May 29, 2023
Dear editor;
This opinion piece is in response to Mr. Suhayda’s commentary in The Voice April 27 edition.
Rather than wade through the fiction and gross exaggerations Mr. Suhayda tirelessly expounds, some of which have been efficiently and at times humorously dealt with in The Voice, I will, instead, focus on one Mr. Suhayda’s least distorted comments from April 27 concerning the history of the Democratic Party.
The following information is adapted from Becky Little, “How the Party of Lincoln Won Over the Once Democratic South,” and any errors are mine.
One-hundred-and- fifty years ago racists, rebel sympathizers, and all manner of sordid human folk found home in the Democratic Party. David Goldfield, in his book,” The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good” writes: “The Democratic Party came to be more than a political party in the South, it came to be a defender of a way of life; and that way of life was the restoration, as much as possible, of white supremacy. Confederate statues all around the South were erected by Democrats.”
Fast forward to 1948: President Harry Truman, a Democrat, ordered desegregation of the military, while supporting a pro civil-rights plank in the Democratic party platform, it was too much for the southern democrats; they formed a faction, seceded from the party at large, and called themselves the Dixiecrats. They soon held their own convention beginning what Goldfield called “the erosion of the southern influence of the Democratic Party.”
President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner, signed the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and although some southern Democrats trickled to the Republicans prior to the signings, afterwards, according to Goldfield, “the defections became a flood. And so, the political parties began to reconstitute themselves.” By Ronald Reagan’s time as president, the South was Republican.
Mr. Suhayda’s comment that “it was the Democrats who voted in greater numbers against the Civil Rights Bills of the 1960s than Republicans” is misleading: the “Dixiecrats” mentioned previously were most probably the “NO” vote in any Civil Rights legislation, and they were in actuality, ”Republicans in waiting”.
David Hoehne, Aurora