American crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south
How the Republican party’s dog-whistle appeal to racism, refined by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, led inexorably to Donald Trump
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy now,
Save poor Bob, if you please”
Robert Johnson, Cross Road Blues
How did it get to Trump?
To put it in Trump terms: you could say it started with a deal. Or more precisely, a big deal with various side deals attached, all of it amounting to one grand, dark bargain whose payment may be coming due at last. If one was inclined to reach for metaphor, you could say it was a deal with the devil. Or you could say it started with this, a plank adopted by the Democratic national convention of 1948:
The Democratic party commits itself to continuing efforts to eradicate all racial, religious, and economic discrimination.
That was enough to bring the devil howling out of his hole, that foot-on-the-neck-of-the-black-man devil of the Jim Crow, hookworm, lynch-prone south - “the solid south” that reliably delivered its votes to the Democratic party every four years.
The year 1948 was a flash that led to a slow burn, a simmering fuse that wouldn’t erupt again for 16 years. The flash was the breakaway States’ Rights Democratic party, aka the Dixiecrats (motto: “segregation forever”), who recoiled from the regular Democrats’ spasm of conscience and put forward their own candidate for president, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond. Thurmond campaigned on a platform that decried civil rights as “infamous and iniquitous”, “totalitarian” and an attempt by the federal government to impose “a police nation” on the land of the free. That fall, the Dixiecrats took four deep south states and 39 electoral votes from Harry Truman, a rippling of racist muscle that kept the Democratic party’s egalitarian impulse in check throughout the 1950s.
That decade was the slow burn, but it was coming. Occasional aberrations aside, the south stayed solid for the Democrats after Truman, though the devil felt the cracks under his feet, roamed uneasy over the land. Brown v Board of Education was a tremblor. Montgomery, Little Rock, more tremblors. At the Democrats’ 1960 convention, African American delegates walked out in protest over John F Kennedy’s concessions to the southern segs, this at a time when the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation - and thus a 90lb weakling in most of the south - was welcoming civil rights advocates to its convention. Devil stamped his feet, sniffed the air.
Across the south people were marching and sometimes dying for civil rights, though you didn’t have to march or even reach the age of majority to qualify for murder, as shown by the 1963 bombing deaths of four young African American girls, at church, in Birmingham. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson, Democrat of Texas and a son of the hardscrabble south, seized JFK’s cautious civil rights agenda and turned it into a juggernaut. “If you get in my way I’m going to run you down,” he told his old Senate mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia, and it’s surely one of the great mysteries not just of American politics but of human nature in general that Lyndon Johnson, a man born and formed in one of America’s most enduring tar pits of xenophobia, would be the crucial force multiplier for civil rights.
He knew better than anyone the political risk. “I think we just gave the south to the Republicans,” he told his staff after ramming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. His aide Bill Moyers recalled the moment in more drastic terms: Johnson feared he had delivered the south to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine”, a prediction whose proof, while not yet conclusive - we are happy that Mr Moyers is still with us - has trended ever since toward prophecy. The first hard evidence came in the presidential election that fall, when Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater saw only Arizona (Goldwater’s home state) and the old Dixiecrat states, plus Georgia, go Republican. Goldwater had been one of only a handful of Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act, and his nominating convention turned into a raucous revolt against the party’s eastern establishment. Nelson Rockefeller, millionaire governor of New York and the avatar of what’s now known as a country club Republican, was roundly booed, hooted and dissed. Goldwater delegates berated and shook their fists at the press, and African American delegates were “shoved, pushed, spat on and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets”. Something new and nasty was afoot; Republicans were acting like a bunch of Dixiecrats. One black delegate had his suit jacket set on fire. The southern caucus at the convention named its hotel headquarters “Fort Sumter” after the starting point of the civil war. Jackie Robinson spent several “unbelievable hours” on the convention floor, and summed up his experience thus: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Ex-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, now a Democratic US senator and as fiercely segregationist as ever, broke party ranks and declared support for the Republican nominee, not only campaigning with Goldwater in the south but switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in the middle of the race. Goldwater ended up capturing 55% of the white southern vote, making him the first Republican ever to win a majority of white southerners, and the party of Lincoln was transformed, for one election at least, into the party of southern reaction.
The transformative chemistry went by various names. “White backlash.” “Racial conservatism.” Or the old standby, “states’ rights”, a political term of art that presumed wide latitude on the part of individual states to regulate provincial society, which included, it hardly need be said (though plenty of hot-blooded segs yelled it anyway), the power to grind black people down to the legal and economic equivalent of inmates on a Louisiana prison farm. As channelled by Goldwater, this new force in the Republican party was a disaster. He may have won white southerners, but he was drubbed in the overall popular vote, and Republicans lost more than 40 seats in the House. His support from Wall Street was tepid at best, and he was deserted by establishment Republican constituencies throughout the north-east and midwest.
Clearly, the situation called for serious soul-searching in the GOP. One might have expected the party to reject Goldwater’s white-backlash strategy and return to establishment Republican conservatism. But party pros, and in particular that political genius Richard Nixon, saw in Goldwater’s defeat the makings of an extraordinary coalition. A compact. A combination. A deal.
Mmmm, standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me
Everybody pass me by
What was needed was white backlash with a kinder, gentler face. Years later, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, by then an operative in the Reagan White House, would explain the essence of the “southern strategy” to an academic researcher:
You start out in 1954 by saying ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger’.
The problem was mainly one of marketing: how to make racism suitable for prime time. It was Atwater’s mentor and fellow South Carolinian Harry Dent Sr, a former adviser to Strom Thurmond, who helped Nixon perfect the southern strategy, tutoring the future president in the kinder, gentler vocabulary of the new racial politics, a politics that would deliver the White House to Republicans in five of the next six presidential elections.
It wasn’t an accident. It took planning and work. As made plain in the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority by Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips, the southern strategy was a considered, premeditated, highly disciplined appeal to southern whites, and more generally to the deep-seated racism of America. In a 1970 interview published in the New York Times, Phillips put it this way:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10% to 20% of the negro vote and they don’t need any more than that … but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Well, if that’s where the votes are, then by God, we better get down in that hog wallow and root ’em out! And so the Grand Old Party, the party of New York financiers, thrifty New Englanders, and wholesome midwesterners whose ancestors fought and defeated the Confederate States of America, made a deal with the south. It had taken the better part of 40 years, but Republicans had finally found their answer to the New Deal.
Goldwater discovered it; Nixon refined it; and Reagan perfected it into the darkest of the modern political dark arts. Where does Trump come in? We’re getting there. It may seem hard to reconcile so congenial a presence as Ronald Reagan with the violent racism behind the southern strategy, but Reagan knew that devil well; knew him and paid him court on his home turf. In August 1980, for his first speech as the Republican party’s newly minted nominee, Reagan traveled to the Neshoba County fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and spoke the following words:
I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to be given to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
The Neshoba County speech is a remarkable moment in American political history, the crystallization of an existential struggle whose outcome is still very much in doubt. Why would Reagan, fresh off the Republican convention with his party’s nomination in hand, travel to a remote, rural county in a poor southern state that possessed all of seven piddly electoral votes? Devil knows why, indeed. It’s in the history, and in particular an episode from the summer of 1964 - the “Mississippi freedom summer”, when scores of civil rights workers travelled to Mississippi to organize and register African Americans to vote. On 21 June, three of these activists - Michael Schwerner, age 24; James Chaney, age 22; and Andrew Goodman, age 20: kids, basically - drove from their base in Meridian to Neshoba County to investigate the burning of tiny Mount Zion AME church, whose congregation had recently agreed to host a “freedom school” on its premises. That afternoon, the three young men were arrested on a speeding charge by Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey, held in jail for six hours, then released around 10.30 in the evening. They drove off in the direction of Meridian and disappeared.
Mmm, the sun goin’ down, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here
Ooo ooee eeee, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here
I haven’t got no lovin’ sweet woman
That love and feel my care
For the next six weeks - a span of time that included Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater’s nomination at the Republican National Convention - the country watched as more than a hundred FBI agents fanned out across the state in search of the young men. Walter Cronkite did a special report for CBS; the national press had dozens of reporters on the ground. Mississippi officials insisted that the whole thing was a hoax, a publicity stunt to drum up support for the civil rights movement. Mississippi senator James Eastland alleged that the movement’s Meridian office had reported the three men missing in advance of their disappearance, and he called on President Johnson to launch an investigation into “civil rights fraud”. Leaders of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission asserted that the young men were regularly being sighted alive and well, most reliably in Alabama. Others claimed that they were hiding out in Cuba, “with Fidel Castro and the communists”.
Eventually the search homed in on an earthen dam on the farm of one Olen Burrage, about five miles south-west of Philadelphia, and on a 106-degree day in August, with FBI agents fighting off swarms of blowflies and a stench so bad that some of the men puffed strong cigars to mask the smell, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were dug out of the Burrage dam.
In the months and years to follow, the story of their deaths would gradually come to light: their abduction by a Ku Klux Klan posse; the collusion of local law enforcement; the point-blank execution in a clearing in the woods. Far from being the work of a few vigilantes, a quite distinct picture emerges of a brutal, highly organized power structure procuring the murders of these three young men, then spinning hard to keep the truth from coming to light. Elected officials. Citizens councils. Law enforcement. The “community”.
And that’s where Reagan went to speak the words “I believe in states’ rights”, in his first appearance as the Republican nominee. These days we know it as dog-whistle politics, that coded language Lee Atwater was talking about. Reagan did not, by the way, mention Chaney, Schwerner or Goodman, whose bodies had been found a few miles away. That screaming silence, that was a dog whistle too, and to think that Reagan didn’t know what he was doing is to consign him to the ranks of the epically stupid. He’d campaigned for Goldwater. He was a two-term governor of California, and a veteran of national politics. The Neshoba County speech stands as one of the true masterpieces of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle that blew out the eardrums of every racist reactionary within 3,000 miles.
•••
The story goes that Robert Johnson met the devil at a crossroads one night, and bargained away his soul in exchange for otherworldly musical chops. “Who’s the other guy playing with him?” Keith Richards is supposed to have asked the first time he heard a Johnson record, but it was just Johnson and his guitar. Literal-minded blues fans have burned a lot of gas over the years roving the Mississippi Delta, seeking the actual crossroads where the deal went down, but that crossroads belongs more to myth than any one place. The archetype of the devil at the crossroads waiting to make a deal shows up in cultures all over the world. One naturally wonders what sorts of forces Karl Rove was channeling when he named his Super Pac American Crossroads.
The devil didn’t have to wait long to collect his due. Robert Johnson died at age 27 - poisoned, according to lore, by the jealous husband of a woman he’d been flirting with. The Republican party’s pact with the south has had a much longer run, going on 50 years now, though the deal is looking shaky. It won’t come as a news flash to anyone that the Tea Party, the true believers, “the base” - the core of which is all those white southerners who gave an estimated 70% of their votes to Romney in 2012 - is fed up with the party establishment, the country club and Fortune 500 set that has prospered beyond imagining these past few decades. And how has the base been doing? Lousy, by pretty much every measure - income, longevity, drug addiction, job security, healthcare, education and social mobility.
“Take the bureaucratic shackles off” was Goldwater’s war cry back in 1964, and his laissez-faire economic gospel has echoed down through the years, from Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes and all the way through Romney. Cut taxes and regulation, roll up the social safety net, squash organized labor to nil. It’s worked out wonderfully for the job creators. While the true believers in the base were fighting the Kenyan in the White House over prayer in the schools and immigration and the hetero sanctity of marriage, tidal waves of money have been flowing upstream to their bosses.
No wonder people are pissed off. The south’s been suckered, along with all the other blue-collar and middle-class “Reagan Democrats” who put their faith in the GOP. The deal at the heart of the Southern Strategy is falling apart, and perhaps the modern Republican party with it. At this point it seems only a preternaturally gifted dealmaker could save the situation. Boehner couldn’t do it; he’s someplace warm playing golf. McConnell can’t do it; it’s all he can manage to keep the Senate from sinking into a cesspool of dysfunction. So just when it looks like the deal is beyond saving - lo, unto us a Trump is given.
It’s no fluke that one of the loudest and most persistent of the Obama birthers took the deep south states on Super Tuesday. While the other Republican contenders keep their xenophobia within the bounds of acceptably cruel political discourse, Trump blows it out: his racist rants play like full-fledged operas compared to the dog-whistle stuff, shredding the finely honed code that’s worked so long and so well for the GOP establishment. But that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage. Even better, he’s beyond the establishment’s control. Nobody is the boss of Trump, not the Kochs, not Sheldon Adelson, and certainly not Reince Priebus, chief functionary of the Republican National Committee.
If Bernie Sanders has caused more than a few McGovern flashbacks for the Democrats, then surely Trump is giving Goldwater night sweats to plenty of old heads in the Republican party. But if Trump is the guy, the south looks solid for at least one more election. At what long-term cost to the party, we shall see. The country grows more colorful, less like that white southern man with each passing year.
You can run, you can run,
Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
You can run, you can run,
Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
Lord, that I’m standin‘ at the crossroad, babe
I believe I’m sinkin’ down
SOURCE
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy now,
Save poor Bob, if you please”
Robert Johnson, Cross Road Blues
How did it get to Trump?
To put it in Trump terms: you could say it started with a deal. Or more precisely, a big deal with various side deals attached, all of it amounting to one grand, dark bargain whose payment may be coming due at last. If one was inclined to reach for metaphor, you could say it was a deal with the devil. Or you could say it started with this, a plank adopted by the Democratic national convention of 1948:
The Democratic party commits itself to continuing efforts to eradicate all racial, religious, and economic discrimination.
That was enough to bring the devil howling out of his hole, that foot-on-the-neck-of-the-black-man devil of the Jim Crow, hookworm, lynch-prone south - “the solid south” that reliably delivered its votes to the Democratic party every four years.
The year 1948 was a flash that led to a slow burn, a simmering fuse that wouldn’t erupt again for 16 years. The flash was the breakaway States’ Rights Democratic party, aka the Dixiecrats (motto: “segregation forever”), who recoiled from the regular Democrats’ spasm of conscience and put forward their own candidate for president, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond. Thurmond campaigned on a platform that decried civil rights as “infamous and iniquitous”, “totalitarian” and an attempt by the federal government to impose “a police nation” on the land of the free. That fall, the Dixiecrats took four deep south states and 39 electoral votes from Harry Truman, a rippling of racist muscle that kept the Democratic party’s egalitarian impulse in check throughout the 1950s.
That decade was the slow burn, but it was coming. Occasional aberrations aside, the south stayed solid for the Democrats after Truman, though the devil felt the cracks under his feet, roamed uneasy over the land. Brown v Board of Education was a tremblor. Montgomery, Little Rock, more tremblors. At the Democrats’ 1960 convention, African American delegates walked out in protest over John F Kennedy’s concessions to the southern segs, this at a time when the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation - and thus a 90lb weakling in most of the south - was welcoming civil rights advocates to its convention. Devil stamped his feet, sniffed the air.
Across the south people were marching and sometimes dying for civil rights, though you didn’t have to march or even reach the age of majority to qualify for murder, as shown by the 1963 bombing deaths of four young African American girls, at church, in Birmingham. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson, Democrat of Texas and a son of the hardscrabble south, seized JFK’s cautious civil rights agenda and turned it into a juggernaut. “If you get in my way I’m going to run you down,” he told his old Senate mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia, and it’s surely one of the great mysteries not just of American politics but of human nature in general that Lyndon Johnson, a man born and formed in one of America’s most enduring tar pits of xenophobia, would be the crucial force multiplier for civil rights.
He knew better than anyone the political risk. “I think we just gave the south to the Republicans,” he told his staff after ramming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. His aide Bill Moyers recalled the moment in more drastic terms: Johnson feared he had delivered the south to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine”, a prediction whose proof, while not yet conclusive - we are happy that Mr Moyers is still with us - has trended ever since toward prophecy. The first hard evidence came in the presidential election that fall, when Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater saw only Arizona (Goldwater’s home state) and the old Dixiecrat states, plus Georgia, go Republican. Goldwater had been one of only a handful of Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act, and his nominating convention turned into a raucous revolt against the party’s eastern establishment. Nelson Rockefeller, millionaire governor of New York and the avatar of what’s now known as a country club Republican, was roundly booed, hooted and dissed. Goldwater delegates berated and shook their fists at the press, and African American delegates were “shoved, pushed, spat on and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets”. Something new and nasty was afoot; Republicans were acting like a bunch of Dixiecrats. One black delegate had his suit jacket set on fire. The southern caucus at the convention named its hotel headquarters “Fort Sumter” after the starting point of the civil war. Jackie Robinson spent several “unbelievable hours” on the convention floor, and summed up his experience thus: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Ex-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, now a Democratic US senator and as fiercely segregationist as ever, broke party ranks and declared support for the Republican nominee, not only campaigning with Goldwater in the south but switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in the middle of the race. Goldwater ended up capturing 55% of the white southern vote, making him the first Republican ever to win a majority of white southerners, and the party of Lincoln was transformed, for one election at least, into the party of southern reaction.
The transformative chemistry went by various names. “White backlash.” “Racial conservatism.” Or the old standby, “states’ rights”, a political term of art that presumed wide latitude on the part of individual states to regulate provincial society, which included, it hardly need be said (though plenty of hot-blooded segs yelled it anyway), the power to grind black people down to the legal and economic equivalent of inmates on a Louisiana prison farm. As channelled by Goldwater, this new force in the Republican party was a disaster. He may have won white southerners, but he was drubbed in the overall popular vote, and Republicans lost more than 40 seats in the House. His support from Wall Street was tepid at best, and he was deserted by establishment Republican constituencies throughout the north-east and midwest.
Clearly, the situation called for serious soul-searching in the GOP. One might have expected the party to reject Goldwater’s white-backlash strategy and return to establishment Republican conservatism. But party pros, and in particular that political genius Richard Nixon, saw in Goldwater’s defeat the makings of an extraordinary coalition. A compact. A combination. A deal.
Mmmm, standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me
Everybody pass me by
What was needed was white backlash with a kinder, gentler face. Years later, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, by then an operative in the Reagan White House, would explain the essence of the “southern strategy” to an academic researcher:
You start out in 1954 by saying ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger’.
The problem was mainly one of marketing: how to make racism suitable for prime time. It was Atwater’s mentor and fellow South Carolinian Harry Dent Sr, a former adviser to Strom Thurmond, who helped Nixon perfect the southern strategy, tutoring the future president in the kinder, gentler vocabulary of the new racial politics, a politics that would deliver the White House to Republicans in five of the next six presidential elections.
It wasn’t an accident. It took planning and work. As made plain in the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority by Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips, the southern strategy was a considered, premeditated, highly disciplined appeal to southern whites, and more generally to the deep-seated racism of America. In a 1970 interview published in the New York Times, Phillips put it this way:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10% to 20% of the negro vote and they don’t need any more than that … but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Well, if that’s where the votes are, then by God, we better get down in that hog wallow and root ’em out! And so the Grand Old Party, the party of New York financiers, thrifty New Englanders, and wholesome midwesterners whose ancestors fought and defeated the Confederate States of America, made a deal with the south. It had taken the better part of 40 years, but Republicans had finally found their answer to the New Deal.
Goldwater discovered it; Nixon refined it; and Reagan perfected it into the darkest of the modern political dark arts. Where does Trump come in? We’re getting there. It may seem hard to reconcile so congenial a presence as Ronald Reagan with the violent racism behind the southern strategy, but Reagan knew that devil well; knew him and paid him court on his home turf. In August 1980, for his first speech as the Republican party’s newly minted nominee, Reagan traveled to the Neshoba County fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and spoke the following words:
I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to be given to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
The Neshoba County speech is a remarkable moment in American political history, the crystallization of an existential struggle whose outcome is still very much in doubt. Why would Reagan, fresh off the Republican convention with his party’s nomination in hand, travel to a remote, rural county in a poor southern state that possessed all of seven piddly electoral votes? Devil knows why, indeed. It’s in the history, and in particular an episode from the summer of 1964 - the “Mississippi freedom summer”, when scores of civil rights workers travelled to Mississippi to organize and register African Americans to vote. On 21 June, three of these activists - Michael Schwerner, age 24; James Chaney, age 22; and Andrew Goodman, age 20: kids, basically - drove from their base in Meridian to Neshoba County to investigate the burning of tiny Mount Zion AME church, whose congregation had recently agreed to host a “freedom school” on its premises. That afternoon, the three young men were arrested on a speeding charge by Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey, held in jail for six hours, then released around 10.30 in the evening. They drove off in the direction of Meridian and disappeared.
Mmm, the sun goin’ down, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here
Ooo ooee eeee, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here
I haven’t got no lovin’ sweet woman
That love and feel my care
For the next six weeks - a span of time that included Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater’s nomination at the Republican National Convention - the country watched as more than a hundred FBI agents fanned out across the state in search of the young men. Walter Cronkite did a special report for CBS; the national press had dozens of reporters on the ground. Mississippi officials insisted that the whole thing was a hoax, a publicity stunt to drum up support for the civil rights movement. Mississippi senator James Eastland alleged that the movement’s Meridian office had reported the three men missing in advance of their disappearance, and he called on President Johnson to launch an investigation into “civil rights fraud”. Leaders of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission asserted that the young men were regularly being sighted alive and well, most reliably in Alabama. Others claimed that they were hiding out in Cuba, “with Fidel Castro and the communists”.
Eventually the search homed in on an earthen dam on the farm of one Olen Burrage, about five miles south-west of Philadelphia, and on a 106-degree day in August, with FBI agents fighting off swarms of blowflies and a stench so bad that some of the men puffed strong cigars to mask the smell, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were dug out of the Burrage dam.
In the months and years to follow, the story of their deaths would gradually come to light: their abduction by a Ku Klux Klan posse; the collusion of local law enforcement; the point-blank execution in a clearing in the woods. Far from being the work of a few vigilantes, a quite distinct picture emerges of a brutal, highly organized power structure procuring the murders of these three young men, then spinning hard to keep the truth from coming to light. Elected officials. Citizens councils. Law enforcement. The “community”.
And that’s where Reagan went to speak the words “I believe in states’ rights”, in his first appearance as the Republican nominee. These days we know it as dog-whistle politics, that coded language Lee Atwater was talking about. Reagan did not, by the way, mention Chaney, Schwerner or Goodman, whose bodies had been found a few miles away. That screaming silence, that was a dog whistle too, and to think that Reagan didn’t know what he was doing is to consign him to the ranks of the epically stupid. He’d campaigned for Goldwater. He was a two-term governor of California, and a veteran of national politics. The Neshoba County speech stands as one of the true masterpieces of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle that blew out the eardrums of every racist reactionary within 3,000 miles.
•••
The story goes that Robert Johnson met the devil at a crossroads one night, and bargained away his soul in exchange for otherworldly musical chops. “Who’s the other guy playing with him?” Keith Richards is supposed to have asked the first time he heard a Johnson record, but it was just Johnson and his guitar. Literal-minded blues fans have burned a lot of gas over the years roving the Mississippi Delta, seeking the actual crossroads where the deal went down, but that crossroads belongs more to myth than any one place. The archetype of the devil at the crossroads waiting to make a deal shows up in cultures all over the world. One naturally wonders what sorts of forces Karl Rove was channeling when he named his Super Pac American Crossroads.
The devil didn’t have to wait long to collect his due. Robert Johnson died at age 27 - poisoned, according to lore, by the jealous husband of a woman he’d been flirting with. The Republican party’s pact with the south has had a much longer run, going on 50 years now, though the deal is looking shaky. It won’t come as a news flash to anyone that the Tea Party, the true believers, “the base” - the core of which is all those white southerners who gave an estimated 70% of their votes to Romney in 2012 - is fed up with the party establishment, the country club and Fortune 500 set that has prospered beyond imagining these past few decades. And how has the base been doing? Lousy, by pretty much every measure - income, longevity, drug addiction, job security, healthcare, education and social mobility.
“Take the bureaucratic shackles off” was Goldwater’s war cry back in 1964, and his laissez-faire economic gospel has echoed down through the years, from Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes and all the way through Romney. Cut taxes and regulation, roll up the social safety net, squash organized labor to nil. It’s worked out wonderfully for the job creators. While the true believers in the base were fighting the Kenyan in the White House over prayer in the schools and immigration and the hetero sanctity of marriage, tidal waves of money have been flowing upstream to their bosses.
No wonder people are pissed off. The south’s been suckered, along with all the other blue-collar and middle-class “Reagan Democrats” who put their faith in the GOP. The deal at the heart of the Southern Strategy is falling apart, and perhaps the modern Republican party with it. At this point it seems only a preternaturally gifted dealmaker could save the situation. Boehner couldn’t do it; he’s someplace warm playing golf. McConnell can’t do it; it’s all he can manage to keep the Senate from sinking into a cesspool of dysfunction. So just when it looks like the deal is beyond saving - lo, unto us a Trump is given.
It’s no fluke that one of the loudest and most persistent of the Obama birthers took the deep south states on Super Tuesday. While the other Republican contenders keep their xenophobia within the bounds of acceptably cruel political discourse, Trump blows it out: his racist rants play like full-fledged operas compared to the dog-whistle stuff, shredding the finely honed code that’s worked so long and so well for the GOP establishment. But that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage. Even better, he’s beyond the establishment’s control. Nobody is the boss of Trump, not the Kochs, not Sheldon Adelson, and certainly not Reince Priebus, chief functionary of the Republican National Committee.
If Bernie Sanders has caused more than a few McGovern flashbacks for the Democrats, then surely Trump is giving Goldwater night sweats to plenty of old heads in the Republican party. But if Trump is the guy, the south looks solid for at least one more election. At what long-term cost to the party, we shall see. The country grows more colorful, less like that white southern man with each passing year.
You can run, you can run,
Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
You can run, you can run,
Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
Lord, that I’m standin‘ at the crossroad, babe
I believe I’m sinkin’ down
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