Origins of the Southern Strategy

Under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party assembled a political coalition so vast and diffuse that it included the "solid south" voting bloc of white supremacists, but also included most African-American voters, who were attracted to the New Deal's economic program and who were beginning to be incorporated into some Northern political machines. This, in turn, helped spur the growth of a civil rights bloc inside the Democratic Party that saw its first meaningful stirrings during Harry Truman's administration. When Dwight Eisenhower came along to try to rebuild the Republican coalition, the GOP both pursued a strategy of trying to take advantage of Southern disgruntlement to win outer south states, and a strategy of trying to win black voters back over to the GOP. This latter strategy had some success in 1956 (driven in party by Ike's endorsement by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.) but by the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race those gains had all been re-erased. David Nichols recounts the post-election assessment discussion between Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, RNC chair Thruston Morton, and a few other White House aides (A Matter of Justice, page 262):

Ike turned the discussion to civil rights. He observed that Attorney General Rogers was "somewhat to the left" of himself on civil rights. Nixon groused that a statement during the campaign by his vice-presidential running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., about possibly putting a Negro in the cabinet "just killed us in the South." Eisenhower bitterly complained: "We have made civil rights a main part of our effort these past eight years but have lost Negro support instead of increasing it." Negroes, the president said, "just do not give a damn." Nixon remarked that black loyalty to the Democrats was "a bought vote, and it isn't bought by civil rights." Morton agreed with the vice president and said, "the hell with them."

Eisenhower was tempted to agree with Morton, but he pulled the conversation back to a more civil tone. He would not say "the hell with them," although he could not comprehend why his efforts were not more appreciated. No one, he said, was "more sincere" than he was in "bettering opportunities" for African-Americans. He recalled reading about economic reprisals against Negroes in Tennesee and said that such reports still "infuriated him."

After a couple of years of dawdling, the Kennedy administration eventually got behind a strong civil rights program -- stronger than anything Ike had ever embraced -- and LBJ was able to get it passed through congress. With that done, the correct direction of the cynical calculation shifted decisively in favor of the Nixon/Morton "to hell with them" point of view and the rest, as they say, is history.

Comments

He would not say "the hell with them," although he could not comprehend why his efforts were not more appreciated.

Right. Why the blacks didn't warmly embrace him after his firm stand in support of Brown was beyond him.

Did Eisenhower just never really understand politics?

Posted by Anderson | November 20, 2007 10:41 AM

Excellent Cliff Notes.

You should send a copy to Jonah Lucianne who once again soils my morning paper with the declaration that Huckabee is more scary (because he wants to institute a national ban on smoking and other such offenses)than Ron Paul even though Paul may be supported by neo-Nazis and white-supremacists.

Posted by gregor | November 20, 2007 10:42 AM

So what we learn from this is that republicans supported civil rights as a way to win black votes and when they didn't get any, they signaled an anti-civil rights stance in order to get southern male votes, which they did get. The party of principal.

Posted by cw | November 20, 2007 11:17 AM

Most everyone is getting Nixon wrong in these arguments about Reagan. You need to check out Matt Lassiter's argument in _The Silent Majority_. In his very detailed telling, Nixon's southern strategy wass really a suburban strategy aimed at the sunbelt south, and the rest of the emerging suburban nation by using the language of color-blindness and suburban innocence in racial inequality.

The key is the 1970 midterms, when Nixon led a strategy of appealing to overt segregationists in the South and the Republicans got wiped out by the new southern democrats like Carter who combined the language of suburban racial innocence with pro-growth populism.

Posted by Anderw | November 20, 2007 11:19 AM

The very graph posted two posts below shows why the Southern Strategy, as articulated as appeals to segregationist impulse, makes no sense. It's this mysterious middle position (of suburban protectionism) that forms the core of the modern Republican party's suburban strategy.

Posted by Andrew | November 20, 2007 11:22 AM

"Did Eisenhower just never really understand politics?

Posted by Anderson | November 20, 2007 10:41 AM"

In some ways, yes. After all, when was the last time since Ike that you heard a Republican do anything but scoff at the phrase "military-industrial complex"? In many ways, the divide between Northern-ish, moderate, technocratic Republicans like Eisenhower and crazy firebreathers like McCarthy was set during his administration. Buckley in part founded the National Review as a corrective against Eisenhower's moderation and supported McCarthyism. Eisenhower is the model the Republicans have been running away from since he left office (when was the last time they had warm and fuzzy feelings about an Ivy League university president?). He was being slowly abandoned by his own party and he didn't even know it.

Posted by Reality Manor | November 20, 2007 11:25 AM

Andrew, don't be naive.

the first impulse of the southern strategy was to secure richard nixon and not ronald reagan the 1968 republican nomination, and the basis for securing that was strom thurmond's support, which was predicated on the southern strategy, which had as its first functional objective appointing rightists to the courts.

that there was an emerging suburban population in the south in the 1970s that wasn't crassly segregationist but still didn't want anyone too uppitty living next door is a further feature, but not the original goal.

the southern strategy was never about restoring segregation, but then again, the southern triumph in getting reconstruction abandoned wasn't about restoring slavery, either.

Reality Manor, it's a fasincating thing about eisenhower that his politics were so little known when he was an officer that both parties wanted him to run, but yes, you are right: from eisenhower on left in the 1950s republican party, the modern republican party abandoned them all.

Posted by howard | November 20, 2007 11:38 AM

Just a footnote: your explanation for the shift in African-American partisan allegiances from the Republicans to the Democrats would be incomplete without at least a mention of the Mississippi River Valley Flood
in 1927.

Posted by rufustfyrfly | November 20, 2007 11:47 AM

Howard

I'm not being naive, this belief that Nixon's southern strategy is based on appeals to segregationists in the Deep South is simply incorrect. Look at where Nixon wins in '68. He cedes the deep south to Wallace but cleans up in the new south suburbs of North Carolina and Virginia. He won where Goldwater lost. The Deep South is the tail that wags the dog in the larger story of southern political transformation.

And Nixon (and earlier, grassroots suburban politicians in the suburbs of Charlotte and Atlanta) did it by appealing to the people who were wary of both school desegregation and massive resistance. The new politics of middle-class suburban entitlement assured southern suburbanites that their segregated suburbs (now labeled de facto, thus obscuring the legal and political mechanisms used to create suburban segregation) would remain protected/segregated even as Nixon and others assured suburbanites that they were innocent of the larger crimes of segregation. It's in this appeal to middle class entitlement and suburban innocence that the Republican majority in the South was built.

Posted by Andrew | November 20, 2007 11:54 AM

the rest of the emerging suburban nation by using the language of color-blindness and suburban innocence in racial inequality.

"suburban innocence in racial inequality"?

WTF?

Why do you think the US was becoming an "emerging suburban nation" in the 60s and 70s?

Desegregation. What you call an "emerging suburban nation" is what I've always known as "White Flight" - the white, middle-class folks leaving the inner city for the suburbs when school desegregation came onto the scene. By moving out of the multi-racial cities and into the predominantly white towns outside of the cities, these folks didn't have to send their kids to integrated schools. Saying that the GOP wasn't pursuing a "Southern Strategy" but instead a "Suburban Strategy" is making a distinction without really making much of a difference.

Posted by NonyNony | November 20, 2007 11:55 AM

You need to check out Matt Lassiter's argument in _The Silent Majority_.

Southern historian offers reinterpretation that is more charitable to his forefathers than previous interpretations. Who could have guessed?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 20, 2007 11:56 AM

The black rejection of the GOP is pretty complex. My father has told me that my grandfather, who lived in rural south-central Virginia, never voted for a Democrat at the local and state level because of the Byrd machine, but at the national level voted for every Democrat since FDR. He died having never casting a vote for a Democrat other than for president.

Posted by chaz | November 20, 2007 11:57 AM

Not directly on topic, but this discussion seems another example of how particular thematic debates can get people more interested in history and historical research than just suggesting that people 'ought' read about certain important historical periods.

Origins of the New Deal, the Conservative Coalition which dominated Congress for most of the 20th Century, the origins of the Republican South in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s -- all comes out of this debate.

Posted by El Cid | November 20, 2007 11:58 AM

Tim

Read the book or his article in the Journal of Urban History, or this review in the Boston Globe http://bostonreview.net/BR31.3/decker.html , then decide how charitable the interpretation is toward the South.

Nony, sorry, I must not have been clear, by 'suburban racial innocence,' I mean it purely in terms of the way that Nixon rhetorically constructed the "Silent Majority." Take his acceptance speech in 1968,

"Let us now listen to the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick. They are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land."

He holds out 'innocence' and 'not racist' here as one of the key attributes of the silent majority. This rhetoric of innocence helps gloss over the politics and law of suburb building that made metropolitan political boundaries lines of segregation that were far more enduring than segregated trains and buses, and that were vigorously defended in the suburban anti-busing movements of the 70s (which differ in important ways from the urban anti-busing movements in places like Boston).

Anyway, enough. I think the argument's pretty clear at this point.

Posted by Andrew | November 20, 2007 12:17 PM

I must say that when I came to the US in 1970, it quickly became instinctively obvious to me that the GOP would never normally welcome a brown person like me. It was a 'blink' decision, and has served me well for the last few decades, and I don't think that the Repubs have any intention of transforming themselves in this regard in my lifetime.

Posted by gregor | November 20, 2007 12:27 PM

Read the book or his article in the Journal of Urban History, or this review in the Boston [Review] , then decide how charitable the interpretation is toward the South.

Fair enough. This seems to summarize the question at issue:

In many ways, Kruse and Lassiter are characterizing some of the same events in different ways. Both argue that Jim Crow gave way in the 1960s to less overt structures to promote white privilege, organized around ideas of privacy and meritocracy instead of outright white supremacy. But each draws different conclusions from this shift. Kruse argues that we cannot understand the conservative politics of suburbanization without understanding the battles over civil rights in the South. As he puts it, the “politics of race and racism did inspire policies that now seem to have little to do with race.” Lassiter, on the other hand, contends that Southern politics was not all that different from politics elsewhere.

I'm happy to believe that the responses to the dismantling of Jim Crow were complex, and that there were other factors also at work in moving the South into the Republican camp. Today, the things that seem relevant are that the South holds 38% of the Republican Party's votes, and that Southern conservatives are crazy, with a weird and troubling understanding of American norms.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 20, 2007 12:35 PM

Adam Clayton Powell's endorsement of Ike in 1956 may in part have been motivated by Powell's incme tax problems.

As for Ike's own civil rights record: Yes, it is true that he had serious reservations about *Brown* and school desegregation. Remember that his background was from a small-town Midwest none too friendly to blacks, and a segregated Army. On the other hand, he does seem to have been really outraged by denial of voting rights to blacks, and proposed stronger legislation to deal with it than Congress adopted in the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which LBJ as Seante Majority Leader watered down to the point of maing it utterly ineffective. (LBJ's defenders argue that no stronger bill could have survived a Southern filibuster in 1957 and that he should get credit for just getting *some* bill labelled "civil rights" passed for the first time since Reconstruction.)

Posted by David T | November 20, 2007 12:36 PM

Andrew, i'm sorry, you remain naive - i mean, really, taking richard nixon's actual speeches as though they were a rigorously honest analysis is the living, breathing definition of naive.

as seems to occur in the reagan discussions, you don't have to claim that richard nixon personally wanted to restore segregation to understand the purpose of the southern strategy, but apparently you need some help.

so let us stroll back to 1964 and 1965, when LBJ finally passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Although certain aspects of segregation had been negated, de facto and de jure segregation both remained in effect throughout the south (and in certain ways in the north as well, but i digress). No less a southern politican than johnson himself recognized that the passage of these two acts would put southern white votes into the republican column that had traditionally been democratic, but the republican party still had to go out and win those votes (or, to phrase it differently, to win the regular allegiance of those voters).

In addition, Nixon was being challenged from his right at the gop convention, with a groundswell emerging for ronald reagan.

All these factors led to his explicit embrace of the Southern Strategy with the full support of that famous suburban moderate, Strom Thurmond.

As a political matter, the southern strategy was about winning southern white votes; as a governance strategy, it was about changing the courts, which had been the key venue for civil rights victories for several decades (and if you think that Nixon tried to appoint Haynsworth and Carswell because of their deep understanding of the new suburban southern voter, well, i've got a bridge over here).

Yes, the hard-core segregationists supported Wallace in 1968 as one last hurrah before they, too, started voting republican, but the Southern Strategy had nothing to do with your implicit straw man that if they weren't out to restore segregation, it means their motives were pure. As i noted, the defeated treasonous slaveowners and their political allies, after the civil war, didn't need to restore slavery: what they needed was the federal government to get out of the south and allow Jim Crow and oppressive tenant farming "business" relations to proceed without interference, and, voila! the "coloreds" were kept in their place, the fine young bloom of southern womanhood didn't have to sit next to "big black bucks," plantation farming resumed, and life went on perfectly well without all that annoying responsibility that went with slave-ownerhship.

I suppose you would regard that as a strategy of adopting to new economic conditions, and you would tell us that race, as such, had nothing to do with it....

Posted by howard | November 20, 2007 1:06 PM

Robert Caro's Master of the Senate has a great account of LBJ's shepherding of the 1957 civil rights bill through the Senate. Caro makes a pretty convincing case that nothing stronger than the bill that got passed could have made it through. I found it hard not to walk away more disgusted with the structure of the U.S. Senate than anything else.

Posted by mrsaturdaypants | November 20, 2007 1:41 PM

howard (and others), Andrew is clearly not an apologist for Nixon's Southern Strategy. He's simply pointing out that it was based on saying that the fundamental distinction on civil rights is between de jure and de facto segregation, rather than segregation and integration, and hence mythologizing the suburbanization process. So he was talking about an end to busing, rather than using the police to black kids out of white schools.

Posted by Omar | November 20, 2007 1:45 PM

Omar, i'm not saying that Andrew is being an "apologist," i'm saying he's being naive. the Southern Strategy was of course an attempt to reach out to segregationists as Andrew himself concedes with his reference to 1970. Since the Southern Strategy was adopted by Nixon in 1968, how the strategy evolved over time to fit changing circumstances is neither here nor there in terms of its original intent.

Even more important, the essential point of opposition to forced bussing, affirmative action, and other attempts to rectify the failure of reconstruction is the underlying assumption that once the actual segregationist laws are changed, that is the only obligation society has. That is, of course, what "the hell with them" means....

Posted by howard | November 20, 2007 2:06 PM

Matt, JFK was awful on civil rights. He tapped Martin Luther King's phones. He did nothing for 3 years. He escalated the Vietnam War, which would kill thousands of poor blacks. As a result, Dr. King marched on Washington to protest THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION.

JFK did eventually propose civil rights legislation, but LBJ strengthened it, and pretended that it was similar to what the dead President wanted to help make it more popular. And LBJ went beyond that and passed voting rights legislation and the Great Society as well.

Kennedy was a horrible President on civil rights.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 20, 2007 2:42 PM

More context is needed, and the original posting was too simplistic and left out too many key details, etc.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who, almost single-handedly in 1939, ushered the Black vote into the Democratic party. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Marion Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall, Eleanor resigned in protest, and arranged to have Anderson sing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday.

Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and strongly supported civil rights laws - which is why Strom Thurmond ran against him in '48.

Ike was not exactly an integrationist. He did the right thing at Little Rock but privately railed against Brown v. Board of Education.

In October, 1960, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, is was Jack and Bobby Kennedy who actively intervened to get King out. They rightly feared he would suffer an unfortunate "accident" and never get out alive. Nixon did nothing. This helped secure many Black votes, although proportionately not as much as you would think, as Kennedy was Catholic and most Blacks either Baptist or othre Protestant denomination. Kinda funny when you think about it. I guess we all have our prejudices.

"I just handed the country over to the GOP for the next 50 years." - Lyndon Baines Johnson, quietly speaking to his young aid, Jack Valenti, upon signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When LBJ uttered the phrase "We shall overcome" you could have knocked most Black folk with a feather.

Goldwater went after the white Southern segregationist vote, because, "You go hunting where the ducks are" as he put it.

Nixon wasn't a racist per se; he hated everyone. And he knew his own kind.

Posted by A middle-aged Andrew | November 20, 2007 2:43 PM

GOP Senator Everett Dirksen's role in the civil rights struggle deserves to be mentioned. BTW, is it true that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican? Anyone able to confirm or refute this? That's what the National Black Republican Association's website says. It also says:

"Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860's, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon‘s 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation‘s first goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater who ran for president against Democrat President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater, also ignore the fact that President Johnson, in his 4,500 word State of the Union Address delivered on January 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only thirty five words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest against the Viet Nam War, President Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger preacher."

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats" did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political careers as Democrats, including Democrat Senator Robert Byrd who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former "Dixiecrat" is Democrat Senator Ernest Hollings who put up the Confederate flag over the state capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd praised Senator Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Democrats denounced Senator Trent Lott for his remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Senator Byrd and Senator Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970's with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" which was an effort on the Part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous."

Posted by Fred | November 20, 2007 3:27 PM

Good ol' Fred. This is choice:

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats.

Yep, the National Black Republican Association (which must include at least 6 members, 7 if you count Lynn Swann) has got our dastardly plan figured out.

I'm surprised no one here has pointed to William Saletan's horrid series of columns on Slate about how science has proven that blacks are not as intelligent as whites and Asians. Seriously sick stuff.

http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/

Posted by Rob Mac | November 20, 2007 3:54 PM

A white, privileged male talking about how the magic scores from an IQ test shows why he should remain in a privileged position. Gee, surprise.

Posted by grumpy realist | November 20, 2007 4:29 PM

Andrew is of course, completely right, and his citations follow much of the work and expertise on the post war politics and demographics of the deep south and the sun belt in political science and history for the last 25 odd years. But I do suppose those people are also naive because they don't use a cliff notes version of history.

Posted by DRR | November 20, 2007 6:43 PM

In October, 1960, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, is was Jack and Bobby Kennedy who actively intervened to get King out. They rightly feared he would suffer an unfortunate "accident" and never get out alive.

Yeah, they needed him out so they could tap his phones.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 20, 2007 8:15 PM

Dilan Esper quotes and writes: "In October, 1960, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, is was Jack and Bobby Kennedy who actively intervened to get King out. They rightly feared he would suffer an unfortunate "accident" and never get out alive.

Yeah, they needed him out so they could tap his phones."

The Kennedys weren't in charge in 10/60, and I'm not sure what evidence says they approved of the King phone taps - Hoover surely wasn't above doing that on his own.

I'm certainly open to evidence that I'm out of the loop here.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 21, 2007 3:51 AM

Oh, and the Vietnam War was nothing from a US perspective under JFK. It didn't reach real war status until Lyndon took over.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 21, 2007 3:55 AM

Amen, MoeLarryAndJesus. There were - what? - 24 solders killed in Vietnam under JFK. Some people here think they can make up history, sort of like Bush. I was going on 10 when the March on Washington took place. My mom had wished we had all gone.

Posted by A middle-aged Andrew | November 21, 2007 11:15 AM

The Kennedys weren't in charge in 10/60, and I'm not sure what evidence says they approved of the King phone taps - Hoover surely wasn't above doing that on his own.

Um, Moe, Robert Kennedy signed the order tapping King's phones, and JFK approved it.

There were - what? - 24 solders killed in Vietnam under JFK.

When JFK took office, there were 700 American servicemembers in Vietnam, and none were in combat. When JFK was assassinated, there were either 16,000 or 25,000 American servicemembers in Vietnam (depending on who you ask) and they were fighting the war.

And since JFK's refusal to end American involvement in Vietnam allowed LBJ and Nixon to do what they did, he therefore is responsible for the murder of 58,000 brave American servicemembers and 1,000,000 Vietnamese.

He was an evil man, both on race and war.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 21, 2007 6:03 PM

"Under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party assembled a political coalition so vast and diffuse that it included the "solid south" voting bloc of white supremacists, but also included most African-American voters, who were attracted to the New Deal's economic program and who were beginning to be incorporated into some Northern political machines."

I'm not so sure this reading is correct. I think African-Americans continued to vote primarily for Rs at least until Kennedy-Nixon, when Kennedy got credit for calling for having RFK call the governor of Georgia, who called the judge who put MLK in jail, to get him out of jail.

Notably, the New Deal explicitly excluded domestic & agricultural workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act to appease the Dixiecrats. I don't think the ball really got rolling until very late FDR or Truman. And even at that point, I think northern African-Americans were still loyal to the Republicans, who were the party for the non-dominant ethnoreligious groups in many parts of the North (e.g. In NYC and Boston, traditionally the Italians were Republicans, because the Irish ... who ran things ... were Democrats. Obviously NYC Italians had more success than Boston Italians, and at this point the whole dynamic has changed).

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | November 21, 2007 9:23 PM