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and little shacks/Southern man when will you pay them back?/I heard screa-
min’ and bullwhips cracking/How long? How long?”
The South had been almost exclusively a Democratic region, but that
party’s promotion of civil rights turned off southern Whites, so Nixon saw a
political opening–rehabilitate the South to get votes. Hence his veiled but
obvious attack on Blacks, hippies, and women’s lib activists—all groups
unpopular below the Mason-Dixon Line. With this “backlash” against
Democrats and liberals, Nixon was able to turn the South into a Republican
region, as it remains today. Where in the early 1960s southerners were made
the object of shame and derision for their racism, Nixon and the Republicans
helped them restore their regional pride. Recorded in 1973 and released a
year later, while Nixon was involved in the Watergate Scandal and his popular-
ity was at bottom, the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd sang “Sweet Home
Alabama,” a song that would been unlikely to be even written or get radio
play just a few years earlier. Skynyrd began with a slap at “Southern Man”—
“Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/A southern man don’t need him
around anyhow.” Then they defended the segregationist Governor George
Wallace and the beleaguered President Nixon, “In Birmingham they love the
governor, boo boo boo/Now we all did what we could do/Now Watergate
does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” And
with pride, the song ends “Sweet home Alabama/Lord, I’m coming home to
you.” Less than a decade after songs like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” or
“Mississippi Goddam,” Skynyrd had announced that the South was back, and
proud. As for Nixon, he had exploited racial and regional differences and
created one of the most sudden and important political turnarounds in mod-
ern U.S. history. The South was as solidly Democratic as possible but after
1968 would become the most Republican and conservative part of America,
with great consequences for elections and social issues. As for Nixon person-
ally, his political career, long and full of accomplishments and finally freed of
the Vietnam War after early 1973, fell apart and crashed in the best-known
scandal in U.S. presidential history, simply known as “Watergate.”H2OGate Blues
In 1974, the Black protest singer and activist Gil Scott-Heron riffed on Richard
Nixon and the scandal that had driven him from office in “H2OGate Blues”: