From Now On, Is Everything About Race???

Over the past week, especially since President Obama’s health care speech to Congress, the political debate in Washington and across the country has reached a heightened sense of craziness. Crystallized by the outburst of South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson—and the subsequent vote of disapproval in the House yesterday—the issue of race has once again been raised. Wilson’s “You lie!” comment has been interpreted in a variety of ways, with many arguing that racism lies not far beneath the surface. The most high profile advocate of this position is former President jimmy Carter. Commentary about Wilson’s motivations has been more divided.

As readers of this blog know, the role of race in American politics and society fascinates me. The Obama candidacy and now presidency have presented us with the opportunity to look, perhaps as never before, at how race defines and divides us. In theorizing about race, though, we need to be extremely careful—not because of the sensitivity of the issue and a fear of being either too overly or insufficiently “politically correct”—but because of how difficult it is to prove anything, especially when it comes to individuals’ motivations, beliefs, and biases. A case for such humility was made recently by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his blog over at The Atlantic (one of my favorites).

So having said this, I want to proceed gingerly in talking about this series of events. Nonetheless, the Wilson case brings to the fore some fascinating political/geographical history--stuff that gets us excited here. Whenever I’ve ventured to talk about race, especially in terms of its salience in the south, I turn to the great work by V.O. Key, “Southern Politics,” originally published in 1949. Key’s work was a landmark study of how the “solid south” evolved in the post-bellum south. In his introduction, Key argues

In its grand outlines the politics of the South revolves around the position of the Negro. It is at times interpreted as a politics of cotton, as a politics of free trade, as a politics of agrarian poverty, or as a politics of planter and plutocrat. Although such interpretations have a superficial validity, in the last analysis the major peculiarities of southern politics go back to the Negro. Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro.

The main “peculiarity” Key explores is why traditional two party politics never emerged in the south after the Civil War. Whereas “rational” politics entails conflicts around economic issues—and thus divides the classes—such cleavages never took hold in the south’s politics. The reason, for Key, was because the fear of black advancement and political political power united both rich and poor whites. Even though poor whites and blacks shared many economic interests, an alliance between the two never congealed. Thus, southern politics was more factional than ideological, playing out completely within the arena of the Democratic party which, due to Jim Crow, was a totally white enterprise.

In Key’s analysis of individual southern states, he found that this type of politics was most entrenched in those areas with the largest black populations. The “blacker” a state or county, the greater incentive there was for whites to unite. Of all the southern states, South Carolina had the second largest black population, second only to Mississippi. In fact, Key entitled his chapter on the Palmetto State “The Politics of Color.” He opens this chapter by noting:

South Carolina has had a succession of spectacular race orators who almost blanket out the achievements of its abler and more temperate leaders, such as James F. Byrnes. While others shared their views, the politicians of South Carolina—and Mississippi—have put the white-supremacy case most bitterly, most uncompromisingly, most vindictively.

Does this history make Joe Wilson’s outburst racist? Who knows. Is he responsible for this history? Of course not. But history is hard to escape and it shapes people’s context and it shapes our culture. And when we’re discussing American history and especially that of the south and its politics, we can’t ignore race, even though doing so would make us more comfortable. We should also recognize that others will consider it and have their own judgments shaped by their particular experiences and histories. An interesting aspect of the Wilson brouhaha has been the role played by fellow SC congressman, and Democratic Whip, James Clyburn. Clyburn represents the neighboring district in the state and has a storied personal history as a leader of the civil rights struggle there. That he was the member driving the move to admonish Wilson should remind us how personal this issue can be.

Interestingly—and here we can find more sure footing—when one looks at Congressman Wilson’s district, one finds that his district is not one where we’d expect quite the level of demagoguery that Key described. The 2nd District finds itself, of the state’s 6, in the middle in terms of its racial composition. It is the third “blackest” with African Americans making up roughly 26% of the population. Also, it has the highest median income in the state and the highest proportion of residents with a college degree. Recent conventional wisdom has suggested that those with higher incomes and education will be the least likely to hold unenlightened views on race. In last year’s presidential race the 2nd was Obama’s third best district, giving him 45% of the vote. Furthermore, as has been noted at length over the past week, Wilson had a relatively close re-election last time, garnering only 54% of the vote. Both candidates have used the events of the past week to rake in huge sums of money for next year’s rematch. Thus, there doesn't seem to be much incentive, in a purely political sense, for Wilson to become the new incarnation of George Wallace.

So where does this leave us??? The fact that we’ve been focused on the meaning of two words over the past week—and that this meaning has been interpreted by many to have sinister racial undertones—tells us that we’ve not yet arrived at a mythical “post racial” America. Given our history and how much in is entwined into our consciousness, perhaps we never will. Where it does leave us is with a realization that these types of debates, clashes, and parsings of words are going to be with us for a while. The Obama presidency makes this unavoidable. However much we might want our political fights (in the best sense of the word) to be “just” about health care, the economy, education, and the like, they won’t be. Beneath the surface of all of these will be the unspoken, and often loudly spoken, role of race in America. We best proceed humbly.

**Top image, slave map of South Carolina, originally published in The Atlantic in 1861.

ElectionDissection.com Book Club--Revisiting 1976

A few weeks back, while visiting Milwaukee for work, I stopped into my favorite bookstore, Renaissance Books. A towering warehouse filled with miles of shelves lined with musty books, I like stopping in a few times a year because I’m always sure to find older works of political history and biography that can’t be found easily anywhere else. Sure enough, I found a few things destined to find their way into future posts. The treasure of my visit was a copy of the 1976 Almanac of American Politics. For political junkies—especially those who study the Congress—this is our bible. I’d never seen a copy this old (1974 was the first edition) so the past several days have been spent digging into the congressional bios of members long since gone and the voting data from the post-Watergate Democratic landslide. This is high level politics nerd-dom.

What I have found particularly interesting in my reading so far is how it described the upcoming 1976 presidential election. With the benefit of hindsight, we don’t often appreciate the uncertainty that exists a year or so out from an election. However, it was far from clear who would emerge from the chaos of the Watergate era to win the White House. Michael Barone and his co-authors' description of the potential candidates is fascinating.

For example, at the time of the book’s publication in 1975, the presumptive Democratic nominee appeared to be Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson:

…at this writing he is probably the leading candidate for the nomination. The impetus for the Jackson candidacy comes from those Democrats who are liberal on domestic policies and basically hawkish (though Jackson dislikes the word) on foreign policy. And his backers believe that Jackson has shown by his work in the Senate that he has mastered more subjects a President must understand than any other American legislator…Jackson has two majors problems as a presidential candidate: he is still not terribly well known, and he faces the implacable hostility of the portion of the Democratic Party that nominated George McGovern in 1972. At this writing, he is not known by almost half the American electorate; this will probably change in the course of the primaries, unless he runs unexpectedly poorly in the early contests. He certainly has the financial support necessary. He has already collected large sums, much of it from ardent supporters of Israel who appreciate his long record on Middle Eastern policy, much of it from businessmen who see him as a more congenial kind of politician than most liberal Democrats. The antiwar left is another matter. There are literally thousands of Democrats, including now some members of Congress, who got into politics primarily because of the opposition to the Vietnam War; why should they now support a man who was one of its major proponents?

Also given much discussion, but not much of a chance, was Alabama Governor (and 1968 and 1972 candidate) George Wallace. Reflecting on the Alabaman’s journey, including the 1972 attempt on his life, Barone writes:

No one doubts that he wants to run for President; it appears now that for all his primary runs and third party candidacies he has been seeking a way fro a one-time vocal segregationist to make it to the White House. Wallace has managed to raise literally millions in small contributions through direct mail, and he has enough hard core support—augmented, if anything by the respectability conferred by martyrdom—to run ahead of all other Democratic presidential possibilities in early 1975. But even more Democrats find Wallace totally unacceptable and would back anyone in the general election against him, even Gerald Ford; for all his talk of how he reflects the people’s real views, Wallace is clearly the weakest candidate the Democrats could nominate. And of course they won’t.

Also garnering attention, Arizona congressman Mo Udall:

Udall has not yet raised anything like the amount of money a presidential candidate is thought to need, and of course his name recognition is about zero. But he does have certain advantages: most notably, after the withdrawals of Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale, there is a dearth of candidates acceptable to the liberal wing which dominated the Democratic convention in 1972 and may well again in 1976. Udall is at least acceptable to that group.

Where, you might ask, is Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee and winner in 1976? Barone et al, less than a year before the beginning of the nomination contests, have very little to say about the former Georgia governor, and don’t seem to view his as a top tier candidate. Writing about his rise in Georgia political circles and election to the governorship in 1970, they state:

During his campaign, in which he shook tens of thousands of hands, Carter liked to describe himself as a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. He placed somewhat less emphasis on the fact that he had served as a top aide to Admiral Hyman Rickover in the nuclear submarine program, and that his peanut farm was not a shack-and-forty-acres affair but a well-managed, thriving business. Carter lost the Atlanta metropolitan area in both the primary and general election; but surprised some of his erstwhile supporters by coming out foresquare for integration…Now he is running for President, vowing that he will go into all the primaries; barring a major upset of George Wallace, it looks like a uphill race.

Thus, on the eve of the Democratic nominating process, it was virtually impossible to predict who would ultimately emerge victorious. It’s important, I think, to appreciate how hard it is to predict the way events, especially electoral and political, will play out. To maybe put this into a more contemporary perspective, try to go back to the recent editions of the Almanac or its competitor “Politics in America” and find anyone making a convincing argument about Barack Obama’s chances of becoming President. Momentum can develop very quickly in American politics.

As a final note, check out this snippet, written almost in passing, in the section on Arkansas in the ’76 Almanac:

Arkansas seems full of young, fairly liberal, personally attractive Democratic politicians these days—a type that simply was not around in the days before Winthrop Rockefeller (although, ironically, none is in Rockefeller’s Republican Party). There are Bumpers and Pryor, of course, and state Attorney General Jim Guy Tucker and Congressman Ray Thornton and almost successful congressional candidate Bill Clinton.