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A Review of “The Baltimore Elite Giants: Sport and Society in the Age of Negro League Baseball”

were unorganized, had no journal, and perhaps did not even exist. Fourth, in contrast to the late 1960s, when student radicals dominated college campuses, many young conservatives could be found at colleges in 1960. Like their parents, they were Republicans, but they were more conservative. Often the first in the family to attend college, these students were hard working, resilient, anti-Communist, and contemptuous of the welfare state. After the convention, Buckley helped launch Young Americans for Freedom. Liberal Republicans did not put together any similar group. A fifth consideration, which many historians have emphasized, was the emergence in 1960 of conservative southerners as Republicans. John Kennedy riled them by running on a liberal Democratic platform that included a strong Civil Rights plank. Race was important, but Gifford shows that other dimensions also mattered. In South Carolina, Republican leaders stressed economic policy, especially defending state antiunion right-to-work laws. At the same time, many northern white Republicans moved to the south. Both the business community and the migrants were modernizers who despised stodgy southern Democrats. In 1960, Nixon made a play for the region, but he straddled the race issue and thereby lost both black votes and southern white votes. In 1968, Nixon abandoned African Americans to go after the white south. Finally, Gifford traces Nixon’s abysmal failure in 1960 to lure white ethnics, especially Catholics of Eastern European origin. The poorly run Nixon campaign mishandled crucial personal contacts. This was ironic because Nixon’s strong anti-Communist credentials played well among refugees from Eastern Europe. The campaign may have written off ethnics because Catholics were expected to vote heavily for Kennedy. In 1968, Nixon used racial resentment about affirmative action to go after these white ethnic votes. Gifford’s excellent book is thoroughly researched in key manuscript collections. Although the primary audience is scholars, the book will also appeal to educated readers interested in electoral politics. Gifford shows that the Republican Party became conservative for multiple reasons. The book is less convincing in arguing that a different outcome might have occurred. The Republicans were the weaker party, which necessarily became conservative when the dominant Democratic Party became liberal in the 1960s. A two-party South also forced party realignment along ideological lines, but the transformation took a generation. Gifford overemphasizes the significance of 1960. As conservative turning points, both Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 were more important. Gifford, however, is correct that a new generation of conservatives first emerged at the 1960 Republican convention, and those activists afterward did organize inside the Republican Party. W. J. RORABAUGH University of Washington, Seattle Copyright © 2010 Taylor & Francis