How the Party of Lincoln Became the Party of Racism

Nixon and Agnew - architects of GOP racism.

Historically, the Republican Party began as the political party that sought to abolish slavery in America, an institution that was reserved for blacks imported to America against their will, sold into slavery either by Arab slave traders or other black tribes.  The Civil War was the result and for a time afterwards, the Republican Party defended rights of newly freed blacks, especially voting rights.  Now, today, we witness a Republican Party that seeks to disenfranchise blacks - and all other non-whites - and has as its base white supremacists and white Christian nationalists who put their main emphasis on whiteness, not adherence to the Gospel message.  On a day such as Easter, it should cause people to again ponder WTF happened.  How did hatred and racism become the core of the Republican Party?  A column in the New York Times seeks to illuminate what happened in part thanks to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who launched the agenda that the GOP has further weaponized today.  Here are highlights:

In the hours after [Martin Luther] King’s death, violence had broken out in the city [of Baltimore]; along with Washington and Chicago, it was soon occupied by the United States Army. In response, Agnew called together the black community on April 11 for “a frank and far-reaching discussion.”

It wasn’t a discussion. It was a trap. The governor tore into the crowd for standing by while rioters ransacked stores and set cars on fire. They claimed to speak for racial harmony, he boomed, but when the violence began, “You ran.”

Within minutes, most of the audience members had stormed out; at the door, they found a scrum of reporters, whom Agnew had tipped off. Within hours, Agnew’s confrontation was national news; within days, this once-obscure first-time governor was being assailed as a racist by the left and hailed as a rising star in the Republican Party. That summer, Richard Nixon picked him as his running mate.

Fifty years later, we remember Spiro Agnew, if at all, as a bumbling vice president who later pleaded no contest to tax evasion, resigned in disgrace and ended his career funneling military surplus to Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceausescu. But his rise during the spring of 1968 is instructive because suddenly it feels so familiar: a white Republican who claimed to speak against radicalism and for the forgotten man, but in fact ran on exacerbating racial animosity. Far from a bit player, Agnew marked a watershed moment in American history, when the Republican Party committed itself to the shift from being the party of Lincoln to the party of white racial backlash.

The shift was no accident. By the late 1960s, the Republicans were in a bind. Black voters, once loyal to the party, had fled to the Democrats, who had largely shed their Southern, racist faction in favor of civil rights liberalism. Racial conservatives in the South and working-class districts in the North were there for the picking, but aligning with outright racists like George Wallace was a dead end; he had an intense following, but he offended moderate voters, especially the millions of whites plowing into America’s postwar suburbs.

It was easy for most whites to get behind ending Jim Crow in the South; it was harder for them to accept fair housing legislation or school busing, things that touched suburban New York or Chicago as much or more than they affected Atlanta or New Orleans.

Housing integration, urban violence and black radicalism were distinct issues, but coming at the same time, and hyped by the news media as part of the same story, they led many middle-class whites to conclude that the civil rights revolution had gone too far. Soon after the King riots, U.S. News & World Report warned of “a big protest vote at the polls in November,” noting that “some politicians are beginning to call it ‘the revolt of the middle class.’” Opportunistic Republicans pounced.

Agnew was among the first . . . . Early on, Agnew positioned himself as a racial liberal — he won the governor’s office in 1966 by running to the left on civil rights against George P. Mahoney, a pro-segregation Democrat. But his mood soon turned. He became obsessed with black “agitators”; he had state law enforcement spy on civil rights activists, and when King was killed he shut down Bowie State University, one of the state’s historically black campuses, because he feared the students would riot.

Like many conservatives in both parties, Agnew was convinced that the wave of rioting in the late 1960s wasn’t the expression of black frustration over urban unemployment, discrimination and police brutality, but was the result of a conspiracy by black leaders.

Agnew wasn’t the only one taking a sudden hard line on the riots, or using them to build a case against civil rights liberalism in general. Nixon moved further to the right that spring and summer, abandoning his previous sympathy for urban blacks and adopting a fierce law-and-order stance. “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Miami. On the same day he uttered those words, Nixon named Agnew as his running mate.

To political insiders and the media, Agnew was a disaster. He fumbled his speeches and once used a crude racial epithet to describe an Asian-American reporter. But as they did with Donald Trump a half-century later, pundits missed Agnew’s fundamental appeal. He said it like it was, and if he dropped an occasional racial slur, well, so did many white Americans.

Nixon’s campaign that fall was built on what would be called the Southern strategy, but as the historian Kevin Kruse has noted, it was really a suburban strategy. Nixon played to the middle by eschewing the overt racism of George Wallace. But he deployed a range of more subtle instruments — antibusing, anti-open housing — to appeal to the tens of millions of white suburbanites who imagined themselves to be racially innocent, yet quietly held many of the same prejudices about the “inner city” and “black radicals” that their parents had held about King and other civil rights activists.

The strategy worked. Though he beat Hubert Humphrey by just 0.7 percentage points, Nixon dominated the suburbs, which put him over the top in swing states like Tennessee and North Carolina.

Whether Agnew made the difference is impossible to say. His significance, though, lies elsewhere. He heralded a new kind of virulent racial politics in America, one that pretends to moderation and equality but feeds on division and prejudice — one that, 50 years later, we are still unable to move beyond.