Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
American Heritage, July 2004: Democratic Debacle
Democratic Debacle
21 min read
The Republican party ensured a landslide defeat when it nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, but the Democrats did far more lasting damage to themselves at their convention that year. In fact, they still haven’t recovered.
Joshua Zeitz
June/July 2004 | Volume 55 Issue 3
{snip}
Jimmy Carter gained the Presidency in 1976, but no other Democratic presidential candidate has won more than four Southern states; in 1972, 1984, 1988, and 2000 the Democrats lost the entire South. At the heart of this defection was not just a white backlash against civil rights but a sense that the party had embraced the social excesses of the late 1960s.
Many writers trace this rift to the disaster of 1968, when at its convention in Chicago the Democratic party simply imploded. That famously explosive week saw party regulars and antiwar insurgents trade vicious barbs while Mayor Richard Daley’s riot police—12,000 strong, augmented by 11,000 federal and National Guard troops—fought in the streets with upward of 10,000 protesters. The Democratic party entered the 1968 fall campaign badly divided and dispirited, and when Hubert Humphrey lost the November election to Richard Nixon, it was the start of a long decline. Since 1968 Democrats have lost six out of nine presidential elections.
Yet the woes of the Democratic party didn’t originate in Chicago, or even in 1968. They can be traced back to another convention, in another city, in another year. Forty years ago this summer, the Democratic party met in Atlantic City to nominate the incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, for another term. Nobody knew it then, but that 1964 Democratic National Convention would be a turning point for the party. It was Atlantic City that sowed the seeds of the internecine wars that tore apart the Democratic coalition four years later in Chicago and that have left it wounded ever since.
{snip}
On Friday, August 21, just days before the convention’s opening gavel, several busloads of black Mississippians arrived at the shabby, beaten-down Gem Hotel, a mile from Convention Hall. A reporter watching them assemble for a prayer session saw “a hymn-singing group of dedicated men and women, who feel as though they had temporarily escaped from a Mississippi prison and who think they may be jailed when they get back.” They were sharecroppers, small businessmen, maids, and schoolteachers. Among them were a few whites, including the Reverend Ed King, the chaplain of Tougaloo College, a small black institution just north of Jackson. The Mississippians slept four to a room and dined frugally. They were “all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best,” recalled the veteran civil rights activist James Foreman.
These men and women were representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP), and they were there to drop a political bombshell. On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation.
{snip}
But there was a price to pay for fame, as Humphrey soon learned. The U.S. Senate is a conservative institution by nature, and upon his arrival in Washington, he found himself a virtual pariah. Southern members who held tight control over the machinery of the Senate refused even to acknowledge his presence; many Northern Democrats avoided him for fear of losing their standing with long-entrenched committee chairmen.
Humphrey didn’t help matters much himself. Early in his first term in office he brazenly walked into the Senate Dining Room with a black legislative aide and sat down to lunch. When the black headwaiter quietly informed him that African-Americans were not served in the dining room, Humphrey stood his ground and integrated the United States Senate’s restaurant. One day soon after that, as a group of Southern senators slid their way past him and into the Senate chamber, Richard Russell of Georgia asked audibly, “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?” As he drove home along Rock Creek Parkway that evening, Humphrey broke into tears. The Senate could be a lonely place for a man of conscience.
{snip}
Johnson’s close aide Walter Jenkins asked Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, assistant to the director of the FBI, to set up covert surveillance of the MFDP and Martin Luther King, Jr. For several days the FBI used wiretaps and bugs to record and relay reports of the MFDP’s strategy sessions to the President’s advisers. At the same time, agents posing as NBC reporters (and working with the network’s explicit approval) tricked MFDP strategists into revealing “off-the-record” information that ultimately proved useful to Johnson’s surrogates.
{snip}
21 min read
The Republican party ensured a landslide defeat when it nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, but the Democrats did far more lasting damage to themselves at their convention that year. In fact, they still haven’t recovered.
Joshua Zeitz
June/July 2004 | Volume 55 Issue 3
{snip}
Jimmy Carter gained the Presidency in 1976, but no other Democratic presidential candidate has won more than four Southern states; in 1972, 1984, 1988, and 2000 the Democrats lost the entire South. At the heart of this defection was not just a white backlash against civil rights but a sense that the party had embraced the social excesses of the late 1960s.
Many writers trace this rift to the disaster of 1968, when at its convention in Chicago the Democratic party simply imploded. That famously explosive week saw party regulars and antiwar insurgents trade vicious barbs while Mayor Richard Daley’s riot police—12,000 strong, augmented by 11,000 federal and National Guard troops—fought in the streets with upward of 10,000 protesters. The Democratic party entered the 1968 fall campaign badly divided and dispirited, and when Hubert Humphrey lost the November election to Richard Nixon, it was the start of a long decline. Since 1968 Democrats have lost six out of nine presidential elections.
Yet the woes of the Democratic party didn’t originate in Chicago, or even in 1968. They can be traced back to another convention, in another city, in another year. Forty years ago this summer, the Democratic party met in Atlantic City to nominate the incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, for another term. Nobody knew it then, but that 1964 Democratic National Convention would be a turning point for the party. It was Atlantic City that sowed the seeds of the internecine wars that tore apart the Democratic coalition four years later in Chicago and that have left it wounded ever since.
{snip}
On Friday, August 21, just days before the convention’s opening gavel, several busloads of black Mississippians arrived at the shabby, beaten-down Gem Hotel, a mile from Convention Hall. A reporter watching them assemble for a prayer session saw “a hymn-singing group of dedicated men and women, who feel as though they had temporarily escaped from a Mississippi prison and who think they may be jailed when they get back.” They were sharecroppers, small businessmen, maids, and schoolteachers. Among them were a few whites, including the Reverend Ed King, the chaplain of Tougaloo College, a small black institution just north of Jackson. The Mississippians slept four to a room and dined frugally. They were “all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best,” recalled the veteran civil rights activist James Foreman.
These men and women were representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP), and they were there to drop a political bombshell. On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation.
{snip}
But there was a price to pay for fame, as Humphrey soon learned. The U.S. Senate is a conservative institution by nature, and upon his arrival in Washington, he found himself a virtual pariah. Southern members who held tight control over the machinery of the Senate refused even to acknowledge his presence; many Northern Democrats avoided him for fear of losing their standing with long-entrenched committee chairmen.
Humphrey didn’t help matters much himself. Early in his first term in office he brazenly walked into the Senate Dining Room with a black legislative aide and sat down to lunch. When the black headwaiter quietly informed him that African-Americans were not served in the dining room, Humphrey stood his ground and integrated the United States Senate’s restaurant. One day soon after that, as a group of Southern senators slid their way past him and into the Senate chamber, Richard Russell of Georgia asked audibly, “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?” As he drove home along Rock Creek Parkway that evening, Humphrey broke into tears. The Senate could be a lonely place for a man of conscience.
{snip}
Johnson’s close aide Walter Jenkins asked Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, assistant to the director of the FBI, to set up covert surveillance of the MFDP and Martin Luther King, Jr. For several days the FBI used wiretaps and bugs to record and relay reports of the MFDP’s strategy sessions to the President’s advisers. At the same time, agents posing as NBC reporters (and working with the network’s explicit approval) tricked MFDP strategists into revealing “off-the-record” information that ultimately proved useful to Johnson’s surrogates.
{snip}