The Arc of a Covenant, page 55
At first, moderates were unable to make much headway against the public reaction. Over time, however, cooler heads began to prevail. By the 1950s, most white southerners understood how important northern investment was to their future. Major corporations were increasingly reluctant to operate segregated facilities. Northern managers and their families did not want to be transferred to cities where mobs of angry white people spat and screamed at small children on their way to school. Cities like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, where the violent resistance to peaceful civil rights activism was particularly brutal, received worldwide publicity that community and civic leaders elsewhere were determined to avoid. Quietly, in city after city and town after town, white moderates were able to marginalize the extremists, and move with Black leaders toward local progress.
As consequential for southern politics as the civil rights cases, the 1964 Warren Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims and subsequent cases radically recast power at the state level. Previously, state laws and constitutions magnified the power of rural voters by allowing and in some cases mandating radically unequal representation. Alabama’s state constitution, for example, allocated one state representative to each county regardless of population.[11] The reapportionment of state legislatures that followed these decisions shifted the balance of power in southern politics permanently toward the cities and growing suburbs, away from the most conservative rural districts.
Between the economic prosperity and urbanization that New South policies had brought to the South, the evident practicality of the moderates’ approach to the civil rights movement, and the shift in political strength that followed the “one man one vote” decisions, the New South was more dominant in southern politics than ever before. Throwback populists like Alabama governor George Wallace still existed, but by the end of the 1960s the American South was firmly on the road if not to true racial reconciliation and justice, at least to formal racial equality and was fully invested in the idea that maintaining a “competitive” business climate was the high road to prosperity for all.
* * *
Meanwhile, even as New South thinking triumphed in the old Confederacy, another kind of New South was rising in the West. California today is a blue state, but the red California of the Reagan years was a cornerstone of the new American right. Orange County was a citadel of Republican power, and the Southland, as Californians affectionately called the southern third of the state, was home to conservative institutions like Pepperdine University and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (known today as Biola), and gave rise to such distinctive American religious forms as the suburban megachurch. Many of the country’s most conservative politicians hailed from this part of California, where a vibrant aerospace industry provided stable, well-paid jobs to the children and grandchildren of the Okies and other migrants who brought southern culture, southern religion, and southern politics with them.
Energy was to the Southwest what cotton had once been to the South: a basic commodity on whose production and sale the whole region depended. Vast oil deposits across the Southwest extended from the Gulf of Mexico to Los Angeles. Historically, the founders of the southwestern oil industry were refugees from the rise of Standard Oil in the Northeast. As the Rockefeller colossus used its monopoly and political power to squeeze rivals, wildcatters and independents left the oilfields of Pennsylvania and Ohio for the Southwest.[12] There, the rich oilfields of these still remote regions allowed them to create companies strong enough to remain independent from northeastern banks and oil companies, and they laid the foundations for a Sun Belt establishment that rejected the liberal politics and liberal religion of the establishment Rockefeller Republicans.[13]
Like the South, the Southwest was a major beneficiary of federal infrastructure investment and defense spending from the Depression into the Cold War. Huge irrigation projects supported the expansion of agriculture and the rise of new cities. Electricity generated by facilities like the Hoover Dam provided power for air-conditioning and factory operations. With the United States engaged in three major Pacific wars between 1941 and 1971, an enormous aerospace and national defense complex grew up in the Southwest.
Los Angeles, already the global dream factory thanks to its dominance of the film industry, helped pioneer a new kind of urban civilization based on the car and the freeway rather than subways and commuter trains. Caught up in this tsunami of prosperity, the Okies and other Depression era migrants could hardly believe the golden dream of California living that unfolded around them.
But like their southern peers, the entrepreneurs and business leaders of the Sun Belt came from a tradition of laissez-faire economic thinking. Combining the individualism of the West with the self-reliance and self-confidence of newly successful entrepreneurs, the southwestern elite saw no contradiction between a pro-free-market stance and a heavy reliance on government-funded public works and infrastructure. Without the South’s bitter heritage of defeat and resentment, they still had a healthy suspicion of northeastern banks and corporate giants. For the most part, they viewed labor unions as a threat to their competitiveness, and resented what they saw as the heavy hand of federal regulation.
What this meant in politics was that from the 1950s forward Sun Belt and southern entrepreneurs and politicians were drawn toward the Republican Party, seen as more business friendly than the Democrats, but opposed the dominance of the eastern establishment within it. In the late 1940s Richard Nixon’s rise into national politics based on his investigation of establishment hero and Soviet spy Alger Hiss was an early sign that new political forces were rising in California. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 victory over New York governor and Standard Oil heir Nelson Rockefeller in his quest for the GOP presidential nomination was funded in part by J. Howard Pew, who had moved to Texas with his father to escape the suffocating power of the Rockefeller clan.[14] Goldwater may have failed nationally, but he was the first Republican to carry the Deep South since the end of Reconstruction. The Sun Belt coalition had arrived.
The difficult economic conditions of the 1970s offered an opening to an insurgent political coalition, but the existence of an opportunity is no guarantee of success. Sun Belt Republicans learned from the Goldwater defeat that Goldwater’s opposition to key civil rights legislation turned many suburban and northern Republican voters away. Goldwater’s opposition was on constitutional not racial grounds, but the lesson seemed clear: no political force that set itself against legal equality between the races could compete at the national level. This was not just true for liberal Republicans and independents in the North. The Southwest was not as racially polarized as the old South, and states like California would remain out of reach for a party that was “too Southern” on race.
A regional agenda grounded in a distinctive regional subculture and speaking to the economic priorities of an underdeveloped part of the country could not easily appeal to voters in the nation at large. To make Sun Belt Republicanism the dominant political force during thirty turbulent years, its architects had to keep the white South on board without compromising the GOP’s appeal west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Both parts of the task were difficult. When the dust settled after Nixon and Reagan had brought the white South into the Republican Party, the old divisions between Bourbons, populists, and New South party factions remained. When former Alabama governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, he won five southern states. Men like future speaker of the house Newt Gingrich articulated the longtime antiregulation, antilabor, small government, and balanced budget message of conservative pro-business white southerners. But not all southern whites shared these values. To win, Sun Belt Republicanism would have to feel like the old South to supporters in places like Georgia and Alabama while looking modern and national to voters in places like Alaska and Maine.
The answer was to wrap the coalition in red, white, and blue. Overall, the New Right was a movement of what one could call “hyper-Americanism,” a vision that elevated and intensified selected elements of American culture and history into a dynamic and theatrical political movement. Individualistic capitalism, Christianity, and unabashed and unrestrained American patriotism were the foundation on which Sun Belt Republicanism set up its shop. Sun Belt Republicanism offered visions of economic progress, American civic religion, and American identity that were attractive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and on both banks of the Mississippi.
In each of these dimensions Sun Belt Republicans made a similar case: that New Deal ideology had fallen away from “true” American beliefs and values, and that what needed to happen was a return from the failing values of post–New Deal America to the solid, enduring verities on which the nation had been founded.
The overregulated crony capitalism of the New Deal state was failing because it had fallen away from the true American capitalist system of free competition. American foreign policy was too full of self-doubt and muddled thinking. Victory in the Cold War required self-confident and courageous thinking, not the timid nostrums of State Department cookie pushers. Above all, the nation was experiencing a social and a values crisis because the liberal Christianity of the Protestant establishment was too tepid and uninspiring to keep America close to God.
What America needed to escape from the dismal social and economic conditions of the 1970s, the New Right insisted, was a revival. To restore American dynamism, the country would have to return to the values that made it great in the first place.
As it happened, the 1980s seemed to demonstrate the validity of this approach. By unshackling capitalism from the chains of mid-century regulation, Americans opened up a new era of economic growth and technological progress. By prosecuting the Cold War more vigorously, the Reagan administration pushed the Soviet Union and its communist empire toward ignominious collapse. And those who called for a return to the “old-time religion” of salvationist Christianity were rewarded with the greatest religious revival in American history, a revival that spread well beyond the boundaries of the United States and helped to bind the South, the Southwest, and much of the Middle West into a new majority coalition in American culture as well as politics.
The economics was the easy part. As they watched factories close and opportunities shrink, the idea of “competitiveness” appealed to many voters. America needed a new model for industrial policy and the Sun Belt had one ready to hand. The rising prosperity of the Sun Belt states was so evident that hundreds of thousands of Rust Belt residents were packing their bags to build new lives in Sun Belt cities from Charlotte, North Carolina, through the rapidly growing Fort Worth–Dallas metroplex and Phoenix into Los Angeles and San Diego. Whatever the Sun Belt had, it seemed to be working. Why not give it a try?
But people do not live by bread alone. The New Right needed more than an economic policy agenda. Sun Belt Republicanism needed to renew the American spirit as well as the American economy. To do so, it drew on the religious and cultural history of the South, tempered by the experiences of the Southwest, to offer a new kind of civil religion and patriotic vision that, for a time, united the white South, strengthened the Sun Belt coalition, and appealed to many middle- and working-class Americans around the country.
There were two complementary elements to the new platform for American life that the Sun Belt proposed. First, the religious movement exemplified by the ministry of post–World War II evangelicals like Billy Graham sought to renew the American spirit through a religious revival. Second, the patriotic synthesis of Ronald Reagan linked Jacksonian populist nationalism to an expansive vision of American power and ideals that united much of the country behind the foreign policy vision of the Sun Belt right.
Israel played a central role in both the religious and the patriotic projects of the New Right. As a fulfillment of biblical prophecy in a dark hour for the human race, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and their seemingly miraculous victories over larger and richer enemies helped empower the preaching of a generation of American evangelists. As an example of a nation blessed by God overcoming its enemies through the strength of its values, Israel was a powerful symbol of the role of America in the world that animated the Reagan right.
Israel worked in Sun Belt politics like the bronze serpent that Moses raised in the desert. Those who gazed on it were healed, and the higher it was exalted, the more widely the blessings flowed. None of this came from Planet Vulcan; to understand the sources and significance of Israel in Sun Belt Republicanism, we need to look in a different direction. Sun Belt Republicanism’s deeply rooted support for Israel owes much more to Planet Billy Graham and Planet Andrew Jackson than to the efforts or the sentiments of American Jews.
Located for the most part in so-called flyover country, these two planets are relatively unknown to the foreign policy pundits and policymakers who cluster along the Acela corridor from Boston to Washington. That is unfortunate. The views of evangelical Christians and populist nationalists are often decisive in the political struggles around American foreign policy. But anyone who wants to understand the role that Israel plays in American life must venture beyond Acelaland into the mysterious recesses of l’Amérique profonde.
The World of Billy Graham
America was not just facing economic and foreign policy crises in the 1970s. It was facing a spiritual crisis. The loss of the Vietnam War challenged long-held beliefs about America’s invincibility. The manner in which it was fought undermined confidence in America’s virtue as well. The civil rights movement was forcing a long, deep look into the American past. Many Americans who had long assumed that their country was a beacon of hope and a tower of liberty first began to wrestle with the role of slavery and racial injustice in American history.
At the same time, the irrepressible conflict between the individualism fostered by a consumer society and the discipline required to maintain traditional social structures erupted in the 1970s. The feminist movement and the early stirrings of what would grow into the movement for lesbian and gay recognition and rights raised basic questions about family life. More and more women wanted to work outside the home, and as cheap and reliable birth control became widely available, both men and women saw less need for traditional marriage. The “cultural contradictions of capitalism” as outlined by sociologist Daniel Bell were on full display as Americans attempted to negotiate a growing divide between their inherited values and their lived experience.[15]
The sense of insecurity about the ideological and institutional foundations of American life deepened the persistent underlying fears about the fragility of human civilization that never ceased troubling Americans who lived under the shadows of the Cold War and a nuclear holocaust. The idea that the rise of the United States was part of a global movement toward the establishment of a peaceful and prosperous world, toward the culmination of human history in abundance and liberty, was not just a comforting story Americans liked to tell themselves. It was one of the crucial beliefs that held the country together. What if that wasn’t true? What if the cool apocalypse of the American Dream was an illusion, and that illusion was beginning to dissolve?
In a country with deep Christian roots like the United States, a social crisis of this depth and intensity inevitably had repercussions in the world of religion. So-called mainline Protestant denominations had long dominated American cultural and intellectual life. They were increasingly under pressure as the descendants of Catholic and Jewish Great Wave immigrants rose to positions of leadership in politics and culture. The upheavals of the 1970s would further disrupt what remained of the cultural hegemony of the mainline churches even as their membership began a sustained generational decline. By the twenty-first century the social influence and financial heft of some of the most important institutions in American life had largely faded away. Intellectually, demographically, and financially, mainline Protestantism had plunged into a steep decline which left these churches unable to play their traditional role at the center of both spiritual and intellectual life in the United States.
American Catholics were not ready to step into the void; Roman Catholicism in the United States, as in much of the West, was confronting a set of theological and vocational challenges in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. With nuns, priests, and brothers leaving their orders and in some cases the Church,[16] American Catholics were preoccupied by internal organizational problems and were not in a position to replace mainline Protestantism at the ethical and religious center of American culture.
Led by Billy Graham, a North Carolina–born Southern Baptist minister who became the greatest revivalist and preacher on American soil since George Whitefield’s triumphal eighteenth-century career at the height of the Great Awakening, a movement of Sun Belt Christianity rose to fill the void left by the decline of mainline Protestantism. Graham and his fellow evangelicals, as they called themselves, united the Sun Belt behind a specific version of Protestant Christianity that both reaffirmed key elements of classic southern Protestant religion and reshaped southern religion into a force that could have a national and indeed international impact.
