Dixiecrat Dale
| 🏛️ | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 50-65 |
| Home | Jackson, MS |
| Demographic | rural, white, landowner |
| Lean | segregationist |
| Race | white |
A Mississippi cotton planter and county officeholder in his fifties who belongs to the Deep South's white Democratic establishment. The civil rights acts drive him out of the Democratic Party, and he is a leading voter in the cast's segregationist bloc.
Who they stand for
The Solid South in 1961 was a one-party region. The Democratic primary decided every office, from constable to senator, and Black citizens were excluded from it. Local government in Mississippi was run by courthouse rings of planters, lawyers and sheriffs. Mississippi was its centre. Senator James Eastland chaired the Judiciary Committee, and the White Citizens' Councils, founded in the Mississippi Delta in 1954, organised respectable resistance to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
This bloc supported federal spending that reached the South, including cotton allotments, dams, highways and military bases. It opposed federal authority over race by every method short of leaving the Union. Examples include the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi against the enrolment of James Meredith, the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, and the exclusion of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended a century of this bloc's loyalty to the Democratic Party. Goldwater won 87 per cent of the vote in Mississippi in 1964, Wallace carried the state in 1968, and by the 1980s the children of this bloc were voting Republican.
Playing to them
He supports a president who leaves the South to govern itself. This means farm supports and public works with no conditions, federal appointments cleared with the Southern senators, and no federal marshals, Justice Department lawsuits or troops in the region. He became a Democrat for the New Deal's money, and remains one only as long as the party leaves race alone. A president keeps his support through inaction on civil rights, never through action on civil rights. He withdraws his support for the rest of the term if a president sends a civil rights bill to Congress, enforces a court order at a Southern university, or receives Dr Martin Luther King at the White House. Attaching a desegregation condition to new federal education funding ends his support completely.
A president cannot win his support while keeping the support of Birmingham Rosa, Harlem James and South Side Dorothy. Faculty Eleanor, Campus David and Catholic Mary also turn against a president they see courting him, and Country Club Richard views his wing as an embarrassment. The Bible Belt Reverend and Texas Oil Jack are the only voters who support a president alongside him.
Where they live
The five states where Dixiecrat Dale makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Mississippi
- Alabama
- South Carolina
- Georgia
- Louisiana