Reseña de Virginia's Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National Conservatism.

Virginia's Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National Conservatism. de Journal of Southern History Resumen del Libro

IN LATE JULY 1962, A DELEGATION OF THIRTY REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS from Pennsylvania arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia. Among the party were some of the Keystone State's most powerful and influential politicians, including Albert W. Johnson, Republican minority leader in the state house of representatives; W. Smart Helm, chair of the state Republican Party and former Speaker of the state house; and state senator Alvin C. Bush. They were met by a number of Virginia's leading political figures, including Governor Albertis S. Harrison Jr., former governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr., and James Jackson Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader. The presence of so many high-ranking northern Republicans in a city not fifty miles from Richmond, the former Confederate capital, contrasts with the political landscape of a region that, in 1962, was still far from receptive toward much of what the Grand Old Party represented. As Earl Black and Merle Black have recently noted, midway through the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress included no Republican senators and only two Republican representatives from the South. (1) A decade later, of the 106 congressmen the South sent to Washington, only 7 were Republicans, and there were still no Republican governors or senators from the region. (2) At the state level, Virginia was still in thrall to the political machine of Harry Flood Byrd Sr., the state's senior senator and a thoroughgoing southern Democrat who had molded his organization into a crystalline image of his own political, fiscal, and racial conservatism. Granted, pockets of watery Republicanism existed in the mountainous southwestern corner of the state, but in 1962 Virginia as a whole was still so staunchly Democratic that even the greatest challenges to Byrd's political hegemony had come from within his own party. (3) While grassroots, state-level politics remained steadfastly Democratic, signs of a delicate change in southern voting patterns had begun to surface in the realm of presidential politics. Even Byrd's resolute avowal of all things Democratic had been shaken by Harry S. Truman's decision to run on a strong civil rights plank in 1948, and, starting in 1952, Virginia's electorate voted for three successive Republican presidential candidates. Byrd, though, could not bring himself to support Republican candidates openly, even after Truman endorsed greater civil rights. Starting in 1952 Byrd settled instead for what became known as his "golden silence" when asked to endorse Democratic front-runners. As far as the majority of southern segregationists were concerned, political choices between presidential candidates became yet more problematic in 1954 when Chief Justice Earl Warren, an appointee of Dwight D. Eisenhower' s Republican administration, oversaw the Supreme Court that unanimously handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which rendered racial segregation in public education unconstitutional. Segregationists began to formulate strategies of resistance to Brown and the widespread desegregation that it prescribed, and in 1957 they became further disenchanted with Eisenhower when he took the decision to use federal troops to enforce the provisions of Brown at Little Rock' s Central High School. As Virginians wrestled with the pressures that Brown placed upon them, many of the state's white segregationists returned to their previously held view that the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, abolition, and emancipation.

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