Often he told his audience he had come because he had been reading about southern defections to the Republicans. "We just decide we'd come down and see who deserted us and where they'd gone." Or he would talk about his daddy, his father who had been dying in a hospital, but when he, Lyndon, had reminded his daddy that he would get better medical care in the hospital, Lyndon would say, but his daddy had said, "I want to go back amoung our people, where they know when a man's sick, and they care when he dies." That is is the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Johnson would say. "Democrats do care when a man is sick, and they care when he dies, and Democrats care year in and year out." Republicans care too, he said--"just before every election time." ¹

What may be surprising for a modern reader is Johnson was the senator from Texas and this passage describes as he campaigned in the south in 1960 for JFK. During the Civil War, it was the Democratic South that seceded from the Republican North; Lincoln belonged to the Republican party. In the latter part of the 19th century, Democrats began to advocate more use of federal power to cure social ills as a method to win the West; small farmers in Kansas for example were being crushed by railroad companies. This worked also in big cities where workers were having problems against factory owners. The South remained with the Democratic Party until about FDR, whose use of federal power exceeded what many southerners were comfortable with. When Truman then advocated civil rights, the south first formed their own party, the Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond, and when that didn't work some of them switched to Eisenhower in 1952. They held onto the Democratic Party for a few years as the old Democratic stewards from the early 1900s still controlled congress -- people like Lyndon Johnson -- but as they died out the South remained strongly Republican since the 1970s.

Today it seems like an anathema that anyone from the South would be a Democrat and in liberal-rich places like NYC or SF that anyone would dare to be a Republican. But that speech by Johnson, a mere fifty years ago, shows how the tide can turn. I feel like this election is showing the fissures under the surface in both parties, and it could be one of those moments. In 1948 disaffected, southern Democrats created the Dixiecrat party. They also voted for William Wallace as a third-party in 1972. This may be one of those years, and who knows? It may flip again. In another century, New York may proudly proclaim its alliance to Republican principles.

(Whilst I'm quoting this book, I'd also like to mention the part that made me laugh loudly in a quiet library: Often, as the train pulled out, with "The Yellow Rose" blaring again, he would think of additional points he wanted to make, and, with the train already in motion and pulling away from the crowd, would turn back to the microphone, waving and shouting to make them, so that as the train disappeared down the tracks, the sound of his voice remained behind with its final message, as when he shout while the train was chugging away from the station in a little town in Virginia named Culpepper: "Good-bye, Culpepper. Vote Democratic. What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpepper?" Since often the public-address system was still turned on as the train left, his audience could also hear his aides to his staff.... "Good-bye Greer. God bless you, Greer. Bobby, turn off that 'Yeller Rose.' God bless you, Greer. Vote Democratic. Bobby, turn off that fuckin' 'Yeller Rose.' " ²)

¹ Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): 146.
² Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): 147.