“Southern-fried McGovern”: The 1976 Republican Campaign against Jimmy Carter's Southernness

Thursday, January 6, 2011: 3:20 PM
Room 203 (Hynes Convention Center)
Zachary J. Lechner , Temple University
    During the 1976 presidential campaign, Republican incumbent President Gerald Ford faced a nearly impossible task: waging an uphill battle in the South against one-term Georgia Governor and native son Jimmy Carter.  Embarking upon a bold, seemingly illogical strategy to question Carter’s southernness, Republicans labeled him as a “southern-fried McGovern.”  In doing so, they cast Carter as a typical liberal—a southerner in name only—whose policy positions clashed with the majority of white southerners’ conservatism on issues like gun control, taxation, and the size of the federal government.  This paper thus argues that the 1976 presidential contest functioned not only as a battle for the South’s electoral votes but also as a struggle over the cultural meaning of the white South in the post-civil rights era. 
     Carter attracted U.S. voters in part by constructing southernness as a mixture of carefully selected traditional and progressive traits.  His South embodied communal, family-oriented, racially egalitarian, rural values.  The Ford’s campaign rejected Carter’s cultural notion of southernness, and in seeking to blunt the Democrat’s attraction to southerners, maintained instead that it was one’s conservative political views that made a southerner truly “southern.” 
     The Republican attempt to discredit Carter’s southernness failed to overcome the cultural power of a non-demagogic white southerner who stood up for Dixie.  Carter was able to temporarily reunite a Democratic “solid South,” because for southerners he combined the region’s supposedly timeless values with a progressive racial vision that would allow them to re-enter the mainstream of U.S. society.  Employing research in archival and printed materials, this study of the Republican campaign’s inability to reconfigure Carter’s southernness offers insight into the contested nature of southern culture in the 1970s national imagination and demonstrates that many Americans identified that culture as a potent tool to combat contemporary political corruption and social disaffection.