November 13, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST My friend James Taranto, of OpinionJournal.com, notes that the columnists of The New York Times have been having a historical discussion on what Ronald Reagan said in a speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the start of the 1980 presidential campaign and, more important, what he meant by it. Philadelphia, of course, is famous for having betrayed its own name when three civil rights workers were murdered there in cold blood in 1964, one of the most terrible events in the long national struggle for civil rights. Here’s the “money quote” from the speech: “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.” Paul Krugman has, numerous times, called Reagan’s reference to “states’ rights” flat-out racist code language. Yesterday David Brooks called that a distortion. Today Bob Herbert chimes in with his own interpretation of that moment, reasserting that it was a blatant appeal to white racism. Taranto notes that that interpretation is somewhat ex post facto, as neither the speech nor the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” attracted much criticism at the time. Anthony Lewis, then a liberal Times columnist, whose civil rights credentials are 100 percent in order, wrote about the speech only six weeks later and gave Reagan a considerable benefit of the doubt if not complete exoneration. Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist, and neither, obviously, do the vast majority of the American people who increasingly regard him as one of the giants of twentieth-century American history. But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes, which would have been certainly cynical but not necessarily racist? Like Anthony Lewis, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The phrase “states’ rights” is embedded in a paragraph supporting the traditional meaning of the phrase, and apparently it evoked no particular reaction from the mostly white crowd. It was certainly well buried code language if code language it was. So perhaps he meant nothing more than what he said he meant by it: “I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” As Sigmund Freud is famously supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
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