Racial Realignment

The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965

Eric Schickler

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400880973
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades.Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand.Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

TODAY POLITICAL OBSERVERS take for granted the idea that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and racial liberalism cohere under a common programmatic banner, just as Republican partisanship is associated with economic conservatism and greater resistance to government programs to redress problems of racial inequality. But the emergence of these linkages is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to the 1930s Republican elites provided greater (if often only tepid) support for civil rights than did their Democratic counterparts. By the mid-1960s, however, Democratic partisanship and economic liberalism were clearly identified with civil rights support and Republican conservatism had become identified with greater opposition to governmental action to redress racial inequalities. This book aims to explain the dynamics of this momentous transformation.

The partisan transformation on race is often depicted as an elite-led, center-driven shift that occurred in the 1960s, breaking apart the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics for more than a generation. By contrast, I show that the realignment began with mass and midlevel party actors, that it was rooted in state and local politics rather than in Washington, DC, and that much of the important work was complete by the mid-1940s. In doing so, I aim to provide a new way of thinking about the nature of the New Deal coalition and of the political significance of New Deal liberalism more generally. This account also has important implications for theories of political parties and of political change in the United States. Thus the civil rights realignment is important both in its own right and as a window into the workings of the American political system more broadly.

THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS REALIGNMENT

Although scholars have studied the civil rights realignment from a wide variety of angles, three related claims have shaped the prevailing understanding of its dynamics. The first claim is that national party elites played the decisive role in driving the change in each party’s stance. Edward Carmines and James Stimson’s pathbreaking study, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics, put forward the argument that the two parties took similar positions straddling (and often avoiding) civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s, with Republicans if anything a bit to the left of their Democratic counterparts.¹ The critical break point arrived when Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater took sharply different stands on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall put it, “Goldwater … publicly defined the Republican Party as anti–civil rights with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.… Johnson, conversely, firmly established the commitment of the Democratic Party to civil rights.”² Once national party leaders made this dramatic break, party activists followed their lead, polarizing on civil rights policy, and the mass public gradually followed along.³ Indeed, the civil rights case is often taken as a leading example of the idea that public opinion generally follows cues from national party elites, with mass partisans polarizing on issues when these elites provide clear, distinct cues.⁴

This reshuffling of party coalitions launched the post–New Deal party system in which Democrats were identified with African Americans and racial liberalism, while Republicans were associated with racial conservatism.⁵ Lyndon Johnson’s often-cited observation after he signed the Civil Rights Act that “we have delivered the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine” nicely set the stage for the view that elite choice at a critical moment drove the racial realignment.⁶

Second, national political actors take center stage in this story, in part because federalism is understood to be a key blockage preventing action on civil rights. Federalism gave southerners secure control of law enforcement and the means of coercion in their region while allowing southern elites to appeal to the rhetoric of states’ rights to justify their discriminatory policies. Federalism also meant that state party competition often focused on local issues, with the result that many northern state Democratic parties consisted of inward-looking political machines with little commitment to programmatic liberalism.⁷ Change had to come from the top down because only nationally oriented political actors had the capacity and (eventually) the will to move policy on racial issues. The civil rights movement figures into this story as an important source of pressure on these national political elites, but the crucial step was to persuade top party leaders based in Washington that they needed to act.

Third, leading accounts of the civil rights realignment date the partisan transformation to the 1960s. This focus on the 1960s as a “critical juncture” is not confined to works that embrace the elite-led view of the realignment. For example, Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos’s Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America does an excellent job of tracing the creative role of the civil rights movement in generating the partisan landscape that has dominated American politics for the past fifty years. Yet they too accept the idea that the 1960s constitute the critical moment for the realignment, arguing that “the GOP was, in the aggregate, far and away more progressive on civil rights issues” than the Democrats at the start of the decade. A “seismic” shift occurred during “a fairly short span of time in the early to mid-’60s” when the civil rights movement and segregationist countermovement “decisively altered the partisan geography of the United States and in the process pushed the national Democratic and Republican parties sharply to the left and right respectively.”⁸

In sum, the conventional account treats the civil rights realignment as the disruption of one stable partisan alignment—rooted in the avoidance of racial issues—and its replacement by another alignment in which race played a defining role. The critical decisions driving this process occurred in the 1960s as national party elites grappled with the question of how to respond to pressure from civil rights activists and their opponents. The choices made at the center then reverberated throughout the political system, gradually remaking both parties at the mass and middle levels.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS REALIGNMENT: CONSTITUENCIES, LOCALLY ROOTED POLITICIANS, AND TIMING

In contrast to the conventional account, this book argues that the partisan realignment on civil rights was rooted in changes in the New Deal coalition that emerged in the mid- to late 1930s, not the 1960s. Rather than realignment starting in Washington and diffusing out and down, state parties and locally oriented rank-and-file members of Congress provided a key mechanism for pro–civil rights forces—which first entered the New Deal coalition in the 1930s—to capture the Democratic Party from below. Far from spearheading the realignment, national party elites—that is, the leaders of political institutions of national scope, such as the president, top congressional leaders, and national party chairmen—feared the disruptive potential of civil rights issues for their respective partisan coalitions. As a result, these national leaders generally sought to straddle the civil rights divide and were actually among the last to move.

Constituency-Level Changes

Changes in the constituency base of the Democratic Party that took place in the 1930s set in motion the partisan realignment on race. While the New Deal’s economic programs originally drew African Americans and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions to the Democratic Party, their entry into the party coalition—and the reaction that entry provoked from southern Democrats—established important linkages between civil rights liberalism and New Deal liberalism that reverberated through the midlevels of the party and eventually forced the hand of top national leaders.

African Americans had voted Republican for decades but received little in return for their loyalty. By contrast, even as core features of the New Deal accommodated racial discrimination, Roosevelt’s program offered real benefits to many northern African Americans, particularly when compared with the Hoover administration’s dismal record. Recognizing these gains, African Americans voted decisively for Roosevelt in 1936 and stuck with the president for the remainder of his term. The emergence of African Americans as a potentially important source of votes for northern Democrats gave at least some rank-and-file Democratic politicians an incentive to show concern for civil rights.⁹

While the number of northern states and congressional districts with a substantial African American population in the 1930s and early 1940s was modest, the meteoric rise of the CIO gave African Americans an important ally within the Democratic coalition. Before the formation of the CIO in 1935, the American Federation of Labor (AFL)–dominated labor movement had a poor record on civil rights. But from early on, the CIO stood out among white-led organizations in its support for civil rights. Even as rank-and-file union workers often shared in the racial prejudice that was prevalent in their communities, the union’s leaders and organizers made racial equality a key facet of their program. This support was rooted both in the union’s internal organizing imperatives and in its broader programmatic vision. The CIO’s leaders and organizers believed that African American support was crucial for the union’s prospects in industrial workplaces in which replacement workers were a constant threat. At the same time, many of these same union officials had roots in left-wing political movements committed to the idea that racial divisions undermined the class consciousness required to fight economic exploitation. These interests and beliefs led the CIO to fuse concerns about class and race, arguing that the cause of economic justice required an encompassing labor movement willing to use governmental power to tackle the mutually reinforcing problems of economic and racial inequality.

This fusion was especially important as observers on all sides quickly recognized that the CIO had developed into the central mobilization instrument outside the Democratic Party itself on behalf of liberalism. The CIO became the leading symbol—both for supporters and for opponents—of the most ambitious strands of New Deal liberalism in the United States, urging congressional Democrats and the executive branch to move to the left across a range of policies.¹⁰ The CIO’s outspoken civil rights advocacy meant that the group most associated with an expansive reading of the New Deal’s goals was also associated with the civil rights cause.

These two constituency shifts provoked a furious reaction among southern Democrats, which had equally important implications for the future of New Deal liberalism. Southern Democrats had provided critical backing for the first and second New Deal.¹¹ But many southern politicians viewed African Americans’ incorporation into both the Democratic Party and the labor movement as an existential threat to the racially oppressive “southern way of life.”¹² Southern Democrats were soon the most consequential opponents of labor-sponsored expansions of the New Deal, cooperating with Republicans to push investigations and legislation that sought to undermine organized labor, and along with it, the liberal agenda more generally. Southern Democrats’ fierce opposition both to the CIO and to civil rights meant that African Americans were no longer isolated claimants: their political enemies were increasingly identified as a crucial enemy of liberal advances, not just on civil rights but across a range of policy domains, including especially labor policy.

These changes gradually reshaped the meaning of New Deal liberalism. A new political alignment took shape in which the supporters of an ambitious reading of the New Deal’s promise—CIO unions and African Americans, along with Jews and urban liberals more generally—found themselves opposed by southern Democrats who viewed both the CIO and African Americans as mortal threats. This alignment reached all the way down to the mass level of the parties, as economically liberal white northern Democrats were substantially more likely to back key civil rights initiatives by about 1940 than were economically conservative Republicans. The mass- and group-level developments had important implications for politicians: for Republicans to make civil rights their issue, they would have had to overcome the skepticism of their own economically conservative core partisans. For northern Democrats to skirt the issue, they would have had to ignore the views of their own core partisans—economic liberals and the growing number of African American Democrats.

Federalism and Geographical Decentralization

Northern state parties and rank-and-file members of Congress responded to these new constituency dynamics long before national party elites did.¹³ Traditionally, liberals have interpreted the history of civil rights as the classic example of why one should be suspicious of states’ rights and local politics. This analysis suggests that may be too hasty. While federalism and geographic representation certainly facilitated the development of the Jim Crow South, they also helped to precipitate its downfall. Locally rooted politicians played a crucial role as intermediaries between constituency-based pressures and elite decision-making arenas in the civil rights realignment.¹⁴

The nationally oriented party leaders who had the greatest stake in maintaining the Democrats’ North-South coalition were generally slow to respond when advocates attempted to graft civil rights onto New Deal liberalism. But the independent power base of state and local parties and the election of House members through separate geographic districts channeled constituency pressure for civil rights, without requiring an immediate showdown with national party leaders. Even as many national political elites sought to avoid the civil rights issue, movement activists could appeal to rank-and-file members of Congress, mayors and other local officials, and state and local parties, each of which had its own, partly independent power base and constituency. These locally rooted politicians then contributed to civil rights activists’ efforts to raise the salience of the issue.¹⁵

Specifically, Democratic partisanship and economic liberalism became associated with civil rights support among northern members of the House of Representatives starting in the late 1930s. By the end of World War II a substantial gap in civil rights support separated northern Democrats and economic liberals from northern Republicans and economic conservatives. Northern state Democratic parties displayed a similar pattern, adopting platforms and pursuing policies that were to the left of their GOP counterparts on civil rights by the mid-1940s, with the gap increasing gradually in the ensuing years. These midlevel party actors proved far more responsive to pressure to support civil rights than did most top national elites, who were preoccupied with holding together the increasingly precarious North-South coalition forged by Roosevelt.¹⁶

Federalism and the decentralized system of electing members of Congress thus provided key institutional mechanisms to facilitate the gradual incorporation of civil rights into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, undermining the implicit deal among national political leaders that had been a key foundation of the party for decades. Much like abolitionism in the 1830s–1840s and the currency issue in the 1870s–1880s, efforts by national party leaders to block a new issue ultimately failed and party lines were reshuffled.¹⁷ Congress and state parties emerge from this case as potential vehicles for new interests to gain access; localism and geographic-based districts are often seen as bastions of conservatism, but in this case they provided institutional footholds for civil rights liberals.

Midlevel party actors also played an important role in the GOP’s transformation on race. Growing southern Democratic disaffection with New Deal liberalism stirred Republican hopes of a realignment more than two decades before Barry Goldwater entered the political scene. The appeals to states’ rights and limited government that became a staple of conservative Republican attacks on the New Deal in the 1930s were well suited to wooi...