ear next to his lips, heard him ask for a glass of water, went to the kitchen, got the water, and returned to discover that the six-year-old had begun to sob, having just remembered that during his kindergarten nature walk this afternoon—that is, some six hours before—he had fallen and scraped his knee.
I went back to the kitchen, searched in a drawer for a Band-Aid, then returned to the boys’ room to put the Band-Aid on the six-year-old’s knee, only to have him inform me, snuffling back tears, that he needed two Band-Aids, not one. I went back to the kitchen yet again. As I riffled through the drawer, searching for a second Band-Aid, I could hear that instead of continuing to practice her C-major scale, as I had instructed, our daughter had skipped ahead to the right-hand part of “Camptown Races.” Although she was hitting most of the right notes, I knew that she was making up her fingering as she went along, learning the piece incorrectly. I hurried back to the boys’ room, applied the second Band-Aid to the six-year-old’s knee as quickly as I could, and turned to leave, intent on getting back to the piano bench, only to feel the four-year-old tug on my trouser leg. He gestured to me to put my ear next to his lips again. Then he whispered that he wanted his mother. By then so did I.
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