How the South Became Republican

On the evening of 1 August 1952 General Dwight D.Eisenhower, the newly nominated Republican presidential nominee, met with his advisers at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver where his party’s publicity director Robert Humphreys was to present the blueprint for that year’s campaign in a plan codenamed ‘Document X’. Worried about the Party’s prospects Humphreys was keen to find a solution. Having Eisenhower on the ticket helped. The military hero who had orchestrated the D-Day landings, ‘Ike’ was admired across party divides. Despite this, the task was formidable: Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt had relegated the GOP to minority status during the 1930s with his New Deal initiatives. In 1952 just 34 per cent of Americans identified themselves as Republican. In the South – the 11 former states of the Confederacy – fewer than ten per cent of white voters did.

Humphreys presented Document X on flipcharts before a large gathering of influential Republicans. In a contrast with more measured recent campaigns, Document X planned an aggressive strategy of ‘Attack!, Attack!, Attack!’ on the big issues of the day: the war in Korea, corruption in Washington and communist infiltration in the government. Eisenhower said little, which Humphreys considered a signal that ‘the plan, on the whole, had general acceptance in the room’. He then took the flipcharts to the hotel’s boiler room, where he burnt them ‘until they were all completely destroyed’.

Document X made no reference to the South, a region in a state of deep political confusion. With African Americans systemically disenfranchised by discriminatory electoral laws, the region was historically Democratic, a legacy of the Civil War: the Republican Party was the perceived party of the North, of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery. But President Truman had damaged this relationship with his commitments to civil rights reform: in 1947 he had desegregated the armed forces. In protest some southern Democrats, or ‘Dixiecrats’, banded together and formed a third-party ticket in 1948 to prevent Truman’s election. Successful in only four states – South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana – the Dixiecrats’ bark proved worse than their bite: Truman was elected despite the ‘Solid South’ fracturing.

For the Republicans this was an opportunity and, in 1952, Eisenhower demanded that the Party attempt to woo the South in that year’s election campaign. This was partly due to his belief that any presidential hopeful should meet and hear the concerns of Americans across the country, regardless of historic loyalties. If he was ‘going to be President of all the people’, Eisenhower reflected in 1967, then he was ‘going to let them see what I am, what I look like, and tell them what I … plan to do’.

Eisenhower also had family connections to the South. Though raised in Kansas, he was born in Texas. His mother, Ida, was Virginian. During his early career in the military Eisenhower had been stationed at Fort Sam in Houston, where he met his wife, Mamie. As he later wrote: ‘I was going South – even if I had to go alone.’

Eisenhower’s staff opposed this. The Party’s chair Arthur Summerfield thought Eisenhower would damage the Republicans’ wider electoral prospects. Future attorney general Herbert Brownell worried that Eisenhower would lose northern African American voters. Sojourns in the South would simply waste time, money and resources. A Republican businessman, Jerry Lambert, certain that these plans were flawed, bet Eisenhower’s campaign manager Sherman Adams $1,000 that the general would not even carry his native Texas.

In early September Eisenhower’s first official campaign rally was held in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the most reliably Democratic states in the Union. It was a brave, arguably reckless, move. Adams admitted that it ‘nonplused [sic] a good many Republicans’. But Eisenhower’s political instincts were sharp. An estimated 30,000 people gathered in Atlanta, with one supporter comparing the occasion to ‘waiting for Santa Claus’. William Robinson, a speechwriter, telegrammed Eisenhower later that day: ‘Best start of any political campaign in history’, he concluded. ‘Congratulations.’

Eisenhower spent two days traversing Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Arkansas. Lambasting what he called the ‘top-to-bottom mess in Washington’, he promised to end the Korean War and govern conservatively – following the plan laid out in Document X. He deliberately avoided the delicate issue of race relations in an effort to reassure his audiences that he would not dismantle racial hierarchies.

Top Republicans were stunned by Eisenhower’s reception. Representative Hugh Scott, who travelled with Eisenhower, wrote: ‘Ike drawing tremendous enthusiastic crowds … Miami show the biggest day for the South since the War between the States.’

Over the course of the 1952 campaign Eisenhower made three swings through the South, visiting every state except Mississippi. He cajoled audiences and slammed politics in the capital. At times, he courted controversy. When ‘Dixie’, a pro-Confederate song and relic of the Civil War, was played during a visit to South Carolina, Eisenhower commented: ‘I always stand up when they play that song’, drawing cheers from the crowd.

Eisenhower also tapped into economic discontent in the South. This was especially true in the major cities, where burgeoning white collar populations were beginning to identify more closely with the Republicans, the party of a smaller state and lower taxes. Visiting Texas in mid-October, he seized upon the issue of offshore oil. Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court had ruled that such natural resources were the property of the federal government. Eisenhower promised to return the titles to state governments. On 14 and 15 October Eisenhower held some of his biggest rallies, in Houston and Dallas, arguing that the Democrats’ position on ‘Tideland’ oil had proven their ‘policy of grab’. The GOP, he argued, was a sympathetic ideological ally – a defender of states’ rights; heir to the Democratic Party of old.

On election evening in November, the outgoing president Truman received a telegram reporting that early results appeared ‘Landslidish’. So it would prove. Eisenhower swept the nation, carrying 39 of 48 states and accumulating 442 electoral votes. In the South he won nearly 50 per cent of the popular vote. It was sufficient to garner majorities in Tennessee, Virginia, Florida and Texas. Some had not voted Republican for nearly a century. Texas was ‘the greatest Southern prize of all’, according to the New York Times. Not only for Eisenhower: Sherman Adams was $1,000 richer.

Through the 1950s and beyond, Republican support in the South would ebb and flow, but by the turn of the 21st century it was solidly Republican. The majority of officeholders at federal and state level were Republicans. It was Eisenhower, however, who breached the dam that made the flood possible. In 1952 he had fanned the flames of southern Republicanism. Never again would the GOP forfeit the region to the Democrats.

 

Lewis Johnson is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh.