PC/AHC/WI: Blacks a major swing group in American politics
- Thread starter TimTurner
- Start date
First off, it would require the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act to be bipartisan. Furthermore, either party could pass laws to undo the soft racist laws, such as housing laws, that gave them better opportunities. It would require both parties having to purge the segregationists out, who then might form a third party (though both could use that to really crush them)
FillyofDelphi
Banned
Easy; you just need to get a larger share out of bottom rungs of the economic ladder during the period of greater social mobility of the mid-1900's (Which would result in what some call the "Welfare Trap" being less of a dragging force). One element that might help would be tweaking the terms of early Great Society reforms so that households with single parents don't receive as disproportionate aid compared to married couples (extremely relevent for groups with high levels of unemployment and income instability, such as African Americans). This would increase the number of intact households, who are more likely to be able to economize to save, raise (in aggrigate) a generation of less troubled youth, start building up savings or community capital (tax base) to improve education, ect. This would make the group more diverse in terms of economy and geographic spread (as "escaping the ghetto" is easier, which creates a virtious cycle in terms of undermining negative sterotypes and so greater social acceptance by white communities) and so developing a wider array of political opinions and concerns.
I'd like to remind everyone in this thread that what won over black voters for the Democrats wasn't civil rights but the New Deal.
As for the OP, go back to the 1860s-1870s and have a Radical Republican be president and end segregation. When the Democrats return racial warfare ignites in the south but segregation fails to be restored. However, news of what is going on in the south horrifies northerners and the Democrats are soundly defeated in the next election. Without segregation black majority areas in the US have the opportunity to develop. The Democrats eventually fade away and are replaced by the Populists, which begin a campaign of uniting laborers, farmers and the poor regardless of race. With the two major parties in the US not having a legacy of racism and with blacks being a lot richer on average this leads to both blacks and whites being swing groups.
I think it is really hard for this to occur with a post 1900 POD.
As for the OP, go back to the 1860s-1870s and have a Radical Republican be president and end segregation. When the Democrats return racial warfare ignites in the south but segregation fails to be restored. However, news of what is going on in the south horrifies northerners and the Democrats are soundly defeated in the next election. Without segregation black majority areas in the US have the opportunity to develop. The Democrats eventually fade away and are replaced by the Populists, which begin a campaign of uniting laborers, farmers and the poor regardless of race. With the two major parties in the US not having a legacy of racism and with blacks being a lot richer on average this leads to both blacks and whites being swing groups.
I think it is really hard for this to occur with a post 1900 POD.
From my understanding, African-American culture has a large emphasis on community and solidarity due to historical persecution (similar to Jews), and as a result, the old adage "birds of a feather flock together" tends to be especially true with African-Americans. I think it is ingrained in Black culture that they stick together, which part of that would mean voting for the same party (Democrats since the 1930s). Hope I didn't get that wrong or offend anyone.
FDR declines to run in 1940, leading to Wendell Wilkie being elected. Wilkie launches significant desegregation efforts, which runs into massive opposition from the southern Democrats. However, due to quite a bit of opposition in his own party Wilkie partners with Henry Wallace (failed candidate for the Democrats and still pretty popular) to push it through. Wilkie manages to desegregate the armed forces and begin the process of desegregation, but can't finish by 1948 when he leaves office. Adlai Stevenson wins the presidency that year, and does something similiar to continue, partnering with Wilkie to rally Republican support for additional measures aimed at ending segregation.
End result is that civil rights are policies backed by both major parties, with the Dixiecrats left homeless in the face of the national organization, and as such the black vote is fairly split. In the south black voters are largely Republican since they associated the Democrats with the Dixiecrats, but in other parts of the country the Democratic Party emerged as the group championing civil rights due regional factors.
Nixon meanwhile never wins anything, and the Southern strategy is never adopted*.
*This would probably result in a minor party emerging and being important in the south ala the American Independent Party, which achieves more success than it did OTL, but finds its attempts to act as a power broker in the House smashed when neither major party will cave to their demands.
End result is that civil rights are policies backed by both major parties, with the Dixiecrats left homeless in the face of the national organization, and as such the black vote is fairly split. In the south black voters are largely Republican since they associated the Democrats with the Dixiecrats, but in other parts of the country the Democratic Party emerged as the group championing civil rights due regional factors.
Nixon meanwhile never wins anything, and the Southern strategy is never adopted*.
*This would probably result in a minor party emerging and being important in the south ala the American Independent Party, which achieves more success than it did OTL, but finds its attempts to act as a power broker in the House smashed when neither major party will cave to their demands.
And where would this opposition come from? There were socially conservative Republicans who had a genteel support of "social" segregation, but the party was always officially for civil rights. It was just that after Reconstruction, they couldn't be arsed to do anything about it.
????
Wallace was a Midwestern Progressive Republican (his father had been Agriculture Secretary under Harding). FDR brought him in as Ag Secretary as a bipartisan move (the Wallaces had been celebrated publishers of agricultural journals and the younger Wallace founded a very successful seed company). He had no political base in the Democratic Party; in 1940 FDR had to threaten withdrawal to get the convention to nominate Wallace for VP. (Iironically, by 1944 Wallace had become a favorite with much of the party rank and file, and FDR and party leaders had to engineer his replacement by Truman.)
Without that move by FDR in 1940, there is almost no chance Wallace ever runs for anything, much less being nominated for President by the Democrats.
I have been doing some research lately on the 1952, 1956, and 1960 elections, focusing on the two nearly all-African American congressional districts that existed at that time: IL-01 (the heart of the "black belt" on Chicago's South Side) and NY-16 (Harlem, excluding East Harlem which was largely Puerto Rican--with some Italians remaining--and was in another district). IL-01 was listed as 91.7% Negro in the 1960 US Census, 91.0 in the 1960 one. NY-16 was listed as 86.8% Negro in 1950, 88.0% in 1960. Both districts were represented throughout the decade by African American Congressmen (William Dawson for IL-01, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. for NY-16). Here are maps of the districts:
Here are the figures for how these districts voted in the presidential elections of 1952, 1956, and 1960. (I am omitting minor party candidates, who got very few votes in these districts.)
IL-01
1952
D (Stevenson) 99,224 74.6%
R (Eisenhower) 33,805 25.4%
1956
D (Stevenson) 68,266 63.7%
R (Eisenhower) 38,827 36.3%
1960
D (Kennedy) 81,399 77.4
R (Nixon) 23,109 22.0
****
NY-16
1952
D (Stevenson) 82,882 81.2%
R (Eisenhower) 17,497 17.0%
1956
D (Stevenson) 62,004 66.4%
R (Eisenhower) 31,325 33.6%
1960
D (Kennedy) 58,192 64.9
Liberal (Kennedy) 11,364 12.1 JFK total: 77.1
R (Nixon) 19,902 22.2
***
Now it is possible that the vote from big northern African American communities like those of Chicago and New York understate the Republican vote among African Americans in the nation as a whole--for example, the relatively few African Americans who voted in the South seem to have retained their Republican loyalty longer than those in the North. Nevertheless, even looking at the northern big city African American vote, one can say that it was not quite a bloc in the sense of the 90% plus percentages for Democratic presidential candidates we are used to since 1964--or the Republican percentages before the New Deal. Except for Eisenhower in 1952 in NY-16, the Republican presidential presidential candidate in these years always got at least 22 percent of the vote. 1956 was easily the GOP's best year among African American voters. Stevenson took a "moderate" stand on civil rights to get southern white votes; Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. openly endorsed Eisenhower, supposedly on civil rights (cynics suggested it might also have something to do with the administration dropping an income tax charge against Powell). Anyway, Ike got 33.6% of the vote in the Harlem district and 36.3% in the Chicago South Side one.
So if the Republicans in 1964 had not nominated a candidate who voted against the civil rights bill, would the African American vote be competitive? Let's say it would at least be more competitive than it is now! Whether you get 10% or 32% of the African American vote in a state matters in a close election. The problem of course is that some of the very positions that Republicans have taken that alienate black voters may have been necessary for them to win white voters in the South and elsewhere..
(One final note: If Nixon had done as well among African American voters in 1960 as Ike had done in 1956 it is quite clear that he would have carried Illinois--and very likely New Jersey and Missouri, and these states combined would have been enough to give him a majority in the Electoral College. I don't know if calling Dr. King's wife would have been enough to do that, however. One must remember that in 1960 the US was in a recession--a mild one to be sure, but even mild recessions hit the African American community hard. But in any event I doubt that calling Mrs. King would have cost Nixon a single southern state he carried. )
***
Sources: Congressional Data District Book: Districts of the 87th Congress gives the 1952 and 1956 presidential vote by district. as well as the 1960 census figures by race per district. https://books.google.com/books?id=WfZBkikMdI8C&pg=PR7
For the 1960 presodential vote by congressional district, I have used the 1961 CQ Almamac: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uGws4K8ypzoJ:https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal61-879-29204-1371757+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
For the 1950 census figures on percentage of African Americans in each congressional district, see https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uRUj0htSg1MJ:https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal56-1347950+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Last edited:
The New Deal turned black voters into a solidly (around 60-70%) Democratic voting group. The 1964 Civil Rights Act turned black voters into an overwhelmingly (around 85-95%) voting group.
Eisenhower was, IIRC, the last Republican to come close to winning the black vote in a presidential election, when he got over 40% against Stevenson following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case.
Edit: the post above mine goes into more impressive detail on this.
how about Garner replacing Roosevelt following his assassination in 1932? With either no WW2 or US neutrality. Contrary to popular opinion Garner supported around 70-80% of New Deal measures and a lot of the ones he didn't are the ones economists now consider to be of negligible benefit. So a no-frills New Deal with a white Southerner in the White House followed by a longer slower struggle for racial equality and with support from both Republicans and Northern Democrats but avoiding the OTL welfare trap. Black Americans don't feel hugely indebted to either main party getting some good and bad from both and vote on the issues and the attitudes by TTL 2018.
Being officially for something means absolutely nothing. There were plenty of right-wingers in the GOP even then to oppose federal action on civil rights, even if they masked it under states rights or similiar crap.
*shrug*
It doesn't really matter who it is, you just need someone willing to back civil rights and willing to cross party lines to do it. The point is you need the PRESIDENT acting for both parties, since how Congress votes doesn't matter once the issue is past. Giving both the GOP and Democrats a hand in civil rights ending will be the only thing that can shift black voters back into the Republican camp without removing them completely from the Democratic one (letting the Dixiecrats have their way would do that for instance).
FillyofDelphi
Banned
I'd have to disagree: if this is perceived as a truely bipartisan iniative by the Black community than its going to be an irrelevent wash in terms of shifting party loyalty/identification (a generally difficult thing to do). Its just going to mean the issue shifts from a politically salient one to a private society question unless the dispute is over just what degree of power the government should be allowed to be "proactive" rather than "reactive" in eliminating discrimination. So, you'd default back to more relevent issues IE The New Deal/Great Society programs, which if you don't change the economic patterns or policies will still lead into the Democratic camp.
You need to generate internal divisions in the identity and generally reduce the pressures that lead greater tribalism in order to break up block voting. The easiest way to do that is to create more varied economic environments (the pocketbook is always a primary concern), probably with a substantial "floating" middle between Democratic public assistance "proactive aid" Blacks on the poor end and more conventional Protestant work ethic "reactive protection" Blacks who'd increasingly move towards Republicans. Perhaps this could occur by, as a concession to States Rights Dixiecrats to tolerate civil rights reforms while not fleeing the New Deal Cohaliton, turning the economic welfare policies to the states?
It meant so much that when the 1948 DNC adopted a civil rights plank in the platform, the Dixiecrats bolted the convention and launched Thurmond's campaign.
"State's rights" was a pose of Southern Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly for civil rights, as shown by the votes on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. (For the CRA, 136-35 in the House, 27-6 in the Senate.)
Sen. Barry Goldwater, a conservative firebrand, notoriously voted against the CRA. Would he be one of those "right-wingers in the GOP... oppose[d to] ... action on civil rights"? Goldwater was a lifelong member of the NAACP, had desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard (he was its founding commander), the Goldwater family department stores in Arizona, and the Senate cafeteria, voted for earlier civil rights bills that the Dixiecrats blocked, and voted for the 24th Amendment which abolished poll taxes. Meanwhile, southern liberals, such as Al Gore sr and Fulbright joined the filibuster of the CRA.
[/QUOTE]*shrug*
It doesn't really matter who it is, you just need someone willing to back civil rights and willing to cross party lines to do it.[/QUOTE]
There were northern liberal Democrats who would support a civil rights rpogram, but I can't identify who it would have been in 1940. Humphrey, who led the charge in 1948, wasn't any kind of national figure yet.
But it would absolutely not be Wallace.
Last edited: