When Jackie Robinson Almost Fought a Cracker in the Cow Palace: a Story of the GOP's Southern Realignment

Michael Beschloss is the type of American public intellectual who can appear on network television, which is to say that he colors within the lines of official, accepted opinion. Nonetheless, I own many of his books; for instance, his volumes devoted to LBJ's self-taped White House conversations.

Today, tucked in the back of the sports page, Beschloss has a story, "Jackie Robinson and Nixon: Life and Death of a Political Friendship," that provides an excellent thumbnail sketch of the electoral realignment caused by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Grand Old Party's nomination of Barry Goldwater in the Cow Palace the same year.

Let me pick up Beschloss's narrative right there:

Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 [civil rights] legislation as unconstitutional. When Rockefeller denounced political extremism at the party’s San Francisco convention, Robinson, a “special delegate,” shouted, “C’mon, Rocky!” As Robinson recalled, an Alabama delegate “turned on me menacingly” before “his wife grabbed his arm and turned him back." 

Spoiling for a fight, Jackie cried, “Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose!” [How sweet! Oh, to have been there!] He later wrote with uncharacteristic overstatement that on leaving San Francisco, “I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” 

That fall, Robinson joined the 94 percent of the African-American electorate that backed President Johnson. (Since then, the percentage of the black vote for Democratic presidential nominees has never dipped below the low 80s.) In 1968, furious over Nixon’s courtship of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had once led the segregationist “Dixiecrats,” Jackie backed the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. 

Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack at age 53, two weeks before the 1972 election. Although President Nixon’s civil rights record was considerably stronger (especially on public schools desegregation) than many understood, he was eager that year to carry the five Southern states that had supported George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968; Nixon felt he had little chance to regain much of the African-American vote. 

That March, Robinson, ailing and tired, complained to President Nixon by letter that he was “polarizing this country.” No longer the political optimist of his earlier years, he poignantly wrote his onetime friend, “I want so much to be a part of and to love this country as I once did.”

If you want to know about the politics of the U.S. homeland, all you need to know is the Civil War. We've been fighting it for the last 150 years. We've been fighting the slavers, the money-power non-stop for 150 years. Goldwater begins the realignment of the modern Republican Party with the Old South; Nixon consummates it with his Southern Strategy, co-opting George Wallace's American Independent Party.

Presently, the GOP is a party that can't win a coutrywide election but is able to dominate Congress with its majority in the House and by filibustering everything in the Senate. The Democrats are sacks of piss and shit, infants sucking on the corporate tit, surviving only by wailing about Tea Party bogeymen.

The Beschloss piece is part of The Upshot, a new series of Gray Lady think pieces that owe more to the kind of writing found online than traditional journalism. So far they have been quite good.