Posted on 04/18/2013 2:14:07 PM PDT by Epsdude
John Jay, Federalist #2- this still has resonance in the South, but it hasn’t been true in the North for well over a century- not since they welcomed the ‘48ers in with their radical politics, not to mention the waves of diversity that came after; anyway consider the words of founding father and our first Chief Justice:
“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”
BTW, that Gallup thing you keep referring to is an almost unbelievably non-scientific and inaccurate EXIT POLL. Even if one of them seems to be correct, they are unusable for the sorts of differentiations you are proposing.
Air Conditioning.
My point was a historical one about party affiliation. Eisenhower broke the "Solid South" by taking Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, all states outside the Deep South, in 1952. In 1956, he added Louisiana, but that was because of offshore oil rights. Hoover got similar results -- because of Al Smith's Catholicism -- back in 1928, winning the same states Ike carried plus North Carolina.
Republicans took the South from the fringes, from states that were outside the Deep South. The Deep South states stayed loyal to the Democrats for the longest time, up until 1972, when the whole country went for the Republicans (except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) or even until 1984, when every state but Minnesota went for Reagan.
In 1980, Carter had more support in the South than in the rest of the country, although the only state he carried there was his own Georgia. The South still had more Democrat state representatives (and I believe representatives in Washington) than Republicans down to the 1990s.
Outsiders did run the original Republican campaigns for Congress in Texas -- not always Northeasterners, like Bush -- but outsiders to be sure. Most of the first Republicans Texas sent to Washington were raised and educated outside of the state.
Those are the facts and they relate to the original question which was about (White) Southerners switching from the Democrats to Republicans. What interpretation you want to give to the numbers may differ from mine. I'll point out though, that the South wasn't always more conservative in the ways that counted than the North.
In the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian years, the South was, in the understanding of the times, more liberal. In the Populist era and during the New Deal there was plenty of what we would now call progressive sentiment in the South. That started to change at the end of the 1930s, but a lot of the Congressmen around then had started out in a more populist or progressive environment at the beginning of the century.
Was the South more "socially conservative"? Depends. That didn't necessarily mean what it means today and may not always have meant something we might like nowadays. I'll grant, though, that a more rural region would have to have been more socially conservative in ways than big cities were, but politics wasn't always about that.
You’re a south basher from jump street
For personal reasons I’ve always figured
No one but a complete idiot thinks the south is GOP because Yankees moved in....when in fact the opposite is all too obvious
And trying to parse whether the south was socially conservative
Where on earth do they teach the neoyankee crap you and yer posse spew here day in day out
Show me where...please....I live here
I want to see for myself
Is it all about slavery and discrimination for you X?
Are blacks in America the only folks ever got a raw deal
Is Detroit or DC better than say Jackson or Clarksdale?
Would our blacks prefer to have been left behind in ancestral Africa?
When is enough enough?
When do blacks assume their own responsibilities?
When do they examine honestly black culture worldwide?
You may feel some revenge being all Cornell West on Dixie 24/7
But it fixes nothing.... the underlying issue just festers
This is where what Obama has done is such a travesty....he race baits too and thinks America is a hate crime
Yet he had the ear of black youth and all their cultural rot....they would a listened....and he blew it....he just amped up the victim game and gave them more excuses to downward spiral
Folks like you who drink from the same well are the problem
Not jaded old rednecks like me who once had high hopes...back when there were real bogeymen in white sheets and decent folks rejected them....and for what
Our own destruction?
I never said that. I said that historically Republicans won the fringe areas of the South first: Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas. The Deep South was allergic to the Republican Party for a century or more and very slow to break with the Democrats. I said that outsiders ran most of the first Republican campaigns in Texas. That's also true.
Is it all about slavery and discrimination for you X?
You're the one who's bringing up race. And it's strange how you start out saying how much better things are in Mississippi and end up freaking out about some kind of racial apocalypse in a way that most of the rest of the country doesn't.
In high school I actually had a lot of sympathy for the South and the Confederacy. It's only since coming here and watching all the "Yankee bashing" that I changed my mind.
Once upon a time, you'd get much sympathy as a poorer part of the country, much put upon by Northern bankers and such, but seeing how much you guys put down Northern parts -- sometimes for being too rich and conceited, sometimes for being too poor and troubled -- it's hard to agree with y'all and maintain one's self-respect.
Back in sharecropper days, you could get away with playing the victim card, but when you start looking down on other parts of the country it's hard to get away with playing that card.
The roots of the Republican party date to the "Free Soil" party of the early 1850s. It was primarily a 'mid-western' party opposed to the expansion of slavery to the territories and in favor of Homesteading of the Western territories.
The Kansas-Nebraska act, pushed through by the Democrats with some Whig support ended up breaking the Whig party. Pro-slavery expansion Whigs such as Alexander Stevens became Democrats and anti-slavery expansion Whigs such as Lincoln became Republicans. It was only later that the Abolitionist factions also signed on with the Republicans as their best alternative.
Many of the former Whigs in the Republican party then maintained their Whig roots of being in favor of protective tariffs and internal improvements as did the former Whigs in the South who switched to the Democrat party. The position on slavery, or more accurately, the expansion of slavery was the driver, not economic or trade policy.
As to not running candidates in the South, that is not quite true either, depending on how you define "The South." In the Upper South states like VA, KY, and MO, the Republicans did indeed run candidates. They didn't do well, but they did run for office. In the 'Deep South' in the 1850s, it would have been suicidal, literally, for any politician or his supporters of any party to oppose slavery or the expansion of slavery in any way. It would have been like a Jew looking to run for office in Iran today. They would have been killed.
In the South, even the Deep South, politicians supporting the same economic policies the Republicans supported -- high protective tariffs, Central banking, and internal improvements could and did get elected --- Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who became the Confederate Vice President, was a prime example.
The differences all came do to where they stood on slavery.
Hummmmm. Funny thing is that in 1856, the first year a Republican ran for presidenton an anti slavery expansion platform, the "Know Nothing" Party's presidential candidate had the vast majority of his support in the South.
Hummmm? Maybe you want to check your premises. 
Nope. There were at least six different parties that combined into the Republican party. The largest was the Order of the Star Spangled Banner - a.k.a. the Know Nothings. (They were the largest mainly because they overlap with all of the other parties.) The second largest was the Whig party. The third largest was the Anti-Mason party, Then came the Free Soilers, the Liberty Party, and a few others.
The Free Soilers were certainly the most perfidious. They had a history of stabbing their coalition partners in the back. For instance, they betrayed the Whigs and joined with the Democrats in Ohio and Massachusetts to give the Democrats control of those legislatures. In exchange, they got to name one US Senator from each state. That's how we wound up with two of the most vile creatures ever to sit in the US Senate: Charles Sumner and Salmon Chase. When the Republican party was formed both men turned their coats again and joined the Republicans.
It was primarily a 'mid-western' party opposed to the expansion of slavery negros to the territories - There. Fixed it.
The Free Soilers are the ones who funded John Brown's terrorist activities. When Brown killed those people in Kansas and kidnapped their bondsmen, he did not set the slaves free. He took them to the Canadian border and deported them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was also a looney Free Soiler and you may recall the negro subjects of her novel deported themselves at the end of the story. The slavery issue was always really a Negro issue. Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois amended their state constitutions banning the entrance of any negros, free or slave. They opposed slavery because slavery meant negros.
Once the Republican party got itself organized the former Whigs, who had the most experience in politics, quickly came to dominate it. The Whigs stabbed every other party that had joined the Republicans in the back, abandoning every agenda except their own. They abandoned the anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic stance of the Know-Nothings. Thadeus Steven's whole crazy anti-Mason thing disappeared and was never spoken of again. They abandoned the anti-slavery position of the Free Soil and Liberty parties. Remember Lincoln threatened the northern states over enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in his inaugural address. Then there was the Corwin Amendment, the I-would-also-do-that speech, etc. The one and only agenda the Republicans stayed true to was the Henry Clay American System of high tariffs, central banking, and corporate welfare. It's what the party was about. It's what the war was about. It's what they proceeded to implement the minute they got in power.
In the 'Deep South' in the 1850s, it would have been suicidal, literally, for any politician or his supporters of any party to oppose slavery or the expansion of slavery in any way. It would have been like a Jew looking to run for office in Iran today. They would have been killed.
That's a bit of a strawman isn't it? Lincoln campaigned against abolitionism in 1860. And you keep equivocating between anti-slavery and anti-expansion as if they are the same thing. Anti-expansionism is about excluding negros, free or slave. How could it be that slavery is just in the South, but unjust in Kansas? The anti-expansionists wanted to exclude all negros.
Why not take the Republicans at their word.
No man has the right to be surprised at this state of things. It is just what we abolitionists and disunionists have attempted to bring about. There is merit in the Republican party. It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know it's own face, but calls itself national; but it is not national - it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North pledged against the South. ...Wendell PhillipsWendell Phillips publicly declared his party to be "a party of the North pledged against the South", and you won't find any of his contemporaries contradicting him about it. This is why the Union broke up. Slavery, the tariff, and the disposition of the western territories all became super critical because the country suddenly had one entire section, the South, disenfranchised by and politically subordinate to the other (albeit through an election). There wasn't going to be any process of compromise anymore. After the election of 1860 the North would be able to simply impose it's own agenda on the South. That's why the South seceded.
I stand by my premises and you really should have thought that through before posting it. The Know Nothings were not a political party. They were a secret political organization who ran their candidates under the banners of other political parties. They did try unsuccessfully to come out of the closet as the American party in that election, but most of their members had already joined the Republicans by that time. The relatively few Know Nothings who were from the South of course did not join the Republicans and account for most of the votes for that reason.
Except that Republicans were opposed to expansion of slavery to the territories, and opposed to requirements for free states to enforce slavery. That made them against slavery.
Slavery was the key issue for the south, which is why southern states that gave any reason for pretended secession, all cited slavery.
The 1896 GOP presidential convention refused to seat black delegates. That sad betrayal freed blacks to seek a different alignment.
TR was also a big eugenics advocate.
To be fair to the progressives/eugenicists of the early 20th Century, I don’t think they understood the horrors to which it would lead.
After the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by elements of the US Army, eugenics was pretty much discredited.
Margret Sanger’s people still want to abort black babies.
People retire from NY, and move to FL to avoid income tax.
To be fair, American History in schools is taught from a hard left point of view.
That anyone asks questions after that is a significant mark of intelligence. Schools say, “if you question, you must be racist.” which tends to shut down debate.
“Shut up.” is the standard liberal argument.
Not in California. California the Democrat party is all La Raza, all the time.
Your post about the GOP snub freeing blacks to vote for the party of the KKK in 1896 doesn’t make much sense, especially in regards to my post 25 “”Before 1936 blacks voted republican, after 1932, blacks voted democrat.””.
The total and permanent reversal of black voting happened in 1936, not 4 decades before.
cannot disagree.....it has been this way for quite a while though. It is one reason that I made sure my own child had outside reading and field trips to help with this
"During the 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles was a bastion of Anglo Protestantism, reflecting the values of Midwestern parishioners who had been carried to the Southland on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Well into the 1970s, Protestant denominational leaders enjoyed comfortable, influential ties with the city is still-strong "downtown business establishment," which itself was largely Protestant."
"The Immigration Act of 1965, however, created the condition for a radically different religious future for the City of Angels-a future that would anoint Roman Catholicism as the area's dominant religious group. Today Roman Catholicism is the single largest faith tradition in Los Angeles County, with 294 parishes and 3,631,368 adherents. Among Christians, 71% are Catholics. Between 1980 and 1997, Roman Catholicism experienced a 36% growth."
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