WI: James F. Byrnes became FDR’s running mate in 1940?
- Thread starter Ambassador Huntsman
- Start date
It became a more important figure in the sense that in the 20th century, vice presidents began to be invited to Cabinet meetings and be informed of what’s going on whereas they weren’t at all before that and just were there.
Holy cow!
Yes, thank you for clearly laying in the table the reality of the way things were, but
The 2nd in charge and a heartbeat away from the presidency and only in modern times was he allowed to sit in on cabinet meetings ? ! ?
I want a Vice-President who chairs the cabinet meeting when the President is out of town. And often when the President is in town but just busy with other things.
Thomas R. Marshall did chair Cabinet meetings when Wilson was in Europe and was the first veep to do so.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Riker often gives the routine orders on the bridge, deferring the important decisions to Captain Picard.
It’s an intriguing model of leadership.
But when things got tight — when President Wilson was largely incapacitated by his stroke — the executive branch was run by a combo of his doctor Dr. Cary Grayson and his wife Mrs. Edith Wilson. And our first unofficial female president or co-president may have done okay, but that’s not the way things were envisioned working!
Mrs. Willson believed Woodrow's ego couldn't have handled giving up the presidency. Grayson referred to "A serious and lasting affect on the moral of our patient".
Dewey isn't going to lock in a more liberal minded Republican Party any more then two terms of Dwight Eisenhower locked his brand of 'modern' Republicanism. Dewey has to work with the Conservative Coalition to pass his agenda in Congress, the Democratic half of that coalition is conservative southerners who will not stand for aggressive federal action on civil rights, ergo Dewey moves on the issue will have to be muted. The lessons Democrats will take from Brynes defeat in 48' is that they need someone who will run strongly on Civil Rights to win the black vote/Southerners can't win, Republicans pursuing the Southern (white vote) as they have for the past half century will realize that the way to make Southerners forget Lincoln is to tie the Democrats to civil rights, and then you're off to the races.
The broader fundementals at play, Republican migration into the sunbelt, the birth of a two-party South, African-American integration within the Democratic Party, the weakness of the 'Eastern Establishment' vis vis the party's grassroots are all working to push the Republicans to the right, push African-Americans out of the GOP, push them toward the Democratic Party.
Even with this scenario tho, having a strongly pro-civil rights Republican president changes the tone and direction of the party system enough that I don't expect the black vote to ever go 85-90% Democrat consistently. Republicans could get 30% consistently under this scenario as long as there's no Goldwater-type around, with Southern white populists remaining Dem and Southern white business conservatives going GOP.
What makes you think there won't be a Goldwater type around? The man himself has a bright career ahead of him in booming conservative Arizona, and the burgeoning breed of lean mean West/Southwestern/Mountain West GOPers birthed from the buzzsaw of SoCal Capitalism, the John Birch Society, and the Oil Business aren't going anywhere west of the Mississippi, while Dewey's brand of goo-goo, me-too GOP liberalism remains confined to a Northeastern base under perpetual threat from the Democrats Labor-Liberal-Minority coalition.
And a pro-Civil Rights Republican who's more symbolism then substance is just Eisenhower with some extra teeth. What they can't offer with substance because for lack of institutional party support Democrats can with labor and machine spoils. Eisenhower got 40% of the African American vote in 56' with Brown and the Warren Court doing his work for him, Nixon running as a Ike continuation lost 8% from that at 32% and then Nixon in 68' lost over half of that and settled in at ~15%. it takes a Dewey/Rockefeller/Eisenhower type to even get the GOP to 30-35%. The problem is the GOP base was always more Taft/Nixon then Dewey/Eisenhower.
Sooner or later some bright conservative young thing is going to realize the electoral calculus that made the Southern Strategy possible and the GOP will run with that to crack rather then co-opt the New Deal Coalition.
The fundamental crux of the issue that by the time of the PoD Democrats are the liberal* party and the Republicans are the conservative** party and those roles have been solidified but which, owing to history, also possessed regional blocs which were both more conservative and more liberal then their party cores. You can put a Southern Democrat the White House and then follow him up with a liberal Republican, but the cores of the party aren't going to change and sooner or later partisanship and ideological sorting are going to set in.
*laborers, poor farmers, immigrants etc
**vested interests, big business, rich farmers, silk-stockings etc
Last edited:
I love the tension between, How much are things locked in vs. random flux?
For starters, racism is stupid and thus seems like it would be avoidable. In fact, I did a recent thread that the American middle class doesn’t grow as rapidly between 1945 - 1970. And thus, we avoid the inevitable slowdown and the thrashing around like a wounded animal looking for villains to blame— which ended up being “liberals” rather than black persons themselves. Of course, this being a cardboard caricature of liberals.
And then I had a college professor back in 1991 who said, “American parties are not class-based.”
At first, I thought the man’s an idiot. Or he’s committed to some ideological position which leads to this strange result. But as I thought about it….
No rule that evangelical Christians have to be 70+ percent in Republican party.
No locked-in reason for rural voters being so strongly Republican. And did that start under Reagan, maybe? And above and beyond the fact that rural voters tend to be older?
George H.W. Bush Retrospective
George H.W. Bush enjoyed high approval ratings his first three years in office, but low ratings in the fourth year led to his re-election defeat.
news.gallup.com
Look at the job approval for Bush, Sr. 89 percent approval after the Persian Gulf War. And, except for the accidental fact of where his approval was in 1992 ….. easy re-election.
==============
I think I see at least part of your argument. That there was political opportunity, and over time someone’s going to take it. But if their timing is wrong or they’re not personally appealing, some of those efforts will fall flat.
And then drawing an analogy,
Not every possible song has been written. Even today, there are some rich fields of music left unexplored, unplowed, unharvested.
Last edited:
The emergence of such a person could be much later or slightly different. Like Goldwater didn’t oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on opportunistic grounds but on ideological libertarianism whereas you still had people like Bob Dole who leaned more in that direction but still voted for every single civil rights bill while in Congress. The black vote only became so heavily Democrat because Goldwater was the Republican candidate in 1964, if it was someone else the shift might’ve been less pronounced and the vote share may have been more similar to how Republicans do with Hispanics.
But was read by whites in the south as lying like a gentleman. Or, the “lying to your face” style and action which you admire in someone you agree with, but find galling in someone you disagree with.
1976 | The American Presidency Project
www.presidency.ucsb.edu
And look at this. Jimmy Carter won back “the South” in 1976.
Now, if only he had a successful presidency . . .
The breaking event was 1948. Up through 1944, white Southern Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate for President. There was a blip of support for Hoover in 1928, but it vanished in 1932. General elections were almost a formality, and turnouts were low.
From 1932 to 1948, no former Confederate state voted for a Republican. In 55 state results, the Republican got less than 20% 31 times - less than 10% 12 times.
In 1948 many previously ultra Democrats of the Deep South bolted and voted Dixiecrat. The reflexive loyalty of Southern Democrats to the national ticket substantially collapsed. In all subsequent elections, substantial and increasing proportion of them voted Republican for President. This started in 1952. In that election, Eisenhower got at at least 30% in every former Confederate state, and won Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The Republican vote share increased more than 10-fold in South Carolina and Mississippi.
At the same time, overall voter turnout in those states increased substantially as well - from 5.1M in 1948 (which had been the highest ever) to 8.5M in 1952.
Goldwater was a life member of the NAACP, who had desegregated his family's department stores in Arizona and also desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the rest of the armed forces. He voted for 1957 Civil Rights Act and for the 24th Amendment, which abolished poll taxes. He voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he thought the provisions relating to private accommodations and employment exceeded the federal government's constitutional authority.
However, when it became apparent that his stance would win support of "Dixiecrats", he opportunistically embraced that support.
By 1966, with the Voting Rights Act, the "Jim Crow" regime in the South was broken and the race question ceased to be the absolute priority of white Southern voters. While there was still broad residual loyalty to the Democratic Party, the historic "deal" between white-supremacist Southerners and the national party was dead. So the reflexive loyalty of the past was pointless, and Southern politics became bipartisan-competitive - shown by the election in 1966 of Republican governors in Arkansas and Florida, Republican Senators in Tennessee and Texas, and 10 new Republican US Representatives.
Ironically,Mr. Republican Robert Taft, is very pro Civil rights.
And if we think about the bell-shaped curve, and which parts are fat and which parts are skinny . . .
There are many more ways to achieve a 70-30 result than a 85-15 result.
I guess I can agree with that last part of no longer “the absolute priority.”
But Ronald Reagan pandered on race, officially opening his 1980 campaign for the general election at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from the site where the 3 Civil Rights workers had been kidnapped and murdered in 1964. And Reagan used the phrase “states’ rights” in a favorable way.
I wish I could say, well, he’s uplifting people’s thinking from race to economics. Maybe.
And then Reagan frequently mentioned a “welfare queen from Chicago.” And to our friends in the UK and elsewhere, yes, that checks several racially-charged boxes.
This woman — Linda Taylor — was actually a con artist who also defrauded private individuals. And she sounds like a sociopath who kidnapped children from parents who trusted up. And a live-in boyfriend said he believed she had kidnapped Paul Joseph Fronczak in a famous case.
So, a real work of art!
And so much more than just welfare fraud.
——————————————
‘ . . . Taylor posed as a voodoo practitioner and spiritual adviser, and after one or Taylor's particularly naive marks during that scheme turned up dead, Taylor was found with the dead woman's credit card. But police investigators didn't go after Taylor on murder charges, because they were worried it would detract from an ongoing welfare fraud case.
“Linda Taylor's story shows that there are real costs associated with this kind of panic, a moral climate in which stealing welfare money takes precedence over kidnapping and homicide,” Levin writes. . . ’
President Reagan didn’t look beyond some tiny-circulation “conservative” publication because he wanted it to be true because it was useful politically.
==============
Plus, there was Reagan’s phone call to Nixon.
His children Patty and Ron Jr. said he never talked that way in the house.
Last edited:
Being pro-Civil Rights until it comes to using the federal government to enforce said civil rights is a position in and of-itself. Barry Goldwater opposed giving the federal government a broad role in desegregating the South, Bob Dole did not. I don't think the fact that one of those men was on the bleeding edge of movement conservatism while the other wasn't is a coincidence.
Race is both polarizing and has a way of heightening the contradictions. Hispanics were white* on the census until 1970, African Americans were decidedly not. The trends that vaulted AuH2O to the GOP nomination aren't going away, and the battles over integration after the destruction of Jim Crow will force the members of on both parties to pick a side. The GOP can win a large chunk of the Hispanics and other immigrant groups vote because there is room to talk past race, there far far less room to do the same with African Americans especially after the 1960s.
He was so pro-civil rights he broke with the NAACP because he didn't support giving a Fair Employment Practices Commission any actual power.
Last edited:
Irrelevant.
Under the "Jim Crow" system, whites had complete control of government in the South and blacks were completely disfranchised. This was enforced by crypto-racial laws such as poll taxes, "literacy tests", and grandfather clauses, backed up by extralegal intimidation and terror, including lynching.
Republicans pretty much gave up on the South after 1876 (except in Tennessee), and couldn't be arsed to Do Anything about about white supremacist violence. I've seen a 1914 letter from Teddy Roosevelt in which he wrote that pure democracy was impossible in the South because of the sheer number of blacks there who were incapable of voting responsibly. I.e. he tacitly endorsed Jim Crow and the terror required to maintain it.
There were occasional efforts by some Republicans to change things, such as the Lodge "Force Bill" of 1890 and the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1922, but all of these efforts were killed by Southern Democrats with the support of northern (i.e. non-"Southern") Democrats. When necessary, Southern Senators filibustered against such bills, with northern Democrats voting against cloture, while Republicans refused to change the cloture rules.
Throughout the Jim Crow period, the national Democratic party could count on all states of the "Solid South" to vote for Democrats for President, and send only Democrat Senators and Representatives to Congress. (There were a handful of exceptions, but even when the Democrat presidential candidate was a hated Catholic, the vast majority of white Southerners voted for him.) In return, northern Democrats protected Jim Crow from federal interference. That was the deal.
And both Democrats and Republicans tolerated the segregationist practices demanded by the South in the armed forces and federal civil service, and often practiced elsewhere to lesser degrees.
By the 1930s, some northern Democrats had come to oppose Jim Crow. Two Democrats (from Colorado and New York) sponsored an anti-lynching bill in 1934, but it died just like earlier Republican bills. Roosevelt refused to support it, even though his wife Eleanor publicly condemned lynching. And up through 1944, no Democrat campaign platform had a "civil rights" plank.
All that changed in 1948, when anti-Jim Crow Democrats won control of the convention and included a civil rights plank. As I noted above, that was when the loyalty of white supremacist Southerners to the Democrats first broke in a substantial and permanent way. Also, Truman desegregated the armed forces and the Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in real estate titles. The deal was dead.
For the next 17 years, white-supremacist Southerners tried to resist the dismantling of Jim Crow - and lost every battle. The Voting Rights Act was the last nail in the coffin. After that, there was no point in voting Democrat to maintain white supremacy. Residual loyalty - the habits of a lifetime or more - kept most white Southerners voting Democrat in local elections. And of course nearly all incumbents were Democrats. That maintained Democrat dominance for another generation.
But with voters now focused on other issues, and the national Democrats skewing increasingly liberal, there could now be a large shift of Southerners to the Republicans. Which there was.