Having said that, on Neshoba, I mainly take issue with Krugman’s claim that Reagan somehow specifically chose that location and to use the term “states’ rights” to show that he was on the side of the Southern segregationists. It completely ignores that Mississippi was a swing state at the time, that the fair was important to politics there, and that “states’ rights” is not always a racial term. I also think the idea that everyone understood the speech as Krugman says they did is questionable.

Having said that, I do agree that Reagan was hardly a minority advocate. But not being an advocate is different from being a dyed-in-the-wool segregationist (something I think Krugman would rather people forget).

I wouldn’t try to deny that some observers (Southerners or otherwise) may have seen Neshoba as proof that Reagan was on the side of the Southern whites, but that hardly means that his intent was such. If anything, Reagan was concerned about the implications of the location, not glorying in them.

I’ll stay out of the debate over whether Reagan’s anti-Welfare campaign was racist, though I do think it’s an interesting contention. I also want to thank you for this interesting exchange. Whether or not either of us is convinced to change position, I certainly enjoy the discussion.

Granted, the speech was presented with his inimitable sunny style, but beneath is this dark undertone. And it’s not outrage over big government. As I pointed out earlier, that same year associated civil rights legislation with Southern humiliation. This point was not lost on Southern whites; Southern Partisan magazine and other voices of the old guard gave it prominence.

This wasn’t just a stump speech that he made across the country. It was designed for a Southern audience with the theme, “the Democrats have abandoned you. I am here to pick up the banner.”

Lyndon Johnson said that the Civil Rights Act would hand the South and many northern “hard hats” to the GOP. And movement conservatives jumped on it immediately, followed soon thereafter by the rest of the party. Reagan was among those who picked up the signal immediately and rode the backlash to the governorship (he pointed to “negroes” specifically in speeches on California’s equal housing law).

Krugman’s point is that the small government talk wasn’t enough to swing the South and many of the northern blue-collar Dems to the GOP. Southerners loved New Deal government - right up to the point that black people, including all those promiscuous “Welfare Queens” also became recipients of the largess.

The other thing I would say about “state’s rights” is that Reagan used the term (at Neshoba) as part of his wide-ranging discussion of his distaste for the bloat of government (especially Federal) that he argued kept people down. This is not to deny that the term has a troubling lineage, but to make clear that uttering the term itself hardly means you’re intentionally trying to bring that lineage to mind and become a part of it.

I also thinks its notable, though perhaps not meaningful, that though the term “states’ rights” may have had an established and racist meaning in the South, Reagan was not a Southerner. That doesn’t necessarily excuse the use of the term, but it does complicate the idea that he knew exactly what “I believe in states’ rights” would imply to concerned observers.

Note that early in the speech Reagan makes a remark along the lines of “I’m a Republican, and I know you all are Democrats…”

This is interesting, because Southern Democrats were not federalists or small-government enthusiasts. They were the backbone of the New Deal, for pity’s sake. The only area in which Southern Dems favored federalism were matters involving race.

And Reagan’s appeal wasn’t seminal; it was the culmination of years of using race to drive a wedge through the South. Since 1968, if not before, the GOP had explicitly made it a goal through its Southern Strategy to capture the same demographic as George Wallace, who once said he should have replaced “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” with “States’ rights now! States’ rights tomorrow! States’ rights forever!”

I don’t think it was wrong for Reagan to attend the fair (BTW, the Reagan camp admitted the decision to not kick off with the Urban League was made specifically to avoid sending the “wrong” signal to Southern whites). But it was wrong to employ such loaded language in a place where Jim Crow was not by any means a faded memory, simply to score votes as the Southern Democrats had up to that point.

And the campaign was aware of the symbolism of going so close to Philadelphia, but decided it was important enough to go anyway. Perhaps you can reasonably say that they were wrong to attend the fair, but I still find the claim that the appearance is incontrovertible proof that Reagan and his supporters were racists is, at best, weak.

I think both Krugman and Herbet have a valid point about Reagan’s policies and the importance of race in the Republican resurgence. But race wasn’t overtly an issue in Reagan’s appearance and the fair, and the importance of event has certainly been exaggerated. I think it’s rhetorically useful to be able to claim some moment as seminal proof of the racism of Republican, but that hardly means that Krugman’s story about the event is accurate.

Naturally, Reagan couldn’t go all Orval Faubus (that most famous of Southern “educational policy” advocates) on the crowd and remain a viable national candidate.

The local crowd at that time probably wouldn’t have responded favorably to that kind of rant, either. But let’s keep in mind that this was a mere 16 years after the murders, and 22 years before the community would finally come to grips with what had taken place.

Regardless of what meanings federalism evoked in the rest of the country, in that place and for the people to whom he was speaking it alluded to a very particular symbolism about Southern Pride: Faubus telling the carpetbaggers to mind their own business.

It boggles the mind to think that a great rhetorician like Reagan wasn’t aware of that fact. That’s not to say that he was making racist syllogisms for their own sake; he was trying like the devil to make people believe he was on their side. And in that he was spectacularly successful.

Also, Brooks makes it relatively clear—and no one has refuted, nor could they—that the words “state’s rights,” though uttered, hardly stood alone. Reagan’s words, quoted by Brooks:

“Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

Though one could make an argument about the inherent racism of advocating for local control, I don’t think we should. Republicans regularly appeal to state’s rights as Reagan did, not to race-bait, but as a way to appease the libertarian wing of the party. I’d be tempted to believe that if Reagan meant anything by it, it was primarily that he supports weakening the Federal government, which is not necessarily or inherently a racial position.

I’m not contending, nor would anyone but the most foolhardy fan, that Reagan was some great anti-racism crusader. But his overall stance on race is specious to the question of Philadelphia, where there is legitimate doubt that Reagan was intentionally deploying some coded racial message.

I don’t see how this is exculpatory to the charge that Reagan pandered to racial sentiments in the South. Any first-year student of rhetoric knows that setting is an inseparable part of speech.

Are we to believe the Great Communicator didn’t understand that deploying the “states rights” trope in, of all places, Neshoba County, Mississippi, created a racist enthymeme (particularly given that he had proclaimed earlier that very same year that the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South”)?