1952
The election of 1952 proved a turning point for the Republican Party in the traditional Democratic stronghold of Mississippi. Although the state posted the third largest percentage turnout for the Democratic ticket in the general election that year, Eisenhower managed to attract over 39 percent of Mississippi voters – a tremendous jump from the single digits the party polled in previous general elections.
Perry Howard, the son of former slaves, had led the state’s “Black-and-Tan” Republican Party since 1924. Composed largely of African Americans, the party remained ineffective in general elections although its leaders wielded power through the distribution of federal patronage jobs and its seats at the national convention. In 1952, white Eisenhower supporters in Mississippi negotiated a deal to place their own people on the ballot as Republican electors in place of Black-and-Tan members.
This racial displacement proved a significant step in the resurgence of the state’s two-party system, since white Mississippians with beliefs similar to the GOP’s were more likely to vote for members of their own race. In the broadside “What Was the Deal with Perry Howard?,” the Mississippi Democratic Party chairman denounces “our erstwhile, so-called Democrat friends, who first called themselves Democrats for Eisenhower, then Mississippians for Eisenhower, and finally Independents for Eisenhower, so that they now appear as what they have really been all the time – REPUBLICANS.”
A letter received by U.S. Senator James O. Eastland typified the dilemma conservative Mississippi voters faced in 1952: “I am in my 70th year and have never voted anything but a straight Democratic ticket. I voted for Roosevelt though I have never recovered from it. The Republican platform looks more Jeffersonian to me than the Democratic platform. Jim, I am in a fix…” Meanwhile, in a poster entitled “The Democratic Party Saved Coahoma County from the Brink of Bankruptcy!,” the local Adlai Stevenson campaign committee pointedly links the current Democratic ticket with the prosperity granted farmers by FDR’s New Deal programs twenty years earlier.
"What Was the Deal with Perry Howard?: A Statement by Thomas J. Tubb, Chairman of the Democratic Party of Mississippi"
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1952 letter from H. Rey Bonney to U.S. Senator James O. Eastland
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The Democratic Party Saved Coahoma County. Coahoma County Stevenson Campaign Committee
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