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Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000 - Hardcover

Mayer, Jeremy D.

 
9780375506253: Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 037550625X ISBN 13: 9780375506253
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

An investigation into how the politics of race has shaped the last forty years of presidential elections examines the impact of the growing power of the African American electorate.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy D. Mayer grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and received his undergraduate degree in political science from Brown University in 1990. After two years in Japan, he pursued graduate studies in politics at Oxford and Georgetown, receiving his Ph.D. from Georgetown in 1996. He is a visiting assistant professor of government at Georgetown. Mayer is also the author of the textbook <i>9-11: The Giant Awakens</i>.

Aus dem Klappentext

ics has permeated American presidential campaigns for more than half a century. From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, presidents-to-be and their adversaries have dealt with the problems and the opportunities presented by America’s bitter racial divide. Some chose to embrace racial progress, others to play to the white backlash, and still others attempted to do both, often with surprising success.<br><br>Jeremy D. Mayer has studied every presidential race from JFK’s campaign in 1960 to George W. Bush’s in 2000 and the crucial difference the black vote has made in each election.<br><br>Mayer discusses in detail:<br>• The 1960 election, where John F. Kennedy brilliantly straddled the civil rights issue. In an effort to satisfy white southerners, he spoke appeasing words to segregated white audiences, and to attract black voters, he called Coretta Scott King while her husband was imprisoned. <br>• The 1976 primary race between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford

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THE IMPORTANCE OF RACE IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1903

At the opening of this century, W. E. B. Du Bois boldly predicted that the story of the next hundred years would be the problem of the color line, the tortured divide between black and white. For at least fifty years, Du Bois was wrong; politicians of both parties worked to keep race off the nation's agenda until 1948, and the issue would not dominate our politics until 1963-65. Yet the last decades of this century confirm Du Bois's prescience, for the upheavals and changes that have been wrought in the matter of race have been the dominant narrative of American history in this era. Beneath the surface of American politics, the pressure for change in America's racial caste system had been building and exploded in the tumult of the 1960s. Much of the battle over racial equality revolved around the presidency. Just as slavery and Reconstruction shaped sixty years of presidential politics and policies, so too with the admission of blacks into the sunlight of de jure equality.

Race and the array of issues surrounding it have been crucial to every presidential election since 1960. Every presidential candidate during this period has had to take positions on racial matters, and each campaign's strategic choices were influenced by the racial environment of the election year. Moreover, decisions about racial issues played a role in each party's nomination fights. Race affected the presidential contest in years when race was central to the nation's agenda and in years when race was submerged by a host of other issues. Race always mattered in presidential campaigns, whether the candidate was liberal or conservative, Democratic, Republican, or independent.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE RACIAL POLITICS OF CAMPAIGNS, 1960-2000

At the midcentury, the politics of race underwent tremendous change. African Americans, who had tended to vote Republican out of loyalty to the party that brought Emancipation and the brief period of Reconstruction, had shifted to Roosevelt in 1936 in response to his economic populism. FDR maintained their loyalty in each of his subsequent elections, and blacks became a key part of the New Deal presidential coalition that dominated American politics from 1932 to 1968. However, the coalition was inherently unstable, because segregationist southern whites were an even larger component of the Democratic majority. FDR successfully kept race from emerging on the national scene during his presidency, but by 1960, the issue was becoming unavoidable. In 1956 blacks had voted Republican at a higher rate than at any point since 1932, because of Stevenson's studied vagueness on race and Eisenhower's halting moves toward racial equality. Thus, the black vote was up for grabs in 1960, as it has never been at any time since.

On the surface, there is a great deal of stasis to the racial politics that followed 1960. Blacks would vote Democratic by overwhelming margins, outpacing any other ethnic or occupational group in their loyalty to Democrats. Indeed, in most years blacks would vote Democratic at higher levels than all professed Democrats. At the same time, majorities or pluralities of whites voted Republican in ten of the eleven presidential elections from 1960 to 2000, turning Democratic only in the Johnson landslide of 1964. Also, the competitive policy positions of the two parties did not change during this period; in every election after 1960, the Republicans were more racially conservative.

Yet change was also vast and far-reaching. The most obvious and significant change during this period was the growth in black electoral power. In 1960, only a fraction of eligible blacks were registered in the South, the region where the majority of African Americans lived. In the North, blacks voted in great numbers but frequently saw their political leadership co-opted by urban machines. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) succeeded, after much blood and struggle, at enfranchising blacks almost a century after the Fifteenth Amendment ostensibly gave them the right to vote. The majestic realization of this overdue promise signaled the end of the one-party white South, indirectly helped bring down the last urban machines, and forever altered the electoral landscape. Blacks were no longer passive observers to the political process; they could be defeated, but they could not be easily ignored. The only comparable electoral shift in American history was the 1919 awarding of the franchise to women. However, the full enfranchisement of African Americans was more significant because blacks shared a common economic and ethnic history, a cohesive set of political goals, and a great tendency to cohere as a voting bloc, none of which characterized women in the decades after they won the vote. Because of their unequal distribution around the nation, and their nearly monolithic voting in presidential elections, blacks elected every Democratic president since 1944 except Johnson, just as declines in their turnout helped defeat Hubert Humphrey and others. As important, the introduction of black suffrage radically altered white voting behavior in the South and in parts of the North. As black registration rose, so too did white registration. As blacks voted monolithically Democratic in response to Kennedy's and Johnson's civil rights moves, many whites eventually shifted their allegiance to the GOP in response. In many ways, the American political order is still shaking with the aftershocks of the 1965 electoral earthquake of black enfranchisement.

Racial issues also changed greatly from 1960 to 2000.* (* One of those changes was the increasing ethnic diversity of the country, due to Hispanic and Asian immigration. This book focuses on the black-white divide in presidential politics. From 1960 to 2000, this was the most enduring, and most influential, racial fault line in our political system. While the scope of this study is limited to a particular aspect of racial politics, the others are surely worthy of examination. Some of the implications of our increasing ethnic diversity will be raised in the conclusion.)

The racial debates of 1960 revolved around ending the most egregious examples of Jim Crow segregation in the American South. By 1964, the desegregation of all public accommodations was on the agenda, as well as the looming prospect of full voting rights. In 1968, the focus shifted to the North, as the ghettos burned amid advances in the legal and socioeconomic standing of African Americans. By 1972, no major political figure would endorse segregation, not even George Wallace, who had proclaimed in 1963, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" Yet how to end segregation, as well as what to replace it with, bedeviled political elites, as candidate after candidate responded to the white backlash against busing. Indeed, busing was the pivot for the most radical change in the rhetoric of racial politics. Up until that point, racial liberals typically argued for color blindness, and racial conservatives pined for a government that at least tolerated traditionally color-conscious social structures. With busing and affirmative action, the terms of the debate upended to the point where racial conservatives hijacked the rhetoric of the slain Martin Luther King Jr., and advocated a society that judged individuals on their individual character, not the color of their skins. De jure equality was now the stated goal of racial conservatism. Racial progressives, on the other hand, argued for the benign use of race to eradicate remaining inequalities. In 1960, an all-black dormitory on a majority white campus was an obscene symbol of racial intolerance; nine years later, such a dorm was an emblem of racial progressivism. In 1964,...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
037550625X
ISBN 13 
9780375506253
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
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