How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

Crucially, however, Roosevelt’s definition of hardworking Americans in the western mold excluded people of color, many immigrants (including Asians), organized workers, and independent women, all of whom had come to be seen as “special interests” wanting government benefits. Roosevelt was as dead set against government “by the mob” as he was against government by plutocrats. He kept America from turning into an oligarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he did so the same way the Founders had: by creating an ideological underclass.

Western settlers had reinforced racial distinctions rather than abandoning them, and their laws went far beyond the citizenship restrictions based on the 1802 naturalization law. By adopting elaborate laws against racial intermarriage, they advanced the pre–Civil War social categories that had established hierarchical racial lines to prevent the corruption of white blood. And they expanded the list of “races” that must not intermarry with “white” people to include Indians, Chinese, native Hawaiians, and anyone with “negro” blood.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists.

After Wilmington, the political argument against black voting quickly became a social one that tapped into generations of mythmaking. If black men could hold political office, they would give jobs to men who could vote for them. White women who wanted to become teachers had no votes to offer, so they would have to find some other way of persuading black school superintendents to hire them. Pundits turned their arguments about political corruption into fears of sexual predation, and then white mobs turned that equation into the age-old idea that black men were rapists.

In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues to Confederates, making them into western-style heroes and individualists. No longer were Confederate soldiers fighting for slavery. Instead, as the dedication speaker for the statue that stood on the University of North Carolina campus put it, they fought for states’ rights against “consolidated despotism.” Their heroic individualism had preserved democracy for northerners, who were finally coming around to see the light.

After a long fight for the ratification of a constitutional amendment to guarantee women the right to vote, the Nineteenth Amendment finally became part of the Constitution in 1920. In 1922, Georgia put a women’s suffrage advocate in the Senate for a day. Rebecca Latimer Felton was a reformer who wanted educational and prison reform as well as women’s suffrage. She was also in favor of lynching her black neighbors who wanted equal rights, seeing lynching as a way to free white women from “the brutal lust of these half-civilized gorillas.” The Ku Klux Klan, driven underground in the early 1870s, reformed and rebounded in the 1920s.12

The 1917 massacre in East St. Louis, Illinois, in which at least forty blacks were murdered, was a prelude to the terrible years after the war. The summer of 1919 was known as the Red Summer, partly because of fears that communism was creeping into America as black citizens demanded equal rights, and partly because of the carnage in more than thirty towns and cities consumed by race riots that took hundreds of lives. Located primarily in the South and West, the rioters echoed the idea that black equality meant communism. As President Woodrow Wilson put it: “The American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.”16

By the turn of the twentieth century, with people of color and workers back in their place, southerners and westerners began to sign on to government activism.

The willingness of southern and western leaders to jump aboard the progressive train depended on its exclusion of certain Americans.

When FDR won the 1932 election, he set out to bring a “New Deal” to the American people. Although his vision of placing the power of the federal government behind poor Americans was enough to swing black voters to the Democratic Party, it preserved enough of American racial lines to avoid alienating poor whites. To people of color, the New Deal looked pretty much like the old deal.

Politician, historian, and former slave John R. Lynch, among others, attacked Rhodes’s “history” as “warped,” biased,” and of “very little if any value for historical purposes,” but it was Rhodes’s version of history that took over the academy. Rhodes’s volume on Reconstruction was finished in time to be available to a professor of political theory at Columbia University, William Archibald Dunning. A key historian during the Progressive Era, Dunning would turn Rhodes’s version of Reconstruction into a school of history. He believed that blacks and whites could not coexist, and that once slavery was gone, “its place must be taken by some set of conditions which, if more humane and beneficent in accidents, must in essence express the same fact of racial inequality.”

In his scholarly study of Reconstruction, Dunning did Rhodes one better: he blamed the northern armies for the poverty and violence in the South after the war, and he maintained that everything would have been fine if only southerners—“black as well as white”—“could have resumed at once the familiar methods of production.” Dunning’s version of the postwar years, published in 1907 as Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865–1977, echoed entirely the southern Democrats’ version of the immediate postwar era: southern white men were hardworking individuals who just wanted to make a living, and were prevented from doing so by Republican radicals determined to lord it over the South and by lazy ex-slaves.29

It was not much of a leap from Dunning’s work to declaring that perhaps slavery wasn’t such a bad thing.

Perhaps the most famous adherent of the “Dunning School” was not a Dunning student at all, but rather an Indiana journalist and historian. In 1929, Claude G. Bowers produced The Tragic Era, which claimed that Andrew Johnson was one of the nation’s best presidents, that “the Southern people literally were put to the torture”, and that brutal, hate-filled Republicans had attempted “revolution.”

The Southern Agrarians included some of the South’s best-known white literary figures, but it was a housewife from Atlanta who truly popularized their version of Reconstruction. Margaret Mitchell had grown up enamored of Thomas Dixon’s books—as a child she organized plays based on them, and she once wrote him a fan letter. When an ankle injury immobilized her, she wrote her own bestseller, Gone with the Wind.

In 1932, the first of another set of books also became a bestseller. That series, too, remains hugely popular, although it often flies under the radar because it is classified as a children’s series. The first in the series was Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had traveled west from Wisconsin in a covered wagon, grown up on the frontier, lived in South Dakota, and settled in Missouri in the Ozarks. Wilder loathed the New Deal, and her portrait of her upbringing was the western individualist mythology personified. In her stories, Pa was the rock of the family, protecting them from Indians and providing for his wife and four girls with the deer he shot, the muskrat he trapped, and the fields he planted. Men had to look out for themselves, he told Laura, because they were “free and independent.”35 In fact, Pa had never been able to support his family; he had relied on income from the work of Laura, her sisters, and her mother.

By 1939, Hollywood was capitalizing on the image of bootstrapped self-reliance. In that one year, it produced five films featuring an individual winning victory over a corrupt and distant government: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Geronimo, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Stagecoach, and one, The Women, in which a wife and mother triumphs over independent women. In all of these classic films, the lines between good and evil were crystal clear.

In the years from the Depression through World War II, FDR had created an activist federal system, one that promoted equality of opportunity from the ground up. New Deal policies provided jobs for more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, constructed or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, put up more than 125,000 buildings, and brought electricity to the 90 percent of rural Americans who lived in places private power companies considered unprofitable. The government regulated the stock market to stop the risky practices that had led to the Great Crash, and stabilized the financial system with the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and savings banks, and with federal insurance for bank deposits. New Deal policies also gave Americans unemployment and old age insurance—Social Security—and helped poor people buy food. Crucially, they also gave workers real bargaining power in their negotiations with employers.

The need for all hands on deck broke down the nation’s racial, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Men were equally subject to the draft, and by 1945, roughly a million African Americans, 500,000 Latinos, and 1.5 million Italian Americans had served in uniform. Around a million Polish Americans, horrified by Hitler’s treatment of their homeland, served alongside roughly 550,000 Jews, 33,000 Japanese Americans, 30,000 Arab Americans, and 20,000 Chinese Americans. Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—roughly 25,000 people, one-third of all able-bodied men from ages eighteen to fifty joined the service, including the soldiers who developed the famous “code talk,” based on tribal languages, which Axis spies never cracked. About 350,000 American women also served in the U.S. military,

Multicultural support for the war did not translate to equality, though.

Hitler’s race-based fascism had been inspired in part by America’s own legal system, and as the military fought fascism, schools and churches across the country challenged racial hierarchies at home.

In the 1950s, politicians and commentators agreed that those commonsense American ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: the New Deal had finally achieved the government that best reflected democratic values. In this worldview, Americans stood firmly between leftist revolution on one side and right-wing reaction on the other. “Liberalism,” the influential literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition . . . there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation.”

The dominance of the liberal consensus infuriated old-school Hoover Republicans, libertarians, and fundamentalist Christians who hated the New Deal’s secular reforms. Led by Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of former president William Howard Taft, these men insisted that any government intervention in the economy was socialism.

As soon as the war was over, Republicans in Congress, with Taft as their leader, first cut back on the rights of workers by prohibiting unions from donating to national political campaigns, among other things, then launched investigations into whether communists had infiltrated Hollywood and were spreading their dogma through films.

On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy stood in front of a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, gathered to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, and claimed there were 205 members of the Communist Party working in the State Department. Worse, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, knew it. McCarthy didn’t have time to list the names, he said, but assured his audience that there were “traitors in the government.”13

Eisenhower tried to quiet the Taft Republicans by supporting the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and saying little about McCarthy, but it didn’t work. Taft’s men hated Eisenhower for taking the 1952 Republican nomination from their beloved senator, and Taft’s death the following year hardened their enmity. When the new president embraced the premises of the New Deal with a program he called the Middle Way, they were apoplectic. It had been bad enough when Democrats used the government to promote the general welfare, but when a Republican president signed on, too, they concluded that socialists had taken over the Republican Party as well as the Democrats.

McCarthy had shown the Taft wing of the Republican Party how to advance their agenda by exploiting the media.

argued that McCarthy’s ends had justified his crude means, because America was under siege not necessarily by actual communists, but by those who were not sufficiently opposed to communism: “the Liberals,” a name they capitalized to make this general leaning sound like a political cabal. The term swept in almost everyone in America, for Buckley and Bozell made no distinction between Soviet-style communism and the widely popular liberal consensus. They praised McCarthy for challenging the orthodoxy of the New Deal and called for a movement that would purge the country of Liberals and create a new orthodoxy of strict Christianity and individualism. They called themselves Conservatives, though their determination to overthrow a popular, stable system of government was, in fact, quite radical. To distinguish their political movement from traditional conservative principles, adherents began to refer to their project as “Movement Conservatism.”19

Buckley’s views were a far cry from traditional conservatism, which called for stability, gradual change, and common-sense-based legislation. His worldview was based on an ideology that looked much like that of James Henry Hammond and his fellow slaveholders a century earlier. Buckley insisted that the government must be limited solely to protecting life, liberty, and property. Only if individuals were allowed to organize their lives as they saw fit would they be able to advance the cause of freedom and spread prosperity spread across the nation. This was precisely the argument slaveholding Democrats had made in the 1850s, and, in much the same way, it would permit the rise of oligarchy.

The liberal consensus was vulnerable, though, on the same grounds the post–Civil War consensus had been: race and gender. Since the Founding, Americans had been steeped in the argument that equality for white men depended on inequality for people of color and women. Now, as marginalized Americans demanded full inclusion in the national fabric and the government took on issues of racial and gender equality to try to level the playing field, Buckley and his fellow travelers turned to the American paradox, embracing its corollary and claiming that equality would undercut liberty.

Eisenhower, and after him Democratic president John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called “the military-industrial complex,” which by 1961 employed more than 3.5 million Americans directly and many more indirectly.

Truman and Eisenhower backed desegregation both because it was morally right and because they recognized that communist regimes used the Jim and Juan Crow laws to undermine American influence by calling attention to the hypocrisy of American talk about freedom.

Eisenhower responded by nationalizing the Arkansas National Guard and dispatching the 101st Airborne to protect the “Little Rock Nine.” For the first time since Reconstruction, a president had sent federal troops to the South to protect equality for black Americans, and, just as they had done after the Civil War, state politicians began to talk about states’ rights.

In another editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail,” Buckley made the same argument James Henry Hammond had used in 1858, explaining that a minority could override the wishes of the majority if the majority was wrong. Buckley dismissed the idea of universal suffrage as “demagogy” and declared that whites were entitled to dominate black people because they were “the advanced race.”29

In 1958, Robert Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Foundation for Economic Education—a libertarian organization dedicated to ending government regulation and taxation—started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism under the Eisenhower administration. Backed by powerful industrialists who loathed government regulations—including Fred Koch of Wichita’s Koch Engineering and Koch Oil Corporation—Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism: “The trouble in our southern states has been fomented by the Communists . . . to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan and coalesce these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war. . . . The whole slogan of ‘civil rights,’ as used to make trouble in the South today, is an exact parallel to the slogan of ‘agrarian reform’ which they used in China.”

Birchers forced Republican politicians to tolerate them out of fear they would be the next victims of such attacks. Between 1964 and 1968, white southerners opposed to integration opened more than 160 all-white private academies for their children, with state legislatures getting around the prohibition on using tax dollars for segregated schools by offering tuition grants or state tax credits.32

At its peak, Bonanza, which had broken ground by being filmed in color, reached 480 million viewers in 97 countries. The shows all embraced the myth of the American West, where cowboys worked hard, stood for what was right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians. The cowboys were white, the storylines simple, and the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualist’s fight against evil.33

the Goldwater family’s money had come to them the same way it came to other western entrepreneurs: from U.S. government investment. After 1905, federal subsidies for the Roosevelt Dam provided paychecks for workers who spent their earnings at the Goldwater family’s department stores.

Conscience of a Conservative nonetheless offered two crucial things that appealed to many voters in the South and West. It maintained that the civil rights legislation of the past decade—including Brown v. Board—was unconstitutional. And it insisted that the government was spending too little on the military to force back international communism. Voters now had an intellectual justification for both segregation and the increased military spending that fueled their regional economies.

The concept of women as equal to men horrified traditionalists, especially fundamentalists, who insisted that God had made the family the model for society, with women subordinate to men and some men subordinate to others. Overturning that system undercut God’s law. Two years later, in 1963, they found evidence of their fears when in her book The Feminine Mystique young housewife Betty Friedan skewered the comfortable suburban home life to which most Americans aspired as a “concentration camp” that stifled women as individuals.38

White delegates to the convention heckled and threatened black attendees. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson—until then a keen Republican—left the Cow Palace shaken. “A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy,” Robinson said. He added that he now knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”40

Dixiecrat South Carolinian Strom Thurmond switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and publicly supported Goldwater.

Thanks to Movement Conservative ideology, southern Democrats had begun to shift to the Republican Party. Thanks to the American West, the ideology of the Confederacy had regained a foothold in national politics.41

Over the next fifteen years, Movement Conservatives would argue that the claims of minorities and women for access to opportunity were destroying individualism and the way of life it represented. That narrative would enable them to move from the political margins to the White House.

The confluence of a slate of new government measures that would help minority communities with a guarantee that minority voting would now be protected was an almost exact replay of Reconstruction. White tax dollars would be “redistributed” to African Americans, Mexican Americans, and feminists through government programs and the bureaucrats necessary to administer those programs. Yet, just as those programs went into effect, the Watts riots forced the government to call out four thousand federal troops. Those riots, along with Chicanos going on strike and women allegedly burning their bras, convinced many white Americans that their black and brown neighbors, along with feminists, were not only undeserving and ungrateful but also trying to overturn American society. In the 1966 midterms, Republicans won forty-seven seats in the House and three in the Senate, enabling them to slow down what U.S. News and World Report called “the big bash.” Notably, Reagan won the governorship of California, promising “to send the welfare bums back to work” and also to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” where students were protesting the Vietnam War.

To bring Movement Conservatives to his standard, Nixon went after the southern states Goldwater had won in 1964. He courted Strom Thurmond with the promise that he would not use the federal government to pursue desegregation. This was the point at which the Republican Party made the decision to abandon its attempts to attract black voters and instead to focus on attracting whites opposed to desegregation, a process that came to be known as the “southern strategy.”

Movement Conservatives supported private organizations that defended individualism, religion, and a traditional family structure and that viewed postwar liberalism as a plot to make America socialist. So pervasive was their narrative that when Nixon’s paranoia about enemies led him to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel, supporters believed him when he claimed that he had to resign not because he had committed a crime but because the “liberal” press made it impossible for him to do his job.