Dilemma in Dixie

Though the Republican Party's Southern renaissance started in the '50s, G.O.P. leaders are unhappily aware that its gains in 1964 were achieved largely with the help of defecting white Democrats incensed at the Administration's support of civil rights. Nor were Republican officials made any happier last week by a penetrating analysis of its dilemma in Dixie prepared by two liberal groups, the nationally organized Republicans for Progress and the Yale-based Republican Advance. Their report, a product of a state-by-state survey, warned that G.O.P. organizations in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are "lily-white," and described party support for segregationist candidates as "sheer madness."

Noting that the Goldwater platform had caused a "precipitate decline in Negro support," the liberals' report termed the 1964 election a "historic reversal rarely matched in politics," adding: "The party which had suffered the stigma in the South of being the 'black' Republican Party while most Negroes lacked the franchise, chose to ignore the Negro just as he was beginning to acquire political power."

Bet on Tomorrow. Republican organizations in some states, notably Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, have been moderate on the racial issue and receptive to Negro membership. Elsewhere in the South, said the report, the Republican Party in 1964 "appeared to be pandering to those elements intent on turning back the clock of history." The five Deep South states that Goldwater carried were those with the most disfranchised Negroes--many of whom have since won the vote under the 1965 Voting Rights Act and are registering overwhelmingly Democratic.

Though few Republican leaders could disagree with the report's findings, they could hardly accept its recommended remedies. The liberals demanded that the National Committee elicit no-discrimination pledges from all state and local G.O.P. groups on pain of expulsion, and require Mississippi's Republicans to drop the pro-segregation platform plank they adopted in 1964. The party's congressional leadership, urged the report, should reject converts such as South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond and Representative Albert Watson unless they state their "agreement with the cardinal Republican principle of equal opportunity for all Americans" before crossing the aisle.

"Dead as a Hammer." In fact, the National Committee has no power to read a state out of the party. Even if it did, the G.O.P. is in no condition to afford another internecine conflict. National Chairman Ray Bliss, who was put into office to promote unity, is as conscious of the racial problem as the liberals, and has been quietly attempting to solve it. Bliss pushed for the recent appointment of Clarke Reed, a relatively moderate Mississippian, to replace racist Wirt Yerger as state party chairman. "The race issue," Reed is telling G.O.P. candidates, "is dead as a hammer." Bliss also plans to re-establish the National Committee's minorities division, with a Negro as its head.

For practical reasons, many Republican--and Democratic--candidates in the South may find it wise to drop racism as an issue. One incentive to do so, suggests Kentucky's Thruston B. Morton, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, would be to give the party's white supremacists a "bare minimum" of campaign funds. In most areas, however, candidates can only invite defeat by vigorously espousing integration and civil rights.

In any event, as the Democrats learned after the Dixiecrat walkout in 1948, in a country as diverse as the U.S., neither national party can enforce ideological conformity. By adhering to its own tradition as a moderate, civil rights-minded party, the G.O.P. at large can in time undoubtedly realize the objectives that its liberal wing would achieve by fiat.

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