The Eisenhower Administration and the Desegregation of Washington, D.C.

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Eisenhower Administration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Liberal Democrats ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Black Equality ◽  
Liberal Bias

Liberal historians have traditionally played down or neglected the achievements of the Eisenhower administration in the area of civil rights. At the same time, they have overstated the contributions of liberal Democrats and understated the role congressional Democrats played in obstructing civil rights in the 1950s. The liberal bias of most historians has led to a distorted picture of the political dynamics affecting the struggle for black equality. The fact is that the Democrats, as a party, were not so liberal in the 1950s as they have often been portrayed, and the Republican party was not so conservative. The positions of the parties in fact were not so clear-cut as they became in the next decade. Neither party forcefully and openly advocated full equality for blacks; both reflected the dominant racism of white society. Granting that, however, the Eisenhower administration was not the obstructionist barrier to civil rights that historians have often portrayed.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

Newspaper Wars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
White Press

This study examines the role of the black and white press in the cultural and political struggle over civil rights in South Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s, when black newspapers in the Deep South were mostly cautious and conservative, John McCray and his allies at South Carolina’s Lighthouse and Informer challenged their readers to “rebel and fight” for their rights – to reject the “slavery of thought and action” that created “uncle Toms and aunt Jemimas” and become “progressive fighters for the emancipation of the race.” As black activism spread, journalists at the state’s daily newspapers assumed leadership roles in the white resistance movement. They crafted new narratives designed to undermine black activism, but they also engaged directly in the political process to help implement the policy of massive resistance. When that strategy began to fail, the same journalists ignored their profession’s new norms of impartiality and joined the fight to create a new political home for white segregationists in a conservative Republican Party in the South. By moving the press from the periphery to the center of the political action, Newspaper Wars asks readers to reconsider the role of journalists during times of social, cultural, and political change in their communities.

Anticommunist White Ethnics in Search of True Americanness: Ideas and Alliances in the 1950s–1970s

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1065-1080 ◽  
Author(s):  
IEVA ZAKE
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
White Ethnics

This study explores the ways in which certain groups of white ethnics understood the idea of the un-American between the 1950s and the 1970s. Their definition of the un-American was determined by their perception of true Americanness, which in turn was connected to their anticommunist beliefs. Such an understanding of true Americanness helped these white ethnics build political alliances, particularly with the Republican Party. However, by the mid-1970s, the white anticommunist ethnics found themselves outside of the political mainstream, with anticommunism a heavy ideological burden to carry. The article is based on archival materials from presidential libraries and sources from within the ethnic communities themselves.

The Insider Route in Wisconsin

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Marc Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Municipal Employees ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter traces the development of the first statewide public-sector collective bargaining legislation in Wisconsin in 1959 and the campaign waged by municipal employees there. The case for public-sector rights lacked the fanfare of the campaigns in Indiana and Ohio, though it was clearly shaped by the political winds surrounding these efforts. Well before the upsurge of civil rights–inspired public-sector organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, bargaining rights in Wisconsin were rooted in the 1950s fights over labor rights. The success of the public-sector union campaign in Wisconsin is mostly a story of political opportunity. It was after more than a decade of public-sector advocates organizing and introducing bills in the legislature, and after the overreach of business activists on right-to-work in the region, that dissension within the Republican Party and between party leaders and business circles provided the opening that activists needed.

Marketing West Africa's Export Crops: Modern Boards and Colonial Trading Companies

1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Laurens van Der Laan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Private Enterprise ◽  
Public Enterprise ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Export Crops

The establishment of marketing boards in British West Africa in the 1940s was heralded at the time as a drastic, perhaps revolutionary change in the produce trade. The political implications were undoubtedly great: public enterprise (the marketing boards) had replaced private enterprise (a number of trading companies), and the ongoing debate on their relative merits made a colourful excursion to West Africa in the 1950s because this region offered a clear-cut case for comparison.1 The differences between the organisations were thus inevitably highlighted.

The Brunanburh Campaign: A Reappraisal

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Halloran
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Variant Form ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Battle Of Brunanburh

Modern accounts of the battle of Brunanburh have generally suggested a location in the Northumbrian-Mercian borderlands east or west of the Pennines, a conclusion based in part on analysis of the aims and strategy of Anlaf Guthfrithson, Viking king of Dublin. This article re-examines the political dynamics of the coalition against Athelstan, taking account of the territorial and political ambitions of the kings of Alba and Strathclyde, and proposes a radically different interpretation of the campaign of 937. It also questions the reliability of the variant form Brunanburh as a guide to the battle's location and concludes that the most likely site was Burnswark in Annandale.

Playing with Positionality?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kingston
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Research Site ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions

The chapter outlines how researchers take on different roles and positionalities as they adapt to the field, moving, for instance, from that of an “outsider” laden with externalized theoretical assumptions and having few contacts with and knowledge of the research site to one approaching, to varying degrees, that of a “pseudo-insider.” Indeed, the argument here is that researchers make choices when moving from outsider to insider roles (and between them), contingently adapting their positionality in the hope to better understand the political dynamics that underlie research projects. The setting is post-civil war Lebanon and the research project revolves around an examination of the micropolitics of civil society and associational life in this re-emerging but fragmented polity.

Political Science: Seeing Like a Subversive Social Scientist

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-437
Author(s):  
Meredith L. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Global Patterns ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
New Democracy

Much of the work of political science revolves around institutions—the structures through which politics happens. Leaders enter the frame, of course, but often as institutions in human form: presidents, premiers, populists, and mobilizers who serve to channel and direct who does what and what they do, much like an agency or law. We might trace this pseudo-structural, largely mechanical reading of human agency to political scientists of an earlier era: the behavioralists of the 1950s and 1960s. James C. Scott began his career as just such a scholar. For his dissertation-turned-book, Political Ideology in Malaysia: Reality and the Beliefs of an Elite, Scott surveyed a gaggle of Malaysian bureaucrats to examine, effectively, the extent to which their values and assumptions supported or subverted the new democracy they served. Although itself fairly prosaic, that work foreshadows the political grime and games that soon pulled Scott in more promising directions theoretically, whether scrutinizing Southeast Asia or global patterns: disentangling structure from norms, finding agency around the margins of class and state, and rethinking how power looks and functions.

scholarly journals Sports, Transgender Rights and the Bodily Politics of Cisgender Supremacy

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Sharrow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Legislative Proposals ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
Political Right

Between 2020 and 2021, one hundred and ten bills in state legislatures across the United States suggested banning the participation of transgender athletes on sports teams for girls and women. As of July 2021, ten such bills have become state law. This paper tracks the political shift towards targeting transgender athletes. Conservative political interests now seek laws that suture biological determinist arguments to civil rights of bodies. Although narrow binary definitions of sex have long operated in the background as a means for policy implementation under Title IX, Republican lawmakers now aim to reframe sex non-discrimination policies as means of gendered exclusion. The content of proposals reveal the centrality of ideas about bodily immutability, and body politics more generally, in shaping the future of American gender politics. My analysis of bills from 2021 argues that legislative proposals advance a logic of “cisgender supremacy” inhering in political claims about normatively gendered bodies. Political institutions are another site for advancing, enshrining, and normalizing cis-supremacist gender orders, explicitly joining cause with medical authorities as arbiters of gender normativity. Characteristics of bodies and their alleged role in evidencing sex itself have fueled the tactics of anti-transgender activists on the political Right. However, the target of their aims is not mere policy change but a state-sanctioned return to a narrowly cis- and heteropatriarchal gender order.

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