{"id":10557,"date":"2017-11-27T06:05:48","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T06:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=10557"},"modified":"2017-11-29T06:26:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T06:26:36","slug":"before-breitbart-there-was-the-charleston-news-and-courier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/before-breitbart-there-was-the-charleston-news-and-courier\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Breitbart, there was the Charleston News and Courier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sid Bedingfield<\/a>, University of Minnesota<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Conservatives who dislike Donald Trump like to blame the president and his Breitbart cheering section for the racial demagoguery they see in today\u2019s Republican Party.<\/p>\n

For example, New York Times columnist David Brooks lamented<\/a> the GOP\u2019s transformation over the past decade from a party that had always been decent on racial issues to one that now embraced \u201cwhite identity politics.\u201d <\/p>\n

I respect Brooks and read him regularly, but on this issue he and his ideological allies have a blind spot. They ignore overwhelming evidence showing the central role racial politics played in the Republican Party\u2019s rise to power after the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

In my book \u201cNewspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina<\/a>,\u201d I write about the white journalists who helped revive the GOP in one Deep South state. Their story shows how prominent voices of the conservative movement have long harnessed racial resentment to fuel the party\u2019s political ascendancy.<\/p>\n

A journalistic mouthpiece for segregation<\/h2>\n

In 1962, Republican William D. Workman Jr. launched a long-shot bid for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina. For more than eight decades, the Democratic Party had been the only party that mattered in state politics. To most white voters, it represented the overthrow of Reconstruction and the restoration of white political rule. <\/p>\n

Yet Workman nearly defeated a two-term Democratic incumbent. It was a turning point that signaled the GOP\u2019s reemergence as a competitive force in the region.<\/p>\n

The nation\u2019s top political reporter, James Reston of The New York Times, traveled to South Carolina to examine this new GOP in the Deep South. He called Workman a \u201cjournalistic Goldwater Republican.\u201d It might seem like an odd description, but it fit the candidate perfectly. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Political reporter William D. Workman\u2019s 1962 U.S. Senate campaign in South Carolina proved that \u2018Goldwater Republicans\u2019 could compete in the Deep South.<\/span>
\n Courtesy of South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before he joined the senate race, Workman had been the state\u2019s best-known political reporter. He had also been working secretly with GOP allies to build the party in South Carolina and rally support for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, leader of the GOP\u2019s rising conservative wing.<\/p>\n

In the late 1950s, Workman and his boss, Charleston News and Courier editor Thomas R. Waring Jr., were staunch segregationists who had found a political ally in William F. Buckley Jr., conservative editor of a new journal, National Review. <\/p>\n

As political scientist Joseph E. Lowndes notes<\/a>, National Review was the first conservative journal to try to link the southern opposition to enforced integration with the small-government argument that was central to economic conservatism.<\/p>\n

In 1957, Buckley delivered the magazine\u2019s most forthright overture to southern segregationists. In an editorial on black voting rights, Buckley called whites<\/a> \u201cthe advanced race\u201d in the South and said whites, therefore, should be allowed to \u201ctake such measures as necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.\u201d In Buckley\u2019s view, \u201cthe claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.\u201d <\/p>\n

In the News and Courier, Waring described the editorial as \u201cbrave words,\u201d but Buckley\u2019s argument created a firestorm within the conservative movement. His brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, condemned the editorial in the pages of Buckley\u2019s own magazine. Bozell said<\/a> Buckley\u2019s unconstitutional appeal to white supremacy threatened to do \u201cgrave hurt to the conservative movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workman and the \u2018great white switch\u2019<\/h2>\n

Buckley and Goldwater began avoiding such overtly racist appeals, but it took longer for their southern allies to temper their rhetoric and master the use of racially coded language. In his 1960 book, \u201cThe Case for the South<\/a>,\u201d Workman wrote that African-Americans remained \u201ca white man\u2019s burden\u201d \u2013 a \u201cviolent\u201d and \u201cindolent\u201d people who needed guidance from their white superiors.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Workman rallied local and national Republicans to his banner in the senate race. At the time, the tiny GOP in South Carolina was run by conservative businessmen who had migrated to the Palmetto State from the North. They embraced Goldwater\u2019s call for lower taxes, weaker unions and smaller government, but the Republicans lacked credibility with white voters who cared mostly about segregation and white political rule. <\/p>\n

Workman\u2019s 1962 campaign changed that. He united the state\u2019s racial and economic conservatives, a political marriage that would fuel the party\u2019s dramatic growth in South Carolina and the nation over the next two decades. <\/p>\n

As historian Dan T. Carter contends<\/a>, \u201ceven though the streams of racial and economic conservatism have sometimes flowed in separate channels, they ultimately joined in the political coalition that reshaped American politics\u201d in the years after the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n In 1964, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond \u2013 the former Dixiecrat presidential candidate \u2013 left the Democratic Party and joined the GOP.<\/span>
\n Courtesy of South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Workman was thrilled by the letters he received from northern conservatives who embraced his campaign. One of those was William Loeb, editor of New Hampshire\u2019s Manchester Union-Leader, who told Workman the GOP should become \u201cthe white man\u2019s party.\u201d Loeb said his proposal would \u201cleave Democrats with the Negro vote,\u201d but give the Republicans the white vote and \u201cwhite people, thank God, are still in the majority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buoyed by the surprising strength of Workman\u2019s campaign, South Carolina\u2019s junior senator, Strom Thurmond, abandoned the Democratic Party in 1964 and joined the Republicans. Sixteen years earlier, Thurmond had left the Democrats briefly to run for president as a \u201cDixiecrat\u201d on the States\u2019 Rights ticket. His surprise announcement in 1964 signaled the start of what political scientists call<\/a> the \u201cgreat white switch.\u201d <\/p>\n

As more African-American voters joined the Democratic Party, southern whites moved to the GOP. William Loeb was getting his wish.<\/p>\n

Reagan and the Neshoba County Fair<\/h2>\n

By the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan had united former segregationists with economic and social conservatives to create a political movement that would dominate American politics. Reagan built this coalition in part through the use of coded rhetoric tying race to such issues as crime, welfare and government spending. <\/p>\n

In 1980, he launched his fall presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Sixteen years earlier, three civil rights activists had been murdered in Neshoba County and buried in an earthen dam. Reagan used his visit to declare his support for states\u2019 rights \u2013 a phrase indelibly linked to Thurmond\u2019s Dixiecrat campaign of 1948. <\/p>\n

In a 2007 column, Brooks angrily disputes<\/a> any notion that Reagan\u2019s Neshoba County trip was a dog-whistle appeal to white racial resentment in the post-civil rights era. He calls such claims a \u201cslur\u201d and a \u201ccalumny.\u201d Reagan\u2019s campaign was notoriously disorganized, Brooks argues. The candidate had planned to launch his general election campaign discussing inner-city problems with the Urban League, not preaching states\u2019 rights in Neshoba County.<\/p>\n

Maybe he\u2019s right. Perhaps it was just a scheduling mishap. But on the question of race and politics, I\u2019m more inclined to believe Lee Atwater, the late political strategist from South Carolina. <\/p>\n

Atwater served as White House political director under Reagan and chief strategist for President George H. W. Bush\u2019s 1988 campaign. In a 1981 interview<\/a> with political scientist Alexander Lamis, Atwater explained the evolution of coded racial language in political campaigns in the South. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou start out in 1954 by saying, \u2018nigger, nigger, nigger.\u2019 By 1968 you can\u2019t say \u2018nigger\u2019 \u2013 that hurts you, backfires,\u201d Atwater said. \u201cSo you say stuff like forced busing, states\u2019 rights, and all that stuff, and you\u2019re getting so abstract. Now, you\u2019re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you\u2019re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not to say that all Republicans are racist, or that economic, social and cultural issues played no role in the rise of the conservative GOP. But it is clear that racial resentment mattered to voters \u2013 a lot \u2013 and the Republican Party found ways to stoke that animus for political gain. <\/p>\n

\"TheDonald Trump\u2019s racial appeals may be more transparent<\/a>. But in him, the legacy of conservative journalists like William Workman lives on.<\/p>\n

Sid Bedingfield<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Minnesota<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sid Bedingfield, University of Minnesota Conservatives who dislike Donald Trump like to blame the president and his Breitbart cheering section for the racial demagoguery they see in today\u2019s Republican Party. For example, New York Times columnist David Brooks lamented the GOP\u2019s transformation over the past decade from a party that had always been decent on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":10558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[3605,699,191,308,1998,13,498,2496,993,420],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10559,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10557\/revisions\/10559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}