The Other Southern Strategy

...More important, Leuchtenburg's approach demonstrates how Presidents Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson contributed to transforming the mainly rural, segregated, impoverished, and disrespected "hookworm belt" of the 1920s—the nation's most vexing economic problem—into the urbanized, relatively prosperous region it is today...

...Roosevelt consulted "Negro" leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Walter White (head of the NAACP) and Mary McLeod Bethune for policy advice...

...Breaking the grip of the past is not always universally popular...

...Nevertheless, I finished The White House Looks South with a feeling of sadness...

...But when this flawed giant became President, the first from the South since Woodrow Wilson and only the second since 1865, something shifted...

...Nonetheless, the economic benefits of new Federal programs for job creation, price support, rural electrification, and Social Security, even when filtered through local Democratic appointees, benefited white and black Southern farmers alike...

...Pressed by progressives within his party and recognizing America's need to practice the egalitarian virtues it preached to the world, he desegregated the Armed Forces and secured the passage of permanent fair employment practice legislation...

...Reviewed by Bernard A. Weisberger Former columnist, "American Heritage...

...Those achievements were shepherded to fruition by Lyndon Johnson, who reassured Southern audiences of his soundness on Southern rights in a down-home accent that grew thicker the farther South he traveled during the 1960 campaign, and who had a record of watering down civil rights legislation in the Senate...

...Or to come closer to Leuchtenburg's subject, there would have been anti-Depression efforts regardless of who was elected in 1932, but no New Deal if the winner had been Herbert Hoover instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Roosevelt did not at first disappoint...

...The most unexpected and crudest wound has come from the dagger blow of atrusted friend," one segregationist howled...

...Yet not being altogether Southern, they had a national rather than regional perspective, bringing the South into closer conformity with the country's trends while appearing to respect its special past and problems...

...But the Dixiecrats could not deny Truman the nomination in 1948, nor could the creation of the States Rights Party and Strom Thurmond's candidacy prevent "Give 'Em Hell" Harry's election...

...The Southern political bosses seemed to score a victory for their side in 1944, forcing FDR to abandon-Henry A. Wallace in favor of then Senator Truman as his Vice Presidential candidate...

...Certainly for better in embracing modern mores that ruled out the segregation of the past—though to be sure, racism, poverty and economic injustice are far from dead there or elsewhere in America...

...Place, politics and personal leadership, the author maintains, still are vital forces...

...As they say, no good deed goes unpunished...

...Indeed, the Second Reconstruction created a new South, for better or for worse...

...Even more to the outrage of white supremacists, he did not disavow Eleanor Roosevelt's frank racial egalitarianism...

...In the words of W.E.B...

...Full disclosure: I am a contemporary of the author and I know him...

...FDR's accomplishments were made possible in part by the firm base of the old solid Democratic South, which allowed relatively risk-free political cultivation of Leftleaning constituencies...

...He appointed a Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that produced a hard-hitting manifesto against the denial of basic rights to blacks...

...They might have preferred a candidate more authentically their own, but at the time a distinctively Southern candidate could not yet win a nationwide election...

...The Democrats no longer needed the South to win—and could scrap the two-thirds rule at the 1936 convention...

...Her stance, said one writer, made her "the most hated woman in the South since Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...and the personalities of figures in authority can have a deep impact on those decisions...

...On Roosevelt's funeral train, Burnet R. Maybank, a Democratic Senator from South Carolina, reassured a friend: "Everything's going to be all right—the new President knows how to handle the niggers...

...Truman, who liked to boast of his Confederate ancestry, joined other Southern Senators in resisting threats to segregation...

...So it was that African Americans abandoned the party of Lincoln for that of Roosevelt...

...The new order, as one historian quoted by Leucbtenburg observes, was not a result of "unguided market forces alone...

...On the night of his landslide 1964 election victory over Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, he told his young press secretary, Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come...

...Alas, even before sinking into the quagmire of Vietnam and enduring the urban riots of the '60s, Johnson sensed that his own career would not survive the head-on confrontation with racism...

...Some, like myself, lament the loss in our homogenized 21st century of distinctive patterns of Southern language and culture that, unlike segregation, deserve respect and preservation...

...But by the time overtly racist Democratic Senators and governors became committed Roosevelt haters, the New Deal had firmly attracted the loyalty of Northern—and Southern—working- and middle-class voters...

...The irony, of course, is that the trio also transformed the one-party Democratic South into the virtually one-party Republican South...

...A sense of place shapes group behavior...

...Lyndon Johnson of Texas was equally at home presenting himself as a Southerner or a Westerner...

...Now it is Republican Social Darwinists who enter each election cycle with a guaranteed vote from the old Confederacy, and that phenomenon has nudged the general political discourse Rightward...

...Roosevelt seems a stretch, but after polio struck FDR did spend much of his life in Wann Springs, Georgia, where he kept a regular residence...

...A native New Yorker who taught at Columbia University before moving 25 years ago to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Leuchtenburg believes, contrary to popular opinion, that the pleasanter aspects of Southern folkways still exist...

...He named many Southerners to his Cabinet as well as to head New Deal agencies, and he offered little endorsement of antilynching and anti-poll tax measures in his early White House years...

...He was therefore supported in 1932 by many of the Democratic kingmakers from the "Solid South"—men holding major Congressional committee chairmanships by virtue of their seniority, and powerful enough to wield a veto at the party's national convention, which then required a two-thirds vote to win the Presidential nomination...

...author, "America Afire: Jefferson, Adams and the Election of 1800" William E. Leuchtenburg booms onstage in the Prologue to his new book with a forthright declaration: He is making a case for the validity of traditional history, lately out of vogue in academic circles, where issues of race, class and gender predominate...

...The infant United States might have looked much different under a first President otherthan George Washington...

...I subscribe almost unreservedly to these propositions...

...Truman was appalled, though, by evidence that black servicemen were beaten, crippled and murdered by segregationist gangs for refusing to return to "Yassuh, boss" ways...

...It required national political leadership, working in tandem with the civil rights movement, to bring about the demise of the old order...

...He became familiar with the area and claimed to be as much a Georgian as a Hudson River squire...

...In refreshingly fluid, engaging prose buttressed by a steady stream of quotations from a wide variety of sources, Leuchtenburg contends that his three principals were able to win at least initial acceptance in the South because they were perceived as essentially sympathetic through birth or residence...

...Some of us who are old enough may remember shedding happy tears when, facing Congress and a national TV audience, he boldly quoted the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement— "and we shall overcome...

...While Truman himself remained highly conservative and resistant to "social equality" for blacks, his actions, Leuchtenburg notes, launched "a chain of events that made the greater achievements of the 1960s possible...

...political decisions channel the direction of economic and cultural currents...

...DuBois, "Roosevelt gave the American Negro a kind of recognition in political life the Negro never before received...

...Truman came from the border state of Missouri, regarded both as part of the old slaveholding South and as the historic gateway to the West...

...Attuned to the direction of national opinion—and probably possessed of a genuine belief thatthe time forjustice had arrived—Johnson pushed through Congress both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, that ended—legally, at least—a century of disfranchisement and segregation...

...The same held for urban-directed measures encouraging unionization and funding public housing...