The Rise Of The Republican Right

The narrative of Spiro Agnew's rise and fall has never been fully told. This compelling book tells the story of one of the most controversial, high-level politicians of recent American history and explains the importance of Agnew's life and career. Too often overlooked by students of modern conservatism, Spiro T. Agnew's political career mirrored the transformation of the Republicans from a "big tent" party to a narrower, more conservative, and ideologically purer one in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro Agnew and the Rise of the Republican Right traces Agnew's life and career and shows how Agnew was a key figure in American politics—and documents how a powerful politician who looked to be headed to the presidency ended up having to resign from the office of the vice president in shame and fade into the shadows of political history. This political biography examines how Spiro Agnew's ideological transformation from a moderate liberal to a conservative spearheaded the rise of the Republican Right. Author Justin P. Coffey, PhD, explores the political, social, and racial aspects of Agnew's career and how he both influenced and was himself shaped by each of these parameters. This book offers an unprecedented study of Agnew's legacy in the present-day context, providing information suited for any reader interested in history or politics and filling a void in the scholarship of the rise of the conservative movement.

The transformation of Southern politics over the past fifty years has been one of the most significant developments in American political life. The emergence of formidable Republican strength in the previously solid Democratic South has generated a novel and highly competitive national battle for control of Congress. Tracing the slow and difficult rise of Republicans in the South over five decades, Earl and Merle Black tell the remarkable story of political upheaval. The Rise of Southern Republicans provides a compelling account of growing competitiveness in Southern party politics and elections. Through extraordinary research and analysis, the authors track Southern voters' shifting economic, cultural, and religious loyalties, black/white conflicts and interests during and after federal civil rights intervention, and the struggles and adaptations of congressional candidates and officials. A newly competitive South, the authors argue, means a newly competitive and revitalized America. The story of how the South became a two-party region is ultimately the story of two-party politics in America at the end of the twentieth century. Earl and Merle Black have written a bible for anyone who wants to understand regional and national congressional politics over the past half-century. Because the South is now at the epicenter of Republican and Democratic strategies to control Congress, The Rise of Southern Republicans is essential to understanding the dynamics of current American politics. Table of Contents: 1. The Southern Transformation 2. Confronting the Democratic Juggernaut 3. The Promising Peripheral South 4. The Impenetrable Deep South 5. The Democratic Smother 6. The Democratic Domination 7. Reagan's Realignment of White Southerners 8. A New Party System in the South 9. The Peripheral South Breakthrough 10. The Deep South Challenge 11. The Republican Surge 12. Competitive South, Competitive America Notes Index Reviews of this book: These two leading scholars of Southern politics present a rigorous investigation of how voting in the peripheral South (Florida, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee) and the Deep South (Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina) was realigned since Ronald Reagan was first elected president in 1980. --Karl Helicher, Library Journal With publication of their latest book, The Rise of Southern Republicans the Blacks, both 60, have produced a trilogy that traces an almost geologic-style evolution in the South's political landscape. They've analyzed the whys and what-fors of a region, that in the past 50 years, has gone from impenetrably Democratic to competitively Republican. Their overarching conclusion: the two-party warfare that defines the South defines the nation...The Blacks' work--a mix of political wonkery and historical perspective, cut with the deliciously illuminating anecdote--is read by academics in various disciplines and political junkies of all stripes. The books are valued for their coolly dissecting insights...Because their writing swells beyond the data-crunching lab work of most political scientists--though new readers beware: The books are littered with scary-looking charts and graphs--it travels beyond academia. Party strategists are steeped in the work. "The Blacks wrote the book on how academic political science can illuminate practical politics," says Republican pollster Whit Ayers. --Drew Jubera, Atlanta Journal-Constitution The South's political identity has been transformed in the last half-century from a region of Democratic hegemony to a region of Republican majority. Earl and Merle Black...sedulously examine this remarkable change...This is a work of serious scholarship that lacks any hint of a partisan purpose. Committed readers will increase their understanding of both Southern and national politics. The Blacks' effort may well be the definitive statement on Southern politics over the 20th century. --Publishers Weekly Not since 1872, Earl Black and Merle Black point out in their third book on Southern politics, had the Republicans constructed majorities from both the North and the South in both houses, and it was the national character of their victory that made the 1994 election such a landmark...In The Rise of Southern Republicans, the Black brothers chronicle the party's history from the 1930s to the present, election by election. They illuminate the economic, racial and political dynamics that gradually moved the South toward the Republican Party, while also warning that the Republicans do not by any means own the region in the way the Democrats once did. --Kevin Sack, New York Times Book Review In The Rise of Southern Republicans brothers Earl and Merle Black explain the partisan realignment that has brought the South into the national political mainstream. The Blacks...focus most of their attention on the congressional arena, where voting patterns reflect long-term partisan loyalty more closely than at the presidential level...[T]he story the authors of The Rise of Southern Republicans tell is a fascinating one, with implications for American politics that are both profound and uncertain. --David Lowe, Weekly Standard The rise of southern Republicans is one of the most consequential stories in modern American politics. For political reporters of a certain generation...the Democratic dominance of Southern congressional politics is barely understood. The Black brothers make it all very clear. --Major Garrett, Washington Monthly This superb analysis of Southern politics by Earl Black...and his brother Merle Black...not only tracks the recent rise of Republicans in the South but explains why party realignment along ideological lines was so long in coming to that region...The Rise of Southern Republicans is already being rightly hailed as a political science classic. Its strength is the thorough and systematic manner in which it examines the changing ways a wide variety of factors have affected Southern voting patterns over the past four decades. The data and the rigor of the analysis are truly impressive. --James D. Fairbanks, Houston Chronicle This extraordinary book by the country's two leading scholarly experts on the politics of the American South could accurately have been titled "Everything you wanted to know about Southern politics, as well as everything you could ever imagine asking about it"...Their knowledge of the intricacies of particular congressional districts across the region is amazing, and their analysis of the larger partisan trends in the region makes this the most important book on Southern politics. --Stephen J. Farnsworth, Richmond Times-Dispatch The Black brothers have done it again. The Rise of Southern Republicans is without question the most important book ever written on the role of the South in Congress and the partisan consequences for our national legislature. Far and away the most comprehensive updating of the V.O. Key classic Southern Politics. This is a major work by extremely talented scholars. --Charles S. Bullock, University of Georgia The dramatic rise of the Republican Party in the South is the single most important factor in the transformation of American politics since the 1960s. Earl and Merle Black have described this process in a book that is witty, always filled with insight, and readable to the last page. The Rise of Southern Republicans is indispensable reading for anyone interested in American politics - past, present or future. --Dan T. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics This marvelous book captures - with authority and readability - the big story of post-New Deal party politics in the United States. It is a surefire classic of political science and politics. --Richard F. Fenno, Jr., author of Congress at the Grassroots: Representational Change in the South, 1970-1998

In the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment, Republican women set out to forge a place for themselves within the Grand Old Party. As Catherine Rymph explains, their often conflicting efforts over the subsequent decades would leave a mark on both conservative

Few scholars have paid close attention to the factors internal to the Republican Party that helped the Right to consolidate its power within the party between the 1960s and the 1980s. Plugging the gap in party literature, The Rise of the Republican Right: From Goldwater to Reagan provides a comprehensive account of the rise of the Republican Right in the years between Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential defeat and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Specifically, it offers a historical-institutional analysis of the organizational factors internal to the Republican Party that helped the conservative Right maintain, and then expand its ascendant position within the GOP in the critical years between Goldwater and Reagan. Brian M. Conley demonstrates how the growth of the Right during this period was aided by a desire on the part of many Republican leaders to rebound from electoral defeat by rebuilding the party organizationally, rather than reforming it politically, through the introduction of a more "service" -oriented party structure. The Rise of the Republican Right will interest academics, party scholars, and researchers eager to gain a more nuanced understanding of the factors that helped the Right become a dominant force within the Republican Party.

Ideologically divided and disorganized in 1960, the conservative wing of the Republican Party appeared to many to be virtually obsolete. However, over the course of that decade, the Right reinvented itself and gained control of the party. In Turning Right in the Sixties, Mary Brennan describes how conservative Americans from a variety of backgrounds, feeling disfranchised and ignored, joined forces to make their voices heard and by 1968 had gained enough power within the party to play the decisive role in determining the presidential nominee. Building on Barry Goldwater's short-lived bid for the presidential nomination in 1960, Republican conservatives forged new coalitions, began to organize at the grassroots level, and gained enough support to guarantee Goldwater the nomination in 1964. Brennan argues that Goldwater's loss to Lyndon Johnson in the general election has obscured the more significant fact that conservatives had wrested control of the Republican Party from the moderates who had dominated it for years. The lessons conservatives learned in that campaign, she says, aided them in 1968 and laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980.

In this, the first book to deal exclusively with conservative politics in California, author Kurt Schuparra pinpoints the myriad factors that led to the formation and rise of the conservative movement in California after World War II, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966. While Schuparra is concerned with prominent figures such as Ronald Reagan, California senator William Knowland, Richard Nixon, and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, his larger interest is in the principal players in the movement behind these individuals, the causes they espoused, and the movement's role in pivotal electoral contests. Schuparra also provides an assessment of how the struggle between liberals and conservatives - and those caught in the middle - in the Golden State both reflected and influenced the national debate over major governmental policies and social issues, particularly on racial matters.

The narrative of Spiro Agnew's rise and fall has never been fully told. This compelling book tells the story of one of the most controversial, high-level politicians of recent American history and explains the importance of Agnew's life and career. Too often overlooked by students of modern conservatism, Spiro T. Agnew's political career mirrored the transformation of the Republicans from a "big tent" party to a narrower, more conservative, and ideologically purer one in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro Agnew and the Rise of the Republican Right traces Agnew's life and career and shows how Agnew was a key figure in American politics—and documents how a powerful politician who looked to be headed to the presidency ended up having to resign from the office of the vice president in shame and fade into the shadows of political history. This political biography examines how Spiro Agnew's ideological transformation from a moderate liberal to a conservative spearheaded the rise of the Republican Right. Author Justin P. Coffey, PhD, explores the political, social, and racial aspects of Agnew's career and how he both influenced and was himself shaped by each of these parameters. This book offers an unprecedented study of Agnew's legacy in the present-day context, providing information suited for any reader interested in history or politics and filling a void in the scholarship of the rise of the conservative movement.