The 1966 election in Georgia and the ambiguity of the white backlash.(Viewpoint essay)

It's the damnedest mess down there I have ever seen. Senator Richard B. Russell Jr. (D-Ga.), June 2, 1966

WHEN KEN MEHLMAN, THE CHAIRMAN OF THE REPUBLICAN National Committee, told the NAACP in 2005 that his party's use of the "southern strategy" to polarize voters along racial lines had been wrong, some observers questioned the sincerity of this belated request for forgiveness. (1) Few, however, questioned the basic premise of Mehlman's remarks: namely, that the Republican Party had achieved its reemergence in the South and return to majority status in the nation by exploiting the white backlash against the civil rights movement. According to the dominant popular and scholarly opinions, this backlash turned the South into a bastion of conservative Republicanism, and these southern Republicans in turn became the driving force in shaping the national political agenda. (2) In several of the best and most recent works on the postwar South, the continuing centrality of this interpretation is clearly evident. In White Flight, an account of changing strategies of white resistance to racial change in Atlanta, Kevin M. Kruse concludes that "the rise of southern Republicanism ... was largely due to the white backlash against the [1964] Civil Rights Act." Similarly, Jason Sokol, in his 2006 analysis of white southerners' reactions to civil rights, There Goes My Everything, argues, "As much as anything else, [the rise of southern Republicanism] was the legacy of the Civil Rights Act." (3)

In addition to providing the impetus for the Republicans' regional and national dominance, the white backlash is also often credited with cutting the legs from under the southern liberalism that had appeared tantalizingly close to spreading through the region in the late 1940s. This sense of an opportunity missed is hinted at in the titles of works on the post-New Deal South, such as Patricia Sullivan's Days of Hope and Pete Daniel's Lost Revolutions. (4) Glenn Feldman recently expressed this view in more explicit terms, charging the white South with a failure to embrace liberalism because of a compulsive addiction to a reactionary "politics of emotion." (5) Consequently, according to the white backlash narrative of postwar American politics, the white reaction to the civil rights movement all but crippled the Democratic Party, especially in the South. Ronald Radosh may be exceptionally dramatic in his language, but his assessment that it was "the civil rights movement that launched the Democratic Party on a trajectory that ended in disaster" is only a more strongly worded version of an otherwise generally accepted consensus. (6)

Recently, the white backlash nanative has been challenged, most notably in Matthew D. Lassiter's The Silent Majority and Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston's The End of Southern Exceptionalism. Lassiter argues that far from cementing Republican growth in the region, the GOP's decision to pursue a racially polarizing "Southern Strategy" in the 1970s actually enabled the Democratic Party to hold the "balance of power" in the region. Shafer and Johnston similarly argue that economic development, not race, was the "Republican accelerator" in the postwar South. Both works effectively conclude that what Lassiter terms a "suburban strategy"--rather than a "southern strategy"--represented the key to regional and national electoral success alter 1970. Neither of these studies deny the significance of race as a political issue in the so-called New South, nor do they suggest that postdesegregation southern politics actually represented a misunderstood triumph for southern liberalism. Their arguments do, however, provide a valuable and necessary counterbalance to the white backlash narrative's insistence on the inescapable centrality of race to the political culture of the New South and a powerful challenge to the view that the civil rights movement broke the back of the Democratic Party in the region. (7)

Further evidence of the need to reconsider the white backlash narrative can be found in a case study of one of the electoral contests that is often seen as an example of the power of that backlash: the 1966 gubernatorial contest in Georgia. At first glance, the election of Lester G. Maddox as governor of Georgia seems to be a perfect illustration of the white backlash at work. Not only was Maddox's career based on open hostility to the civil rights movement, but also his defeated opponent in the Democratic primary, Ellis G. Arnall, personified the 1940s liberalism that the backlash is credited with undermining. When one further considers that Maddox's campaign and nomination bitterly divided the Georgia Democratic Party and allowed the Republicans to come within an electoral regulation of occupying the statehouse for the first time since 1872, it seems that all the ingredients of a classic white backlash narrative are there.

It is therefore understandable that the white backlash element of Maddox's victory has received the most attention. Stephen G. N. Tuck has described it as a sign of the "continued strength of resistance to racial equality" in Georgia. Numan V. Bartley considered Maddox's election to be a decisive rejection of progressive leadership just when underlying changes should have been strengthening that leadership's base, which Robert Sherrill in turn attributed to Maddox's "emotional" appeal to the past. Harold Paulk Henderson saw the outcome as evidence that the optimistic predictions prior to 1966 of an imminent "liberalization of southern politics" following the end of segregation "did not occur," while Kevin Kruse has argued that Maddox's election demonstrated that the themes of the backlash--the basis of his appeal--had "firmly taken root in Georgia and, indeed, the rest of the South." (8)

There is no question that Maddox did appeal to a backlash against civil rights or that his victory demonstrated that he represented the sentiments of a sizable portion of Georgia's white electorate. Furthermore, there is no doubt that Maddox's election shaped subsequent political development not just in Georgia but also in the South as a whole, and as such, his impact cannot be ignored. However, to speak of the 1966 election only in terms of the strength of the white backlash is to leave the story incomplete on two counts. In the first place, it presents Maddox's victory as somehow an inevitable or, at the very least, natural response to the political events of the 1960s. In fact, his election was essentially a political fluke. To describe his win as such is not to claim that it is inexplicable or insignificant or to dismiss the white backlash as politically irrelevant. The elections in 1967 of John Bell Williams in Mississippi and John J. McKeithen in Louisiana offer ample supporting evidence for the potential of those whom Numan Bartley termed "commonman segregationist[s]" to win office by courting white resentment. (9) Rather, the justification for terming Maddox's election a fluke is that it depended on the occurrence of a series of unanticipated and unpredictable events: the withdrawal of former governor Ernest Vandiver Jr., the presumptive favorite, from the race; the decision by U.S. senator Herman E. Talmadge not to enter the contest; a narrow second-place finish for Maddox in the first Democratic primary; highly unusual voting patterns in Maddox's runoff victory; and a grassroots write-in effort during the general election that denied his Republican opponent a critical number of votes. Had any of these highly contingent events, none of them driven primarily by the white backlash, turned out differently, the election result would in turn have been very different. There was, in short, nothing inevitable about Maddox's victory.