Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Richardson traces the concept of 20th-century conservatism. Amid the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully chosen female secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, believed that the government had a responsibility to protect workers. Congress, FDR, and Perkins worked to regulate the stock market, instate maximum work hours and a minimum wage, prohibit child labor, guarantee the right to unionize, raise taxes on the wealthy, provide jobs programs for unemployed, invest in infrastructure, and create a social safety net that included the Social Security Act. These incentives “imperfectly” included women and Black Americans, which earned the ire of Southern Democrats and a “rump group” of Republicans, who believed the New Deal threatened “traditional values.” In 1937, this coalition leaked a “Conservative Manifesto” whose appeal to states’ rights veiled southern states’ desire to keep their “racial codes.” Though Congress largely ignored it, “whites-only citizens’ organizations and chambers of commerce” and “business and manufacturing organizations” republished millions of copies (19-20). This document still has influence on 21st-century conservatives.

The historical meaning of “conservatism” emerged from Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke during the French Revolution, who wanted to “make changes slowly according to facts on the ground” (20), rather than with ideology. The word was rarely used in the United States until the 1800s, when abolitionist Joseph Medill accused anti-abolitionists of falsely representing history, as the Declaration of Independence did not address “free white men” but “ALL men” (22). Republicans began to claim abolition as a conservative stance that held to the nation’s original principles. Lincoln’s “conservative” government created public universities, guaranteed access to resources for lower classes, invested in railroad infrastructure, and ended Black enslavement “except as punishment for a crime” (23): Many of these same programs underwrote the New Deal.

After the United States’ entry into World War II, the movement of Americans who embraced fascism as a way of maintaining “traditional” power structures collapsed, as FDR publicly declared a defense of democracy in the face of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascist states. Democratic, Allied victory in WWII led to a liberal consensus: bipartisan support of the New Deal’s business regulations, social safety net, and infrastructure investment. The war also highlighted disparities and systemic racism in the United States. Traditional Southern Democrats prevented FDR and his successor, Harry S Truman, from passing meaningful civil rights legislation. After 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education was passed under a Republican Supreme Court justice, Republican Arthur Larson stated that “modern Democratic policies” and the “traditional Republicanism” of the Lincoln era united as “Modern Republicanism” whose government acted to meet the needs of its citizens (28).

Richardson tells the anecdote of Isaac Woodard, a Black WWII veteran who was beaten and blinded by a local police chief. In 1946, a local judge and the South Carolina government refused to charge the chief. The NAACP publicized the story, catching the attention of actor and radio host Orson Welles, who called out the South Carolina government daily on his radio show until President Truman agreed to meet with the NAACP. Though the Department of Justice indicted the chief, an all-white jury immediately acquitted him. Truman put together the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to address racial inequity. Richardson then tells the story of Felix Longoria, a Mexican American who died in 1945 while fighting in the Philippines. When his body was returned to his widow four years later, she was refused a wake on the grounds that “the whites won’t like it” (32). A local Texas doctor, Héctor P. García, took up the cause and caught the attention of Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who arranged for Longoria to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, which sits on the site of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s plantation. These two stories show instances in which federal action protected American citizens.

Truman and Johnson had difficulty working against segregationist southern Democrats, dubbed “Dixiecrats.” In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as a Supreme Court justice, and he ruled in favor of the case of NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, unanimously agreeing that racial discrimination was unconstitutional.

Amid “white reactionary violence” (34), a young boy named Emmett Till was murdered. Despite his open-casket funeral, his murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, even though they “admitted their guilt and sold the story of the murder to Look magazine for cash” (34). The pressure around racial equity built through the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the bombing of Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.’s homes, and the violence against the Little Rock Nine. In 1957, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

After WWII, the liberal consensus linked civil rights and economic welfare. This enabled opponents to create a false history that claimed that “the federal government was misusing tax dollars from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for undeserving Black people” (36). After racial discrimination against voters became unconstitutional, Southern states changed their argument to an economic one, saying that poor Black voters would vote for leaders who promised public improvements that white taxes would pay for. Northern Republicans who previously supported Black rights “began to look the other way” toward anti-Black voting disenfranchisement (39).

In the 1950s, William F. Buckey Jr. and L. Brent Bozell Jr. imagined the world was divided into “Christians and communists” (40). On the latter side were “liberals”: people of any party who believed in government regulation, civil rights, or “fact-based argument” (40). On the former side were “Movement Conservatives” who supported “traditional family structures and social hierarchies that put men in charge of their families the same way that God oversaw the world” (41). While Americans initially rejected Movement Conservatism based on the success of the New Deal, civil rights in the 1950s resurrected this movement in the form of the television cowboy on shows like Bonanza, a character trope conservative lawmakers channeled to argue against federal civil rights laws.

Movement Conservatives associated the civil rights of Black Americans with communism through the Kennedy presidency. Meanwhile, Democratic support for Black voting rights crystallized in 1965 after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama. On the outs of their previous party, Southern “Dixiecrats” rallied behind Richard M. Nixon, who realized he could appeal to disillusioned segregationist Democrats. Nixon’s “southern strategy” was a key turning point for the Republican Party’s stance on race, as civil rights became weaponized by Republican politicians to convince the coalitions that additional rights for fellow citizens was a direct threat to their own livelihoods.