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chaP ter 10

Power, Lost and Found:

America At Century’s End

R

ichard Nixon, a Republican from California, was elected president in 1968
in large measure in reaction against the Vietnam War and the 1960s.
Nixon had promised he had a “secret plan” to end the war, to bring “peace
with honor” to America. He also subtly attacked Black activists and the coun-
terculture. Nixon talked at length about restoring “law and order,” which to
White Americans meant ending liberal power, “taking back” America from
the hippies and protestors, stopping the urban unrest that had become preva-
lent in African American areas, and putting Blacks “back in their place.” He
also attacked the Democrats as being the party of “acid, amnesty, and abor-
tion” [thus connecting liberals to drug use, plans to offer amnesty to draft
dodgers, and reproductive rights, and letting Americans infer about Democratic
immorality]. A big part of Nixon’s political campaign, along these lines, was
the southern strategy. The images that had come out of the South for over a
decade of Blacks violently beaten or killed, buses attacked by the KKK and
other southern Whites, cops attacking Black schoolchildren with dogs or fire
hoses, troopers refusing to allow African American kids to attend school, had
badly harmed the region’s reputation, not just in the U.S. but throughout the
world. Neil Young wrote “Alabama,” and “Southern Man” to describe what
millions were thinking, “I saw cotton and I saw Black/Tall White mansions