philnugentexperience.blogspot.com
Magnolia II
In 1980, Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. the town made famous as the site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James E. Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Reagan told the crowd, "I believe in states' rights...I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment," and promised to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." Now, in 1980 people were pissed off at Jimmy Carter because of gas prices and a sputtering economy and the taking of the American embassy in Iraq and the Russians overreaching in Afghanistan. "States' rights" was not a phrase on everybody's lips. It did not come trippingly off the tongue. But it had baggage. It was associated, especially in the minds of white Southerners who felt stepped on and disenfranchised by the civil rights movement and the desegregation era, and in 1980 there were a lot of people who fit that description, with federal troops coming in to force George Wallace to get his hateful ass out from in front of the schoolhouse doorway so that the desegregation laws could be enforced, over the objections of many of the locals. It was a code phrase, it was loaded, and speaking as the son of a Klansman and someone who at that time had spent pretty much his whole sentient life in rural Mississippi, I can assure you there was no adult in that crowd who had a problem with black people who didn't hear those words and immediately take them as a signal that Ronald Reagan and the Republican party were on his side.
That was all obvious at the time and has been no kind of secret since. In a disingenuous, stupid, and potentially dangerous op-ed piece in the New York Times, David Brooks attempts to rewrite history and recast it as "a slur... a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months" that "was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale." To hear Brooks tell it, the idea that Reagan was reaching out to white bigots is ludicrous, because he also campaigned in front of black audiences that year. "In reality," he writes, "Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes...Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters." Besides, "Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful...He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.” [He was in fact speaking to a crowd that was 90 percent "Mississippi Democrat," a local term that meant people who think like Republicans but still harbored an animus against Republicans in name for being the party of Lincoln."] He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day." Yeah, it was just the liberal media's fault, stirring up shit were none was intended; we know that the crowd didn't get any signals from Reagan's speech because if they had, instead of failing to "spark any reaction," Reagan's words would have set them all to firing their six-shooters in the air and hollaring, "Wheeeee doggies!" And the specific reference to states having the right to do what they want with regard to "education", without the government interfering--that's probably about vouchers or school uniforms or something, No way could it have been meant as way of pushing the buttons of people who, in 1980, still spoke frequently and bitterly about how angry they were about being forced to send their kids to the same schools as blacks. (My parents sent me to a whites-only "private academy" that the locals had thrown together overnight in response to a deseg order, and I went there until 1977. The school kept going for many years after that, but it gouged the parents of its students blind for the privilege of keeping their children's "education experience" lily-white, and after my parents divorced and my free-lance plumber-electrician father had to find his own place to live, he just couldn't afford to foot the bills anymore.)
Brooks concedes that "it's obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.'s ascent." He can hardly claim otherwise and hang onto his image as a "reasonable" Republican voice; the development of the Southern strategy, and the plan by which, starting under Nixon, the Republican party deliberately started wooing the voters who felt alienated from the Democrats over civil rights is too well-documented to be plausibly dismissed as a baseless "slur" or conspiracy theory. It's true that every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan has made a big public show of trying to do away with the strategy and welcome blacks into the big tent. It's also true that many of these attempts have seemed threadbare and insincere, and that they've seemed designed less to genuinely attract black voters than to reassure those white voters who want to vote Republican but need some reassurance that they won't be seen as supporting the official party of bigotry. (I suspect that George Bush, Jr., has been the most heartfelt of all Republican presidents on this issue, and the outrage that the party faithful showed in the face of his failure to show proper levels of xenophobic loathing towards illegal immigrants is a sign that, whether Republican candidates are comfortable about it or not, the day when Republicans aren't dependent on the bigot vote is still a ways off.)
The question, given the evidence, is why anyone would doubt that Reagan would be more comfortable race-baiting, in his genial manner--revelling in his ability, as Garry Wills once put it, to "croon, in love accents, his permission to indulge in a hatred of poor people and blacks"--than he would be embracing blacks for anything besides cynical political purposes. If Reagan is a hero in Brooks's eyes, fine; let him salute him, as is the custom among his kind, for cutting taxes and standing up to the Soviets, but let's have no pretense at being shocked, shocked, that anyone could be so "partisan" as to suggest that Ronald Reagan was not a great friend to the cause of black progress. Reagan, then and now, was perceived as a president who meant to roll back the "excesses" of the sixties, and make no mistake: the sixties weren't just about LSD trips and dirty rock lyrics, they were the age of the civil rights movement. There was no more radical or, for those who liked things fine the way they were, no more jarring and discombobulating change in the America of the sixties, not the anti-war movement or feminism or the first stirrings of the gay rights movement. And Reagan defined himself as being in oppostion to it. He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964,. He once said, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so." As president he opposed the bill he eventually signed that made Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday. He had always indicated that he suspected that King was a dangerous Commie subversive; he yielded to pressure when he realized that continuing to oppose the holiday was politically untenable, but when a reporter asked him, after the signing, if he still thought that King might have been a stooge of the Kremlin, he replied, "We'll know in about thirty-four years, won't we"--a reference to when King's last FBI files would be unsealed. " Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair," writes Brooks. "He didn’t." No, he certainly didn't, and it would have been spectacularly out of character for him to have done so. We may never know what was truly in his heart well enough to bluntly label Ronald Reagan a racist. But he left behind plenty of reason to think that he never stopped regarding the civil rights leaders of the sixties as insolent troublemakers at best and criminals at worst. A man who, in 1983, still nursed suspicions that Martin Luther King might have been a Commie plant and who imagined a day when the work of J. Edgar Hoover would vindicate him on that point was a man who plainly wanted to believe the worst about the greatest American of the second half of the twentieth century.
Ronald Reagan's heroic reputation is not based on his civil rights record, and the fact that he was, at the very least, historically insensitive on the subject isn't going to scuttle his good name. It is one of the strangest but also one of the truest things about contemporary American history is that while other things, such as having protested the Vietnam war, will follow a public figure to his grave and leave him branded with the mark of Cain so far as a large percentage of the media and other opinion-makers are concerned, anyone who managed not to actually be filmed wearing a sheet and lighting a cross on fire gets a pass on their history regarding race; you might think that having opposed fair treatment of black Americans in the voting booth and the work place would be the kind of thing that marks someone as having once been too far beyond the pale to be trusted with the TV remote control, but instead, politicians who said things that now seem outrageous on this one subject are now forgiven, since after all they were reflecting the mainstream opinion of a bygone age, and any opinion that was once shared by many Americans must be a reasonable one. Brooks should just let this one go; the fact that he had the gall to bring it up now at all, in a tone of finger-wagging indignation aimed at anyone who trusts the evidence of what Richard Pryor once called "your lying eyes" on the subject of Reagan and race, is testimony to the continuing deranging effect of Ronald Reagan's very name on self-styled conservatives. Reagan may be Fox News' ideal American, but some of his admirers won't rest until the last suggestion that he had any flaws or character defects at all has been declared unfit for polite conversation, and for anyone with the bad taste to examine them at all, Reagan's racial attitudes may be the biggest stain on his memory. This is silly, but I can understand why Brooks might want to spend the next year or so devoting as many of his columns as he can to trying to ironing the last stubborn kinks out of Ronald Reagan's image. It's got to seem like more rewarding work than trying to think of some way to defend the current Republican president. |
