How the GOP Became the White Man's Party

Publisher's Note: In the latter third of the twentieth century, the United States built the largest penal system in the history of democratic governance. This exceptional prison buildup had surprisingly little to do with crime and a great deal to do with politics, particularly racial politics. Texas Tough traces the entwinement of race, crime, and punishment all the way back to slavery. It argues that mass incarceration developed in the backlash against civil rights, just as Jim Crow took hold in reaction against emancipation and Reconstruction. On the national stage, the punitive turn in U.S. criminal justice policymaking gained forced in the second half of the Johnson administration, just as the civil rights movement cemented its historic gains. Leading the way were two arch-conservatives, a canny southern demagogue from Alabama and a belligerent anti-communist from Arizona. Not only did they help construct a prison nation; they polarized and racialized America's politics in ways that are still thwarting the task of governing two generations later.

No one understood the politics of backlash better than Lyndon Johnson, Texas's most legendary politician since Sam Houston and the White House's most determined champion of civil rights since Ulysses S. Grant. Although Johnson had started out as a segregationist, as president, his social programs extended the New Deal and went further toward alleviating economic inequality than any policy regime before or since. His deployment of federal power in the interest of civil rights retraced the footsteps of Reconstruction and for the first time gave genuine credibility to the age-old American credo, equal justice before the law. "I'm going to be the President who finishes what Lincoln began," Johnson pledged -- and to a certain extent he was. Even as his Great Society ushered new voters into the Democratic Party, however, Johnson increasingly antagonized his traditional white southern base. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he confided to Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."

The Great Society's fiercest critics indeed came from Johnson's own section of the country, often from his home state. In 1960, he and Lady Bird had been jostled and spit on by a right-wing mob in Dallas. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, J. Evetts Haley, a wealthy rancher and far-right rabble rouser, denounced the president as a "traitor" to the South whose policies would result in "race and national suicide."

By the mid-1960s, however, neo-Confederate obstructionists were in retreat. A strong majority of white poll respondents nationwide said they accepted the basic justice of civil rights demands; even whites in the South were no longer responding to racial venom with the same fervor they once had. Critics of the Johnson administration, therefore, had to refine and redirect their ire. Anticommunism remained at the ready, but with the president dispatching hundreds of thousands of combat troops to Vietnam, red baiting was losing its zing. A fresh issue on the home front, however, held unusual promise. Not only might it allow the right to tap into smoldering fears and frustrations without resorting to outmoded racist demagoguery, but it suggested a way to reclaim the populist mantle from redistributionist liberals. The issue was crime, and after 1964, it became one of the most divisive forces in American politics.

Since crime had traditionally been a mayoral or at most gubernatorial concern -- with the notable exception of Prohibition -- Johnson was slow to grab hold. "A visitor coming to America for the first time might have been forgiven for assuming that the President of the United States commanded all the city police departments and that control of the courts was his personal responsibility," he explained "[But] crime is a local problem. … The federal government has little or no power to deal with the problem … nor should it have." From the mid-1960s, however, Johnson's foes increasingly ignored his civics lesson. As the president himself was sabotaging his experiment in social democracy by diverting resources and attention to Southeast Asia, the New Right began ravaging it from within in the name of public safety and just desserts.