Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965

by Eric Schickler

Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites―such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater―set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades.

Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand.

Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.

Genres: Politics, History, Political Science, American History, Race, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2016

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting perspective on how political coalitions change, and in particular how the Democratic Party came to embrace the cause of civil rights for African-Americans starting around the late 1930s — a shift from below that the author demonstrates was already well underway in the northern parts of the country by the time Lyndon Johnson and national leaders ultimately made their break with the party's southern segregationist faction and pass the 1964 civil rights act. The entry of African Americans, the CIO, and urban liberals into the Democratic coalition in the north first started under Roosevelt's New Deal for reasons unrelated to the questions of civil rights but ultimately reshaped the priorities of the party's liberal wing to include that new commitment. The development of this base throughout the 1940s and 1950s — and the counter-mobilization of the southern Democrats and efforts by Eisenhower (and later Goldwater, Reagan, and others) to develop the Republican party as an alternative for southern white conversatives to defect to — eventually set the Democrats up for a confrontation with the southern wing when civil rights activists were able to force the question onto the national agenda in the late 1950s and early 1960s, breaking the national leadership's attempts to straddle the issue and hold the two competing wings of the party together. The author notes that the federalized, geographic single-member constituencies used in the American political system provided a key point of entry into the larger party coalition for the new civil rights coalition, without which it is doubtful that the national party would have necessarily been forced to accomodate them. I was somewhat familiar with the Congressional Democratic Study Group's efforts to re-shape the party's civil rights platform in the 1950s - this book answers the question as to where that group came from within the party, and generally gives much greater weight to bottom-up rather than top-down leadership. The book also makes a strong case for the CIO (and unions more generally, but the CIO is given particular credit for its racial progressivism) as a key actor here in pushing for the fusion of economic liberalism and support for African-American civil rights. I need to read more American labor movement history.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Racial Realignment," Eric Schickler traces how the party coalitions for the Democratic and Republican Parties (and especially the former) changed drastically between the rise of the New Deal and the Great Society. By the 1960s, black voters had become solidly Democratic, and the Democratic Party's previous coalition of Northeastern and Midwestern cities and the Jim Crow South was breaking apart. Schickler explains how this realignment had been many decades in the making, and not a project of changing elite party attitudes toward issues of race and civil rights.

If one were to look at debates, manifestos, essays, etc., about "liberalism" in the early 1930s, the question of race was noticeably absent. And the enemies of "liberalism" and the New Deal were not viewed as the Jim Crow South, but the wealthy industrialists of the Northeast. The contentious intra-Democratic fights in subsequent decades were, however, *very* much about race and civil rights. Schickler shows how the CIO, the NAACP and other black-led civil rights organization, Jewish organizations, and forward-thinking state parties changed the political landscape to cement the role of civil rights in liberalism and in the Democratic Party --- and, importantly, against a national party looking to maintain intra-party comity. The CIO's role in particular in forging cross-racial solidarity and connecting racial liberalism and economic liberalism is a particularly central point across the book.

Even though the New Deal was often compromised, the heavy investments in public works and social programs were able to gain support among black voters, especially Black voters in the Northeast and Midwest who were less cut out of it than those in the South. Black voters were pretty consistently more economically liberal than white voters, and the GOP's opposition to the New Deal (on behest of its wealthy industrialist base) made it more difficult for them to show black voters that the Republican Party had anything to offer. This became increasingly true as civil rights hit up against the rights of big business (e.g., anti-discrimination law).

Schickler also shows how the realignment in the Republican Party also came up from the party's base (especially as Eisenhower chose to invest party resources more in a suburban electorate in the South) and against a national party's desire to moderate for Northeastern Republicans who still held significant sway in nominating conventions.

One part of the book I especially appreciated was Schickler's attention to what happens before a vote takes place. I'm a big fan of roll call votes as data points and accountability mechanisms, but they are limited ones. They do not tell you who fought a vote coming to the floor before begrudgingly voting yes, and they can't tell you anything if the vote never even makes it to the floor. He digs in deeper on many civil rights votes to explore the backstory and other data points available to show how this evolution in party composition and ideology was happening.

[David Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this is a well worn topic, I really liked it. His explanation of the black realignment and the fact that support for civil rights and support for economic liberalism was correlated long ago(controlling for region) made the book well worth it.

[Matthew Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty good. Fits approximately zero of the common narratives (i.e. non-academic) around this subject.