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IV. Regional Identities in Question

Ronald Reagan’s Northern Strategy and a new American Partisan Identity: The Case of the Reagan Democrats

Françoise Coste
p. 221-238

Abstract

Alors que Ronald Reagan est souvent présenté comme un politicien californien ayant conquis le Sud pour conquérir la Maison Blanche, son succès présidentiel de 1980 a surtout été rendu possible par une stratégie électorale centrée sur le Nord des Etats-Unis. Le candidat républicain conservateur a en effet brillamment su exploiter le profond malaise qui caractérisait la classe ouvrière vivant dans les villes industrielles du Nord, et souvent d’origine immigrée européenne. Ces millions d’électeurs, traditionnellement fidèles au parti démocrate, se sont tournés en masse vers Ronald Reagan en novembre 1980. Ce bouleversement électoral s’explique en particulier par les tensions raciales qui existaient alors dans les villes du Nord entre communautés blanches et noires. Mais plutôt que de recourir à une rhétorique ouvertement raciste, Reagan est parvenu à provoquer une rupture entre le parti démocrate et sa base ouvrière blanche dans le Nord grâce à une campagne très active dans cette région et à une rhétorique subtile centrée sur les notions de travail, de succès et de rêve américain. Ainsi, c’est en manipulant les espoirs et les peurs des ouvriers blancs du Nord que Reagan a réussi à briser de manière assez définitive la coalition du New Deal.

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1One of the main debates currently raging among American historians of the Twentieth Century revolves around the relevance of the concept of Southern Exceptionalism. While many writers have insisted on the growing influence of the South in American culture and politics since the end of the Second World War (a trend famously started by Nixon’s advisor Kevin Phillips with his book The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969), younger historians (like Matthew Lassiter in The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006) or in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, co-edited with Joseph Crespino in 2010) have argued that focusing on the South alone to explain contemporary politics in the United States was misguided. In their eyes, such an approach eclipsed other crucial phenomena, especially the rise of suburbs since 1945. This debate is admittedly complex and fascinating, yet in some respects it fails to account for another fundamental trend in recent American history. This trend is best exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in November 1980. This momentous event in American political history proves that the contemporary debate opposing the South to the suburbs—however relevant it may be—is too narrow, since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was not just made possible by the growing political influence of the suburban West, or by Reagan’s smart resort to the Southern Strategy. 1980 was also the year of the urban vote, more specifically the white and northern urban vote.

  • 1 These two regions comprise 18 states which could swing a presidential election since they represent (...)

2In 1980, the Reagan campaign knew it could rely on the West—as Reagan had been the popular Republican governor of California from 1966 to 1974. As for incumbent President Jimmy Carter, he was confident that, as the former governor of Georgia, he could rely on the South—as he had successfully done so in 1976. Consequently, both campaigns concentrated their efforts on the North and the Midwest.1 The 1980 presidential campaign papers in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library attest to this choice, as they contain considerably more papers devoted to these two areas than to the rest of the country. Interestingly, in November 1980, Reagan overwhelmingly won these states (he won Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine). The main characteristic of this region was its strong industrial, urban, and Democratic identity. In other words, Reagan convinced millions of traditionally Democratic voters to vote for him, hence the emergence of the famous ‘Reagan Democrats’: 22% of all Democrats voted for Reagan in 1980 (Edsall and Edsall 164); more specifically, Reagan won the votes of 54% of the white working class and 47% of union members (while Carter only got 43% of them) (Abramson et al. 98-99). Reagan thus created what journalists Thomas and Mary Edsall have called a "cross-class alliance" between workers and the Republican upper classes (Edsall and Edsall 154). This paper will show how Reagan and his advisors patiently and skillfully devised an ideological and rhetorical campaign strategy which enabled them to reverse the partisan identity of the people who had embodied the very heart of the American Left for decades.

A group in crisis

3The voters who became Reagan Democrats in 1980 constitute a very specific demographic group, strongly associated with the white working class. Culturally, this population is mostly composed of non-Protestant whites, essentially Jewish and Catholic people, often popularly referred to as ‘white ethnics’. In its internal documents, the Reagan campaign used this “ethnic” label but it also frequently resorted to the more general term of "nationalities", a category in which it listed almost thirty groups (the most important being "Poles, Italians, Germans, Czeks, Hungarians, Slovaks, Greeks, […] Lithuanians, Armenians, […] Serbs, Slovenians, Croats, […] Irish, Romanians, Latvians, Portuguese, […] Bulgarians, Albanians, Estonians, Ukrainians") (Organizational Chart). From a geographical point of view, these voters were concentrated in what the campaign identified as "major nationality cities and states" (Memo Hal Short), such as the Northern and Mid-Western industrial states of "New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin" (Summary). Politically speaking, the white working class came of age in 1932 when it became the largest component of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Between 1932 and 1980, no Democrat ever won the presidency without winning this particular part of the American electorate. In 1980, the white working class represented more than one third of the nation’s voters (Abramson et al 37).

4Yet, at the end of the 1970s, this most influential political group was going through very difficult years, especially from an economic point of view. The crisis was manifold: a 13.5% inflation rate, the energy crisis resulting from the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 (the price of a gallon of oil went from 35 cents in 1970 to $1.19 in 1980), a 7% unemployment rate, and a 4.6% fall in median incomes between 1978 and 1980 (Edsall and Edsall 17, 134-135). These trends particularly affected the working class because they led to the destruction of close to 700,000 industrial jobs in 1979-1980 (especially in the steel and car industries) (Edsall and Edsall 198). But if the difficulties of the working class were many, one element trumped them all: race.

  • 2 This competition was also imposed by the courts in police and fire departments in large Northern ci (...)

5The Civil Rights Movement had, in a first phase, focused on political rights for Southern Blacks. However in the late 1960s, its demands evolved towards social and economic equality, which meant that, for the first time, the Movement reached the North. And when it reached the North, it engulfed the white working class. The points of conflict between the black community and the white ethnics in the North were numerous. The first clashes were economic. In the 1970s, many industrial companies were ordered by the federal government and by the courts to abandon racist practices and to set up preferential programs for Blacks (Sugrue and Skrentny 174). This intensified the competition between white and black workers precisely when jobs were becoming increasingly scarce.2 In other words, white blue-collar workers were asked to share with Blacks a quickly diminishing pie—when no such efforts were asked of white professionals.

  • 3 Thus, between 1940 and the late 1960s, the black population of New York City went from 6% to 16% of (...)
  • 4 The link between urban decay and the rise of racism among the white working-class was brilliantly i (...)

6This competition between white and black workers was also quite literally spatial. In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents).

  • 5 In the fall of 1972, the white ethnic neighborhood of Canarsie in Brooklyn erupted in anti-busing r (...)

7In this general climate of exasperation, the final straw was busing. Because white ethnic neighborhoods were so close to black ghettos, they became the main targets of the busing programs launched by the courts and by local governments in the North in the 1970s (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 65). White ethnics stormed the political stage in the early 1970s, when they violently protested against busing in Northern cities (Boston, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago etc).5 Of course, these tensions did not go unnoticed by Ronald Reagan. Busing—which the candidate described as "wrong" and "a social experiment that has failed" and was only supported by "zealots"—featured predominantly in the list of "issues of special concern to ethnic Americans" that his campaign published in 1980 (News Release).

  • 6 Hence the indignation and even anger expressed by the white ethnics from Brooklyn interviewed by Ri (...)

8In the late 1970s, racist reactions crystallized around one issue: welfare. Welfare was the perfect political scapegoat for the white working class because it combined all the racist resentments just mentioned. At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder. Admittedly this mechanism requires sacrifices and patience, but for most white ethnics, such were the dues to be paid to achieve the American Dream, without complaining (Sugrue and Skrentny 178-179). Logically, the Welfare State system violated every single tenet of this ideology.6

9Of course this moral condemnation of welfare was compounded by the specific economic difficulties of the late 1970s. Welfare was expensive—especially because the number of recipients increased by 237% in the 1970s—and it was financed through taxes: to finance the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson had increased the federal income tax by 10% in 1968 (Edsall and Edsall 106, 71). Thus, for the white working class, the revolt against welfare was closely linked to a revolt against taxes. Whereas most of these working class families had themselves benefited from welfare during the Great Depression, more and more blue collar workers came to see welfare in the 1970s not as a temporary system of relief for out-of-work workers, but as a generous and self-perpetuating system where white tax payers’ money was redistributed to undeserving Blacks who just did not want to work.

  • 7 Kevin Phillips had identified this problem as early as 1969: "The Democratic Party fell victim to t (...)

10This racially-tinged criticism of welfare became an obsession for the white working class in the late 1970s. Interestingly, the institutions which had the most to lose from this situation, that is the Democratic Party and trade unions, did see the storm coming. In 1980, the largest American union, the AFL-CIO, surveyed its members and found out that more and more workers were questioning their allegiance to the Democratic Party. The reason for this historic disaffection was simple, as expressed by the president of a union called the Communication Workers of America: "When I speak to our members, people are always asking me, ‘Why do we pay so much taxes to take care of those deadbeats?’" (qtd. in Shabecoff).7 But the fact that the Left saw the storm coming does not mean it actually took any action to prepare for it. On the contrary, in 1980, Carter never addressed the resentment of the white working class regarding the Welfare State, probably seeing it as too racist to be considered a legitimate political matter. Thus, the Democratic Party left the doors wide open for Ronald Reagan to come and pick up its most stalwart supporters.

Reagan’s Northern Strategy

  • 8 It is crucial to realize that Reagan appealed to Democratic voters well before the term ‘Reagan Dem (...)

11Ronald Reagan—who was born in a Protestant family in a small Mid-Western town and who later became a rich Hollywood actor—rather brilliantly managed to create a political persona that successfully clicked with the white ethnic working class from Northern cities.8

12The Northern and working class focus of Reagan’s 1980 strategy is first literally inscribed in the geographical nature of his campaign. The all-important announcement speech in which he formally declared his presidential candidacy was organized in New York City in November 1979 (Cannon 447). Reagan often returned to the New York area during the campaign, and his most spectacular speech there took place on Labor Day, September 1, 1980. The Republican candidate did not go to New York to speak to Wall Street Republicans. His target audience was more original: using the Statue of Liberty and New York harbor as his background, Reagan gave a speech and then organized “an ethnic picnic” in Liberty State Park, NJ, where the flags of Eastern European countries were predominantly displayed and where the guest speaker was Stanislaw Walesa, Lech Walesa’s father. The “event objectives” described by the campaign are electorally transparent:

If the Reagan/Bush ticket is to carry New York and New Jersey, it must cut into the ethnic, Catholic, blue-collar vote. Nowhere is there a better chance to achieve this goal than in Northern New Jersey […]. Offshore there are two great immigrant symbols: the Statue of Liberty (symbol of America’s freedoms) and Ellis Island, which served as a gateway to America (Briefing Documents).

13In case the association Labor Day/industrial Northern city/white Catholic immigrants was not explicit enough for average Democratic voters, Reagan left the New York area immediately after the picnic to fly to Detroit, where he attended another party organized by steel and auto workers (Raines Republicans Stress). Here too, the campaign wanted to convey a message specifically devised for voters suffering economically in what Reagan’s advisors saw as "the epitome of the Democratic, big-labor-controlled big city" [sic]: "Gov. Reagan will attend a barbecue at the home of an unemployed worker named Emil Petri. The purpose of this event is to show Gov. Reagan’s concern about the plight of the unemployed" (Memo Event Objectives). Finally, the campaign came full circle geographically when, a few days before the November election, Reagan gave a televised speech devoted to the economy. Again, far from his Sun Belt image, he never mentioned the dynamic prosperity of the West or the South. He devoted the first lines of the speech to a summary of his campaign and the geographical lens he used is particularly telling:

During this campaign, I have visited places in America with such proud names… Steubenville and Detroit, Youngstown and Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Seattle, Houston and Hartford and Jersey City and Lima, cities like New York and small towns like Greenville, Illinois (Reagan A Vital Economy).

  • 9 In this last case, the campaign went through a company called Catholic Major Markets, a "Catholic n (...)
  • 10 Here are a few examples of the ethnic newspapers used by the Reagan campaign: the Greek Press in Il (...)

Except for Houston and Seattle, all these places are in the North and the Mid-West, all of them large industrial centers. Reagan’s rhetorical choices of cities drew up a political map; through his list of places, a geographical identity morphed into a socio-economic and ideological one. This rather subtle approach echoes the general strategy adopted by the branch of the Reagan campaign specifically devoted to appealing to traditional Democratic voters, the "nationalities division." The nationalities division had a tremendous responsibility within the campaign, as Reagan’s advisors were well aware that the ethnic vote "in any state running from Wisconsin through to New York c[ould] provide the margin of victory" (Memo Ethnic Events). Yet, it often proceeded by stealth, elaborating an electoral strategy which, despite being unquestionably ambitious, coherent and well thought-out, remained very discrete. Although Reagan is remembered as the Great Communicator who mastered like no other president before him the television medium, his nationalities division did not use TV to reach ethnic voters. Rather, as in the case of its "office of Catholic affairs," it relied on 650,000 flyers distributed near 6,000 Catholic schools; on spots on local radios; on chain letters addressed to thousands of bishops, school principals and administrators; and on the local ethnic press in target states (Summary).9 This strategy presented a twofold advantage: not only did it disseminate Ronald Reagan’s ideas in the very heart of traditionally Democratic communities, but it did so at a very low cost (less than $200,000 total) as the ethnic press was "comparably inexpensive" (Nationalities Advertising Summary).10 By comparison, the Carter campaign did not focus on such media at all.

  • 11 This pro-union strategy also explains why Reagan abandoned in 1980 several of the anti-union stance (...)

14Ronald Reagan also proved original by breaking the traditional conservative ideological mould and openly courting the union vote. Far from campaigning as the conservative zealot people see in him, Reagan, in many respects, presented himself as the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His own personal itinerary helped make this identification more plausible. He was born in a Democratic family, and his own father had survived thanks to welfare during the Great Depression. Reagan actually shocked the rather conservative delegates at the Republican National Convention in 1980 when he concluded his acceptance speech with a passage paying tribute to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan made his own the most famous phrase of Roosevelt’s 1932 acceptance speech: "an American president told the generation of the Great Depression that it had a ‘rendezvous’ with destiny. I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny” (Reagan Acceptance Speech). This Rooseveltian persona was also linked to Reagan’s unionist past. In the 1950s, he had been the president of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood, a fact he never tired of recalling when in front of working-class audiences, as during his Labor Day speech in New York: "I happen to be the only president of a union ever to be a candidate for President of the United States… Well I pledge to you … that the voice of the American worker will once again be heeded in Washington" (Reagan Labor Day Speech). In the last weeks before the election, the campaign distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers in industrial towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and the message the flyers conveyed was practically indistinguishable from what a Democratic candidate would have been expected to say: "He led the Screen Actors Guild in its first strike and he won it! Elect the former union president, President!" (Raines In Move).11

15Reagan’s insistence on America’s industrial identity and on his own union past was of course more than mere nostalgia. The mention of the past was intrinsically linked to the volatile economic and social atmosphere of the late 1970s. It is impossible not to read Reagan’s appeals to the working class through the prism of the revolt against the Welfare State described earlier. Praising America’s working class and unions enabled Reagan to praise the value which he characterized as the opposite of welfare: the value of work

16Welfare had already been at the center of Reagan’s first presidential campaign in 1976. The most famous argument he used during the 1976 Republican primary—which he had lost—had been that of the ‘welfare queen’. He devoted many speeches to this issue:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans (sic) benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000 (Washington Star).

  • 12 The woman who came to be known as the ‘Welfare Queen’ was eventually convicted of fraud for using 2 (...)

17Another staple of Reagan’s 1976 stump speech had been his description of Taino Towers, a public housing development in New York City: "If you are a slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities" (Washington Star). These welfare statistics were widely inaccurate,12 but this did not matter. What mattered was that the so-called welfare queen—Linda Taylor—was black and that the Taino Towers were located in Harlem. The racial dimension of Reagan’s crusade against welfare had therefore been unmistakable in 1976. In 1980, however, Reagan adopted a more subtle approach, one which was more finely attuned to the values of the white and unionized working class. Of course, he continued to criticize the Welfare State, but instead of doing it through attacking the people who received welfare benefits, he focused on a more abstract—and interesting—reflection on the meaning of work and success in the United States. In this sense, even if he targeted traditional Democratic constituencies, he did so differently from Democratic politicians.

18Reagan’s most striking originality in 1980 was consequently substantive. Probably aware that competing on a traditional Democratic turf with traditional Democratic arguments would be both difficult and not really credible, the Reagan campaign decided that its "thrust" would "not be made on a ‘labor issue’ but rather on a middle-class issue" (Memo Michael P. Balzano). This crucial displacement was based on the conviction of Reagan’s advisors that white ethnics were "skilled laborers who think of themselves as middle class, not working class" (Memo E. Callahan). This interesting intuition explains why even the campaign’s most blatant appeals to the working class, like Reagan’s frequent mentions of Roosevelt or trade-unions, never came from a liberal perspective. For example, in the conclusion of his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Reagan quoted FDR at length:

For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government—federal, state and local—costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action, we mush abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government…. We must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford. I propose to you, my friends, and through you that government of all kinds, big and little be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his cabinet (Reagan Acceptance Speech).

The passage chosen by Reagan is significant since here, Roosevelt adopted a rather conservative attitude hostile to Big Government. Rather ingenuously, Reagan proved to the white working class that it was possible to vote for him while actually remaining a Democrat, since by criticizing an over-regulating and over-taxing government, Reagan was not echoing the reviled Goldwater or Nixon, but only following FDR’s example.

19The treatment of white ethnics as middle-class rather than working-class voters also explains the thematic substance of Reagan’s message, which was articulated around three main issues: "traditional family values and jobs and inflation" (Catholic Advertising Summary). Through weaving these themes together, Reagan managed to echo all the social, cultural, and economic grievances that took over millions of white ethnics in the 1970s. This rhetorical strategy started by idealizing America’s immigration past. For example, in his Labor Day speech, the history of white ethnics enabled Reagan to adroitly and unquestionably condemn welfare without ever mentioning it explicitly:

  • 13 With this obvious and deliberate echo of the very renowned passage in John Kennedy’s Inaugural Addr (...)

It is fitting that on Labor Day, we meet … with the eyes of Miss Liberty on our gathering. … Through this ‘Golden Door,’ under the gaze of that ‘Mother of Exiles,’ have come millions of men and women. … These families came here to work. They came to build. … They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them (Reagan Labor Day Speech).13

20Another way of linking the past to the political present was to include these immigrant communities in the largest American and middle-class experience by insisting on the traditional values of white ethnic neighborhoods. One of Reagan’s stock speeches throughout the 1980 campaign was entitled The Ethnic American and His Role in American Society and its message was obviously tailored for people like the inhabitants of Brooklyn or Jersey City:

Love of family, willingness to work to achieve desirable ends, a sense of community manifested in neighborhoods all across the United States, an unashamed belief in the American dream of material well-being guided by love of God—these are the values that exist in every ethnic community, not only among those living in the traditional ethnic neighborhoods of the cities, but in the second-and-third generation who may have moved to the suburbs but still hold family values dear (Ethnic American Speech).

21The celebration of work, family, immigration, and personal responsibility led Reagan to ground his message on two types of comparison. The first comparison is, of course, that between the hard-working white ethnics and the undeserving black welfare recipients. The second comparison is between the glory of the American Dream in which millions of white immigrants believed and the situation of their descendants decades later.

Victims and victimizers

22One of the keys to understanding the Reagan Democrats phenomenon can be found in the speech Reagan gave in New York in 1979 to announce his candidacy. In a critical passage, he highlighted the drop in status that the working class was then going through: "The lack of year growth in the economy has introduced the justifiable fear in the minds of working men and women who are already over extended that soon there will be fewer jobs and no money to pay for even the necessities of life" (Reagan Announcement). In his Labor Day speech in 1980, Reagan also heavily insisted on the symbolic impact of the economic crisis on the white working-class: "Jimmy Carter’s Administration tells us that the descendants of those who sacrificed to start again in this land of freedom may have to abandon the dream that drew their ancestors to a new life in a new land" (Labor Day Speech). For Reagan, the economic crisis was clearly not just an economic problem. It did not just threaten the livelihood of people, it much more importantly threatened the middle-class status that millions of blue-collar workers had managed to reach during the years of prosperity which had followed the end of WWII. By stressing the precariousness and vulnerability of the white ethnics’ middle-class success, Reagan put his finger on a quasi-ontological anxiety within the white working class: just when the children and grandchildren of impoverished Jewish, Catholic, or Eastern European immigrants thought they had achieved the American Dream, they were in danger of losing everything.

  • 14 Italics mine.

23Reagan understood this emotional context, and he repeatedly adopted an alarmist tone in his messages to white ethnics. In their analysis of the "nationalities" voters, Reagan’s advisors insisted on their "fear of losing jobs" and on their need to "protect … acquired money [and] status" (Memo Hal Short; Memo E. Callahan). Reagan’s Labor Day speech was used by the campaign to illustrate a flyer which featured a picture of the candidate with the Statue of Liberty in the background and the slogan: "‘We Share the Same Dream’— Elect Ronald Reagan to Preserve Those Dreams" (Statue of Liberty Flyer). One of the ads published in the Catholic press claimed: "The time is now to rebuild America’s cornerstones: Our families and our neighborhoods," while the letter Reagan sent to Catholic leaders insisted that "work and family are at the center of our lives […]. We must ensure that soaring prices and high unemployment do not deprive people of what they have earned nor take away their jobs, nor endanger their values" (Summary).14 Because such a difficult situation required an explanation, the plot of the 1980 presidential campaign can be compared to a trial: the white working class is suffering a terrible fate, and Reagan will find who the culprit is.

24At a first level, the villain was of course the Democratic Party and Jimmy Carter. The white working class had voted for Carter in 1976, and Reagan accused him in 1980 of betraying the trust of his blue collar base: “Back in 1976, Mr. Carter said, "trust me." And a lot of people did. Now, many of these people are out of work." (Reagan Acceptance Speech); or: "I have talked with unemployed workers all across this country…. They are out of work and they know who put them out of work. … The damage is done and every American family knows who did it" (Reagan Labor Day Speech). A few days before the election, Reagan called "what Mr. Carter ha[d] done to the country" not "fair", not "right", he even compared Carter’s economic policies to a "punishment" for the people (Reagan A Vital Economy). The image of a punishment is striking because it put traditional Democratic white ethnics in a position of victims. The process of victimization can be seen as the apex of Reagan’s ethnic strategy. The pathos of his Ethnic American Speech for example is inescapable:

The ethnic American has been called ‘the invisible man’ of American society—and with good reason. Too often the government and media treat ethnics as if they did not exist. […]

The ethnic has persevered in spite of government indifference, and even in the face of government-created obstacles. Often ethnic Americans have been displaced by affirmative action quotas. […]

Nothing short of an entire reexamination of the way the values of ethnic Americans have been neglected and ignored is acceptable. The condescending pat on the head during election year (and the political amnesia that immediately and inevitably follows), the rhetoric that praises the past contributions made by ethnic groups but neglect to deal with their present concerns – these are some of the practices that must be eliminated from our national life. […]

  • 15 Interestingly, since Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man, published in 1952, the image of the ‘ (...)

The 1980’s must be a time when the values which have sustained our common American culture become the dominating force in our national revival. It is time for the ‘invisible man’ to be recognized (Ethnic American Speech)15.

25The next logical step in the process of victimization is to wonder: who benefitted from this abandonment of the white working class by the Democratic Party? Given Reagan’s insistence on the value of work and his rejection of welfare, the answer is obvious: the Democratic Party stopped caring for the white working class because it decided to favor black people. Even worse in this case: these new victims had to literally pay for the crime, as it was their taxes which financed the welfare apparatus which enabled Blacks to live like princes in places like Taino Towers. So, instead of using racism to appeal to the white working class, Reagan much more subtly turned racism on its head by describing Whites as victims and Blacks as victimizers. In 1980, for the first time, the platform of the Republican Party introduced the concept of “reverse discrimination”. It admittedly paid lip service to the concept of racial equality—the sign that blatant racism was not acceptable anymore in the public discourse by 1980: "The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance." But the following sentence was a direct rebuke of this general principle: "However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory" (Republican Party, Republican Party Platform). So, the new victims of racism were the white workers whose factories were forced in the 1970s to open their doors to black workers or the white policemen and firefighters whose departments were integrated by court order.

26In this reversal of the mechanisms of racial discrimination lies the origin of the "Reagan Democrats" phenomenon. The paranoia of the white working class in 1980 was an unstoppable force, brilliantly exploited by Reagan. By recalling the glorious past of the unionized working-class, by praising work over welfare, by incessantly resorting to the specter of social degradation for white workers, Reagan reinforced the conviction the white working class had that it was being besieged by Blacks—besieged spatially in urban neighborhoods surrounded by black ghettos, and besieged financially by the taxes levied by Democratic administrations to finance the welfare checks sent to these ghettos. Or to put it differently, Reagan replaced the image of black kids harassed by a white crowd in Little Rock by the image of the Northern white ethnic harassed by a tax collector working for a Welfare agency. This reversal marked the end of the New Deal and of classical democratic liberalism. Through the switch between victims and victimizers, Reagan convinced millions of Democratic voters that they could abandon their traditional partisan identity with a clear conscience since they were the ones being abused by their traditional party. This electorally brilliant maneuver reveals a lot about Ronald Reagan as it illustrates an often forgotten dimension of his political persona. The case of white ethnics shows that a leader who is to this day remembered and praised as a supremely optimistic politician actually campaigned in 1980, in some parts of the electorate, not on hope, but on fear. And this worked because Reagan proved that he perfectly understood the deepest feelings of the American working-class. What had made the white working-class Democratic since the New Deal was the party’s claim to represent the little guy fighting against powerful forces which worked against his interest. In 1980, Reagan argued that these forces were not banks or corporations anymore—as during the 1930s. A new oppressor had appeared—the black lower class demanding quotas and welfare—and this new oppressor required a new protector: Ronald Reagan. So the switch of millions of Democrats to Reagan in 1980 was more than the mere expression of the embourgeoisement of the working class. It was a switch born of fear—as in 1932, when the working class had massively turned to Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression. Reagan had therefore understood that fear—rather than mere selfishness or racism—was the prime motivator of the American working-class.

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Bibliography

Archival Documents

Briefing documents, "Jersey City, NJ – Detroit, Michigan, September 1, September 1-2," undated, folder "California Headquarters – Briefing Documents from Policy Coordination Office, 9/1-2/-80," Box 55, Hannaford/ California Headquarters, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Catholic Advertising Summary, undated, folder "Media Campaign – [Voter Groups – Activity Reports Binder] (2)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Ethnic American Speech, Ronald Reagan, Dec. 15, 1979, folder "Meese, Ed - Subject File- Ethnics (1)," Box 129, Ed Meese Files, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Memo, E. Callahan to D. O’Reilly et al., Aug. 20, 1980, folder "Media Campaign – Voter Block (1)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Memo, "Ethnic Events," Bill Casey to Bill Timmons et al., Sept. 25, 1980, folder “Political Operations - Voter groups - Nationalities (2),” Box 257, William Timmons (Director of Political Operations), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Memo, "Event Objectives," undated, folder "California Headquarters – Briefing Documents from Policy Coordination Office, 9/1-2/80," Box 55, Hannaford/ California Headquarters, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Memo, Hal Short to Eugene Rossiders and Anna Chenault, Sept. 8, 1980, folder "Media Campaign - Voter Block (2)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Memo Michael P. Balzano, Jr., undated, folder "Meese, Ed - Campaign Planning - Tactics (1)," Box 104, , Ed Meese Files, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Nationalities Advertising Summary, undated, folder "Media Campaign – [Voter Groups – Activity Reports Binder] (2)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Nationalities Media Plan, anonymous, undated, folder "Media Campaign – [Voter Groups – Activity Reports Binder] (4)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

News Release, "Gov. Reagan’s Stand on Issues of Special Concern to Ethnic Americans!", Jan. 15, 1980, folder "Meese, Ed - Subject File- Ethnics (1)," Box 129, Ed Meese Files, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Organizational Chart, "Nationalities Division," undated, folder "Meese, Ed - Subject File- Ethnics (1)," Box 129, Ed Meese Files, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Statue of Liberty Flyer, undated, folder "Media Campaign – [Voter Groups – Activity Reports Binder] (5)," Box 228, Peter Dailey (Media, Promotion, Advertising), Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Summary of Voter Group Activities, Max Hugel, Oct. 23, 1980, folder "Campaign Operations - Voter Groups Update (1)," Box 248, Campaign Operations – Mike Deaver, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, 1965-1980, Ronald Reagan Library.

Secondary sources

Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1980 Elections, Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1983.

Broder, David, Lou Cannon, Haynes Johnson, Martin Schramm, Richard Harwood and the staff of The Washington Post, The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1980, New York: Berkeley Books, 1980.

Cannon, Lou, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, New York: PublicAffairs, 2003.

Dallek, Matthew, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Diggins, John Patrick, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Edsall, Thomas Byrne and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Lassiter, Matthew D., The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Lassiter, Matthew D., Joseph Crespino eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Lowndes, Joseph E., From the New Deal to the New Right, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Micklethwait, John, Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, London: Penguin Books, 2004.

Moriarty, John W., "Candidates Face the Region", The New York Times, 2 September 1980.

Phillips, Kevin P., The Emerging Republican Majority, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969.

Raines, Howell, "In Move to the Center, Reagan Plans to Alter 2 Antiunion Positions", The New York Times, 9 October 1980.

Raines, Howell, "Republicans Stresses Economy", The New York Times, 2 September 1980.

Rieder, Jonathan, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Shabecoff, Philip, "Voter Shifts and Conservatives’ Gains Worry Labor", The New York Times, 9 November 1980.

Sugrue,Thomas J., John D. Skrentny, "The White Ethnic Strategy", Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, Schulman, Bruce J., Julian E. Zelizer eds., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Washington Star, "‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign", The New York Times, 15 February 1976.

Internet sources

Reagan, Ronald, "Labor Day Speech at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey", 1 September 1980, <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/9.1.80.html>

Reagan, Ronald, "Ronald Reagan’s announcement for Presidential Candidacy", 13 November 1979, <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/11.13.79.html>

Reagan, Ronald, "Republican National Convention Acceptance Speech", 17 July 1980, <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/7.17.80.html>

Reagan, Ronald, "Televised Campaign Address, A Vital Economy: Jobs, Growth, and Progress for Americans", 24 October 1980, <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/10.24.80.html>

Republican Party, Republican Party Platform of 1980, 15 July 1980, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25844>

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Notes

1 These two regions comprise 18 states which could swing a presidential election since they represented in 1980 241 electoral votes, 29 votes shy of the 270 required to win the presidency (Moriarty). But 1980 was the last presidential election where the North and the Mid-West had such political influence: the 1980 census revealed a large loss of population in these regions and subsequent redistricting greatly diminished the weight of these states, to the benefit of the Sun Belt.

2 This competition was also imposed by the courts in police and fire departments in large Northern cities, which had been white ethnic strongholds for decades (Edsall and Edsall 124).

3 Thus, between 1940 and the late 1960s, the black population of New York City went from 6% to 16% of the total population, and from 13% to 29% in Philadelphia (Phillips 106).

4 The link between urban decay and the rise of racism among the white working-class was brilliantly illustrated by sociologist Jonathan Rieder, in his study of white ethnics in Brooklyn (Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism). Here is for example a typical—and typically politically incorrect—reaction, coming from a Jewish worker: "I seen [sic] the house my father built with his own hands, I seen [sic] the niggers [sic] come into that house and destroy it… The niggers [sic] ruined it… They ruined it! The doorways, the fixtures, the windows – the works" (qtd. in Rieder 92).

5 In the fall of 1972, the white ethnic neighborhood of Canarsie in Brooklyn erupted in anti-busing riots (with housewives throwing rocks at school buses), which prompted the New York Times to compare the neighborhood to the segregationist Deep South: "The shameful situation in Canarsie illustrates the forced of unreason sweeping over the city and nation. [We hope that] the arrival of new [black] pupils can be turned into a friendly occasion rather than a shameful blocking of the school house à la Little Rock" (qtd. in Rieder 2).

6 Hence the indignation and even anger expressed by the white ethnics from Brooklyn interviewed by Rieder, like this Jewish woman: "My grandparents were like Russian serfs, but we climbed our way up. We were poor when we were growing up, but we were never on home relief, and our family still had closeness and warmth!"­—contrary to more and more numerous fatherless black families in the 1960s-1970s (Rieder 27-28).

7 Kevin Phillips had identified this problem as early as 1969: "The Democratic Party fell victim to the ideological impetus of a liberalism which had carried it beyond programs taxing the few for the benefit of the many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few (the Great Society)" (Phillips 37).

8 It is crucial to realize that Reagan appealed to Democratic voters well before the term ‘Reagan Democrats’ was coined after his 1980 presidential victory. His first election—as governor of California in 1966—was made possible to a great extent by the Catholic vote: the 1966 campaign took place in the wake of the terrible race riots of Watts in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965. The riots made Sam Yorti, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles who defended a repressive ‘Law and Order’ approach to crime, a star in the eyes of white Californians. In his 1966 campaign, Reagan repeatedly appealed to these conservative Yorti Democrats (Dallek 210). The strategy worked since he won most traditional Catholic working-class neighborhoods in Los Angeles (Diggins 134).

9 In this last case, the campaign went through a company called Catholic Major Markets, a "Catholic newspaper buying service" which "place[s] ads in religious newspapers" (Catholic Advertising Summary).

10 Here are a few examples of the ethnic newspapers used by the Reagan campaign: the Greek Press in Illinois, the Hungarian Szabadsag in Ohio, the Italian Tribune in New Jersey, Il Progresso in New York, La Tribuna Del Popolo in Michigan, the Latvian Laiks in New York, the Polish-American Journal in Pennsylvania, the Gwiazda Polarna in Wisconsin, the Serbian American Srboban in Pennsylvania, or the Slovak Jednota in Ohio (Nationalities Media Plan).

11 This pro-union strategy also explains why Reagan abandoned in 1980 several of the anti-union stances he had adopted during his first presidential campaign in 1976, such as the abolition of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the adoption of a national right-to-work legislation or the inclusion of unions into anti-trust laws (Broder et al 287). This led several unions, like the very powerful Teamsters, to endorse his candidacy.

12 The woman who came to be known as the ‘Welfare Queen’ was eventually convicted of fraud for using 2 aliases, not 80, and receiving $8,000, not $150,000 (Washington Star, 1976).

13 With this obvious and deliberate echo of the very renowned passage in John Kennedy’s Inaugural Address of January 1961 ("Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country"), Reagan cleverly used the words of a Democratic and Catholic president to strengthen his denunciation of welfare in front of a white ethnic audience.

14 Italics mine.

15 Interestingly, since Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man, published in 1952, the image of the ‘invisible man’ has traditionally been used to describe the hardships of the African-American community.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Françoise Coste, Ronald Reagan’s Northern Strategy and a new American Partisan Identity: The Case of the Reagan DemocratsAnglophonia Caliban/Sigma, 31 | 2012, 221-238.

Electronic reference

Françoise Coste, Ronald Reagan’s Northern Strategy and a new American Partisan Identity: The Case of the Reagan DemocratsAnglophonia Caliban/Sigma [Online], 31 | 2012, Online since 16 March 2015, connection on 17 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/acs/476; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.476

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About the author

Françoise Coste

Université de Toulouse, UTM, CAS.

By this author

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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