In the summer of 1964, three forces converged at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, each with the potential to shake the moorings of traditional democracy: the all-white segregationist delegation from Mississippi, a mostly black delegation determined to unseat the segregationists, and President Lyndon Johnson, who had signed the civil rights bill but wanted to avoid trouble that could jeopardize his chances of carrying the South in the November election. These groups struggled to reach a "compromise" that in the end epitomized sheer political power and its consequences. By examining the motivations of those involved, this work explores how American politics and the civil rights movement clashed at the convention, how the federal government felt compelled to spy on its own people for purely political purposes, and how this interlude changed the political landscape for generations.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND COSMOPOLITAN John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.
Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was a staunch conservative more interested in advancing the conservative cause than running for president. A "Draft Goldwater" campaign three years in the making catapulted him to the Republican nomination in 1964, despite bitter opposition within the party. He was defeated in a landslide by Lyndon Johnson but the right had established itself as a reinvigorated force in the years to come. This is a chronicle of the 1964 Republican convention and the beginnings of the modern conservative movement.
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.
In the first biography of U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack, author Garrison Nelson uncovers previously forgotten FBI files, birth and death records, and correspondence long thought lost or buried. For such an influential figure, McCormack tried to dismiss the past, almost erasing his legacy from the public's mind. John William McCormack: A Political Biography sheds light on the behind-the-curtain machinations of American politics and the origins of the modern-day Democratic party, facilitated through McCormack's triumphs. McCormack overcame desperate poverty and family tragedy in the Irish ghetto of South Boston to hold the second-most powerful position in the nation. By reinventing his family history to elude Irish Boston's powerful political gatekeepers, McCormack embarked on a 1928 - 1971 House career and from 1939-71, the longest house leadership career. Working with every president from Coolidge to Nixon, McCormack's social welfare agenda, which included Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and civil rights legislation helped commit the nation to the welfare of its most vulnerable citizens. By helping create the Austin-Boston Connection, McCormack reshaped the Democratic Party from a regional southern white Protestant party to one that embraced urban religiously and racially diverse ethnics. A man free of prejudice, John McCormack was the Boston Brahmin's favorite Irishman, the South's favorite northerner, and known in Boston as "Rabbi John," the Jews' favorite Catholic.
Over time the presidential election of 1964 has come to be seen as a generational shift, a defining moment in which Americans deliberated between two distinctly different visions for the future. In its juxtaposition of these divergent visions, Two Suns of the Southwest is the first full account of this critical election and its legacy for US politics. The 1964 election, in Nancy Beck Young’s telling, was a contest between two men of the Southwest, each with a very different idea of what the Southwest was and what America should be. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, came to represent a nostalgic, idealized past, a preservation of traditional order, while Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent from Texas, looked boldly and hopefully toward an expansive, liberal future of increased opportunity. Thus, as we see in Two Suns of the Southwest, the election was also a showdown between liberalism and conservatism, an election whose outcome would echo throughout the rest of the century. Young explores how demographics, namely the rise of the Sunbelt, factored into the framing and reception of these competing ideas. Her work situates Johnson’s Sunbelt liberalism as universalist, designed to create space for all Americans; Goldwater’s Sunbelt conservatism was far more restrictive, at least with regard to what the federal government should do. In this respect the election became a debate about individual rights versus legislated equality as priorities of the federal government. Young explores all the cultural and political elements and events that figured in this narrative, allowing Johnson to unite disaffected Republicans with independents and Democrats in a winning coalition. On a final note Young connects the 1964 election to the current state of our democracy, explaining the irony whereby the winning candidate’s vision has grown stale while the losing candidate’s has become much more central to American politics.
This volume's contributors expand the chronology and geography of the black freedom struggle beyond the traditional emphasis on the Jim Crow South and the years between 1954 and 1968. Beginning as far back as the nineteenth century, and analyzing case studies from southern, northern, and border states, the essays in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest incorporate communities and topics not usually linked to the African American civil rights movement. The collection opens with a biographical sketch of Thomas DeSaille Tucker, an educational pioneer who served as the first president of Florida State Normal and Industrial School for Colored Students. It then highlights the work of black women, including Bostonian publisher Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who defied local governments during the Progressive Era by disseminating medical information and providing access to medical professionals. Next, the collection explores the life and work of Norfolk civil rights attorney James F. Gay, who helped to democratize the political establishment in Virginia’s largest city but became a victim of his own success. The collection then moves to York, Pennsylvania, to examine a 1969 riot that went mostly unnoticed until the town's mayor was charged--more than thirty years later--with the riot-related murder of Lillie Belle Allen. Also featured is an essay examining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's "Food for Freedom" campaign that aimed to complement voter registration work in Mississippi by providing everyday sustenance to African Americans. Addressing more recent issues, this volume considers the politics of public memory in Baltimore, Maryland, a city divided by racial "riots" in 1968 and in 2015. It then examines the Black Lives Matter movement that gained international attention for its response to Michael Brown's death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the Sandra Bland Movement inspired by the arrest of Bland and her subsequent death in the Waller County jail in rural Texas. These chapters connect the activism of today--shaped in so many ways by social media, student activism, and grassroots organization--to a deeply historical, wide-ranging fight for equality.
Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.
The presidential election of 1912 was the only one whose candidates included an incumbent president, a former president and a future president. Theodore Roosevelt, in the Oval Office from 1901 to 1909, chose not to run again. When his former Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, took controversial actions as his successor, Roosevelt challenged him for the 1912 Republican nomination. Taft emerged as the nominee and Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) ticket, causing a split in the GOP that allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency. The author examines the election in detail and traces the effects of Roosevelt's actions on the Republican Party for decades. Appendices detail Republican primary results and all of the parties' platforms and provide a summary of presidential assassinations and attempts.
What the hell happened on the way to making the world a better place? We boomers were told our success would be unlimited. We had democracy and capitalism, and God was on our side. We took our religious teachings seriously, and set out to end bigotry, violence, and destitution. Inevitably, we collided with American Caesars, whose power and wealth was sufficient to dominate national and international affairs. Political and religious Caesars appropriated Jesus and used him to justify war, sexism, racism, dictatorships, and poverty. What were the faithful to do? Lots of boomers I know tossed the spiritual baby out with the religious institution's bathwater, and became cynical about civic engagement. It is not time to abandon hope in our goodness, however, and it is not time to surrender our conscience to Caesar. Our experiences as boomers teach us that it is possible to bring the love of God to bear in our lives, despite Caesar's constant pressure to cherish power, wealth, celebrity, and things more than we cherish people. This book is for folks who are ready to get off Caesar's treadmill and dig deeply into their hearts and minds to see what remains of the Kingdom of God within.
