Roger Wilkins on the White Flight President

[AirAmFan]

'Reagan was ... very genial, and very optimistic, and upbeat, but underneath there were some really ugly parts of his politics.... He capitalized on anti-black populism,... by going to Philadelphia Mississippi for example in beginning his campaign in 1980. Nobody had ever heard of Philadelphia Mississippi outside of Mississippi except as the place where 3 civil rights workers had been lynched in 1964. And he said, "I believe in States' Rights". Everybody knew what that meant. He went to Stone Mountain Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan used to burn its crosses, and he said, "Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine." He was rebuked by the Atlanta newspapers, who said, "we don't need that anymore here". He went to Charlotte NC, one of the most successful busing for integration programs in the country, and he said, "I'm against busing". And again the Charlotte papers rebuked him....'

This evening's (June 7th) Newshour with Jim Lehrer featured a panel discussion on Reagan's legacy. Historian Michael Beschloss and journalist Haynes Johnson had absolutely no response or comment when historian Roger Wilkins (George Mason University) recalled these key news reports about the unsavory sources of Reagan's historic "political realignment". See http://www.pbs.org/newshour for rebroadcast times and video links.

Any state-by-state comparison of 1976 and 1980 election results would show that Reagan gained power mainly due to political "white flight" from the Democratic Party in the South. During this week's saturation coverage of the Reagan years, have you seen any other mention of the events Wilkins remembered today?

[candy]

1. Even Massachusetts went for Reagan--

No Southern Democrats here in Mass. We were the ONLY state that didn't vote for Nixon.

The "white flight"theory appears to be flawed.

[AirAmFan]

2. No white flight in Massachusetts?

I recall much openly-expressed racism in Boston over the issue of busing for school integration. There was a Boston school board member named Louise Day Hicks. Her most famous utterance was, "There are no inferior schools, there are just inferior children."

Political white flight during the Reagan years was by no means limited to the South, but before Reagan much of the South went Democratic. Since Reagan, among southern states only Louisiana has been competitive.

[theboss]

9. Boston is probably the most racist city in the country

At least the most racist northern city.

Just because it sends liberals to Congress and the Senate doesn't mean it's progressive on race relations.

It fought bussing more than any city. When a judge finally ordered students to be bussed from Roxbury to South Boston, the residents pelted the bus with rocks and bottles.

More recently, the President of a rowing club in South Boston said it probably wasn't safe for black rowers to compete there.

This is the place that didn't want Boston Celtics living in certain neighborhoods (Dee Brown) or trashed their homes (Bill Russel).

The Boston Red Sox were among the last teams to sign black players.

[Octafish]

3. Excellent post, AirAmFan!

Not surprised about Michael Beschloss the turd and Haynes Johnson the turd. Neither one would dare sniff the hand that feeds them.

Besides taking Geritol every day, Reagan was a klansman, through and through. If he didn't carry the card, he sure as hell was a fellow traveler.

Terrence Bell served as Pruneface's Secretary of Education and wrote a book about the experience. In the galley proof, Bell indicated mid-level White House staffers ran around referring to Dr. Martin Luther King as "Martin Lucifer Coon." That's telling. What's worse, the publisher dropped the section from the first edition.

(Sorry I can't source the story from a GOOGLE search. It can be found in a book called "The Clothes Have No Emperor" by Paul Slansky. My copy's lent out, but the author documents where he got all his quotes, anecdotes, and so forth.)

Like Beschloss, Johnson, the entire NewsHour cretinous staff -- COWARDS!

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, AirAmFan! Where ya been?

[AirAmFan]

4. Here are two maps that show dramatically Reagan's political realignment

Thanks Octafish.

I'd forgotten how badly Carter lost to Reagan in 1980 until I revisited Dave Leip's electoral archive a few minutes ago. But realignment of the South nonetheless jumps out of a comparison of electoral maps for 1980

http://www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/national.php?year=1980

and 1976

http://www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/national.php?year=1976

Notice how in 1976 Carter ceded to the Republicans everything north and west of Texas, and won just about all of the states that ever had any claim to being part of the South.

Just four years later, Carter lost the entire South except for his own home state of Georgia. Of course he lost most other states too, but the shift from solid red to solid blue is especially vivid in the South.

[frank frankly]

5. it is clear that Reagan was a racist

you can still FEEL it.

[Octafish]

8. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young pegged the so-and-so.

From an obit in The Detroit Free Press:

EXCERPT...

Holding court on the 69th floor of the Plaza Hotel the day after his speech, Reagan had breakfast with then-Mayor Coleman Young, Governor William Milliken, General Motors Corp. Chairman Thomas Murphy and Dean Burch, a political adviser.

A participant later told reporters Young had talked the most - about housing and urban revitalization. Young later called Reagan's GOP platform ``a step backward'' and referred to him as ``President Pruneface.''

CONTINUED...

http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/pm20132_20040605.htm

Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracey, had a character named Pruneface. The guy seemed to be pro-war and a patriot, but he was really a NAZI spy. Sounds about perfect.

[AirAmFan]

6. Reagan was a genial, charming idiot who ACTED seemingly "presidential"

Octafish--thanks for the Slansky reference. I don't remember ever hearing of it before, though googling tells me Slansky was a humorist for both Spy Magazine and the New Yorker. I must have read his work at some point, but I don't recall him by name.

Looking for more on Slansky jogged my memory about another humorous treatment of Reagan: "Reagan's Reign of Error". Amid all the hoopla about "Reagan on Rushmore", books like these have almost fully disappeared into what George Orwell called "the memory hole".

I shudder to think how the GOP myth-making machine will have fared twenty years from now in elevating Dubya's reputation: Will George W. be considered grander than Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy? I pity younger people today for knowing little beyond the kinds of Orwellian lies saturating the media this week.

The reader reviews at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671673394/p11-20/ref%3Dnosim/002-8958832-8893635 are the closest thing to actual quotes from Slansky I was able to find on the Internet.

[Octafish]

7. We're on the same page. Check out Robert Parry's excellent reportage...

Rating Reagan: A Bogus Legacy

By Robert Parry
ConsoritumNews.com
June 7, 2004

The U.S. news media’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level.

Across the U.S. television dial and in major American newspapers, the commentary is fawning almost in a Pravda-like way, far beyond the normal reticence against speaking ill of the dead. Left-of-center commentators compete with conservatives to hail Reagan’s supposedly genial style and his alleged role in “winning the Cold War.” The Washington Post’s front-page headline – “Ronald Reagan Dies” – was in giant type more fitting the Moon Landing.

Yet absent from the media commentary was the one fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War “won”? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some analysts believe, then Reagan’s true historic role may not have been “winning” the Cold War, but helping to extend it.

If the Soviet Union was already in rapid decline, rather than in the ascendancy that Reagan believed, then the massive U.S. military build-up in the 1980s was not decisive; it was excessive. The terrible bloodshed in Central America and Africa, including death squad activities by U.S. clients, was not some necessary evil; it was a war crime aided and abetted by the Reagan administration.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/060704.html

A right fine indictment of Pruneface.