Humphreys presented Document X on flipcharts before a large gathering of influential Republicans. In a contrast with more measured recent campaigns, Document X planned an aggressive strategy of ‘Attack!, Attack!, Attack!’ on the big issues of the day: the war in Korea, corruption in Washington and communist infiltration in the government. Eisenhower said little, which Humphreys considered a signal that ‘the plan, on the whole, had general acceptance in the room’. He then took the flipcharts to the hotel’s boiler room, where he burnt them ‘until they were all completely destroyed’.
Document X made no reference to the South, a region in a state of deep political confusion. With African Americans systemically disenfranchised by discriminatory electoral laws, the region was historically Democratic, a legacy of the Civil War: the Republican Party was the perceived party of the North, of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery. But President Truman had damaged this relationship with his commitments to civil rights reform: in 1947 he had desegregated the armed forces. In protest some southern Democrats, or ‘Dixiecrats’, banded together and formed a third-party ticket in 1948 to prevent Truman’s election. Successful in only four states – South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana – the Dixiecrats’ bark proved worse than their bite: Truman was elected despite the ‘Solid South’ fracturing.
For the Republicans this was an opportunity and, in 1952, Eisenhower demanded that the Party attempt to woo the South in that year’s election campaign. This was partly due to his belief that any presidential hopeful should meet and hear the concerns of Americans across the country, regardless of historic loyalties. If he was ‘going to be President of all the people’, Eisenhower reflected in 1967, then he was ‘going to let them see what I am, what I look like, and tell them what I … plan to do’.
Eisenhower also had family connections to the South. Though raised in Kansas, he was born in Texas. His mother, Ida, was Virginian. During his early career in the military Eisenhower had been stationed at Fort Sam in Houston, where he met his wife, Mamie. As he later wrote: ‘I was going South – even if I had to go alone.’