The Role of Race in the Republican Party

The role of race in the Republican Party

As we near an election in which Barack Obama is poised to become the first African-American to win the Presidency, race is a constant theme.

Republicans insist that a vote against Obama is not a result of racism, while Obama supporters wonder otherwise, implying that the only reason the average American (defined statistically by median income) struggling with inflation, rising costs in energy and health care, job instability, and less spending power would not vote for Obama is racism, as Obama’s policies on all of these issues would benefit this person much more than the Republican candidate.

When looking into the history of the Republican Party, it is clear that race defines the Republican party more than any other issue, and no doubt exists that racism has been a major unifier of the Republican Party, both past and present. The question is: How much of a variable is it in why one votes Republican today?

To be clear: It is neither fair nor accurate to claim that a person voting against Obama in 2008 is a racist by default (although those cases do exist without question), and certainly a percentage of Republicans are voting for their candidate solely on policies that are color-blind, such as tax implications.

However, race is still relevant for most voters, because even if you take the “black” out of the Republican tag line that Obama is “a socialist, elite, liberal, big city, anti-American, pro-terrorist, anti-military, black man,” the message is the same: Obama does not represent real America. However, what is real America?

The Founding Fathers that Republicans quote and celebrate on July 4th, President’s Day, etc., were mostly highly educated, pro-Europe, preferred urban cities, spoke multiple languages, traveled extensively overseas, held professional positions in law and medicine, were not religious extremists, and enjoyed healthy debate and exchange of ideas.

In fact, the Founding Fathers were very distrustful of rural America, hence the creation of the electoral college, which protected the country from having uneducated citizens directly determining the Presidency. This was intentional and by design.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams would certainly not find much in common with the “real American” of Sarah Palin and majority of the Republican base, so what do Republicans mean when they say American values come from small rural American towns? Is it coincidence that rural America is mostly white?

Race, either explicitly (via promoting segregation or fighting civil rights legislation) or implicitly (Willie Horton ads against Dukakis in 1988, McCain supporters pushing a story of a woman beaten in Pennsylvania by a black man who was an Obama supporter in 2008 (proven to be false), or the tactic of leaving recorded messages in white neighborhoods of a black man using ghetto slang urging them to vote Democrat), has been used by Republican party leaders as the glue that unifies the party to one common goal: keeping the status quo of white America.

These Republicans may be at odds with each other daily (the Wall St. banker screwing the Kansan retiree by manipulating the market), have lives that will intentionally never cross (the CEO of a major corporation and the 18-year-old soldier serving in Iraq), or have conflicting interests (the immigrant Hispanic pro-life Catholic vs. the Idaho construction worker upset at immigration lowering local wages), but they still unify every four years on the mantra of “keep the status quo.”

A Republican Presidential candidate may run on a campaign of change, but the change is not to progress ahead but return to the past: America in the 1950s, when things were more simple, safe, and defined. The problem with this, of course, is this era was completely subversive to anyone except white males.

The transformation of the Republican Party from its birth in the 1850s to present day is remarkable, and one must understand this shift to explain how Abraham Lincoln and Strom Thurmond both belonged to the same party.

The Republican party was created when neither the Compromise of 1850 nor the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 could relax tensions over slavery (without going into detail, both of these acts were about maintaining a balance between the Northern “free” states and Southern slave states).

The Whig party, which was the dominant party along with Democrats at the time, was split internally with opposing views of slavery (you can probably guess which geographic area was on which side).

When these slavery issues could not be resolved for the election of 1856, Northern Whigs left and formed the Republican party, which also included a smaller party called Free Soilers, as well as antislavery Democrats (a few did exist). The Democrats won the 1856 election partly due to this chaos, but four years later, Abraham Lincoln ran and was the first Republican to win the Presidential election.

Although Lincoln spent his entire Presidency in war (the only US President with this distinction) and as such never was able to focus on a domestic policy, the Republican party did stand for something besides opposition to slavery; the new Republican party put forward a progressive vision of modernizing the country by emphasizing higher education, banking, railroads, industry and cities, while promising free homesteads to farmers. Its initial base was progressive elites in the Northeast and farmers in the Midwest.

The Republican Party also played a leading role in securing women the right to vote. In 1896, Republicans were the first major party to favor women's suffrage. When the 19th Amendment finally was added to the Constitution, 26 of 36 state legislatures that had voted to ratify it were under Republican control. The first woman elected to Congress was a Republican, Jeanette Rankin from Montana in 1917.

Yet if you took Abraham Lincoln or James Garfield (who wrote in his presidential inaugural address “the elevation of the negro race… has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people”), and introduced them to Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, or Ronald Reagan, the former would be completely flabbergasted by the policy and social stances of the latter.

So what happened to the Grand Old Party (GOP)? The same party that invited Frederick Douglass to address delegates in the 1876 convention while nominating the most reform-minded person they could find in that election in Rutherford B. Hayes?

Four big moments led to the transformation of the Republican Party from 1860 to 2008, and most were race-related.

The first was the election of 1876. Up to this point, opposition of slavery and support of African-Americans was the glue of the party, but that glue quickly eroded in a moment that would replay itself in the 2000- an election with disputed electoral votes.

In the 1876 election, Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden had more popular votes than Hayes and a 184-165 lead in electoral votes, but the returns from four states totaling 20 electoral votes were in dispute.

To sort out the controversy, Congress appointed a commission (eight republicans and seven democrats) and the two parties reached in agreement, called the Great Compromise. Democrats agreed not to contest the commission finding that all 20 electoral votes went to Hayes, giving him the presidency (no surprise that a “non-partisan” commission managed to vote along party lines). In return, however, came the sell-out: The Republicans promised to remove all remaining federal troops in the South, which ended the period known as Reconstruction.

African-Americans called the deal the Great Betrayal (historians call it the Nadir period), as many of the gains of Reconstruction were lost and replaced with even harsher anti-black legislation and social policies. By 1900, all southern states, in new constitutions, had written into law the disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks. For example, a Negro farm laborer in the South made about fifty cents a day and was paid in “orders”, not money, which could only be used at a store controlled by the white farm planter. Policies like this helped keep African-Americans poor and without political power.

Many Negroes fled the South to escape violence and poverty. This complete reversal of reconstruction Federal policy and enforcement and the impact on African-Americans cannot be understated, as it led to almost 100 years of Jim Crow laws, whose impact is still felt today (unfortunately, Reconstruction and the following Nadir period is typically ignored in the US history books and few Americans know anything about it, but that is another article). The Nadir period began the shift in political parties; Republicans lost a lot of support from African-Americans but gained support from racist Democrats.

After the 1876 election, Republicans stayed the dominant party in politics (with a brief break coinciding with World War I) until 1932.

During their roughly 60 years in power, other shifts began to take place. Republicans now became synonymous with laissez-faire economics, which held that non-interference with business practices ensured a healthy economy for all (the genesis of the Republican Wall St. banker/investor who desired no Federal oversight or regulation).

Republicans created an anti-immigrant stance during this time, which led to isolationism in the country-wars in Europe and the rest of the world. Both of these platforms also contributed to the lack of active support of black civil rights, as Republicans believed that a healthy economy eradicating poverty should be enough, especially combined with a decrease in immigration.

In other words, “trickle down economics” was a staple of the Republican party long before Ronald Reagan. It was also the time when it was entrenched in the Republican mind that someone who worked hard would be successful financially, so if you were poor, it was because you were lazy- not a result of any global discrimination towards those who had darker skin or spoke little or no English.

However, during the Depression and World War II, the nation ceased to support these ideas. No matter how much the average Republican was against government help towards blacks or immigrants, when unemployment was 25%, banks lost everything, and no one escaped the impact, government intervention was welcomed as a way of preventing life-ending poverty and struggle (similar to how a stock market/home market crash of 2008 led to a public cry for government oversight). In 1936 the GOP reached its low point; a Democrat in the White House and only 17 GOP senators and 89 GOP representatives in the Congress.

At the end of World War II, however, the country took another turn with Republicanism due to the unpopularity of Herbert Hoover (a Democrat), the Korean War, the economy, and five consecutive terms of Democratic rule, and Americans elected Dwight Eisenhower President in 1952 and gave Republicans control of Congress.

At a time when Republicans expected to be at their strongest, they were greatly disappointed Eisenhower had not reversed the New Deal that had been Roosevelt's hallmark nor defeated Communism (intervention in foreign affairs was now held as a virtue by the Party, a trait that George W. Bush took to new levels).

Ironically, the second big moment that defined the Republican party was a pro-black decision by a Republican president; it was Eisenhower who supported the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which permitted black students to attend white schools.

Eisenhower sent Federal troops into Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court ruling that the Governor of Arkansas refused to enforce, but this angered many Republicans who felt it was the wrong decision. While this caused many Republicans to drop support of Eisenhower (he was in his second-term anyway), the racist tones of the moment unified the party. The party of Lincoln was far from its founding beliefs at this point.

This strife led to the election of the Democrats, with John F. Kennedy followed by Lyndon B. Johnson. During the Johnson administration, the third big moment took place: LBJ passed the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War.

LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (barring discrimination in public places and employment), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which outlawed poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers white southerners had erected to keep blacks from voting), Medicaid and Medicare, federal aid to education, food stamps, and Head Start.

This legislation angered many southern Democrats, who were so upset that they left the party and became Republicans. Here are two examples:

Strom Thurmond served as governor of South Carolina and as a senator. He ran for the presidency of the United States in 1948 under the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party banner. Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to April 1956 and November 1956 to 1964 as a Democrat, but due to the shift of Democratic support of African-American civil rights, served 1964 to 2003 as a Republican.

Jesse Helms, an outspoken conservative who opposed many progressive policies such as school integration, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, served as a campaign aide for Democratic segregationist Willis Smith in the early 1950s, but was a Republican when he served five terms as a Senator from North Carolina. Helms, much to the joy of his supporters, tried, with a 16-day filibuster, to stop the Senate from approving a national holiday to honor black civil-rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These are just two of many examples of racists jumping from the Democratic party to Republicans specifically because Civil Rights legislation was passed. The reversal of Democrats being racist to pro-minority, and Republicans supporting Reconstruction to blocking Civil Rights amendments, was complete.

In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected, but this endorsement was not so much a support of Republican ideas as it was the hope that he would end the war in Vietnam. His resignation from the office, in disgrace, damaged the Republican Party more than his progress in ending the war had helped it. The nation once again turned to the Democrats, electing Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Carter’s perceived failure in the arena of foreign affairs, combined with a recession at home, directly led to the election of Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The election of Reagan led to the fourth major moment of Republican history, and for once, it wasn’t race related (not directly, anyway).

In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the "Moral Majority". The following year, Falwell embraced Reagan, in a move that helped shift millions of long-time Southern Democrats and born-again voters into the GOP column (Carter, a self-professed born-again Christian, had first captured this emerging voting block in 1976).

The Moral Majority is credited for giving 67% of the white evangelical vote to Reagan over Carter, handing him the presidency. Reagan never forgot this, and all Republican presidential candidates since, worried that they cannot win the White House without fundamental Christian support, have never stopped catering and making policy decisions aimed at pleasing this faction (for example, McCain picking Sarah Palin as a running mate).

It is important to note that while the founding principles of the Moral Majority were mostly around social issues, such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, they also opposed the Equal Rights Amendments. In other words, the racists were still on board and voting Republican.

Reagan reshaped the Republican party, gave rise to the modern conservative movement, and altered the political dynamic of the United States. More men voted Republican under Reagan, and Reagan tapped into religious voters. Bill Schneider, senior political analyst at CNN, said, "[T]he whole Republican Party traces its lineage, its legitimacy to this one man." In the 2008 Republican primaries, all presidential candidates, regardless of differences, from McCain to Thompson to Guliani to Huckabee to Romney, all made references to how they admired and wanted to be like Reagan.

Reagan (who, by the way, was yet another Democrat who supported FDR and Eisenhower in the 1950s before switching to be a Republican in the 1960s after Civil Rights legislation passed) embodied many qualities that the New Right faction of the GOP admired; anti-Communist, willingness to be intervene in foreign disputes, and economic policies that effectively rendered null the remnants of the New Deal. Additionally, this administration was committed to opposing what they perceived as overly liberal steps taken by the courts in the direction of abortion, civil rights, and school prayer. This was not Barry Goldwater’s party.

The economic boom of the 1980s helped gain re-election for Reagan, and in 1988 for George Bush; however, when the economy entered a downturn in the early 1990s, this was seen as being indicative of a failure of the GOP economic policies and led to the election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992.

Ironically, the other factor that hurt the Republicans was the dissolution of the Soviet Union that it fought so hard to achieve; anti-Communist rhetoric lost its appeal when the Communists became capitalists, and it didn’t take long for Republicans to completely switch gears and support Communist China, when it benefited big business.

In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” using the Ronald Reagan game plan very effectively. He campaigned on a platform that included increasing the size of the United States Armed Forces, cutting taxes, and catered hard to the religious right. Bush became just the third president elected without receiving a plurality of the popular vote, so his election was hardly a ringing endorsement of Republican values, but he also won re-election in 2004 by a small margin in the popular vote.

In 2008, it appears the country is ready for a change. But how deep that change is nationally, and what impact it has on redefining the Republican Party, remains to be seen.