This paragraph comes very early in Perlstein’s thousand-page magnum opus on the rise of this “New Right” in American politics. What he started in Before The Storm with its focus on Barry Goldwater, continued in Nixonland with its focus on Richard Nixon, and continued again in The Invisible Bridge with its focus on Ronald Reagan, comes to its fully-gestated birth and emergence in what I think is the misnamed Reaganland. Misnamed because this is a book less about Ronald Reagan and more about the New Right forces he would learn to ride.
The New Right’s discontinuities from the old one would be exaggerated in the years to come -- not least by its self-mythologizing leaders. But there were some important differences. For one thing, they believed Barry Goldwater, in whose presidential campaign many had cut their political teeth, was by then too much a member of the establishment to retain their respect. That made the outsider Orrin Hatch a natural recruit. “I’m a non-politician,” he liked to say. “I’ve spent most of my professional life fighting the growing, oppressive federal bureaucracy, mostly for working people.”
These few paragraphs at the beginning of his work are an excellent primer in helping us understand what the New Right was (and is), and what things it stood (and stands) for. Each one seems to illuminate another prime focus on the movement which has now all but subsumed the Republican Party.
That notion -- conservatism as an ideology for working people -- was another New Right theme. [Richard] Viguerie’s father had been a construction worker; his mother toiled in a paper mill and sold milk from the family cow. Another movement principal was the son of a furnace stoker. Kevin Phillips grew up in the Bronx, and excoriated “conservatives whose game it is to quote English poetry and utter neo-Madisonian benedictions over the interests and institutions of establishment liberalism.” He wished instead to build “a cultural siege-engine out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi, and working-class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to ideological-institutional smithereens.” Another New Right pioneer said he was fighting “a guerrilla battle at the grassroots of a generation of lower-middle-class people who feel betrayed and exploited.”
Lower-middle-class people who feel betrayed and exploited; check.
For the left, employers were the exploiters. The New Right replied that the true exploiters were federal bureaucrats grasping for tax dollars, and the media elites who shoved 1960s libertinism down Middle America’s throats. New Rightists were obsessed with what were known as the “social issues” -- crime, government intrusion into family life, sexual mores, the right to own a gun. Reagan’s establishmentarian presidential campaign manager John Sears dismissed them as the “emotional issues.” But the New Right reveled in emotion -- particularly, the emotion of resentment.
The emotional politics of resentment and grievance; check.
The prototypical New Right crusade was a movement in 1974 of fundamentalist Christians in the union stronghold of Kanawha County, West Virginia, against the “educrats” who issued textbooks they considered ungodly. The protests escalated to the point of dynamiting the school board building. The Heritage Foundation, the New Right’s new think tank, sent a lawyer to represent the alleged bombers, and introduced the Kanawha organizers to fellow anti-textbook crusaders around the country. “We talk about issues that people care about,” Weyrich said unapologetically: a voter brought into the conservative tent via an “alliance on family issues is bound to begin to look at the morality of other issues” -- like “the unjust power that has been legislated for union bosses.”
Violence and intimidation of local officials and school boards; check. And what really makes this so powerful, from a political perspective, is not just the way it galvanized people, but the way it realigns the traditional coalitions that framed the Republican and Democratic parties.
Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were “no longer solely motivated by economic concerns -- which have traditionally made them Democrats.” Now that they feared “change in society” more than losing their place in the middle class, they were “one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.” The New Right social-issue strategy was rooted in just that -- and not, at least at first, in the ideological convictions of its leaders. Those were more along the lines of the ones Barry Goldwater wrote about in Conscience of a Conservative in 1960: ending farm subsidies and the progressive income tax, facing down the Soviets even at the risk of nuclear war -- the sort of notions that, when Goldwater ran for president, scared voters half to death. So the New Right searched for more tantalizing lures. As organizer Howard Phillips put it: “We organize discontent.” Organizing discontent meant foraging for whatever issues roused an otherwise apathetic citizenry to conservative political action. Presently, social issues were it.
And this is what Reaganland is really about. This New Right and the new form of American politics that it created. Reagan himself was a figurehead around which those forces were able to mobilize -- and it’s safe to say that Reagan himself did much of the mobilizing. But, as we have seen in the last several years, organizing discontent in order to rouse citizens to conservative political action turned out to be a slippery slope to simply organizing discontent. The conservative ideology that helped frame that discontent has now all but vanished from this politically successful formula and we have been left only with the metastasizing discontent that still uses the same political apparatus to push our society ever closer to the authoritarian cliff. The characters in Reaganland may be blissfully unaware of this destination, but the modern reader cannot be.
A Lie By Any Other Name
That was another secret to the New Right’s success: an eagerness to accept that their end -- the survival of Western civilization -- most decidedly justified nearly any means.
In my analysis of Perlstein’s other books I have cited numerous instances of lies told to drive a politically-motivated narrative (the lie that tax cuts increase government revenue by stimulating economic growth, for example, or the lie that most people on welfare are black women having more babies so that they can bilk the system for even more money). In Reaganland, this reality seems ratcheted up to a new level -- in the sense that they can no longer be defended as lies of political convenience because now they seem part of a conscious and coordinated strategy.
For years Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had argued that the arms agreements his rival Henry Kissinger had negotiated with the Soviet Union were not worth the paper on which they were printed: the Soviets simply built any weapons they pleased. Rumsfeld’s neoconservative deputy Paul Wolfowitz had convinced him that the CIA’s annual intelligence estimate of the Soviet’s capabilities was biased toward detente. So Rumsfeld lobbied the president to generate a competing assessment of the Soviet threat.
CIA director William Colby was not amused by the bureaucratic insult. But in the fall of 1975, Rumsfeld engineered a bureaucratic coup that removed him. The following spring, at the height of the primaries against Reagan, President Ford took Rumsfeld’s advice, authorizing a panel of sixteen “outside experts” to review the highly classified data by which the annual National Intelligence Estimate was produced, to write a counter-estimate of its own. The group became known as “Team B.” (Team A was the CIA itself.) Team B concluded just what Rumsfeld wished it to: first, that the Soviet Union could wipe out virtually America’s entire nuclear capability in a first strike if it wanted to; and second, that the USSR did want to.
Team B included Wolfowitz, a neoconservative Harvard professor of Russian history named Richard Pipes, and Paul Nitze, a hard-line defense intellectual whe had served five presidents. Nitze had authorized a similar report in 1957 whose leaked conclusions made their way into the 1960 presidential campaign when John F. Kennedy accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing a catastrophic “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The report was based on inaccurate Air Force intelligence claiming the Soviet Union possessed as many as a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles when in fact they only had four, a reality that proved that the Soviets were not in fact pursuing global dominations. The hard-liners remained unchastened by their mistake -- as they would be again and again following many more bias-driven errors.
This is an anecdote with all the hallmarks of what will become the conscious strategy: doubt the information coming from a government agency (“government is the problem,” remember?), create a intelligence report with no public oversight and based on false information, and use the “official” status of that report to defend and push the political narrative one wishes was true but wasn’t.
And perhaps the longest lasting example of this practice is the political rhetoric and lies that were (and are) told about the tax revenue stimulating effects of tax cuts. It’s a particular bugaboo of mine, something I colloquially call “The Big Lie.” And it’s a lie that weaves in and out of Perlstein’s narrative. As near as I can tell, it begins here.
Congressman William Steiger was a Republican from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, elected to the House in 1966 at twenty-eight years of age, when he looked so young, he was often mistaken for a page. He sponsored the legislation creating OSHA, was an avid environmentalist, and championed legal services for the poor. Pundits admired his eloquent idealism. So on March 22, 1978, when Steiger -- not some reactionary, or money-grubbing corporate shill -- introduced to the pending tax legislation an amendment to lower the tax rate of capital gains almost by half, Capitol Hill paid serious attention. Not least because another eloquent Republican idealist, John Anderson, was a cosponsor.
This was a surprising development. Capital gains had been taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income since the 1920s. The rationale was that this encouraged job-creating investments. Then, in 1969 a liberal Congress rejected that argument outright, raising the rate to 49 percent as part of the most liberal tax reform since the introduction of the federal income tax -- which was blessed with President Nixon’s signature. But any affluent person with a half-decent accountant could still easily get his or her capital gains burden down to 16 percent. Which was why, seven years later, Gerald Ford signed a law before the TV cameras just prior to Election Day to close still more loopholes (among them, as it happened, one involving phony losses on investments in cattle that Ronald Reagan had used to pay little or no federal income tax in 1970).
This was how the politics of taxation had worked since the days of Franklin Roosevelt: politicians sought favor with ordinary voters, especially right before elections, by soaking the rich. Yet here was a congressional liberal, a supporter of those 1969 and 1976 reforms, proposing to lower from 40 percent to 25 percent the rate for a tax paid almost exclusively by the rich -- even as the share of the tax burden borne by corporations had fallen almost by half since 1960, from 23 to 14.1 percent. What was going on?
What was going on, indeed. It was the New Right and its lobbyists, inventing facts and cloaking them in authoritative trappings.
Steiger had heard a convincing macroeconomic argument. A former aide of his worked for an organization called the American Council for Capital Formation. On March 7, he dropped by his old boss’s office, accompanied by a lobbyist for the American Electronics Association named Edward Zschau, who argued that the higher capital gains rate was decimating the burgeoning computer industry in Northern California’s “Silicon Valley,” and that radically lowering it would reverse the sclerosis not just in his industry but all industries. America’s economic reversals since the 1974 recession, he argued, were largely caused by taxes eating up potential investment capital. Zschau even presented data suggesting that the federal treasury would not be starved by this tax cut but enriched -- because the economic dynamism unleashed by ending the “capital shortage” would create so much more capital gains to be taxed.
There it is. The Big Lie. Cutting taxes spurs growth which results in more tax revenue. Steiger may have found it a convincing argument, but it really isn’t, since simple math has the power to destroy it. Suppose we have $1 billion in capital gains, actually taxed at 50%. That’s $500 million in tax revenue. Now let’s say we cut the tax rate to 25%. That’s now $250 million in tax revenue. How much additional in capital gains, taxed at 25%, would be needed to exceed the $500 million that came in when the tax rate was 50%? That answer is another $1 billion, meaning that capital gains would have to double in order to provide the same amount of tax revenue when you cut the tax rate in half. And how realistic is that? Has capital gains ever grown by 100% in one year? Ever?
But once proposed, the lie is embraced and quickly converted into dogma. Perlstein says the argument tantalized Steiger.
It also tantalized Ronald Reagan. In a column released on March 23 he posed a riddle: “What creates jobs, increases U.S. exports, boasts tax revenue and expands technology all at the same time but is an endangered species?” The answer was venture capital, each $100 of which, he claimed, yielded an average of $70 in export sales, $33 in research and development, $15 in federal corporate income taxes, $15 in state and local taxes, and $15 in federal personal income taxes. And yet, he rued, this “golden goose” was being strangled in its crib by the U.S. Treasury, all out of a misplaced concern with “fairness.”
And not just Reagan. Remember the modus operandi. We need new “intelligence reports,” instruments created with no public oversight and based on false information, so we can use their “official” status to defend and push the political narrative we wish was true but isn’t.
The day before the final Panama Canal Vote, as the House Ways and Means Committee began marking up Jimmy Carter’s tax bill, a study was released from the economic analysis firm Chase Econometrics that some in the media began citing as if it were holy writ. It concerned Representative William Steiger’s capital gains tax cut bill.
“Under such legislation, the rate of growth in constant dollar GNP for the period 1980-1985 would average 3.6 percent compared to 3.4 percent annual average growth rate otherwise,” Wall Street Journal's “Heard on the Street” column said, citing the study. “That would add 440,000 new jobs, boost spending on plants and equipment by a percentage point, lower corporate debt, decrease net tax revenues to the U.S. treasury only slightly, and lower the budget deficit by $16 billion in 1985.”
Interesting that the Wall Street Journal here admits that lowering the tax rate does NOT increase tax revenue to the government -- an opinion evidently not shared by its own opinion pages.
Its lead piece on April 26 boasted, “The Carter tax package, already reeling from other setbacks, has been stopped in its tracks by the Steiger amendment,” and was entitled “Stupendous Steiger.” It was written by a fellow named Jude Wanniski, who went even further than Chase Econometrics to argue that the dynamism the cut would unleash would actually increase tax revenue.
At least, one of that study’s critics noted, they weren’t claiming the Steiger Amendment would cure dandruff.
It did not concern the Journal that the U.S. Treasury said that this all was nonsense; “the Treasury,” Wanniski wrote, “insists on using ‘static analysis,’ which calculates the effect of tax cuts by making the convenient but plainly silly assumption that nothing else in the economy changes as a result of different tax rates. Others work with ‘dynamic analysis,’ trying to calculate the feedback effects from the rate cuts themselves.” He said these economists were “the cutting edge of an important intellectual and financial breakthrough.”
Ronald Reagan said that, too -- although, as usual when it came to conservative policy ideas, he said it better: that all those old-fashioned economists with their “static analysis” acted as if when “someone gets a tax cut he will bury the money in a tin can in the backyard. … The world doesn’t work that way. … The tax savings pump through the economy, generating growth, new jobs, and thus new sources of revenue for the government.”
Perhaps. But why do these economists on “the cutting edge of an important intellectual and financial breakthrough,” make such unrealistic projections about what kind of economic growth and increased tax revenues will occur as a result of these tax cuts?
No matter that respectable economists called “dynamic analysis” so much mumbo jumbo. Newspapers far beyond the ken of the Wall Street Journal commentators, considered the furthest thing from ideologues, were suddenly filled with claims like these. Louis Rukeyser, a popular TV investment advisor, trumpeted a study commissioned by the Securities Industries Association -- undertaken using “the world’s largest computerized bank of economic information” -- calculating that if all capital gains taxes were eliminated it would increase capital investment by $81 billion, boost gross national product by almost $20 billion, and raise $38 billion in new tax revenue.
Yeah. New tax revenue on capital gains taxed at 0%. That makes sense.
One of the challenges here is that “dynamic analysis” is at least partially true in concept -- in that cutting taxes can create new economic activity that will change the landscape. But that landscape is so complicated that it is almost always impossible to tell what is cause and what is effect. Conservatives at the time often cited tax cuts that occurred during the Kennedy administration as their gold standard, as their example that tax cuts increased tax revenue, describing them as same percentage point reductions across every bracket.
This is not quite what John F. Kennedy had done: he’d proposed cutting tax rates by an average 18 percentage points, and the cuts were not uniform across the board …, but progressive, a 36 percent cut for the lowest bracket but only 6 percent for the highest; with the cuts Congress eventually authorized averaging 19 percent. As for “paying for itself,” taxes captured from increased economic activity made up only a third of what the tax cut had cost in lost revenue.
So, in their one real-world example, tax cuts resulted in less tax revenue to the government, not more. But that didn’t stop Senators Jack Kemp and William Roth from saying the opposite about their proposal to drastically cut income taxes across all tax brackets, and likely introducing into our political lexicon the concept of supply side economics.
Professors from across the ideological spectrum dismissed the supply side enterprise as errant nonsense. Gardner Ackley, an architect of the Kennedy-Johnson tax, called Kemp-Roth “the most irresponsible policy proposal -- seriously advanced by people who should know better -- that I can recall during the nearly forty years I have been closely observing or participating in national economic policy making. I am ashamed of my profession for the fact that a handful of its members have suggested or endorsed this policy.” Milton Friedman said the raging inflation it would produce made it merely “a proposal to change the form of taxes.” Franco Modigliani said it would “do irreparable damage to the United States economy.” Alan Greenspan, Gerald Ford’s former chief economic advisor, said of [discredited economist and former Nixon advisor Arthur] Laffer, “I don’t know anyone who seriously believes his argument.” Another free-market economist, George Stigler, bound for a Nobel Prize four years later, labeled his former University of Chicago colleague [Laffer] “a propagandist.” The economics editor of Business Week called supply-side “more a course of amusement than a basis for public policy.” The conservative economist Herbert Stein called Laffer’s curve “extreme to the point of bizarre,” a “shoddy echo of silly self-serving businessmen’s nostrums going back to time immemorial.”
Stein then twisted the knife: “It may turn out that such a tax cut will raise revenue, just as it may turn out that there is human life on Mars. But I would not invest much in a McDonald’s franchise on that planet.”
The Laffer Curve, by the way, is one of those pseudo-scientific concepts that is supposed to lend credibility to the specious arguments that the New Right was making at this time. And it worked, because most of the conservatives dismissed both the predictions and the credentials of the most conservative economists on the planet. Look at the Laffer Curve! It’s just common sense.
But real common sense is not what anyone wanted to hear.
The presumption that an across-the-board tax cut would pay for itself by spurring an economic boom whose benefits would be broadly shared …, contained a fatal flaw. The precedent it relied on, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut, had been accompanied by “‘Great Society’ programs that vastly increased transfer payments” -- and redistributed income downward. That was what had boosted economic growth.
That’s right. Giving poor people more money to spend, rather than cutting taxes on the wealthy, is what more reliably spurs economic growth.
Eventually, something like Kemp-Roth would pass and Jimmy Carter would sign it into law.
The supply-side economists had promised that just on news of a capital gains cut the stock market would soar into the stratosphere. Instead, during the two weeks that followed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 10 percent. The problem, a key Charls Walker deputy, the chief economist of the Securities Industry Association, patiently explained for an article about Wall Street’s continuing woes six months later, was that “the capital gains tax cut was not really strong enough to attract people into the equity market”: next time, it would just have to be bigger.
And there you go; another hallmark of magical thinking. What? The thing I asked for didn’t produce the results I promised? Well, we’ll just have to have more of it next time. What? The cup of water I poured on the campfire didn’t ignite it? Well, we’ll just have to use a gallon of water next time.
Same As It Ever Was
Another common theme throughout Perlstein’s work is the understanding that many of today’s political debates are not new and have been with us for decades or longer.
Look at what happened after President Carter, on March 22, sent a letter to Congress recommending a package of electoral reforms. The president was concerned that America ranked twenty-first in voter participation among the world’s democracies. He argued that the problem was not voter apathy by that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restrictive voter registration laws” -- a fact proven by the record rates of participation in 1976 in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota that let voters register on Election Day. So Carter recommended same-day registration be adopted universally -- tempering concerns that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by increasing penalties against it to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He asked for $25 million to help states comply, an expansion to congressional elections of the current system of federal matching funds for presidential campaigns, and closing a loophole in campaign finance law that advantaged rich contenders by allowing them to evade spending limits if they funded their own campaigns. He proposed revising the Hatch Act to allow federal employees “not in sensitive positions” the same rights of political participation as everyone else when not on the job. Most radically, he recommended a constitutional amendment to scrap the Electoral College, which, three times so far, had selected as president a candidate who had received fewer votes than his opponent.
It was among the most sweeping political reform proposals in U.S. history -- and soon afterward, legislators from both parties stood together at a news briefing to endorse all or most of it. The bill for universal registration, which RNC chairman Brock called “a Republican concept,” was cosponsored by four Republicans. Senator Baker suggested going even further by making Election Day a national holiday, keeping polls open twenty-four hours, and instituting automatic registration. House minority leader John Rhodes, the conservative disciple of Barry Goldwater, predicted the proposal would pass “in substantially the same form with a lot of Republican support, including my own.”
More democracy: who could object?
The answer was: the New Right, which took their lessons about “election reform” from legends of Kennedy beating Nixon via votes received from the cemeteries of Chicago.
What is most interesting about this next section is the way the New Right rebelled against the Establishment Right and wound up both changing the narrative and winning the policy fight -- and then reshaping the entire party along its own bellicose and frantic lines, so much so that their rhetoric will sound hauntingly familiar to modern readers.
The next issue of Human Events was bannered, “ELECTION ‘REFORM’ PACKAGE: EUTHANASIA FOR THE GOP.” It argued that the current electoral system had never disenfranchised a single citizen -- at least “no citizen who cares enough to make the minimal effort.” So why was Carter proposing to change it? Because, Kevin Phillips insisted, it would “blow the Republican Party sky high.” Phillips claimed that Carter had calculated that since he had won Wisconsin by a tiny margin, defying predictions, and since “most electoral analysts credited that upset to the 210,000 allowed to register on election day,” he wanted to expand the scam to all fifty states. A Berkeley political scientist, Human Events noted, predicted national turnout would go up 20 percent under Carter’s reforms -- a bad thing, the editors said, because “the bulk of these extra votes will go to Carter’s Democratic Party … with blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups accounting for most of the increase.” The Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, got out one issue brief arguing that instant registration might allow the “eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote, and another arguing that it was a mistake to “take for granted that it is desirable to increase the number of people who vote.”
Yes. Then as now, the argument is not just that more people voting is bad because it might allow for more fraud, but it is bad because it increases the likelihood that Democrats will win, even without any new fraud occurring.
Ronald Reagan had been making similar arguments for years. “Look at the potential for cheating,” he thundered in 1975 when Democrats proposed a system allowing citizens to register by mail. A voter “can be John Doe in Berkeley, and J.F. Doe in the next county, all by saying he intends to live in both places. … Yes, it takes a little work to be a voter; it takes some planning to get to the polls or send an absentee ballot … that’s a small price to pay for freedom.”
A small price to pay for freedom. Priceless. Exactly whose freedom are we talking about?
He took up the same cudgel shortly after Carter’s inauguration when California adopted easier procedures: “Why don’t we try reverse psychology and make it harder to vote?” Now, following Carter’s electoral reform message, Reagan wrote in his column that what this all was really about was boosting votes from “the bloc comprised of those who get a whole lot more from the federal government in various kinds of income distribution than they contribute to it. … Don’t be surprised if an army of election workers -- much of it supplied by labor organizations which have managed to exempt themselves from election law restrictions -- sweep through metropolitan areas scooping up otherwise apathetic voters and rushing them to the polls to keep the benefit- dispensers in power.”
He added, in a newsletter column on Hatch Act reform, “The intent of the bill seems to be to convert your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat into a machine politician. After all, he does have an interest in keeping government growing” -- and if successful it would “render the Republican Party as dead as the dodo bird.” He dedicated a radio broadcast to what he called the most terrifying idea of all: popular election of presidents. “The very basis for our freedom is that we are a federation of sovereign states. Our constitution recognizes that certain rights belong to the states and cannot be infringed upon by the national government.” John C. Calhoun had pioneered that argument in South Carolina in the 1830s, as a way to cloak attempts to preserve slavery in noble constitutional raiment.
That’s right. Not the freedom of the people, but the freedom of the states -- always the states -- each of which evidently free to violate the freedoms of the people living within it. At least until the 14th Amendment was added to their beloved Constitution.
And the party establishment soon became convinced.
Republican National Committee Chairman Bill Brock met in Los Angeles with Reagan, who subsequently told supporters that the chairman had assured him “he is opposed to the election reform package,” which “might better be called the Universal Voter Fraud Bill.” Brock then penned an article in the RNC magazine First Monday on the “Democratic Power Grab”; when it had been proposed he called it a “Republican idea.” The RNC passed a resolution claiming that same-day registration would “endanger the integrity of the franchise and open American elections to serious threat of fraud.” Representative John Rhodes, after what the Washington Post called “unremitting opposition for his original stand” -- including a cartoon in the Citizens for the Republic newsletter depicting a bleeding GOP elephant stabbed by a figure labeled “Rhodes” and “Universal Registration” -- directed his House Republican Party Committee to adopt of statement of formal opposition.
And there you have it -- one of the first examples of the New Right fringe taking over and becoming the GOP establishment. There would be many more examples to come.
The Merging of Conservatism and Racism
Case in point, I found this anecdote, ostensibly about the launch of Reagan’s presidential campaign after securing the Republican nomination in the late summer of 1980, particularly noteworthy.
Their 23,000-square-foot headquarters in an Arlington office building formerly occupied by John Connally’s campaign was a hive of activity in which nothing was left to chance. No voter subgroup, no issue position, no dollar spent, no mile traveled, no campaign stop’s pros and cons went unaccounted for. Naturally the choice of where to launch the campaign received particularly intense consideration. They chose for his first big speech after the convention an August 2 gathering of the National Urban League, the venerable African American civil rights organization. “We weren’t expecting to pick up any black votes in New York,” an advisor later noted. “We just wanted to show moderates and liberals that Reagan wasn’t anti-black.” The target audience, [Reagan strategist Richard] Wirthlin explained, was suburban whites.
Check all of that. Nothing is accidental. Everything is planned. The intent was to “show” that Reagan wasn’t anti-black.
But what the campaign said was a scheduling problem arose, and the Urban League appearance was postponed to the next day -- the sort of development, in a crowded campaign, that was neither particularly unusual nor consequential. Except that this made his first campaign stop what was originally supposed to be his second, and Reagan ended up actually opening his campaign marveling, wide-eyed, to a T-shirted crowd of thousands standing under a hot Southern sun, “I think you all know without me telling you that Nancy and I have never seen anything like this -- because there isn’t any place like this anywhere on earth! … How did you ever accomplish this without a federal program?” The Mississippi crowd roared in appreciation. And it was true. There was nothing like the Neshoba County Fair.
Every July, farm families from across the middle of the state moved into elaborate on-site two-story cabins for a week, enjoying card games, bull sessions, and romancing on the front porch and balcony all night long, after spending long days enjoying the midway, the livestock displays, country and gospel music, mule races, beauty contests, pie-eating contests -- and the only legal horse racing in the state.
White families, that is. Blacks only participated as employees.
This Neshoba County Fair, evidently, has quite a history.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, the fair was the place where state and local politicians competed to outdo each other with nasty imprecations at the evil federal government and civil rights organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP -- an acronym that Paul John said in his successful run for governor in 1963 stood for “Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons and Possums.” In 1964, the fair opened as planned on August 8 even though six days earlier, the bodies of three SNCC voter-registration workers were discovered buried in an earthen dam a few miles away. They had been assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan, with the assistance of the local sheriff, Lawrence Rainey.
And now Ronald Reagan was raising the curtain on his campaign there. Which raised more than a few eyebrows.
It should have. For two reasons: first, because of its position of prominence in the violent culture of racism that had beleaguered the South.
White supremacist organizations like the KKK had been making increasingly frequent appearances in the news in recent years. In 1977, a small Klan unit led by Grand Wizard David Duke received a great deal of publicity for patrolling the Mexican border on horseback with weapons in an effort to halt border crossings, setting “punji traps,” camouflaged pits filled with sharpened sticks, for migrants to fall into, a technique borrowed from the Viet Cong. In 1978, six thousand robed Klansmen rallied in Morgan County, Alabama, after a nineteen-year-old black man with an IQ of thirty-nine was charged with raping three white women; the next year, during his trial, ten thousand rallied, and a gunfight broke out between Klansmen and black demonstrators. That November, Communists in Greensboro, North Carolina, were preparing with residents of a housing project for an anti-Klan march when a caravan of Klansmen and Nazis rolled up, gathered shotguns and rifles out of the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane, and began firing. Eighty seconds later, five were dead. The women who disrupted Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech were widows of two of the victims.
In April of 1980, robed Klansmen had brazenly fired shots from their car while cruising down the main thoroughfare in Chattanooga’s black neighborhood; a week later, Klansmen marched through downtown Kokomo, Indiana. In May, an avowed Nazi got 43 percent of the vote in the Republican primary for North Carolina attorney general, winning forty-five of 100 counties, coming only seventy-five votes from taking the county encompassing Winston-Salem. (“There are many closet Nazis in the Republican Party. Most conservatives are closet Nazis,” he said. “If you scratch a conservative, you’ll find a Nazi underneath, just as if you scratch a liberal, you’ll find a Communist.”) That was during the period in which white sheets became a veritable fixture at demonstrations in Arkansas against the Mariel boatlift. A month later, in California, Klansman Tom Metzger won the congressional nomination from the San Diego area as a Democrat. He promised to “get into Congress and have a fistfight every day.”
Then, the head of the Urban League, Vernon Jordan, was shot while riding in a car with a white woman (it was the first story broadcast by CNN). African Americans suspected a racial motive, correctly: it turned out the shooter was a white supremacist who had shot several other interracial couples, firebombed one synagogue and shot at the members of another, and attempted to assassinate pornographer Larry Flynt because his magazine Hustler depicted interracial sex. Klan membership was believed to have gone from 6,500 and 10,500 in the previous five years. The openly racist magazine the Spotlight, published by a Holocaust denier named Willis Carto, had three hundred thousand paid subscribers, many times more than Human Events or National Review. Gallup found that 13 percent of Americans (and 20 percent of Southern whites) approved of the KKK; in 1965, it was 7 percent. The sort of open racists that the civil rights revolution had supposedly vanquished now seemed almost ubiquitous -- and they were history conscious: in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan even curated an exhibition of nineteenth-century Klan artifacts: “our version of ‘Roots,’” a leader said.
And here was Ronald Reagan, ducking in on what you might call one of their sacred sites. What was his campaign thinking?
And second, because of the political opportunity that the South now represented for the New Right.
It was part of a strategy to signal that Republicans intended to seriously contest the South for the first time in over a century. Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta was considered first, until the Mississippi Republican Party suggested a rural audience would be more receptive. That suited Wirthlin’s plan just fine: a county fair checked off two of the Black Book’s four most important target groups: Southern white Protestants and rural voters (the other two, which overlapped, were blue-collar workers in industrial areas and urban “white ethnics.”
Reagan would be the first presidential nominee ever to address the fair. Previously, it would have been a waste of time: for most of U.S. history it was taken for granted that Mississippi went to the Democrats. This year, however, Mississippi seemed up for grabs.
And why was Mississippi “up for grabs”?
Reagan was fetched at the airport in Meridian by his state chairman, Congressman Trent Lott. Lott had been president of the fraternity that stockpiled a cache of weapons used to riot against the federal marshals protecting a black student seeking to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962. Later, a defensive state party official insisted it was Lott -- and certainly not them -- who suggested that if Reagan really wanted to win this crowd over, he need only fold a certain two-word phrase into his speech: states’ rights.
Because, evidently, of a racist backlash against the gains made on civil rights for black Americans.
These were the most reliable code words Southern demagogues could deploy to activate their audiences’ most feral rage against African American civil rights. Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable belief in his own purity of motivation was his defining trait, surely got to immediate work persuading himself that in uttering them, he was referring to all federal intrusion into local affairs, from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Department of Ed -- the same thing he always excoriated. He seemed anxious about taking the suggestion all the same. For as Reagan speeches went, this was a strange one. He took less than ten minutes, an unusually large portion of that spent buttering up his audience: praising the fair, praising the state, telling an uplifting story about the time he watched the Ole Miss football team upset Tennessee while sitting next to their governor, telling joke after joke after joke (“Now, I know that people keep telling me that Jimmy Carter’s doing his best” -- pause -- “that’s our problem!”): almost as if he was reluctant to get to the point.
Of course he was reluctant. Ronald Reagan was about to merge conservatism with racism, merge it in a way it had never truly been merged before, and the legacy of that action would live with us all long after Reagan himself was dead and buried in the ground.
Halfway in, he finally did. He began reciting his familiar litany of federal government failure, though a little more wobbly than was customary:
“Over the recent years -- with the best of intentions! -- they have created a vast bureaucracy, or bureaucratic structure, bureaus and departments and agencies, to try and solve all the problems and eliminate all the things of human misery that they can. They have forgotten that when you create a government bureaucracy, no matter how well intentioned it is, almost instantly its primary priority becomes -- preservation of the bureaucracy.”
He had started rushing, like he was nervous, far shy of his usual level of energy, when he delivered the payload:
“I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of government.”
Then, he returned to his usual boilerplate. Far from the usual Neshoba County Fair demagoguery, the way he carried out Trent Lott’s suggestion doused the enthusiasm of a previously energetic crowd. He did far better with the jokes and the football story.
That, evidently, was it. The moment when the conservative value of federalism was fused with the racist fiction of “states’ rights.” And although the folks at the Neshoba County Fair may not have thought much of it, other observers clearly did. In many ways, it was one of those shots heard ‘round the world.
And it was hardly worth it. The backlash was immediate and caustic.
Jimmy Carter organized a passel of Southern politicians to demand a collective apology that framed Ronald Reagan as a modern-day carpetbagger. Andrew Young penned a moving essay for the Washington Post about stopping in Neshoba County during Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 March Against Fear.
“Sheriff Lawerence Rainey and his posse were nightriders in good standing, and a black man’s life wasn’t worth much once he decided to approach the courthouse with voting on his mind.
“I remember Martin standing on the Neshoba County Courthouse steps in 1966, describing how the bodies of the slain civil rights workers had been found buried in a dam two years earlier. He said, ‘The murderers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner are no doubt within the range of my voice.’ A voice rang out. ‘Yeah, damn right. We’re right here behind you.’”
Young noted, too, that Reagan had just been endorsed by the imperial wizard of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan -- who praised his platform for reading “as if it were written by a Klansman.” Carter’s only African American cabinet member, Health and Human Services Secretary Patricia Harris, observed that Reagan had taken weeks before disclaiming that endorsement, and that now, when she heard Reagan speak, she saw “a specter of white sheets.” As for the intended audience, many white Mississippians who might have once been proud of their state’s reputation as the most fearsome bastion of resistance, were now ashamed to find the nation pointing it out. Which was why, claimed an embarrassed Mississippi Reagan fan in a letter to Bill Brock, in Neshoba County, the Republican candidate had screwed the pooch. “Three weeks ago Reagan had a landslide victory in Mississippi. Today it is a tossup.”
Well… sort of. History would see Reagan to go on to win Mississippi in 1980, albeit by only a victory margin over Jimmy Carter of 1.33%. The landslide would come four years later against Walter Mondale, when Reagan’s victory margin in Mississippi would be 24.39%.
Like so many other anecdotes in Perlstein’s anecdote-rich narratives, this early stumble by Reagan in what would be the key political innovation of our modern world -- the merging of conservative rhetoric with racist activism -- offers glimpses both into what once was and what didn’t have to be.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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