
          Elephants in the Cottonfields
          By Williams, RandallRandall Williams
          Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 19-20
          
          Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New
Republican South. Wayne Greenhaw. Macmillan, 1982.
          The growing strength of the Republican party in Dixie has taken
many Democrats by both storm and surprise, but the
G.O.P. muscle-building did not begin yesterday. Explaining this fact
is only one of the services performed here by author Wayne Greenhaw,
though if he had accomplished nothing else Elephants
would still bee success.
          In fact the book offers a great deal more. Greenhaw has assembled
detailed profiles of the leading personalities behind the Republican
surge; he manages to give us a picture of the situation in every
Southern state, and his interviews with young voters reveal what the
South's political future might be if many Republican dreams--and
Democratic nightmares--are realized.
          In that sense, Greenhaw's book is non-partisan political reportage;
both Democrats and Republicans will come away from
Elephants knowing much more about their respective
parties.
          There is plenty of history here that never gets taught in many
Southern schools. Greenhaw starts at the beginning, with the Southern
reaction to the formation of the Republican party. Then he moves
ahead, through secession, through war, then Reconstruction, then the
return to power in the South of white Democrats.
          Of more immediate interest is the examination of how Goldwater
fever hit the South in 1964. Here Ronald Reagan appeared for the first
time, and Richard Nixon returned, and the groundwork was laid for the
first real two-party politics in the South in one hundred years.
          Greenhaw writes that this was no accident but an indicator of the
polarization within the Democratic party over racial issues. Strom
Thurmond was not the only Democrat converting to Republicanism out of
a belief that the South was being forced by national Democrats into a
Second Reconstruction.
          But as white Southern Democrats abandoned their party, blacks moved
into it. (The quotes by George_Wallace--the '64 model--on this
development are intriguing.) More than ninety percent of blacks voted
Democratic in 1964, signaling the extent to which Lincoln's party and
the Democrats had switched roles.
          Elephants is a contemporary story from this point
on, and begins to be peopled by familiar characters. Here for example
is Jesse Helms, who began as "a soda jerk at the local drugstore,
sweeping out the weekly Monroe Enquirer, and writing up
the high_school (athletic games)," and eventually became a newspaper,
radio and television personality, which gave him the platform he
needed to become a well-known conservative voice in the "tobacco
valleys of eastern North_Carolina."
          Thousands of words have been written about Helms, but few have as
carefully explored his early career and the foundation of his
astonishing political popularity built around a philosophy of
negativism . . . "He has always against something, whether it was food
stamps for the needy, sex education for the ignorant, or
government-paid abortions for women who could not otherwise afford
such drastic measures of birth control." Meanwhile, adds Greenhaw,
"federal support for tobacco farmers was a necessity as (Helms) viewed
it. Besides, his wife had a tobacco allotment."
          Similarly profiled is Jeremiah Denton, the junior senator from
Alabama who rode his reputation as a Vietnam war hero into the
Capitol. Both Denton and Helms are important to any discussion of
Republicans today, but they do not represent the entire party. In
fact, the detail with which Elephants examines the extreme right,
especially the religious right, reveals the serious differences which
exist within the Republican party.
          Representing another faction of the GOP is Tennessee's Howard
Baker, through whom Greenhaw illustrates the "new old Republican
order." Baker's Senate seat adjoins those of both Helms and Denton,
but his brand of Republicanism may as well be from another
planet. While Helms was reading segregationist editorials over the air
in North_Carolina in the Sixties, Baker was studiously keeping to the
middle of the road, voting against federal funds for busing but for
all major civil_rights legislation.
          Greenhaw's skill as a reporter has never been more evident than in
the chapter he does on Lee Atwater, the South_Carolina protege of
Thurmond who ramrodded the Reagan campaign in the South and in his
spare time managed the campaigns of six Republican congressional
candidates (all six won).
          Atwater is the master--and originator, he says--of the Negative
Factor Theory of politics. This theory is put into practice through a
simple technique: Never mind the issues, just raise lots of money,
find dirt on the opponent, then publicize the hell out of it. If no
dirt exists, invent some.
          This chapter should be memorized by any Democrat planning to run
for office in what used to be the Solid South. However, Greenhaw
writes not just about Atwater's strategies, but about the man
himself. In fact, he peels Atwater like an onion, layer by layer, yet
he does 

it in such a way that probably no one will enjoy that chapter
more than Atwater himself.
          Greenhaw makes no projections for the future success or failure of
Atwater and his Republican colleagues. He acknowledges that although
Republicans are growing in strength, Democrats generally still control
the South but with a looser grip than before.
          What will become of the young Republicans who call themselves
progressives, or the New Right apostles who viewed Reagan's election
as a mandate for them? That remains to be seen, of course, but
Greenhaw has given us a good look at the landscape.
          
            Randall Williams, a writer and editor who lives in
Montgomery, is a Yellow-dog Democrat.
          
        
