Newswise — The national railroad tours made by U.S. presidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are nearly forgotten today, but historian and author Edward O. Frantz uses them as a window on one of America’s most intriguing political shifts: How did the Republicans, party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, later become the popular choice of white Southerners who resented the civil rights movement? And how did the Democrats, party of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, gain the loyalty of most black Southerners?
Frantz, associate professor of history at the University of Indianapolis, explores such questions in his new book, "The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877–1933," published this week by the University Press of Florida.
To find the roots of the later electoral victories of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan, Frantz spent years spent poring through news archives and other original sources on the speaking tours undertaken during the administrations of Presidents Hayes, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover.
“It’s such a crucial time in American history: The Civil War is over, but what is the meaning of freedom, and for whom?” Frantz says. “The questions that the book raises are absolutely relevant today and continue to be instructive.”
Before the advent of mass media and opinion polling, railroad tours were an important means for federal officials to address voters and test new ideas. Accounts of their appearances and speeches, especially in African-American newspapers of the day, reveal how those leaders struggled in addressing the promise of freedom for black Americans – a promise Theodore Roosevelt called “the door of hope.”
At the same time, Republicans needed to win over white Southern voters in order to become a more viable national party. Early talk about guaranteeing the right to vote for all Americans gradually faded as the years went on.
“What promises are they making, and how do they shift over time?” Frantz says. “Their commitment to the legacy of liberation ran up against changing demographics and this other desire to be more than just a regional party.”Notably, three of the era’s “obscure, bearded presidents,” as Frantz calls them jokingly, had fought for the Union during the Civil War, risking their lives to defend America’s guarantee of freedom and dignity for all.
“Racial justice was not an abstraction to them,” he says. “They were trying to make sure that what they fought for still had meaning and significance.”
"The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877–1933"By Edward O. Frantz, Associate Professor of History, University of IndianapolisUniversity Press of Floridahttp://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=FRANT001
Praise for "The Door of Hope":
“Frantz’s insightful reading of primary sources provides an important blueprint for the ultimate demise of the ‘solid’ South controlled by Democrats and the eventual triumph of the once-hated Republicans in the land of Dixie.” – John David Smith, Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History, UNC-Charlotte
“Frantz provides what most American voters desperately need: a deeply grounded historical background study of how the ‘party of Lincoln’ became the ‘party of Reagan’ in our own time. Following all the Republican presidents from Hayes to Hoover on their southern tours, we learn how a sectional party rooted in Union victory and racial egalitarianism transformed over time into a party running against the very meaning of its own origins, while falsely claiming to still represent them. This is new political history of the very best kind and history that helps explain today’s politics of white resentment as well as Republican disdain for the public sector and government itself.” – David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
“This innovative book takes on vital questions about the politics of sectionalism and race in post-Reconstruction America. No other historian has so thoroughly examined tours of the former Confederate states made by Republican presidents from Rutherford Hayes to Herbert Hoover. With skill and insight, Frantz explores how those trips contributed to Republicans’ evolving southern strategy and how a range of Americans – in the North and South, black and white – responded. The time is ripe for the fresh perspective that Frantz offers.” – Stephen A. West, Catholic University of America
“What a poignantly and perfectly titled book this is. Edward Frantz recounts and analyzes how white northern Republicans pursued a ‘southern strategy’ starting nearly a century before Richard Nixon coined that phrase. They yearned to open a ‘door of hope’ to white votes in the former Confederacy. But that meant closing another ‘door of hope’ to African Americans who had voted Republican during Reconstruction and would have gladly continued to vote that way if they had not been disfranchised. It is a fascinating, heartbreaking story with much resonance to twenty-first-century American politics and race relations.” – John Milton Cooper Jr., E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions, Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
RSS