Prometheus 6

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, “The Prodigal South Returns to Power,” Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. “The aim of the Southern strategy,” he claimed, was merely “to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A.” Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. “When I look back,” he said, “my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people.”

The Southern Strategist
By RICK PERLSTEIN

In the small Southern town that produced Harry Dent, the future Nixon White House political aide, Dent’s great-uncle John (The Baptist) Prickett edited the newspaper. One day, an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who like everyone else in South Carolina was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered — and thereby hangs the tale of why Harry Shuler Dent is such an important figure in American history. He was the behind-the-scenes player who did the most to turn the South from a region that despised Republicans into a Republican bastion.