A Liberal Dose
July 29, 2021
Troy D. Smith
“When White County Was Blue, part 2”
Last week I shared statistics about presidential
elections in White County over the last 120 years. For most of that time the
Democrat won by huge margins, with only a couple of exceptions (plus the
unusual election of 1968, when the pro-segregation third-party candidate George
Wallace beat both Republican and Democrat). But that started to change in 2004,
when Bush won by the same margin he had lost in 2000. In every election since,
the Democratic candidate had done progressively worse and the Republican
candidate progressively better, so that now the polarities have been reversed
and the Republican Party dominates by about the same percentage the Democrats
did in the 20th century. What changed?
The fact that Wallace did so well in 1968 shows that
race trumped everything else 50 years ago. The two 20th-century
Republican victories, 1972 and (barely) 1988, could also be said to have strong
racial components: Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to win the votes of Democrats
angry about Civil Rights laws, and Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad that implied
Dukakis was going to turn black rapists loose. Not coincidentally, Bush’s
campaign was managed by Lee Atwater, whose defense of the Southern strategy is
legendary. It would be logical to think that Obama’s race might have been a
factor in his huge defeats in White County.
But there is more to it than that. Bush beat Kerry in
2004, after all, and -though Obama lost both times -he did very much better
than either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
Something changed between 2000 -when local elections
still tended to go overwhelmingly to Democrats -and 2004, when Bush ran for
re-election. I think we all know what the biggest event of Bush’s first term
was: 9/11. Remember a previous column, when I discussed the Bush
administration’s bending of reality (AKA “lying”) to convince the American
public to support his plan to invade Iraq in 2003. That effort worked because
so many Americans had become terrified -even paranoid -about Muslims as a
result of 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with it, but most people didn’t care
-they were lumping all Muslims, and even all dark-skinned foreigners, together,
and anyone who didn’t agree with that attitude was being condemned as treasonous.
I remember sitting in a barber’s chair and hearing everyone in the room cursing
“sand n-----rs.” I remember “Freedom
Fries” because the French were suddenly hated since they didn’t want to help
invade Iraq. I remember tabling on TTU campus with the College Democrats,
raising money to send bathroom items and phone cards to U.S. troops overseas,
and having multiple students cuss us out because as Democrats we were
“traitors.”
And I remember something that happened a couple of
weeks after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
I was living in Illinois at the time, attending grad
school, and I had come home for a visit. I got in pretty late, and I stopped at
an all-night restaurant in Crossville for a cup of coffee. There were two or
three other customers, and they and the waitresses were discussing the fact
that a large number of Katrina refugees were being allowed to stay temporarily
at the old POW camp in Cumberland County (which in itself is drenched in
irony). Everyone there was upset… because they hadn’t realized the refugees
would be black, and now they were going to have to lock their doors and watch
the cash register and maybe ask the Klan to get involved. I was vocally
outraged. One waitress, trying to keep the peace, said, “Well, it’s really our
own fault, we never should have got involved in that Alamo.”
Which made no sense whatsoever -until after I left and
had thought about it. There were a lot of Latino migrant workers coming into
the area at that time. She was conflating all dark people as the same, and as a
problem. And a threat. So were many others.
Stay tuned.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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