War over Reagan's Words

Jim Prince, publisher of the Neshoba Democrat and Madison County Journal discusses the "War Over Reagan's Words" and concludes, "Perpetuating the Reagan race myth only fuels animosity, suspicion and distrust, precisely what some strategists intend, especially the pundits who have made it a cottage industry. No objective person in his right mind can listen to that audio link and believe Reagan is pandering to racist leanings. To do so is an insult to our intelligence - but what's new?"

Reagan Redux

In Sunday's Clarion Ledger Sid Salter discusses the recent debate over Reagan's speech, "I heard Reagan's speech at Neshoba and didn't need The New York Times then or now to interpret it for me.

In the context of declaring that the federal government was too large and that government couldn't and shouldn't be tasked with solving all social problems and with his reform of welfare programs in California as a point of reference, Reagan said:

"I believe in state's rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. "

Reagan's speech drew consistent applause. It was one of the largest political gatherings in Mississippi's history and Reagan played his movie and TV stardom to the hilt - telling the crowd how much John Wayne ("the Duke") would have loved the fairgrounds.

Following decades of listening to actual racist and segregationist political rhetoric from the likes of Theodore Bilbo, Ross Barnett and others, Reagan's use of the term "states' rights" caused no appreciable stir in the fairgrounds crowd and certainly wasn't digested as a racist call to arms - at least not by the overwhelming majority of Mississippians in the crowd.

But the venue in which Reagan uttered those two words made them painful to many and painted a huge political bull's eye on the Republicans' chest in terms of how the national media interpreted Reagan's Mississippi speech. It was as if "states' rights" were the only words Reagan spoke that hot, humid Neshoba County day.

For some, that's still the case."

The Ledger also carried this piece by Greg Mitchell from Editor & Publisher Magazine: "Reagan speech autopsy: Code words or county fair platitudes?"

Alabama's Anniston Star has weighed in as well.

Still Speaking of Reagan

Paul Krugman continues to argue Reagan's neferious intentions of giving a "states rights" speech at the Neshoba County Fair saying, "Reagan appeared and declared his support for states' rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments."

So did Reagan do that? In his nearly 2000 word speech, he does say "I believe in states' rights." But that is it on the subject, less than three-tenths of one percent of his speech.

Deroy Murdock writes at the National Review Online (Reagan, No Racist - Racing through the record):

While defending Reagan against these outrageous charges, columnist David Brooks cites an invaluable online recording created August 30, 2006, long before this controversy erupted anew. David Hixson, a broadcaster who retired from Denver’s KEZW radio, presents an amateur audio tape of Reagan’s August 3, 1980, appearance at the Neshoba Country Fair. It seems to be the only available recording of this speech...Rather than addressing a race rally, the tape finds Reagan speaking jovially for 15 minutes to an overflow crowd. He discusses Carter’s failures including inflation, high taxes, runaway spending, and myriad foreign-affairs blunders. Reagan also tells plenty of jokes...Reagan invokes his experiences with welfare reform in California. While he easily could have used that theme to stir racial animus against minority-group members on public assistance, Reagan empathizes with those on relief:

"I don’t believe the stereotype, after what we did, of people in need who are there [on welfare] simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves."

Next, Reagan prescribes federalism — the basic conservative, constitutional principle of devolving power and resources as close to localities as possible.

"I believe there are programs like that, programs like education and others that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [inaudible]."

The crowd roars over the end of that sentence. Reagan continues:

"I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, [applause] I will devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions that properly belong there."

Examined honestly, the diabolical phrase, “state’s rights,” which Krugman and Herbert decry as a plea for white power, dissolves into an innocuous call for Conservatism 101: A smaller federal government with revenues and public programs left as closely as possible to the people. If Krugman and Herbert are unfamiliar with this concept, they can start by reading the 10th Amendment....Federalism may be hemlock to big-government Leftists like Krugman and Herbert, but advocating it is not Morse code for bigots. If it were, Reagan’s largely white, rural, Mississippi audience would have welcomed the words “states rights” with cheers rather than silence.

Krugman and Herbert failed to mention that after supposedly wooing white supremacists with encrypted Klan rhetoric, Reagan flew from Mississippi to Manhattan to address the Urban League the next day. He promoted the idea of low-tax, deregulated “enterprise areas” to stimulate economic growth in America’s ghettoes...This overture to black Americans presumably dimmed the flaming crosses of the very same voters who Reagan allegedly tried to woo just one day earlier...Krugman and Herbert also forgot to chide 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for speaking at…the Neshoba County Fair! The Massachusetts governor ignored Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on the 24th anniversary of their murders, which were committed about 12 miles away.

Blast from the Past

Frenzy at the Neshoba County Fair, courtesy of a YouTuber

Reagan's Speech

As posted below, David Brooks recently wrote that Reagan's speech at the Fair, despite the conventional wisdom of the liberal press, was not a states' rights focused speech that stood in opposition to civil rights. He used a recently discovered recording of the speech hosted on the Neshoba Democrat's web site to back up his claims.

Columnist Bob Herbert disagreed with Brooks and continued the debate.

Joseph Crespino of Macon, Mississippi and author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution" also disagrees with Brooks.

The New Republic, predictibly, comes down against Brooks, "If you go to Mississippi and use the same words used by every redneck desirous of pulling an ever-so-thin cloak over his bigotry, you're either stupid or you're courting the bigots. In 1980 Reagan could not yet benefit from the defense of stupidity or dementia: He was courting the bigots. Just as, when he declined the Klan's endorsement, he was not acting stupid, either: He couldn't be seen as the candidate only of bigots....Brooks and Krugman appear to think this is a story about Reagan's legacy. But it is bigger, and simpler. For a generation the Republicans have benefited from keeping Mississippi burning, just as the Democrats did before. Both hoped that racist populism would trump economic populism. The coming year will likely bring more of the same, and the results will tell us whether Americans will be so simply fooled again."

Clay Waters at NewsBusters.org supports Brooks saying, "Times columnist David Brooks blew a hole into the left-wing myth of Ronald Reagan appealing to Southern racists to kick off his 1980 presidential campaign. What makes Brooks's Friday column doubly valuable -- it's a bank-shot sinking of fellow Times columnist and Republican-hater Paul Krugman. Brooks's "History and Calumny" defends then-candidate Ronald Reagan from leftists like Krugman who have long slurred his 1980 campaign kick-off in Philadelphia, Miss. as a racist appeal....(full article here).

Nicholas Wapshott, author of "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage," leaves the judgment on Neshoba up to the reader of his recent column, but articulates a strong defense of Reagan personally on race.

The Neshoba Democrat has published a transcript of Reagan's Neshoba County Fair speech, so you can read it yourself.

NCF oral history film

From the Neshoba Democrat: "The Philadelphia-Neshoba County Museum Council hosted a film presentation Sunday afternoon at the museum covering the oral history of the Neshoba County Fair as filmed by Larry Morrisey during the Fair 2007. Larry is the director of the Heritage Program for the Mississippi Arts Commission. A copy of the film in its entirety - 12 hours! - is on file at the local museum. Plans are being made to show it spontaneously in the fair cabin located adjacent to the museum. Sounds like a great way to spend a cold Sunday afternoon!"

History and Calumny

David Brooks in today's New York Times: History and Calumny

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

....Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful...He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators...have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

Reagan, Neshoba and the Politics of Race

Bruce Bartlett, using the MP3 of the speech from the Neshoba Democrat's web page, argues against the charge that President Reagan's Neshoba County Fair speech in 1980 demonstrated any type of crypto racism: Reagan, Neshoba and the Politics of Race.