Seventy Years Since

The Battle of Athens ought to be an inspiration to us all -- if only we all knew about it.

4 comments:

Tom said...

It all turns on election integrity, doesn't it?

Gringo said...

McMinn County, which has Athens as its county seat, voted Republican in 1952. The Republican vote in East Tennessee carried Tennessee for Eisenhower.

Which reminds me. The claim is often made that the 1964 Civil Rights Bill turned the South from Democrat to Republican. This claim is contradicted by the results of the 1952 Presidential Election. Eisenhower got 48% of the votes in the 11 states of the former Confederacy, a big increase from what previous Republican Presidential candidates had gotten: 21.6% in 1940, 25.2% in 1944, and 26.5% in 1948. Eisenhower carried four states: Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas. From 1952 on, Republicans were competitive in Presidential elections in the South. Eisenhower got a higher percentage of the vote in the South than Goldwater did in 1964.

[processing data from Wikipedia information on US Presidential elections.]

Eric Blair said...

Yeah, that 'southern strategy' is basically a big lie. It is just convenient to call Republicans racists.

Gringo said...

Correction: Eisenhower got a higher percentage of the Southern vote in 1956 than Goldwater got in 1964.