The Popularity of the Civil Rights Movement
Race moved closer to the forefront of the most recent episode of Mad Men and it struck me that one thing the show doesn’t necessarily do a great job of making clear is that in the early 1960s the basic civil rights agenda was pretty broadly popular among white northerners. Getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law was a big struggle largely because the procedural rules and traditions of the senate gave southern members a lot of ability to block broadly supported legislation. What’s more, Democratic leaders were reluctant to push hard on an issue that tended to split their coalition. But when it finally did come up for a vote only six northern senators voted against it—Byrd of West Virginia, Hickenlooper of Iowa, Goldwater of Arizona, Mechem of New Mexico, Simpson of Wyoming, and Cotton of New Hampshire. During Mad Men times, both of New York’s senators were pro-civil rights Republicans.
And similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 were both supported by a majority of northern Democrats and a majority of Republicans. Civil disobedience and mass marches were controversial, the civil rights movement was very unpopular among white southerners, northern whites obviously weren’t free of racist sentiments, and something of a backlash against the civil rights movement would come in the near future, but as of 1963 the civil rights cause was broadly popular in the north.
And specifically it’s been indicated repeatedly in the past that Sterling-Cooper is tied in with the northeastern establishment wing of the GOP, which at the time was definitely supportive of civil rights legislation.
67 Responses to “The Popularity of the Civil Rights Movement”
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September 15th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Arizona and New Mexico are “northern”? Maybe “outside the Confederacy” or “not from ex-slave states” is what you need.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“six northern senators voted against it—Byrd of WEST VIRGINA, Hickenlooper of Iowa, Goldwater of ARIZONA, Mechem of NEW MEXICO, Simpson of WYOMING, and Cotton of New Hampshire.”
Flunk geography?
The country isn’t made up “the South” and “the North”. Arguably, Iowa is “the North” in the sense that it fought for the Union in the Civil War, and New Hampshire is of course rock-ribbed, but — West Virginia? Arizona? Wyoming is only “the North” if by that you mean “not the South.”
September 15th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I think only New Hampshire qualifies as a “northern” state in the sense that the term is generally used. If West Virginia is “northern,” that sure would surprise a lot of West Virginians.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
What’s more, Democratic leaders were reluctant to push hard on an issue that tended to split their coalition.
Should read: “What’s more, Democratic leaders were racists, pandering to Southern Democrat racists, because the Democratic Party was then, and has always been, the party of racists.”
But when [the Civil Rights Act of 1964] finally did come up for a vote only six northern senators voted against it—Byrd of West Virginia …
Robert Byrd, ex Klansman, voted against it. But, you see, he was only a racist klansman for a couple of years in the Depression, so that should affect what we think about him long after the depression. Except that he voted with the racists 30 years after the Depression. And he is still a Democratic leader in the Senate today.
Democratic Party – home of racists (including the Klan) in the 1930s, in the 1960s, and in the 2000s.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Al, if you keep repeating that enough times…no wait, it’ll never be true.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
West Virginia left Virginia because it wanted to stay part of the union. It has a strong labor movement. It only started voting for right wing presidential candidates in the last decade. Dukakis carried it.
WV is a northern state
September 15th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
This hardly comes as news, but why is it the case that Al, Jonah Goldberg, and various other right-wing intellectual luminaries adamantly insist on Byrd’s having been a Klansmen and how this shows that “Democrats are the real racists” whenever they get the chance, but on the other hand race and racism are altogether too important to liberals, who should lighten up and not get so pissy and demanding about efforts to address contemporary racism?
Otherwise, I look forward to a Mad Men thread.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I keep forgetting that Sterling-Cooper is an ad agency. By the 5:00 minute mark, I’m sure it’s a mortuary.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I don’t think it’s quite right to say that civil rights were especially popular in the north. It’s more that the whole spectacle in the South – Jim Crow, the civil rights protests against it, the ugly and often violent backlash to the civil rights movement – was unpopular, and northerners hoped it would stop. But they weren’t especially fond of either side.
It was really only with events in 1963 – the time period currently depicted on the show – that opinion in the north really turned in favor of actually doing something about civil rights, as a response to southern brutality.
Furthermore, the emerging conviction that something needed to be done about Jim Crow coexisted with a smug confidence in how great race relations were in the north.
A further point is that support for civil rights by northern Republican politicians did not necessarily indicate that civil rights were supported by most of the white people voting for them. Rather, it was seen as an attempt by Republican politicians to compete for the black vote – and thus it was strongest among Republican politicians in states with a lot of black people.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
To be fair to Matt, Political Scientists typically distinguish the 11 confederate states from all the other ones. We usually call it “non-South” rather than “North,” but the fact remains that the South is far more different from the Northeast, Midwest, or West than those regions are from each other. Also, speaking as a Southerner, we generally consider all non-seceding states the North.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
A Democrat is bad because he’s a Democrat. Byrd’s civil rights vote would make him an silver eminence were he a Republican.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Flunk history? That’s the obvious context when talking about division in the Democratic Party with regard to Civil Rights. In that context, the states listed are “Northern” states.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
but the fact remains that the South is far more different from the Northeast, Midwest, or West than those regions are from each other.
I agree that the 11 Confederate states are the south proper, but the implication that Kentucky is more like Maine than it is like Tennessee seems hard to sustain.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
@6 you were correct right up to that last sentence
West Virginia is not a northern state. Same goes for Maryland and Delaware.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
If we take the classic definition of “states below the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River (further west) are the South,” then West Virginia is definitely not Northern. I concede that it is definitely different than Virginia proper, but that doesn’t mean it’s the North.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
What, you wanted one of the Admiral TV guys to say that just because they didn’t want to market to the “negroes” doesn’t mean that they didn’t support the Civil Rights Act? Or maybe Pete should have said, in the elevator, “I’m not a bigot. I support the Civil Rights Act.”
Mad Men is not The West Wing. Mad Men does a very good job at looking at the social aspects of the time, and let’s the political commentary be implied and not heavy-handedly stated.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Your troll sauce is weaker than gnat’s piss today, Al. And it’s cooked up from leftovers, too.
Very poor.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Al, this is poor form, even for you. You can make some noise about how the Democratic party has the more racist history so what Republican Senators were doing in the 60s and 70s doesn’t matter, but claiming that the Dems are more racist than the Reps through 2000 just makes you look like an idiot and a party hack. Show some self respect man!
September 15th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
“What’s more, Democratic leaders were racists, pandering to Southern Democrat racists, because the Democratic Party was then, and has always been, the party of racists.”
Uh, yeah, we’re talking about the Democratic leadership pushing the civil rights bill promoted by a Democratic president. The kick is up…and…wide right. No good.
Is it supposed to make me like Robert Byrd less because he had to overcome his upbringing and culture to become the man he is today?
Because I’ve gotta tell you, it makes me like him more. He had every reason in the world to follow people like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party during its Southern Strategy/States Rights period, and he didn’t. He went the other way. That shows enlightenment, and courage.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Given comments 10 and 12 I’m not sure why people are still trying to define North and South, but if we’re keeping at it – if you use the Mason-Dixon line as the barrier Delaware is not a Southern state, and neither is part of West Virginia.
But to get back to the point of the post, I think that’s an interesting, and often forgotten, bit of history.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
GOP trolltards like Al will be all sackcloth and ashes when Byrd dies, because their tissue-paper defence against the carnival of racist Dixie assholes like Saxby “show some humility, boy” Chambliss will be gone.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I’d be interested in hearing from Al (yeah, as if) where he learned this noxious little bit of right-wing propaganda.
What’s pretty amazing to me is that it’s not enough for these folks that it’s simply true that Democratic Party had a big contingent of die-hard southern racists, but that they feel the need to exaggerate this until it becomes a full-throated lie in the form of “Republicans have always been, and still are, the party of civil rights and the Democrats have always been, and still are, the party of racists” even though that’s almost entirely contradictory to the history of the last fifty years. In their alternate version of history, the Republicans valiantly fought for civil rights in the 50s and 60s only to be opposed by those dastardly racist Democrats.
These people have just completely moved into their own reality with its conveniently revisionist history.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
And as to comment 19 re: Sen. Byrd – wtf?
He was in his late 40s, standing with Thurmond against the Civil Rights Act – he wasn’t some child constrained by his upbringing. Again and again throughout the 60s and 70s he stood against the forces of equality. He voted against putting Marshall on the Supreme Court. In his completely self-serving autobiography he goes on and on about how he fought against hippies and people who didn’t show him and tradition the proper respect, and he delights in how he undermined the efforts of more liberal Democrats in WV. If you want to call such a guy courageous – well, I don’t get it.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
…and then what happened? And then what did he do?
Why did you stop in the mid-1970s?
Don’t you realize how glaringly obvious it is when you people do that? It’s like writing a biography of Ronald Reagan and ending with his support for the New Deal. It’s like writing a biography of Whittaker Chambers and ending with him hiding the documents in the pumpkin.
It’s obviously false and deliberately misleading as to amount to a concession.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
The Iowa senator is certainly an outlier, his vote says more about the man than his state. Iowa always been one of the most progressive states. The same Iowa Supreme Court that just legalized gay marriage, legalized interracial marriage in 1851 and barred school segregation in 1868. Those Iowans have always been of good stock, East Anglian to be precise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
As for New York, you’re correct, the New York Republicans of the time were a progressive bunch. Governor Tom Dewey (who, in fact, would have been a fine president) was pro-civil rights throughout his career. He signed a state Civil Rights bill 19 years before Congress passed a federal version.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I write Is it supposed to make me like Robert Byrd less because he had to overcome his upbringing and culture to become the man he is today?
and you respond by telling me he was a bad person in the past?
No kidding he was a bad person in the past. Haven’t you ever come across the concept of redemption? Read the allegory of the prodigal son? It is precisely because he has a dark past to overcome that makes him admirable.
Shoot, it’s easy for someone born and raised in the suburban Massachusetts in the late 20th century to subscribe to modern, progressive ideas about race and equality. Robert Byrd was born, grew to adulthood, and had a long political career in pre-civil-rights West Virgnia! For him to be able to see, so late in life, the error of his ways, and stick his neck out to overcome him, demonstrates real character.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
What concession? Will I concede that once it reached a point where it would have been politically painful for him to stay in bed with the anti-Civil Rights brigade he changed his behavior to a degree? Sure. And hey, maybe he’s had a true change of heart (though given his abysmal record on gay rights he clearly still thinks civil rights are for some, not for all). Though of course some Republicans would note his votes against Justice Thomas and Secretary Rice as evidence of continued racism (though obviously there were many reasons to oppose both).
But just because he’s not as appalling as he once was, I don’t see that as any reason to call him courageous. He fought for years against equality for African Americans and he still opposes it for gay Americans. And to give him a free pass for that behavior, well it’s nice that he’s relatively enlightened now, but he was anything but courageous when it mattered.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
LOL — Keith, one reason you misunderstand the history is you don’t understand the geography.
As a politically meaningful term relating to the civil rights movement, “the South” is INCLUSIVE. It refers to the eleven states that tried to secede: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and (most of) Tennessee. But it would also includethe political support for the rump governments that voted for secession in Kentucky and Missouri, and it would be hard to leave out the border states of Maryland, Delaware and the newly created West Virginia. There were also territories claimed by Confederate states, notably what became New Mexico and Arizona.
But “the South” also includes all the states which had Jim Crow laws, which would add to the 11 CSA states Oklahoma, Missouri, West Virginia and Maryland (but NOT Delaware).
“The South” as a term can EXCLUDE certain states — those which held to the Union proudly in the Civil War, but it becomes even less useful as a term to define what it isn’t if you tried to extend “the north is that which is not the south” to apply, say, to the Dakotas, Idaho, and so on. Modern Idaho is many things, but a “northern” state, in the Civil War sense, it ain’t.
The original (that is, not Dixiecrat) Republican opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was largely inspired and exemplified by Barry Goldwater, who in his youth would have happily smacked you in the face if you’d called Arizona a “Northern” state. Goldwater was proudly “Western”, and his take on these issues was (so he said) primarily libertarian. Since Thurmond himself always said Goldwater was the reason he became a Republican, and since Goldwater begat Reagan who begat the Sagebrush Rebellion, it helps to keep the size and diversity of the country in mind. We’re not binary.
So Wyoming (as well as Arizona and New Mexico) can’t be classed as “the north”, politically OR geographically: at least, if you want to use words to clarify meaning.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
And specifically it’s been indicated repeatedly in the past that Sterling-Cooper is tied in with the northeastern establishment wing of the GOP, which at the time was definitely supportive of civil rights legislation.
Probably. The ongoing joke about Atlas Shrugged and Roger’s blackface* makes it possible that at least some of SC is attracted to William Buckley Republicanism. Roger did, I think, speak of Goldwater with contempt.
*Roger is getting fired. The blackface was part racism, part rage.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
The civil rights legislation was overtly supported by the New York based national media. The civil rights movement in the south was covered relentlessly and favorably by the media as well. This was Liberal and liberal and gave rise to the liberal media branding, which was absolutely true.
I’ll take MY’s assertion that civil rights was broadly popular in the urban north under advisement. I suspect it was not broadly popular but the overwhelming editorial position of the national media could make it seem so.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
GOP trolltards like Al will be all sackcloth and ashes when Byrd dies
Yep, because once Byrd is as dead as Thurmond, Al’s best remaining evidence for his hobby proposition will be “Joe Biden once told a racist joke about Indians and 7/11 stores”.
You know, Joe Biden, currently second fiddle to a black president.
It is to laugh.
Which is what Al’s after anyway — a private laugh. He keeps throwing that BS out there and he always gets a reaction out of us.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Haven’t you ever come across the concept of redemption? Read the allegory of the prodigal son?
Oh, silly Joe: they embraced redemption for Preznit AWOL McDrunkard, but since January 20th, everything related to him got shoved down the memory hole.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Many of the older northern WASP establishment – including the top management of Sterling-Cooper – would likely have been actually opposed. You saw that in the previous episode, where that jai-alai-promoting kook’s father (friend of Bert Cooper) was mentioned as opposing integration.
Sure the younger staff, even people of Roger’s generation, may have “supported” it, but not with much passion, and they while they would have proclaimed their support of meritocracy, they would generally have looked down upon most blacks and felt intuitively that appealing to a black demographic in an ad campaign was looking downmarket.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I can think of an interesting way to test Matt’s thesis: were northern politicians – Democrats and Republicans alike – who supported the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts punished for it by the voters, the way that – for instance – Al Gore Senior was punished by the voters of Tennessee for refusing to sign the Southern Manifesto?
I don’t have the election results in front of me, but I suspect the answer is “No.”
September 15th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Arizona and New Mexico are Northern in the sense that they aren’t part of Mexico.
There’s a real limit to how much credit I’m willing to give Byrd on his change of heart. He spent a hell of a long time on the very wrong side of a major issue.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
“Claimed by”? How weak is that?
You don’t know what you’re talking about—you’d do well to avoid the condescension when you are advertising your ignorance.
New Mexico was Union and abolitionist. In fact, this was why it wasn’t admitted to the Union in 1850. (It’s true that abolitionist sentiment diminished when NM wasn’t admitted as a state.) The territorial government as well as most of the territory were solidly unionist during the civil war, with the exception of the most southern portion of the territory. Aside from being aligned with the abolitionists, the biggest reason that New Mexico was emphatically not aligned with the Confederacy is because it feared and despised Texas…which, in fact, had invaded New Mexico in 1841 and had burned down churches and pillaged towns while doing so. Indeed, in 1846 at the beginning of the Mexican-American War, Kearney’s American army captured Santa Fe reportedly without a shot being fired because the New Mexicans greatly feared and hated the Texans…whose army Kearney had encountered en route and turned back to Texas.
In 1861, during the Civil War, the Confederacy launched another attack on New Mexico. The New Mexican territorial governor had raised a Union defensive army. In spite of this, in the westernmost battles of the Civil War, the Confederacy captured and held both Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a period of time, only to eventually be driven back out of New Mexico by Union soldiers.
That history is emphatically not the the history of a culturally “southern” state with regard to the Civil War.
Culturally, the only New Mexicans who consider themselves “southern” are those whose families came from Oklahoma and Texas and settled the Eastern plains in the early 1900s (the area was wild “Indian country” until then). The majority of New Mexicans have never considered themselves “southern” and, in fact, would take offense at the characterization.
The degree to which middle-twentieth century Arizona is conservative and identifies with “southern” values is the degree to which it has been settled by transplanted anglos. The political and cultural demographics of the two states are very different, as one can easily see by looking at census data and historical Presidential election maps.
But, hey, if you want to keep on thinking of New Mexico as “southern” merely because of its geography and because you’re ignorant of its history, there’s nothing I can do to stop you.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
What is ironic is that if Byrd had done what other segregationist Dems (like say Trent Lott) did and became a Republican and never renounced his past assholes like Al would be saying the past is the past…
September 15th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Mad Men is not The West Wing
And thank god for that, because The West Wing was a shitty show.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
GAH!
No! Bad Yglesias! Step away from the History!
Seriously, though. Read Tom Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty on the Civil Rights movement in the North.
Northeastern Republicans liked civil rights fine – in the South.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Please read my previous message. New Mexico is “northern” in every respect other than geography. While it had a minority of Confederate sympathizers, so did every other state which bordered the Confederacy. The territory was officially part of the Union, mustered soldiers to fight to defend New Mexico and the Union against the Confederacy, and was invaded and temporarily occupied by the Confederacy acting a hostile power.
In modern times, it is only in the culturally Texan eastern and (to a limited degree) southern portions of the state does one ever see a Confederate Flag, and even there much, much less often than in neighboring Texas. (Incidentally, the AZ/NM dividing line was original East/West, with Arizona being the southern portion.)
With the exception of only a few years in the 90s, New Mexico has throughout its history been a minority-majority state, with the majority being native Hispanics whose families date to the Spanish colonialist era. Culturally, it is quite distinct from the southern states, notably including Texas.
Also, I overstated my case when I said that New Mexico was “abolitionist”. Legally it wasn’t; and culturally the record in the 19th century was mixed. Until 1841, it was trending toward abolitionism even though there was extensive slavery of Native Americans; after 1841 and leading up to the Civil War, it was trending the other direction. Even so, because of New Mexico’s history with Mexico, the US, and Texas, slavery was not the issue which determined New Mexico’s position with regard to the Civil War. Its fear and hatred of Texas and largely positive relationship with the US was.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
re 4
You are sort of ignoring the whole re-alignment of the parties that took place with the southern strategy, are you not? Or is it willful ignorance?
September 15th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Arizona, at least, has had a history of black-white racial antagonism and was much more pro-Southern than what was then the other half of New Mexico. The territorial capital was moved from Tucson to Prescott in order to move it into an area less favorable to treason. Now, is Arizona southern? Well, no. But there’s a reason that it’s covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and it’s certainly not just the transplants.
It’s also to be noted that the reason Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act was less about Arizona and more about the 1964 Presidential Election.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Methinks you’ve overstated a bit more than your “case”, such as it is, e.g., New Mexico “was trending toward abolitionism even though there was extensive slavery…”
WTF?
I never said New Mexico was part of the definitive “South”, I just noted it ain’t the North. It WAS territory claimed by the Confederacy (that is, by Texas), and as such it was defended by the US Army with local volunteers, most of whom spoke no English and got shitty equipment and worse training, although they did have Kit Carson.
Nor did it have Jim Crow laws (which I suppose I could have said explicitly, I just didn’t include ‘em in the list of the states that DID, which gets at the inclusive character of “the South” as a meaningful term for the civil rights movement); which is primarily because the ethnic divide in New Mexico was more between former Mexicans and those who had moved there from the north and east.
But all of that tends to make it more “the West” than “the North”, no?
September 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
No kidding he was a bad person in the past. Haven’t you ever come across the concept of redemption? Read the allegory of the prodigal son? It is precisely because he has a dark past to overcome that makes him admirable.
You’re giving Al, Scott and any other “Democrats are the real racists” trolls more credit than they deserve. The line had a veneer of plausibility through Bush’s first term, when he had appointed some black people to high offices and Robert Byrd was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party just by his seniority. But with Obama in office, no, it’s simply not worth responding to.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Even in the context of Matt’s post the use of ‘Northern’ is worthy of mockery. Free, Union, anti-slavery, those all work. Calling it Northern means that it’s our duty as snarky comentators to mock the bejesus out of it.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
He just took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Conversations about which states are Northern and which are Southern often include lines such as, “well, if you use the Mason-Dixon line. . .”, as if the Mason-Dixon line were some external standard that had a meaning independent from being the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. It really means absolutely nothing other than saying “if you consider the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland to be the demarcation between North and South, then Maryland (and Delaware, and West Virginia (minus the Panhandle?)) must be considered a Southern state”, which is, to state the obvious, not an informative contribution to the question.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Yeah, there’s other factors involved. I’m not knowledgeable at all about the cultural and political history of Arizona. I do know that it’s culturally and politically very different from New Mexico and has been since the territorial era. I’ve always wondered what the reasons for this are and I’ve assumed that it has something to do with what I assume to be Arizona’s cultural affiliation with southern California in the south and Mormon Utah in the north.
Whatever the reasons are, Arizona is not very much like New Mexico culturally or politically, even though someone unfamiliar with the region would likely expect otherwise.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Has anyone mentioned yet that Robert Byrd was in the KKK?
September 15th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Has anyone mentioned yet that Robert Byrd was in the KKK?
Good joke, Al. As if there was ever any chance that you would NOT mention it. Mentioning it is clearly one of the things you live for.
September 15th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
The post is good, but note there are still multiple 10s of millions of living Americans, many politically active, who angrily opposed the civil rights movement. They’re not dead yet. A lot have had a sincere change of heart & all but a minority were in any case shamed at least into stopping w/ the public racist rhetoric. But that moral humiliation was itself a cause for deep resentment among many people, which in turn may have contributed to the vengeful edge of later Christian-conservative moralism. (How would you react if your self-regard depended centrally on your idea of yourself as a Good Christian Person, & the wider culture called it all into question by dismissing your deep-seated, religiously-sanctioned racial attitudes as gravely morally wrong? You might cast about for some issue, say, abortion, that allowed you to reassert your moral superiority over the people who humiliated you.) Anyway, it’s an intersting question, where are those people today?
September 15th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Maybe among the trust fund set it was popular, but I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Manhattan in the ’50s and ’60s – and I’d have to say that the white working class at least in my neighborhood were as tribal and race conscious as any Southerner. “Colored” was a polite term – and most people that I knew, family, neighbors, etc. didn’t bother to be polite – even in front of the kids.
My family is all down in NC right now where they fit right in. Last time I spoke to my sister she was bragging about how cool it was that she had found a supermarket with mainly white employees – she has to drive about 10 miles out of her way to shop there, but it’s worth it to her. Nothing’s really changed.
September 15th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Yet another courageous Matthew post about race focusing on an era long before he was born!
September 15th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Al’s best remaining evidence for his hobby proposition will be “Joe Biden once told a racist joke about Indians and 7/11 stores”
Oh, please. We’ve got evidence such as Geraldine Ferraro’s racist comments about Obama, Senator Jim Webb’s comment that the Confederate Memorial holds a special place in his heart, Al Sharpton’s prominent place in the party, Sonia Sotomayor’s claim that Latina’s are better at judging on account of their race, the Democratic Party’s insistence on trapping poor black children in failing public schools, and lots of other things.
All you’ve got is “macaca”.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
All you’ve got is “macaca”.
What I love about this is that you could actually populate an entire blog with Republican examples of either of the first two things you mentioned: racist comments about Obama and celebrations of the Confederacy. But no, “macaca” is the sole evidence that any Republican anywhere has ever been racist.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Not to mention that Democrats are so racist against Obama that we nominated him and elected him. But only because he’s a racist, too! We never could have accepted him otherwise.
September 15th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
focusing on an era long before he was born!
It’s bad form to comment about the historical accuracy of TV shows that portray a time before you were born? OK, whatever.
I was born at the time in question, and actually lived in a town right next to Ossining at the time. Unfortunately, I was also only two years old in 1963, and my first awareness of adults’ thoughts about the civil rights movement came at the time of MLK’s assassination, in 1968. My memory of that time, and the impression I got of the views of adults in the Ossining area, was that ordinary people were broadly supportive of the civil rights movement, as were New York’s politicians both Republican and Democrat, that everyone in my area thought badly of George Wallace’s run for the Presidency, but that criticism of Southern white racism did, as someone said earlier in this thread, coexist with a certain smugness about the good state of race relations in the North.
Of course, those particular five years could make a big difference, and I suppose it’s possible that a lot of people had changed their minds before I was old enough to be aware of such things. And in any case, just because people were OK with their Senators and Representatives voting for civil rights legislation doesn’t mean that some of the same people wouldn’t, in ordinary social contexts, be racist in the ways shown in the show.
September 15th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Arizona and New Mexico are *north* of Alabama?
September 15th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
About half of both states are. Look at a map with latitudes.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Maybe Al will pull a Byrd, and when he reaches his 50s or 60s, stop being an asshole terrified at the thought of equality among the races.
September 15th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Another thing worth remembering about Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular, is the way the arc of his own career matched how the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War bookended and framed the beginning and the end differently.
A LOT of people in “the North” as MattY uses the term, had a kind of practical racism about African-Americans in the South, in that they were abused, but also acquiesced in their abuse. You could explain or excuse that (what else could they do?), but the fact that African-Americans hadn’t defeated their oppressors counted against them…. and then King (following on court room victories) led a peaceful movement that was nevertheless openly and radically defiant.
That put a helluva lot of people flat-out on his side, from a distance — if only because (to be cynical) it didn’t cost them anything. But it was very real support, nevertheless — lots of people applauded Ike sending troops to Little Rock, the same way they applauded Truman firing MacArthur: we like decisive action when somebody has gone too far. King’s movement demonstrated that Jim Crow had lasted too long, and many millions of Americans backed how he was beating it.
And then Vietnam happened. It’s certainly true that legislation to kill Jim Crow would have been a LOT harder to pass without LBJ — and LBJ was the principal architect of the war that was first a problem, then a mistake, and finally a crime.
At first, King himself regarded the anti-Vietnam War movement as a distraction from the real struggle, famously telling Allard Lowenstein off — but then he came around to the view that the promises of the Great Society were dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
So just like that, King lost a whole lot of what might be called his ‘conservative’ support in what MattY calls “the North”. Many people who had seen King as a triumph of what it means to be an American, stopped seeing him that way when he took sides against America in a war — as they saw it. King’s troubles “up North”, e.g., in Chicago, all happened after he came out against Vietnam.
It is a modern conceit that sees civil rights and opposition to the American war in Vietnam as a continuum — at the time, it was a jarring break.
September 16th, 2009 at 12:04 am
It’s bad form to comment about the historical accuracy of TV shows that portray a time before you were born? OK, whatever.
It must be special to have the likes of Steve Sailer imply you have an unhealthy preoccupation w/ race.
September 16th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Re: I think only New Hampshire qualifies as a “northern” state in the sense that the term is generally used.
Iowa certainly belongs with the North. Unlike Ohio or Illinois, it didnlt even have a large contingent of “Copperhead”Southern sympahizers in the Civil War.
Re: New Mexico was Union and abolitionist.
New Mexico had only a very small number of Anglo settlers at the time– most of its people were Native Americans (who counted for nothing politically back then) or else Hispanics in the Santa Fe region (and their status was unclear). During the 1850s Texans did move west into New Mexico and they agitated for secession, inviting the CSA in to secure the territory. Col. Chivington out of Colorado (later notorious for the Washita Creek massacre) drove them out. As for Arizona, it was almost entirely a Native American region with only tiny Anglo forts and trading posts at the time.
September 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
It would have been true that the people at Sterling-Cooper would have been either indifferent or supportive of civil rights (at least, in generalities).
But it’s absolutely NOT true that civil rights were strongly supported outside of the South generally. Rather, it’s that, as an advertising agency that views itself (and more importantly wants to be percieved as) as hip and modern, Sterling-Cooper would have a norm of supporting (or at least not strongly opposing) civil rights.
But that’s because Sterling-Cooper needed to be percieved as hip and modern, because it was linked into the elite liberal Republican politics of the time and because it would (generally) hire relatively young staff educated in the better universities in the time frame 1941-1960.
But Sterling-Cooper is precisely an elite economic enterprise, and it’s employees are (or have reasonable hopes to) among the economic elite. Working class whites often strongly opposed civil rights, even in the 1950s as Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, or as Ken Durr shows in Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore or Jonathan Rieder shows in Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism
September 16th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Actually, it goes further and deeper than that — much further than a TV show is likely to go, but oddly enough in the same direction: beginning more or less with the Wallace campaign in 1968, Democratic strategists have tried to figure out how to reach what came to be known as “Reagan Democrats” in the 80s, and “white ethnics” in the 90s.
They are all basically the same demographic — they tend to be baptized if not faithful Catholics (and thus at least potentially pro-life voters, and certainly open to cultural appeals, e.g., anti-gay rights), formerly union families (grampa was a union man, somebody ripped off his pension), a very high percentage of veterans, and the major ethnicities are Irish, Italian, Polish and other Central European-Americans, with a heavy emphasis on the “-American” part.
For this set of voters, the open break with Democrats was Nixon — but it was a LOT more than the Southern strategy, which after all was primarily aimed at, er, “the South”. Nixon’s heavy emphasis on law and order, unleashing Agnew after the cultural elite, and more than anything else, co-opting welfare state liberalism while dragging out Vietnam was all deliberately intended to polarize the country, and keep the bigger half of the voters.
The thing is, liberals promptly adopted all of Nixon’s key targetting — “law and order” was interpreted to be code for racism, which wasn’t exactly the smartest response in the urban riot era.
But what Madison Avenue guys were learning then (and Nixon promptly picked up on — the Selling of the President was all about Madison Avenue techniques applied to politics) was market segmentation.
And here is the great insight about it, in contemporary terms: every time a new market segment is identified, e.g., a new refugee population like Vietnamese boat people or Soviet Jews, or a new immigrant group like Ethiopians, mainstream American companies fall all over themselves to market mainstream products to ‘em. And there are different techniques — I’m told that Soviet Jews, for example, tend to buy on prestige rather than price, so you don’t want to try to sell ‘em toothpaste cuz it’s cheap. You want to say this is the BEST, and show images of prosperous folks brushing away.
But that’s not the big bucks — and it’s not the political lesson, either.
When Mad Men is set, to get a bottle of soy sauce, you would have had to go to a Chinatown grocery, IF you lived somewhere with a Chinatown. Take a moment to contemplate just how much money is involved when a niche ethnic product like that goes mainstream. (My money is on injera bread being the nect niche product to go mainstream like that — and the tef to make it is grown near Kalamazoo, Michigan, by former wheat farmers.)
That’s where the big money is — and that is also where the civil rights movement led marketing.
Opposition to civil rights is a niche market. What it means to be an American is not.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Apparently Matt is cartographically challenged.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
“A majority of white New Yorkers questioned here in the last month in a survey by The New York Times said they believed the Negro civil rights movement had gone too far.”
New York Times, September 21, 1964