On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Nathan Newman wrote:
> It's broader than that on civil rights. Remember in the mid-50s,
> Eisenhower's Justice Department was promoting some decently progressive
> civil rights bills with support from a number of GOP leaders. It was a
> complicated dance, since the GOP was allied with southern Democrats on
> labor issues, so the GOP was reluctant to push too hard on civil rights
> and undermine that alliance. But there was a substantial body of
> pro-civil rights Republicans at that point.
There was also a very cynical reason for it: so long as the south was a one party state they had zero to lose and everything to gain. Nixon was one of the prime movers behind this strategy during the Eisenhower years; he personally campaigned in Harlem.
But it all changed once the South was theirs because the political calculus changed. They now had the Dem's old assets -- and the negative ballast that went with them -- without any offsetting inner city counter ballast.
> Again it's more complicated. Some southerners were rightwing across the
> board. Others were quite progressive on many regulatory issues and budget
> issues, and a few even on union issues.
That is certainly true of Southerners in general. There is no nothing that makes the South politically conservative by nature. Nor fundamentalists. Nor gun owners. Large sections of all of them have been on the left in the past and they could be on the left in the future. In fact, the dominant view of Southern liberals and blacks post-WII was that the triumph of liberalism was inevitable in the South despite the odds.
But the dominant southern politicians elites of the Eisenhower era were definately overwhelmingly reactionary. Actually I thought _Master of the Senate_ made this very clear through its enumeration of the power committee heads and how that mattered so much more than anything else. As a body, southern politicians were actually more liberal in the 40s than they were in the 50s. Brown made them go backwards.
When you are talking of unpredictability, maybe you're thinking of Caro's description of the fight over the Brinker amendment? IMHO, while fascinating, that's a little outside the scope of this discussion -- except on the Republican side of the ledger. IMHO it shows how the Republican party leadership during the Eisenhower years (i.e., Taft) had exactly the same ideas as the Manionites claim they invented later. And thus it shows they weren't the fringe group they claim, but rather the republican mainstream that had been temporarily pushed aside.
IMHHO, Manionites and Goldwaterites have a very distorted self-image which Perlman, a very sensitive writer, wonderfully describes. But to some extent he mistakes their worldview for a correct view of the world.
Michael