For two hundred years, Mississippi was ruled by a cabal of single-issue (or nearly single) Democrats. You couldn’t even say they were conservatives. On issues like women voting, federal parks, trust-busting, and the gold standard, we were pretty moderate to liberal. For anything involving race, dancing, or drinking, we were the most conservative voices out there.
During the sixties, the ice began to melt around the heart of some Southern Democrats with regards to race (Thanks for Lyndon B Johnson) and drinking. While most of Mississippi hated the change, by 1970, you could tell things were beginning to move.
By the seventies, clearly, there was a major change coming. Conservative, single-issue (race) Mississippians began changing to the Republican party. People who were more moderate on the race issue became moderate Democrats, and for a very brief while, they held most of the power in Mississippi.
I won’t describe the “Southern Strategy” the way Lee Atwater did, although he laid it out pretty honestly. To paraphrase what he said: In the past, all you had to do was use overtly racist language, and conservative Southerners were all behind you. Things changed in the sixties. Nobody wanted to be associated with racist language, so they began speaking in code. Any program that people perceived to be more of a help to black Americans than white Americans could be used to create a fear that the program would embolden the presumed baser nature of Africans and, therefore, a danger to whites.
Despite the success of the Southern Strategy, In Mississippi, some new voices and new ideas could be heard, and for a while, they were growing.
I don’t know if you can accurately say if my dad was either liberal or conservative. He didn’t have much patience with a lot of liberal ideas and conservative ideas either. Like many people, he was very interested in resolving issues of race so we could move on to the other items in the mountain of problems Mississippi had. More than anything, my dad was Methodist, and that meant moderate. He didn’t like to rush into anything, but he didn’t like being an idealogue or someone afraid of change either. He advocated moderately considering your options and then reasonably and moderately dealing with your problems. Mississippians tend to be bombastic. This more reasoned approach wasn’t at all popular among some people but very popular among others.
Daddy surrounded himself with other moderates. I can remember very well listening to my cousin Robert Wingate and his friend Charlie Deaton seriously cuss Ronald Reagan’s PIK program while eating boiled peanuts and tossing the shells into the woods. To me, that was the core of the Mississippi Delta.
America was in a farm crisis, and Mississippi was getting it worse than most. Guys who owned their land outright, without any debt, made money with the PIK program. Most guys didn’t, though. In Mississippi, it was common for farmers to buy their daddy’s farm, mortgage it to pay their daddy enough money to retire on, and then get back most of the principal from the loan when daddy died. This went on for generations. In the seventies, mortgage loan rates went higher and higher and higher, and a lot of guys started having trouble making their mortgage payments and began losing their farms. Other guys started picking up these valuable farm acres from a bank sale, but then they would get in trouble because they borrowed so much money to do it.
Some guys were in pretty good shape. My cousin Richard Huzzey was in pretty good shape because his dad died before the mortgage crisis, and he owned his land outright. At Millsaps, I was socially involved with a woman whose father wheeled and dealed and picked up almost a thousand acres from bank sales, added to the over a thousand acres he already had. Romantically and with regard to whiskey, she was a libertine, which worked in my favor. Financially and in matters of race and culture, she was a conservative, which worked against me. She was one of the most beautiful women I was ever involved with, but there’s more to it than that, and the fates were against us. Besides, all that drinking was just about to get me kicked out of Millsaps.
There was a sweet spot in Mississippi moderate politics that stretched from the election of William Winter through Bill Allain till the end of the Mabus governorship when the first-ever Republican governor was elected. Among the most notable achievements during this era were the Winter and Mabus educational packages and Mike Moore’s stunning victory over the tobacco companies. People talk about Huey Long’s victory over the oil companies; that aint nothing compared to what Mike Moore accomplished. Moore had Richard Scruggs in his corner; that might have made a difference.
I went to an Ole Miss football game with my dad, Rowan Taylor, and long-time Mississippi Education leader Bob Fortenberry. This was when they still had most of the big Ole Miss games in Jackson. Before the game, after The Pride of the South played the national anthem, the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Mississippi welcome to the honorable governor of our state and his wife, Ray Mabus!” and you could slowly hear boos come out of the student section, that moved like a wave over the rest of the home side of the field. Mabus had just won a stunning victory for his education bill; what the heck were they booing about? I looked to my dad to see his response. “Were we in trouble?” I thought. Rowan just said, “I’ll be damned,” under his breath.
This business of new Republicans vs. moderate Democrats came to a head when John Stennis retired. John Stennis scared the peanuts out of me. I met him seven or eight times. By that point in his career, he was entrenched enough that he didn’t have to be polite to anybody he didn’t want to, and a moose-shaped white boy from Jackson was somebody he didn’t want to.
Running for his seat were two members of the Mississippi House delegation. Wayne Dowdy, with an office in McComb, and Trent Lott, who is from Grenada but grew up on the coast.
Lott was gregarious and popular. He was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and ran for Student Body President. Out of college, he went to work for Bill Colmer, representing Mississippi in the House. Colmer was a very typical Dixiecrat. After Brown v Board of Education, he was an author of the “Southern Manifesto” and presented it door to door in the House, on foot. I honestly don’t have a lot pleasant to say about Bill Colmer. When he retired, Tent Lott took over his seat, which was a relief.
Dowdy was a Millsaps Graduate. He had new ideas about being a Democrat from Mississippi. For one thing, he believed in the idea of a coalition of white and black voters that could carry him to victory, and it worked. Even today, you’d think that was a strategy that would work in Mississippi, but often doesn’t.
The year before, Ray Mabus beat Jack Reed with a similar strategy, so most people, early on, thought Dowdy was a shoo-in. Lott was convinced Mississippi was ready for a change and pointed to the election of Thad Cochran and George Bush’s success in Mississippi as proof. The race was pretty close for a while, but as it drew down on the wire, Lott began to pull ahead. In the end, he won by seven points.
After the election of Lott, it became harder and harder to elect a white Democrat in Mississippi. The Southern Strategy had taken us over.
After this point, some parts of Mississippi continued to grow (Oxford being the best example) while other parts of Mississippi started to die (Jackson being the best example.) Race is still just about the only issue that will win an election in Mississippi, so long as you don’t ever say that it’s race.
There are a lot of guys now that I look at and think, “Man, I wish you had gotten the chance you deserve.” but Mississippi is different now, and those chances are gone. There’s absolutely no doubt that Mississippi is in decline. I’m not really one to point fingers, but it wasn’t always like this.
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
And for one brief shining moment…
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