It's My Party (7 page)

That story—and the resentment toward Republicans that goes with it—has been passed down in Barry’s family for five generations.
The first three generations were Democrats.

The last two, Barry’s parents and Barry himself, are Republicans.

To my mind, the person who best represents the new, Republican Dixie is a friend of mine named Haley Barbour. Haley, fifty-one,
a stocky, round-faced man with a big grin, grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. (If an invading force of Martians ever wanted
a reliable way to tell northerners and southerners apart, all they’d have to do is mention Yazoo City. When they hear the
name, northerners like me can’t help smirking. Southerners like Haley don’t see anything funny about it at all.) When he was
a very young man Haley defected from the Democratic Party in which he had been raised to become active in the Mississippi
Republican Party, and by the time he was in his twenties he had been elected chairman of the Mississippi GOP. At the same
time, the early 1970s, climbing to the top of the Mississippi GOP seemed an improbable way to launch a career in politics.
Democrats so dominated Mississippi that as far as I can discover there were only four lonely Republican officeholders in the
entire state: two members out of 122 in the state assembly, and two members out of 52 in the state senate. Yet just over two
decades later, Mississippi had a congressional delegation in which Republicans outnumbered Democrats, a Republican governor
for the first time since Reconstruction, and a reputation for voting solidly Republican in presidential elections. Haley had
a lot to do with the transformation—even after stepping down as chairman he remained one of the leaders of the Mississippi
GOP. In Republican circles Haley became so famous that in 1992 President George Bush named him the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, making Haley the highest-ranking Republican in the country after the president himself. Haley played a
central role in the election of 1994, in which the GOP won back the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades,
a feat the party accomplished in large part by picking up nineteen new seats in the South. After stepping down as party chairman,
Haley opened a law firm in Washington. But he remains so devoted to the South that he commutes back to Yazoo City (that name
again) every weekend. When I wanted to ask an expert how the old, Democratic South became the new, Republican South, I called
Haley.

Haley and I began our conversation the way we begin every conversation, with a few jokes about the event at which we first
met. “That was one
hail
of a speech you wrote,” Haley said, chuckling. “Damn near got me elected.”

The story is worth telling. It amounts, so to speak, to a snapshot of the South partway through its transformation.

The year was 1982. Haley, then just 34, was running for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, John Stennis.
On the staff of then Vice President George Bush, I was with the vice president when he flew to Jackson, Mississippi, to appear
at an enormous rally on Haley’s behalf. Soon after I reached my room in the hotel in which the vice president and his party
were staying, my telephone rang. It was the vice president’s press secretary, Pete Teeley. He was with the vice president.
“Get down here right away,” Pete said. When I reached the vice president’s suite, Pete let me in. George Bush was seated with
his feet propped on a coffee table. He looked grumpy. “The vice president would like to know why we’re in Jackson,” Pete said.

This seemed an odd question. I was just twenty-six, the most junior member of the staff. My job was to take the speech assignments
as they were given to me and do the best with each one that I could. I had nothing to do with putting events on the vice president’s
schedule.

“The vice president is here to give a speech for someone called Haley Barbour,” I said. “Barbour is running for the Senate.”

Pete looked disgusted. “We know
that
much,” he replied. “But
why
?”

I ransacked my memory. Had anyone back in Washington told me anything special about the stop in Jackson? All I could come
up with was a conversation I’d had with John Morgan, who worked across the hall from me in the Old Executive Office Building.
John was on the president’s staff, not the vice president’s, so strictly speaking there was never any reason for us to talk.
But since our offices were so close we had become friends. John’s job was to provide the president’s staff with political
advice. On the walls of his office hung a set of enormous maps of the United States. John had colored the maps by hand to
show the county-by-county results of each presidential race going back more than a century. When I had stopped by John’s office
to shoot the breeze not long before, I had happened to mention that the vice president would be flying to Mississippi to give
a speech for the Republican Senate candidate. “Nobody can beat Senator Stennis,” John had replied. A member of the Senate
since 1947, John explained, Stennis was a southern institution. “The only reason to go down to Mississippi is because Senator
Stennis is old now. Bush will just be showing the flag for the local GOP, giving them a little moral support to tide them
over until the day when Senator Stennis finally steps down.”

John Morgan had just been engaging in casual banter, whereas I was being asked to brief the vice president of the United States.
But the conversation I had had with John was all that I could come up with.

“The vice president is just here to show the flag,” I said. Then I repeated the rest of what John had told me.

George Bush and Pete Teeley exchanged looks of relief. Then the vice president told me what was going on.

“I just got a call from Senator Stennis,” Bush said. He lapsed into a pretty good imitation of a Mississippi drawl. “ ‘Now
Geor-udge,’ ” Bush said, quoting Stennis, “ ‘I used to know your daddy. He and I were good friends right heah in the Senate.
[George Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, represented Connecticut in the Senate from 1952 to 1963.] Why, ah re-membuh your daddy
fondly. And it huhts me to think that his son would go into my home state to campaign against me. Ah’m with y’all, Geor-udge.
Ah’m with you an’ prez-dent Reagan. There’s no need for y’all to be sayin’ things against me. Not me who knew your daddy and
has voted with you and prez-dent Reagan right along.’

“So,” the vice president said, dropping the southern accent, “if I’m just here to show the flag, that’s all I intend to do.”

Two hours later, in front of a crowd of several thousand cheering Mississippians, Haley Barbour introduced the vice president.
George Bush strode to the lectern, relaxed and smiling. For the next twenty minutes he delivered the speech just as I had
written it—with one difference. Since the vice president was there to speak on behalf of Haley Barbour, I had of course composed
several paragraphs in praise of Haley, talking about Haley’s modest upbringing in Yazoo City, his rise to the chairmanship
of the Mississippi GOP, his patriotism, his vision, his so on and so forth. The vice president dropped them. He never even
mentioned Haley’s name. He went directly from the grand traditions of the South to the greatness of Ronald Reagan with no
Haley Barbour in between. Haley stood next to the vice president throughout the speech. As he kept waiting to hear himself
mentioned, his smile grew strained. When he heard the vice president close, saying, “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless
the great state of Mississippi,” it was all Haley could do to keep even a strained smile on his face. The vice president waved
to the crowd, then left the stage before anyone could ask him to pose with Haley for photographs. Mississippi had given the
1980 Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the biggest plurality they received
in any state. But in the person of Senator Stennis the old, Democratic South lived on, and not even the vice president of
the United States cared to mess with it. On election day, Haley Barbour lost to John Stennis in a landslide.

“You want to know how the South turned Republican?” Haley asked. “Then go get a copy of the book by the Black brothers.” Earl
and Merle Black are the authors of
Politics and Society in the South
. (Distinguished political scientists, the brothers are twins who grew up in the South. Their first names amount to another
one of those tests that Martians could use to tell northerners and southerners apart. To my Yankee ears, twins named Earl
and Merle sound hopelessly hick. But when I tried to explain this to my southern friend Haley, he couldn’t understand what
I meant.) I got a copy of the Black brothers’ book and worked my way through it. According to Earl and Merle Black and my
friend Haley Barbour, the South went Republican because Yankees moved in, the economy of the South finally began to expand,
and a new generation of southerners got sick of having Democrats run everything.

Why did Yankees move in? To escape the snowy winters and high cost of living of the North, to serve in the armed forces at
one of the dozens of military bases located in the South, and to manage the new factories that were turning the land of cotton
into the land of manufactured goods. They arrived in such large numbers that while in 1920 the proportion of white southerners
born outside the South—in a word, Yankees—was under one in ten, by 1980 the proportion had risen to one in five. Now, it happens
that the three kinds of Yankees who moved South—retirees, members of the military, and managers—are as Republican as any three
demographic groups you could name. The Old Confederacy might as well have established a border patrol, permitting only Republicans
to enter. Of the three groups, the managers are Haley’s favorites. They get involved in party activities. They give money
to GOP candidates. They’re not just Republicans, they’re useful Republicans.

“We had a whole
lot
of managers and executives move down South,” Haley told me. “Look at the suburbs of Atlanta. You show me a neighborhood so
new that the grass hadn’t come up yet in the yard and I’ll bet you those people are going to be Republican. That’s the way
it is all
over
the South. You’ll find the best and most useful Republicans where there’s the newest grass.”

While the Yankees were moving in, the southern economy was expanding. The expansion took the form of almost entirely industrial
growth. While in 1920 agriculture accounted for half of jobs in the South but only a fifth of jobs outside the South, by 1970
the South had roughly the same rate of agricultural employment as the rest of the country. Industry had moved in. As the South
became industrial, the old, landed white families that had formed the core of the Democratic establishment grew unimportant.
A new middle class arose. In the North, many of these new middle-class workers would have joined unions, which are overwhelmingly
Democratic. In the South, there were scarcely any unions to be found. An outgrowth of industrial development, which the region
had never before experienced, unions had failed to become established in the South. Now that industrial development was at
last taking place, southern workers, who knew why they were being given a chance at industrial jobs—“Hell,” Haley explained,
“getting away from unions is why industry went down there”—were content to remain unorganized. Without unions to tie the southern
middle class to the Democratic Party, the southern middle class votes Republican.

This brings us to the third trend. While Yankees were moving in and a new, industrial economy was springing up, young southerners
were getting sick of the old Democratic system. A generation of hotheads arose, just as intent on causing trouble as their
great-grandfathers had been when they went raiding with Jeb Stuart. Haley found himself at the center of this trend, no doubt
because he did so much to foment it. “Folks my age joined the Republican Party because it was the reform party, the party
of change, the party of kickin’ out the folks who’d been runnin’ things down at the courthouse for generations.” In Mississippi
this group included not only Haley himself but Trent Lott, who was elected to the Senate in 1988 when John Stennis at last
retired and has served the last four years as Senate majority leader. Haley quoted his old friend Trent. “Trent used to say—now,
this was twenty years ago, and you’d never catch him saying it today—Trent used to say, ‘Hell, if the Republicans had been
in office down here for a hundred years, I might’ve become a Democrat just to run
them
off.’ ”

One question had to be asked. When the South went Republican, what role had race played?

“Just about none,” Haley replied.

The GOP has scrupulously avoided any taint of racism. “No Republican candidate could get elected in the South if he was perceived
as a racist,” Haley said. “No way. Not a chance. There is just a huge part of the GOP that runs away from a candidate if there
are
any
charges that he’s a racist.” When the racist David Duke announced that he intended to run for governor of Louisiana as a
Republican, for instance, prominent Republicans across the South denounced him. “Our party,” Haley continued, “is real middle
class.” The GOP does not belong to rednecks and bigots, in other words, but to young managers like those you see trying to
get their grass to grow outside Atlanta.

If Haley and the Black brothers had a theme, it was change. The New South was just that, new. The South had become Republican
because it had become more industrial, more middle class, more Yankee-fied. Yet I thought I saw a second reason. The South
had become Republican because it hadn’t changed.

Yankee-fication? Millions of Yankees have indeed moved south. But they have tended to cluster together. In northern Virginia,
there are so many Yankees among the government workers who commute across the Potomac each morning to Washington, D.C., that
if you picked the region up and put it down someplace else, most of the residents would feel more at home in New Jersey or
Connecticut than elsewhere in Virginia. In South Florida, Yankees outnumber the natives, and in the long coastal crescent
from Key West to Miami to West Palm Beach you’re more likely to hear the accents of the Midwest or New York than of Dixie.
But outside these Yankee clusters genuine southerners still predominate. As recently as 1981, Yankees made up less than a
tenth of the population in 750 of the Old Confederacy’s 1,145 counties.