| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dean Kotlowski. Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 404. $35.00.

Many scholars and pundits initially characterized Richard M. Nixon as a scheming man who adopted the southern strategy and employed racially charged "law and order" rhetoric to win two elections, fiercely opposed busing, and submitted conservatives Clement Haynsworth, Jr., and G. Harrold Carswell as Supreme Court nominations. More recently, revisionists have contended that Nixon deserves far more credit on racial matters. Dean J. Kotlowski falls into the latter camp. Acknowledging that Nixon privately held racist views (although he does not discuss these in depth) and was not always a staunch advocate for racial minorities, he nonetheless insists that the president "compiled a creditable record" (p. 3) that had long-term consequences for civil rights policy. The Nixon administration, he argues, redirected civil rights policy away from integration toward economic concerns, emphasized "deeds over words" (p. 14), steered the Republican Party toward a race-based southern strategy, and broadened the scope of civil rights by focusing on Native American and women's issues. 1

Kotlowski organizes the book thematically, with chapters on school desegregation, housing, employment, voting rights, minority businesses and black colleges, the stormy relationship between Nixon and African-American leaders, Native Americans, and women's rights. On race, Kotlowski accords Nixon the most credit regarding economic issues, where he "established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), expanded federal procurement from firms owned by African Americans and Hispanic Americans, and laid the basis for contract set-asides from minority owned firms" (p. 125). The administration fought the integration of black colleges in the South but increased federal funding for them. More important, the Nixon administration backed, at least for a while, the Philadelphia Plan, which helped pave the way for affirmative action programs. . . .

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