the South was totally Democrat when the Battle Flag was adopted! The north was Republican and fought against the flag! In 2015 it is totally the reversed! Strange?
Is history screwed up or what......
- Thread starter VikingDawg2
- Start date
No. After the Civil War, the Democratic Party consisted of southern whites, northern big city political machines, immigrants, trade union members in northern cities, and small farmers in the midwest and western states. The Republican Party was the party of New Englanders, midwesterners, and westerners. The Democratic Party was very much a minority party at the national level for a long time after the war.
Think about this: From 1861 to 1913, there was only one Democratic president, Grover Cleveland. All the rest---Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, McKinley, T. Roosevelt, Taft were Republican, and A. Johnson was a man without a party.
Southern politicians began to lose power within the Democratic coalition during the late 19th century for two reasons: first, immigration into the United States from Europe swelled the numbers of northern political machines in Boston, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. A second and no less important wave of African-American immigrants moved from the south to northern cities; and second, the leadership of the Democratic Party realized that they could take southerners for granted because the south had no other alternative.
This loss of power became very apparent during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945. The Great Depression had caused a major shift in political affiliation with many Americans who felt the Republican Party bore responsibility for the economic disaster. One needs only to look at the election returns for 1932 and 1936 to see how profound this change was. One of the most significant changes in political affiliation was among African-Americans, many of whom felt that the programs of the New Deal benefited them. The rising number of African-American Democrats in northern cities was a demographic national Democrats could not overlook. During World War II, for example, the head of an African-American railroad workers' union, A. Phillip Randolph, threatened a mass march of over 100,000 black men and women on Washington to protest federal discriminatory hiring practices for war work. Roosevelt heeded Randolph and pushed Congress to pass legislation providing for fair employment practices for federal war jobs.
The proof of southern political irrelevancy came during the presidential election of 1948. Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, proved even more willing than Roosevelt to address the issue of civil rights. Truman integrated the armed forces and got Congress to pass a fair employment practices commission for all federal jobs. These advances incensed southern Democrats, who decided they would mortally wound Truman by leaving the Democratic Party and creating a third national party, the States Rights Party, that would draw votes away from Truman. Even with a strong Republican challenger, New York governor Thomas Dewey, and the presence of what the press called the "Dixiecrat Party", led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, Truman still won the election of 1948. This was solid proof that the Democrats could continue to win national elections and ignore their southern constituency.
A schism that developed within the Republican Party during the 1964 election cycle was the beginning of a change in political affiliations among southern Democrats. Conservative Republicans felt their influence had been diluted by moderate and progressives within the party. In 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960, moderate/progressive Republican candidates had won nomination, and Dwight Eisenhower had won the presidency in 1952 and 1956. After Richard Nixon lost the election of 1960, conservative Republicans began to aggressively push for leadership within the party and to add a new political constituency. Conservative Republicans opposed virtually every domestic piece of legislation that had passed since 1933 and viewed the rising power of the federal government and a more progressive Supreme Court as a threat to their political philosophy of conservatism. Southern Democrats tended to view the federal government and the judiciary as a threat to their political philosophy of white supremacy. As you can see, both conservative Republicans and southern Democrats had common fears and common enemies, and had reason to make common cause with one another.
The 1964 Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona, signaled his openness to attracting southern support when he publicly stated his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater was careful to avoid addressing the moral implications of opposing equal rights for all Americans, and explained that he felt the federal government should not take on the responsibility for intervening in disputes between citizens and their state and local governments. That same year, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond switched his allegiance to the Republican Party and a handful of southern Democrats followed suit.
The election of 1964 saw Democratic President Lyndon Johnson win a devastating landslide election, but the results in the electoral college were startling : Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona, and several states that had never gone to a Republican candidate before---Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. National Republican leaders and southern Democratic politicians could not have missed the implication that southern whites had abandoned the Democratic Party.
The presidential election of 1968 was perhaps the strangest since the election of 1860. Opinion polls in that year showed President Johnson had become unpopular over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, and he was challenged in the primaries by an antiwar senator from Wisconsin, Eugene McCarthy. Johnson's mediocre showing in early primaries prompted him to withdraw his name from the Democratic nomination. New York senator Robert Kennedy entered the Democratic race and had all but sewn up the nomination before he was assassinated. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey won enough delegates to gain the Democratic nomination, but was burdened by his association with the Johnson administration and his support for the war.
The Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, had noted the 1964 election results and formulated what he termed the "Southern Strategy". Nixon aggressively campaigned in southern states and hinted that if elected president he would limit federal intervention in southern states, and would restore "law and order" to the country. Nixon had good reason to court southern white voters; there was also a third party candidate for the presidency---former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist who in 1963 defied the federal government over the integration of the University of Alabama and lost. Wallace said he would drastically limit the power of the federal government, vowed he would ignore Supreme Court rulings he disagreed with, and supported escalating the war in Vietnam, including the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.
So here were the choices for American voters in 1968: Humphrey on the left, hampered by his obligation to support the Vietnam War; Nixon in the middle, promising voters he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War and offering southern whites the promise of some return to the past; and Wallace on the right, calling for a rollback of federal authority on the domestic front, and unlimited war on the foreign front. Although Wallace gained 9 million votes, the largest popular vote result for a third party candidate in American history, Nixon managed to prevail in a relatively close election that was more a referendum on the Vietnam War than anything else.
During his presidency, Nixon did not fulfill many of his campaign promises to southern whites but he did make several overtures to the south in the form of nominating conservative judges to the federal bench. He also brought former southern Democrats who had switched allegiances into his administration. Nixon was fortunate four years later when the Democratic party nominated an extremely progressive senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, who was almost calculated to horrify southern white conservatives. Nixon was able to gain further inroads among southern Democrats and accelerate the process of converting Democrats to Republicans.
more to come...
Think about this: From 1861 to 1913, there was only one Democratic president, Grover Cleveland. All the rest---Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, McKinley, T. Roosevelt, Taft were Republican, and A. Johnson was a man without a party.
Southern politicians began to lose power within the Democratic coalition during the late 19th century for two reasons: first, immigration into the United States from Europe swelled the numbers of northern political machines in Boston, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. A second and no less important wave of African-American immigrants moved from the south to northern cities; and second, the leadership of the Democratic Party realized that they could take southerners for granted because the south had no other alternative.
This loss of power became very apparent during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945. The Great Depression had caused a major shift in political affiliation with many Americans who felt the Republican Party bore responsibility for the economic disaster. One needs only to look at the election returns for 1932 and 1936 to see how profound this change was. One of the most significant changes in political affiliation was among African-Americans, many of whom felt that the programs of the New Deal benefited them. The rising number of African-American Democrats in northern cities was a demographic national Democrats could not overlook. During World War II, for example, the head of an African-American railroad workers' union, A. Phillip Randolph, threatened a mass march of over 100,000 black men and women on Washington to protest federal discriminatory hiring practices for war work. Roosevelt heeded Randolph and pushed Congress to pass legislation providing for fair employment practices for federal war jobs.
The proof of southern political irrelevancy came during the presidential election of 1948. Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, proved even more willing than Roosevelt to address the issue of civil rights. Truman integrated the armed forces and got Congress to pass a fair employment practices commission for all federal jobs. These advances incensed southern Democrats, who decided they would mortally wound Truman by leaving the Democratic Party and creating a third national party, the States Rights Party, that would draw votes away from Truman. Even with a strong Republican challenger, New York governor Thomas Dewey, and the presence of what the press called the "Dixiecrat Party", led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, Truman still won the election of 1948. This was solid proof that the Democrats could continue to win national elections and ignore their southern constituency.
A schism that developed within the Republican Party during the 1964 election cycle was the beginning of a change in political affiliations among southern Democrats. Conservative Republicans felt their influence had been diluted by moderate and progressives within the party. In 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960, moderate/progressive Republican candidates had won nomination, and Dwight Eisenhower had won the presidency in 1952 and 1956. After Richard Nixon lost the election of 1960, conservative Republicans began to aggressively push for leadership within the party and to add a new political constituency. Conservative Republicans opposed virtually every domestic piece of legislation that had passed since 1933 and viewed the rising power of the federal government and a more progressive Supreme Court as a threat to their political philosophy of conservatism. Southern Democrats tended to view the federal government and the judiciary as a threat to their political philosophy of white supremacy. As you can see, both conservative Republicans and southern Democrats had common fears and common enemies, and had reason to make common cause with one another.
The 1964 Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona, signaled his openness to attracting southern support when he publicly stated his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater was careful to avoid addressing the moral implications of opposing equal rights for all Americans, and explained that he felt the federal government should not take on the responsibility for intervening in disputes between citizens and their state and local governments. That same year, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond switched his allegiance to the Republican Party and a handful of southern Democrats followed suit.
The election of 1964 saw Democratic President Lyndon Johnson win a devastating landslide election, but the results in the electoral college were startling : Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona, and several states that had never gone to a Republican candidate before---Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. National Republican leaders and southern Democratic politicians could not have missed the implication that southern whites had abandoned the Democratic Party.
The presidential election of 1968 was perhaps the strangest since the election of 1860. Opinion polls in that year showed President Johnson had become unpopular over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, and he was challenged in the primaries by an antiwar senator from Wisconsin, Eugene McCarthy. Johnson's mediocre showing in early primaries prompted him to withdraw his name from the Democratic nomination. New York senator Robert Kennedy entered the Democratic race and had all but sewn up the nomination before he was assassinated. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey won enough delegates to gain the Democratic nomination, but was burdened by his association with the Johnson administration and his support for the war.
The Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, had noted the 1964 election results and formulated what he termed the "Southern Strategy". Nixon aggressively campaigned in southern states and hinted that if elected president he would limit federal intervention in southern states, and would restore "law and order" to the country. Nixon had good reason to court southern white voters; there was also a third party candidate for the presidency---former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist who in 1963 defied the federal government over the integration of the University of Alabama and lost. Wallace said he would drastically limit the power of the federal government, vowed he would ignore Supreme Court rulings he disagreed with, and supported escalating the war in Vietnam, including the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.
So here were the choices for American voters in 1968: Humphrey on the left, hampered by his obligation to support the Vietnam War; Nixon in the middle, promising voters he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War and offering southern whites the promise of some return to the past; and Wallace on the right, calling for a rollback of federal authority on the domestic front, and unlimited war on the foreign front. Although Wallace gained 9 million votes, the largest popular vote result for a third party candidate in American history, Nixon managed to prevail in a relatively close election that was more a referendum on the Vietnam War than anything else.
During his presidency, Nixon did not fulfill many of his campaign promises to southern whites but he did make several overtures to the south in the form of nominating conservative judges to the federal bench. He also brought former southern Democrats who had switched allegiances into his administration. Nixon was fortunate four years later when the Democratic party nominated an extremely progressive senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, who was almost calculated to horrify southern white conservatives. Nixon was able to gain further inroads among southern Democrats and accelerate the process of converting Democrats to Republicans.
more to come...
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The election of 1972 was a stunning reversal of the Democratic landslide of 1964; Nixon won 49 states in the electoral college and achieved what seemed to be a mandate to roll back the liberal Democratic agenda favored by Congress. Nixon's victory was short-lived, however, due to a scandal that implicated the president himself in illegal activity. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in August 1974. An unrelated political scandal a year earlier had caused Nixon's vice president to resign his office, so Nixon turned the presidency over to an unelected former congressman from Michigan, Gerald Ford, whom Nixon had appointed earlier in 1974.
A remarkable thing happened in the presidential election of 1976. A southern Democrat, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, won the Democratic primaries over a number of more experienced candidates and managed to defeat Ford to win the presidency. Carter became the prototype of the late-20th century southern Democrat: he campaigned for African-American votes, he appointed black politicians to his gubernatorial administration, he sought his black colleagues' advice on legislation that affected their constituency, and he worked to diversify his state's economy to attract business.
As far as the American electorate was concerned, Carter's virtues were his outsider status with respect to national politics, his promise to the voters that he would address problems with inflation in the US economy and energy crises related to oil imports from the Middle East, and his pledge that he would be honest with the American people.
Carter's campaign virtues proved to be presidential vices once he took office in 1977. As an outsider, Carter and his advisors did not develop the close working relationship necessary for a presidential administration and members of his party in Congress. Congressional Democrats resented Carter for not consulting them, largely passed their own legislative agenda, and ignored Carter's initiatives. The economy worsened during Carter's tenure, and the one foreign policy accomplishment Carter achieved---a peace agreement he brokered between Middle Eastern enemies Israel and Egypt---ultimately led to the assassination of the Egyptian president and the enmity toward the United States from many Arab nations. Carter's honesty also ill-served him as president. He gave a speech in 1979 in which he appeared to blame the American people for the problems the country was experiencing. The final straw for most Americans was a crisis that occurred in 1979 when the Carter administration offered the deposed Shah of Iran political asylum in the United States on compassionate grounds. In Iran, fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries reacted to Carter's action with anger, broke into the American embassy in Teheran, and seized the embassy personnel as hostages in exchange for the Shah. Carter approved a disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages by the US military in 1980, which further lowered his standing leading into a presidential election year....more later...
A remarkable thing happened in the presidential election of 1976. A southern Democrat, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, won the Democratic primaries over a number of more experienced candidates and managed to defeat Ford to win the presidency. Carter became the prototype of the late-20th century southern Democrat: he campaigned for African-American votes, he appointed black politicians to his gubernatorial administration, he sought his black colleagues' advice on legislation that affected their constituency, and he worked to diversify his state's economy to attract business.
As far as the American electorate was concerned, Carter's virtues were his outsider status with respect to national politics, his promise to the voters that he would address problems with inflation in the US economy and energy crises related to oil imports from the Middle East, and his pledge that he would be honest with the American people.
Carter's campaign virtues proved to be presidential vices once he took office in 1977. As an outsider, Carter and his advisors did not develop the close working relationship necessary for a presidential administration and members of his party in Congress. Congressional Democrats resented Carter for not consulting them, largely passed their own legislative agenda, and ignored Carter's initiatives. The economy worsened during Carter's tenure, and the one foreign policy accomplishment Carter achieved---a peace agreement he brokered between Middle Eastern enemies Israel and Egypt---ultimately led to the assassination of the Egyptian president and the enmity toward the United States from many Arab nations. Carter's honesty also ill-served him as president. He gave a speech in 1979 in which he appeared to blame the American people for the problems the country was experiencing. The final straw for most Americans was a crisis that occurred in 1979 when the Carter administration offered the deposed Shah of Iran political asylum in the United States on compassionate grounds. In Iran, fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries reacted to Carter's action with anger, broke into the American embassy in Teheran, and seized the embassy personnel as hostages in exchange for the Shah. Carter approved a disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages by the US military in 1980, which further lowered his standing leading into a presidential election year....more later...
