There are more word nuggets in that article then there are gold nuggets in The Lost Wharf Rat Mine. I wonder if they also cover the rise of homophobic politics.
How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party”
From Nixon to Rand, Republicans have banked on the unerring support of Southern white men. Here's how it came to be...
Like Wallace, Goldwater had learned how to talk about blacks without ever mentioning race.
No less than Wallace, Goldwater also demonstrated a flair for political stagecraft. A reporter following Goldwater’s campaign through the South captured some of the spectacle: “to show the country the ‘lily-white’ character of Republicanism in Dixie,” party flaks filled the floor of the football stadium in Montgomery, Alabama, with “a great field of white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom, gorgeously arrayed.” To this tableau, the campaign added “seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the field.” Onto this scene emerged Goldwater, first moving this way and then that way through “fifty or so yards of choice Southern womanhood,” before taking the stand to give his speech defending states’ rights and freedom of association. If these coded terms were too subtle for some, no one could fail to grasp the symbolism of the white lilies and the white-gowned women. Much of the emotional resistance to racial equality centered around the fear that black men would become intimate with white women. This scene represented “what the rest of his Southern troops—the thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately believed they were defending.” Goldwater made sure white Southerners understood he was fighting to protect them and their women against blacks.
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