There was only one potential problem for this optimistic future. The Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal had been asked by the Carnegie Corporation to write a report about the challenges facing American society in the postwar period. His 1944 examination of the “American Dilemma” was a comprehensive examination of the country’s persistent problem of race relations – the very same phenomenon that we now call “systemic racism” almost 80 years later. The book’s subtitle announced that “the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” would continue to confront the country until it was addressed in a serious and honest fashion. Myrdal’s examination of how the “problem” limited democratic participation in American society, politics, and economics proved more prescient than anyone imagined. Barely 11 years after his massive study appeared, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus precipitated the greatest mass movement for racial equality in the country’s history. As Jim Crow came under direct assault throughout the South, a tumultuous period of social activity, political conflict, and racial tension tested the limits of the country’s optimism and ushered in a period of profound change. It turned out that much more was at stake than the future of a particular region. As it became clear that the “Negro problem” was a national one, a series of blows would shatter political liberalism’s sunny confidence about the future.

Although the politics of race were most overt in the South, events would soon disabuse Northern whites of their belief that they were racially innocent. George Wallace’s presidential campaigns would reveal the national dimensions of American racial discrimination, segregation, and exploitation, providing bitter evidence for Malcolm X’s observation that “as long as you are south of the Canadian border, you are south.” It turned out that Wallace was the perfect figure to demonstrate the links between the long Southern history of white privilege and racial supremacy and those of its Northern cousin. Slavery and Jim Crow were rooted in Dixie, but Southern racial politics have always had national implications. Indeed, much of American political history has been shaped by white Southern power that shaped national institutions before Lincoln’s election and persisted despite a lost civil war and the subsequent transformation of its social order. Neither major party has been immune. From the Hayes–Tilden compromise of 1876 that ended Reconstruction and signaled national acceptance of Jim Crow until Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy, the South exercised nationwide power through the Democratic Party. So durable has this power been that it is now expressed by Republican politicians. Even the advent of the broadest reformist regime in the country’s history had to make its peace with Dixie’s monolithic white voting bloc.

Despite FDR’s sweeping victory in 1932 and overwhelming Democratic congressional majorities, the South exercised a national veto on race policy throughout the New Deal. Even though it was a minority in the Democratic Party, the region’s senators and representatives held legislative power by virtue of their seniority and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black citizens. Their overriding goal was to protect the South’s racial order from outside interference, particularly from Washington. This arrangement forced Roosevelt to stay away from a congressional effort to pass an anti-lynching law and affected the way the most important New Deal programs were structured. Formally race-neutral, the Social Security Act excluded agricultural workers, domestics, teachers, librarians, and social workers from receiving benefits, rendering 90 percent of Black workers ineligible for the New Deal’s signature piece of social protection. The same was true of the Wagner Act, which created the conditions for the massive unionization of white workers in the North but excluded the same categories of workers left out of the Social Security system. After the war, the country’s powerful industrial unions were able to negotiate private medical insurance, generous pensions, job security, cost of living adjustments, unemployment compensation during layoffs, and regular wage increases that worked to the advantage of their overwhelmingly white rank and file. The third foundational piece of New Deal legislation – the Federal Housing Act of 1934 – brought homeownership within the reach of millions of families by placing the credit of the federal government behind the private lending that made mortgages possible. But the Federal Housing Agency’s determination to protect segregated neighborhoods in its “confidential” city surveys and appraisers’ manuals channeled almost all lending to whites. Washington’s encouragement of segregated suburbs was supported by massive direct federal spending and support for road construction, sewer lines, water supplies, schools, electricity transmission, and other infrastructure. Federal support for de facto residential segregation in the North continued after the war and extended past financial support for suburban single-family houses. Levittown, Long Island’s pioneering postwar experiment in mass housing production for returning soldiers, was open to any veteran who could take advantage of federal lending programs, the vast majority of the veterans being white. The same was true of Parkchester in the Bronx, Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, and dozens of other housing complexes in Northern cities. The GI Bill of 1944, which aimed to reintegrate veterans into the nation’s society after the war, offered low-interest housing loans to all vets regardless of race but delegated implementation to local authorities, who responded to intense pressure from white neighborhood organizations. Restrictive covenants excluded non-whites from homeownership until the Supreme Court outlawed them in 1948, after which those same covenants remained by informal agreement. But even as they cemented white privilege into federal policy, the New Deal and World War II also broke the sharecropping system and brought millions of Black citizens into the national economy. The industrialization of Southern agriculture, made possible by federal support, freed millions of sharecroppers and farm workers to find industrial work in Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Blacks also benefited from the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Writers Project, the segregated Civilian Conservation Corps, and other New Deal programs that provided work relief. Black soldiers returned from war with a newfound claim to full citizenship. In many cases, this involved broadening and deepening the rights they enjoyed in the North. Despite the widespread residential segregation and social isolation they experienced, they could vote, serve on juries, testify against whites, use public accommodations, and enjoy other public and private rights – benefits that were denied them in the Jim Crow South. Buoyed by massive Black participation in Northern industry during and after the war, civil rights organizations and many industrial unions brought pressure on Washington to begin moving away from its embrace of the South. The Social Security exemptions were changed beginning in the early 1950s, and by the middle of the decade, the non-South Democrats were clearly more progressive on racial issues than their Republican counterparts, whose dependence on Chambers of Commerce, business lobbies, and farm organizations made them reluctant to support federal intrusion into employment policies. Black voters outside the South began moving toward the Democrats in greater numbers. The New Deal’s contradictory legacy empowered Black citizens in many areas even as it reinforced segregation and discrimination in others.

Despite the structural changes that were transforming the wider American economy, political life in the South remained white. The bargain that had brought an end to Reconstruction and installed Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876 still held sway: the federal government would not meddle with the South in matters of race, in return for which Northern finance and industry would be free to organize the national economy. This bargain held politics and the Democratic Party together until the civil rights movement forced a reckoning and compelled Northern Democrats to make a choice. The time-honored arrangement that had structured American politics for decades started to disintegrate as early as 1948 – years before Barry Goldwater discovered that he could pry loose white votes from Dixie and construct a new alliance of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.

The first hint of trouble came when that year’s Democratic National Convention committed itself to “continuing efforts to eradicate all racial, religious, and economic discrimination.” President Truman issued an executive order integrating the armed forces two weeks later, and a group of Southern Democrats immediately revolted. Rebels seized control of the Democratic Party apparatus in several Southern states and organized the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” soon known as the Dixiecrats. Opposed to any hint of racial integration and determined to protect Jim Crow and white supremacy from federal intervention, the rebels invoked the Tenth Amendment, Hayes–Tilden, states’ rights, local control, and a selective reading of American history as their slogans. South Carolina Democratic senator Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in hopes of preserving Southern power by splitting the national party but was unable to prevent Truman’s reelection. The Dixiecrats faded away after the election, but the end of the “solid” Democratic South was in sight. The fight to protect Jim Crow was largely fought inside the Democratic Party, but Southern leaders phrased their struggle in broad apocalyptic terms. Trumpeting their opposition to both parties, the Dixiecrats announced that “we call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.” They weren’t the first to deploy states’ rights in support of racial discrimination and white supremacy, and they wouldn’t be the last.

Opposition to Washington would become the rallying cry for defenders of the “Southern way of life.” As the national Democrats reluctantly began supporting a measure of racial democracy, the South summoned its familiar language of regional grievance. Events would soon give it the opportunity to assume the role of oppressed victim. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a powerful sign that the rest of the country had finally decided that Jim Crow was no longer acceptable. In a nod to sensitive opponents, a second decision ordered desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”

“Deliberate” meant “slow,” and the white South exploded with violent rage, self-pity, and a near-universal desire to defend itself. Summoning up anti-Washington sentiment from the Confederacy, politicians and their allies announced a campaign of “massive resistance” to tyranny and repression. Riots and violence accompanied efforts to integrate the schools, and they found a theoretical expression in the so-called Declaration of Constitutional Principles. Written by Democratic senators Richard Russell of Georgia and the former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1956, the Southern Manifesto developed the “constitutionalist” objections to Brown that Barry Goldwater would take to a national audience.

The basic argument was that the Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds and arbitrarily imposed its will on a South that had organized its racial affairs to everyone’s advantage. It claimed that the region’s Black and white citizens lived together under a system that had evolved over decades, reflected Southern culture, was widely accepted, and ensured social peace. Signed by 19 Senators and 82 Representatives, the Manifesto invoked states’ rights against a creeping judicial march toward totalitarianism. The Supreme Court was guilty of a “clear abuse of judicial power” and the Manifesto pledged to organize a legal effort to overturn Brown. It invoked the Tenth Amendment’s limitation of the federal government’s power to those that are specifically granted by the Constitution to support its contention that the Supreme Court had misinterpreted constitutional law and that its Brown decision was illegitimate.

Barry Goldwater was neither a segregationist nor a racist in his personal views, but he provided cover for them in his public life. His own twists and turns illustrated the contradictions of the moment. Even as he opposed the Brown decision and decried judicial overreach, he said that he was in favor of the decision’s objectives. He thought school integration a worthy public policy, had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills in the Senate, and took public positions against Jim Crow. But he opposed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, objecting to its provisions outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment. They were a usurpation of power by the federal government, he said, the first steps on a road that would require a police state for enforcement. The Southern Manifesto had a new champion. The federal government had no business telling people what they could or could not do with their property.

Goldwater’s candidacy was an important step in the Republican Party’s abandonment of civil rights, but the process had begun four years earlier. Richard Nixon had developed a more progressive record on racial issues than John F. Kennedy, and the Republican platform of 1960 went further than the Democrats’. Three years later, Nixon himself had warned that if the Republicans nominated Goldwater “our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party.” The Chicago Defender – the most important Black newspaper of the era – agreed, observing that the GOP was on the road to becoming “a white man’s party.”¹ Despite lingering Black loyalty for the “party of Lincoln,” Kennedy was able to assemble a coalition of Northern Blacks, ethnic blue-collar workers, and the white South to win the election. For the Republicans, the lesson was that competing with the Democrats for Black votes was probably a waste of time. The GOP’s evolution into a white party began before Goldwater decided to run, but his 1964 candidacy solidified it and gave it a clear direction. After the Kennedy administration had used federal troops to break the University of Mississippi’s violent resistance to integration, the Arizona senator demanded that the South have a voice in any matter that affected it. His embrace of Dixie began the process that would culminate in Donald Trump.

Written in 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative was Goldwater’s statement of principles and survived his electoral drubbing to serve as a point of reference for all subsequent Republican political figures. It was ghostwritten by his speechwriter and adviser L. Brent Bozell and published in 1960 under Goldwater’s name; the Arizona senator was always happy to pretend that he had written it. It was anchored in the same bedrock of rhetorical hostility to central government that has animated Republican Party politics ever since. Even conventional Republican politicians like Richard Nixon found it necessary to pay homage to the antistatism that runs throughout the book.

All governmental power, Goldwater declared, has a tendency to expand and threaten individual freedom as it does so. Since the New Deal vastly expanded the scope of the national government, Washington has become the most dangerous enemy of liberty. Goldwater was no anarchist; acknowledging that the state performs many vital functions, he simply argued that the function of wise government is to restrict its power. The whole point of the American Constitution is that it is “a system of restraints against the natural tendency of government to expand in the direction of absolutism.”² The document’s protection of states’ rights is the cornerstone of those restraints. And nowhere was the power of the states clearer than in education.

Civil rights, Goldwater declared, are those that are embodied in laws, such as the right to vote or hold property. But integrated education is not a civil right, and the federal government has no business forcing it upon the states. Integration might be wise, it might be humane, it might be desirable – but it is emphatically not a civil right. The Fourteenth Amendment’s provision about equal protection does not apply to education and cannot be used as a hammer with which to break down local practices. Under those circumstances, Goldwater argued that education policy is reserved to the states and the Tenth Amendment must carry the day. This criticism of Brown stands as an early version of the constitutional “originalism” that later became a bedrock principle of much conservative jurisprudence. The statesmen who wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment certainly did not intend to outlaw segregated schools or authorize federal intervention in education, said Goldwater. The Brown decision, he went on, violates the requirement that the intention of the Constitution be respected and that the Supreme Court not substitute its will for the document’s plain language. Neither the Supreme Court nor any other federal institution should be able to override local practices, laws, and history. Goldwater’s critique was identical to that of the South and its “Manifesto.”

He declared that he was in support of Brown’s objectives. School integration is right and proper, but he was not prepared to impose his views on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina. Education of children in their states is their business, not his and certainly not the court’s.