November 14, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Just a few observations about the debate concerning Ronald Reagan’s campaign visit to Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1980. First, the columnists who have been assessing the meaning and importance of Reagan’s remarks have tended to repeat the common claim that the future President kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with this visit. (For what it’s worth, I made the same claim here. In fact, the speech in question, delivered before an audience of 10,000 white residents, was delivered in August 1980, after the Republican National Convention but many months into the campaign season. Technically, it might be correct to claim that the speech launched Reagan’s general election campaign. But he had been an active candidate for the Presidency long before he visited Mississippi. John Steele Gordon weighs in with the following: “Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist. . . . But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes . . . ? 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.” For what it’s worth, newspaper coverage of the event suggests that the crowd cheered wildly throughout Reagan’s address, though whether they cheered at the offending line is not clear. I agree that it’s folly to ask whether Reagan was a “racist,” per se, though it’s fair to note that his longstanding opposition to civil rights legislation, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to California’s 1964 Open Housing law, doesn’t speak well to his sense of moral purpose. The man who would defend freedom around the world, often bending domestic and international law to do so, would not support it at home. More fundamentally, I’m not sure that Reagan “buried code language” all that deeply, as Mr. Gordon contends. In 1978 the Carter administration’s IRS Commissioner declared his intention to suspend the tax-exempt status of private Christian academies that failed to integrate their student bodies. Founded in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the creeping secularization in public education, these institutions also permitted many white Southerners to evade the federal courts’ efforts to enforce Brown through busing and pupil placement schemes. Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School was typical in this regard. Out of 1,147 students, only 5 were black. The government had already set the bar low. For a school to qualify as integrated, the portion of minorities in its student body needed only be equal to 20 percent of the portion of minorities in the larger community. Thus, if a town were 10 percent black, a school would only need to achieve 2 percent minority enrollment to retain its tax exemption. But for many white Southerners, that standard was intolerably high. When Reagan uttered the terms “states’ rights,” “education,” and “taxes” in the same breath, he was cleverly—but not too cleverly—pushing buttons. Over the past several years, historians, including many liberal historians, have examined Ronald Reagan’s private and public papers and conceded that the former President was a smart man—hardly the empty suit he was long thought to be. Those who insist that we take Reagan seriously can’t have it both ways. He either was or wasn’t a clever man. He either was or wasn’t a master communicator. If he was both, then let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.
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