Republican Albatross: Reconstruction
 
From: bernhard1848@att.net
 
The South is the last bastion of conservatism in the country, and the constitutional Democrats who abandoned the increasingly Marxist administrations of FDR and Truman sought help from the Republican party. The Eisenhower they supported in 1952 was believed to be a conservative, though he appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court and unconstitutional legislating from the bench was the result.  Unknown to the conservatives, the Warren appointment was a pre-election deal to deliver California’s electoral votes to the Republican party..
 
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net  
 
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Republican Albatross: Reconstruction:
 
“Senator

[Harry F.] Byrd well understood the need for bipartisan cooperation among conservatives. He voiced the concept of coalition himself in a 1951 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit:
 
“In effect, today, we have three major political parties in this country. We have the Republicans, we have the [Southern] Constitutional Democrats, and we have the New Dealers and the Fair Dealers. It should be possible to divide the American people into two groups, regardless of party membership; one group comprising those who think in terms of the prime necessity of preserving the basic principles of our constitutional government, and who are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to that end; then in the second group, place those who think in terms of State Socialism and direct personal benefits from the federal government, even at the expense of weakening our system of free democracy.”
 
Though he recognized the desirability, and even the inevitability of Southern realignment, Senator Byrd was not at all enthusiastic about embracing the Republican Party, as least in the Old Dominion.  But Byrd also was determined not to stand by idly, while, in his view, the country suffered under liberal Democratic rule at the national level.
 
Much of Byrd’s resistance to more overt ties with the Republicans was emotional. The Republican Party that he had known since childhood was the party of Reconstruction and black rule in the South and big business in the North. “Good” Virginians simply were not Republicans.”
 
(The Dynamic Dominion, Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945, Frank B. Atkinson, George Mason University Press, 1992, pp. 55-56)