The Republican Review

An enduring dream of the Republican Party has been to secure a foothold in the states of the old Confederacy, from whose borders it was driven nearly a century ago by the collapse of the Republican Reconstruction governments. Today the dream has come true, but the trumpet call that is summoning Southerners to the G.O.P.'s standard is at best uncertain, uncomfortably mingling racism and progressivism. Republicans in other sections of the country have had to stop and ask themselves just what kind of a new party has grown up in Dixie.

The race issue is the catch, the reason Republicans look on their Southern bonanza as though it were an unexpected inheritance from an estranged uncle whose dealings were faintly malodorous. Republicans have long been able to laugh at the national Democratic leadership as it squirmed in its uneasy relations with the Solid South and its solid segregationists. Now the Democrats may be about to have the last laugh.

In the winter issue of the Harvard Republican Review, the Harvard Young Republican Club has taken a careful, and for the most part, realistic look at the Southern Republicans. But when it turns to an analysis of the race issue a note of uncertainty creeps in and the most prickly problem of all--how any party can manage to bring conservative white Southerners and Negroes together under a single label -- gets only a glossing-over.

The special report, entitled "The New South and the Grand Old Party," leaves little doubt about the Young Republicans' attitude toward the Party's racist component. Calling for Republicans to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the report demands expulsion of members of the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society from the G.O.P. "If it was necessary to become `respectable' after Reconstruction by expelling Negroes from the party," the report says, "it is imperative that today's `respectability' involve the rejection of right-wing fanatics and night-riding bigots."

For two reasons, however, hopes that the Republicans may be able to escape the race are illusory. First, bigots are as likely to be found wearing business suits as white sheets. The party may be able to purge Klansmen and Birchites from its rolls, but that is no guarantee that it will thus cleanse itself of prejudice, or that its membership will then find Negro allies acceptable. Even with the Klan excluded, Southern Republicans are still white and conservative sharing the region's general sentiments about politics and race.

Second, the report claims that the race issue will become "politically neutral" with the next ten to fifteen years, allowing Republicans to attack the South's old rural and new urban economic problems: "As the race issue recedes as a political issue, economic questions will come to the forefront, and will have as much weight with the lower income whites as it will with the colored electorate." Even if race does cease to be a political issue, (which seems unlikely, since it has remained an issue in the "emancipated" North for a century) Negroes identified overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party in 1964, and their loyalties will not fade quickly. Negroes should not be anxious to forsake the party which gave them the Civil Rights Act for the party whose presidential candidate voted against the act in the United States Senate. Allegiances endure far beyond the causes which gave them birth and it will probably be much longer than ten to fifteen years before Negroes stop identifying the Republican Party with Strom Thurmond.

In investigating non-racial factors contributing to the G.O.P.'s Southern growth, the Young Republican report takes a clearer view. It notes the economic forces which work strongly for the G.O.P., as rising standards of living and the development of sprawling urban centers create readymade Republican strongholds -- the suburbs.

The report also offers a careful year-by-year and state-by-state summary of the party's development in the South, and concludes with several imaginative proposals for governmental action which, in accordance with Republican dogma, would be at the state level. The suggestions include vocational schools and state minimum wage laws for agricultural workers, a shifting of the tax burden from lower-income groups to the region's new industries, and state civil rights laws attacking job discrimination.

As admirable as the proposals are, they may once again run afoul of the race question. They would be appealing enough to the Negro electorate, but the problem is to unite the Negro and the white conservative under one flag. It is questionable whether white conservatives would accept pro-Negro legislation strong enough to wean the Negroes from their near-total loyalty to the Democratic ticket in 1964. But while the Republicans choose which horn of the dilemma on which to impale themselves, they can take solace in one thought--even though the G.O.P. is the party of Thurmond and Goldwater, and of the five states of the Black Belt, the Democrats are still the party of Wallace and Paul Johnson as well as of the Civil Rights Act. That image will take some dispelling of its own.

The winter issue of the Review also contains an article by Howard D. Neighbor, professor of political science at Park College in Missouri, who offers an interesting rethinking of what Republican Man should be. Neighbor suggests that American society has created a new class of professional people, educated and individualistic. He calls them sophisticrats," and claims that they will replace the old entrepreneurial capitalist as the backbone of the Republican party.

Also in the issue is a brief open letter from Ralph E. Miller, teaching fellow in economics. He suggests that Republicans concentrate their efforts at the state and local levels and leave the national government to the Democrats. This seems little more than sour grapes, vintage 1964. Finally, the Review has extracted a few remarks from a speech by Theodore R. McKeldin, the Republican mayor of Baltimore. The remarks are innocuous enough, concluding with a quote from Kipling. Perhaps the Republicans have run out of quotes from Lincoln.