But as blacks migrated away from Jim Crow and into northern cities, Democratic leaders outside of the South came to see the enactment of civil rights laws as a political imperative. The Republican Party, then the default home of anti-segregation northern liberals, was well-positioned to win the loyalty of the blacks who moved North (where they were suddenly eligible to vote). Thus, the alliance between Northern machine Democrats and Southern conservatives frayed — until finally Lyndon Johnson put his pen to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The reaction from Southern Democrats was uniformly hostile. ’64 was an election year, but Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, Russell Long, among more than a dozen other Southern senators and governors, boycotted the party’s national convention in Atlantic City. And many of the Southerners who did show up came looking for trouble. 43 of the 53 members of the Alabama delegation, for instance, refused to pledge their support for the national ticket of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and were denied seating. And most of the all-white Mississippi delegation walked out when convention organizers demanded that a rival delegation — the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, a group of civil rights activists who argued that the state’s official delegation failed to reflect the diversity of the party — be seated with them as “honored guests,” and that two of the Freedom Democrats serve as at-large delegates. Infuriated by this “humiliation” and “embarrassment,” an up-and-coming Mississippi Democrat named Charles Pickering — who decades later would become the center of a national controversy because of his racial history — left the party on the spot, joined the GOP and became one of the godfathers of modern Mississippi Republican politics.

None of this caused Johnson too much worry in ’64. The nation had rallied around him after John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before and, anyway, civil rights was a popular cause outside the South. That his Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, had actually joined Southern Democrats in their futile filibuster of the Civil Rights Act only made Johnson that much more of a shoo-in. He was elected in a thunderous landslide, racking up more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But the landslide wasn’t universal: In the South, Goldwater broke through and won five states — the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi — where FDR had won nearly 100 percent of the vote just 28 years earlier — Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent. Civil rights had finally come to a head in 1964, and the two parties had made their choice.

The highlight of Goldwater’s campaign, to the extent there was one, probably came at the end of October, when the candidate’s biggest celebrity supporter — an actor and one-time Democrat named Ronald Reagan — delivered a nationally televised address on his behalf. As well-received as it was, the speech did little to help the doomed Goldwater. But the conservative true believers who had had embraced Goldwater and helped him topple the GOP’s liberal Rockefeller establishment took note: Reagan was just as conservative as Goldwater, but far more marketable. The television age was dawning, and he was tailor-made for it.

Two years later, amidst a voter backlash against Johnson and his Great Society, Reagan handily defeated Pat Brown to become California’s governor. With the 1968 Republican nomination wide open, he was immediately touted as a contender, with Goldwater conservatives begging with him to run. Well into ’68, though, Reagan remained ambivalent, a posture that ended up costing him. By the time he threw his hat into the ring, Richard Nixon had already made serious inroads with the Goldwater crowd — particularly in the South, where Senator Strom Thurmond, one of the first segregationist Democrats to flip to the GOP, served as his chief supporter. Reagan made a play, but Nixon held him off, then went on to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the fall.

It was under Nixon that the “Southern Strategy” was born. The idea was simple: Millions of white Southern voters who had been raised to vote straight Democratic tickets were feeling more and more alienated from the national Democratic Party. They were up for grabs — Goldwater had proven it. But Goldwater had also gone too far: His explicit rejection of the Civil Rights Act played well in Dixie, but made him a monster to the rest of the country. The trick, then, was to wink and nod at white Southerners with signals that were simultaneously nebulous and unmistakable. Instead of arguing against civil rights, Nixon talked about “law and order” and, later, busing. In the fall of ’68 his task was complicated by the presence of Wallace, who ran a baldly racist third party campaign and won five Southern states. But Nixon managed to peel off Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina. He ended up with 301 electoral votes, but without those 43 from the South, he would have fallen short of the magic 270 mark.

As president, Nixon continued to court Southerners aggressively. Slowly, Republican candidates began winning races for the U.S. House and Senate in Southern states. Nixon swept the region in his 1972 reelection campaign — although he swept the rest of the country too, winning 49 states over George McGovern. It was against this backdrop that Democrats were so elated by Carter’s victory in 1976. Given the chance to vote for one of its own, the South had returned to the Democratic fold. Maybe Dixie could be saved after all.

But the Republican Carter had beaten, Gerald Ford, in many ways represented the Republican Party Southerners had rejected before Goldwater came along. A moderate Michigan congressman who was appointed vice president by Nixon in 1973, Ford had little natural kinship with Dixie, and he lacked Nixon’s cunning in exploiting the region’s racial sensitivities. In the ’76 GOP primaries, Ford was challenged by Reagan. In the early-going, with most of the primary and caucus action in the North, Ford ran up six straight victories over Reagan. With his campaign on the ropes, Reagan then prevailed in North Carolina — thanks to a huge assist from Jesse Helms, another former segregationist Democrat-turned-Republican. Reagan was a far better fit for Dixie than Ford, and his Carolina triumph set off a wave of late primary wins. The delegate race was virtually tied by the convention, though Reagan ended up falling just short.

As soon as Ford lost to Carter, Reagan became the overwhelming favorite for the 1980 GOP nomination. The man Goldwater conservatives had first sized up as presidential timber 16 years before was finally in position to lead the party. After an early hiccup in Iowa, Reagan crushed his main primary competitor, George H.W. Bush and sealed the nomination. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were all high, and American confidence was sagging, thanks mainly to the economy, but also the the protracted hostage crisis in Iran. After accepting the GOP nomination in mid-July in Detroit, Reagan found himself running more than 20 points ahead of Carter (who had still not officially fended off Ted Kennedy’s intraparty challenge). It was at that point that Reagan, his voice hoarse from an infection, took a few weeks off for a working vacation.

At the end of July, Reagan’s campaign announced that he would resume campaigning on August 3. The first event on his calendar seemed innocuous enough: a county fair in rural south-central Mississippi. But the Neshoba County and its annual fair enjoyed a racially fraught history. 16 years earlier, at the height of “Freedom Summer,” three civil rights workers from the North — Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner — had been abducted and murdered by the Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., Neshoba’s county seat. Local and state politicians, like many local residents, had reacted by playing dumb “Maybe they went to Cuba,” Mississippi’s governor, Paul Johnson, said when news first broke that the trio had gone missing. The Neshoba fair had been around since the late 19th Century, and it had become a popular campaign stop for segregationist candidates in Mississippi — the notorious Ross Barnett was a regular. But no presidential candidate had ever before showed up. Until Ronald Reagan.

Reagan and his campaign sensed political opportunity, both in Mississippi and across the South. The state had voted for Carter in ’76, but only by two points. Reagan’s Mississippi state chairman, a young congressman named Trent Lott, was adamant that it could be flipped. So it was that a cheery Reagan took the stage that August afternoon and issued one of the most thinly veiled appeals to racial resentment in modern American politics. “”I believe in states’ rights,” he told the uniformly white crowd of 30,000 Mississippians, “and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.” Technically, he was talking about welfare policy, his aim in using the term “states’ rights” — the rallying cry for every politician who’d fought civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s — was unmistakable. The crowd responded with delirious cheers.

That fall, Reagan carried Mississippi — and every other state in the South, except Carter’s native Georgia. The Neshoba moment did not, by itself, bring this outcome about (although his margins in Mississippi and other southern states were exceedingly narrow). Nor did the South, by itself, account for Reagan’s victory over Carter. (It was, after all, a 44-state landslide.) But the 1980 election established that the South’s break with the Democratic Party wouldn’t be a short-term phenomenon. And if there’s one moment that captured the spirit that animated this realignment, it was Reagan’s proud invocation of “states’ rights” — and his audience’s gleeful response. It was the fulfillment of the Southern Strategy.

Today, though, you’d never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan’s image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan’s image makeover — and the reality of his record as president — in his 2008 book “Tear Down This Myth.” We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there’s any truth to it.

I’m really struck by the poll that showed Carter much more popular than Reagan. It’s not something that people would think is possible if you asked them now. Can you talk about how we reached that point, back in the early ’90s?

By 1992, Reagan and Carter were kind of being compared as ex-presidents, and on a lot of levels, Jimmy Carter has had this very successful ex-presidency with the work he’s done for Habitat for Humanity and from the other peace-oriented types of missions he’s been on around the world. Reagan received an enormous amount of criticism a couple of years after he left office, particularly for an episode that’s probably not going to get mentioned a lot this week, which is accepting, I believe it was $2 million, to give a speech in Japan. At the time, it was unusual and kind of jarring for Reagan to accept that much money to give a speech, plus the fact that a bunch of millionaires in California had all chipped in to buy Reagan a house, which a lot of people thought was kind of suspicious and didn’t look too different from bribery.

Also, Nancy Reagan actually published her memoirs (1989′s “My Turn“), and they were very poorly received as being kind of nasty and vindictive. And so there were a lot of negative feelings about Reagan. But the real reason Reagan had fairly high unpopularity in the early 1990s was that people were not happy with the aftermath of his policies as president. The American economy was doing very poorly in the early 1990s, there was a recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Bush 41′s presidency basically collapsed because he was forced to increase taxes to deal with the continuing deficits that were a legacy of Reagan. There was high anxiety among the American people starting in Reagan’s second term about the loss of jobs in manufacturing, the growing clout of Asia — so all of these things really caused Reagan to be viewed pretty negatively at the time. Bill Clinton campaigned very aggressively against Reaganomics. When Clinton was able to get some of his economic policies through Congress in the first two years of his presidency, Time ran a cover with a picture of Reagan upside down, and it was about the death of Reaganomics. That was the tone in the early ’90s, before this conservative campaign to build what I call the Reagan myth got started.

Going back a step to his time in office, the popular version of Reagan’s presidency is that he was elected kind of overwhelmingly, and then in 1984 reelected in a 49-state landslide, and then he just rides off into the sunset at the end of his term. But that second term was — there were some serious problems in there, weren’t there?

Oh, absolutely. A lot of people — and I mean people in Congress who were in a position to do something about it — felt that Reagan possibly committed impeachable offenses in the Iran-Contra scandal. There were several reasons he wasn’t impeached. One, I think, was his age and some concern about his mental state, and the fact that he was in his second term. You have to remember that in the late 1980s, it really didn’t feel like it was that long after Watergate — and I think there’s a tendency in politics to not want to relive something that’s so traumatic. I mean, obviously, Congress had shed its qualms about impeachment by the late 1990s, but I think with Reagan there was a reluctance to do that.

Reagan’s poll numbers really suffered a lot in the last two years of his presidency, partly because of Iran-Contra, but the other thing was the huge crash of the stock market in October 1987, which in the short run caused people to really start to reexamine Reagan’s economic policies and whether the economic boom of the mid-1980s had maybe been a house of cards. I believe there was a poll that showed maybe a third of the American people wanted to see Reagan resign before his term was over, and certainly his approval ratings fell back under 50 percent.

The thing about Reagan and his approval ratings is they really went way up and way down. I mean, he was elected by a pretty big margin in 1980, probably because of Jimmy Carter’s unpopularity. Then, when he came into office, he cut taxes and always gets so much credit for improving the economy — except the economy got much worse over the next year, to where unemployment hit a high point, I think 10.8 percent. And Reagan’s approval ratings dropped much lower than Obama’s ever has, down to 35 percent. And then in ’84 — talk about good timing — he really got the most benefits of the inevitable capitalist cycle of the reversal of the economy. It was really roaring back in ’84, and the Democrats didn’t really nominate the strongest opponent in [Walter] Mondale, and Reagan did win a big landslide. But then his popularity really plunged again because of Iran-Contra and nagging worries about aspects of the economy.

When he left office, his approval ratings were pretty high, and I think that after all the failed presidencies that came before him — Nixon, Carter and Ford — there was a sense of relief that he’d gotten through two terms and nothing disastrous had happened. There was goodwill toward Reagan because of his personality and his age. So he left office with a pretty high approval rating. And when he left office and people started to ponder the effects of his policies, his poll numbers dropped again only to be resurrected in the late 1990s.

But here we are just 15 or 20 years later and that whole story you just outlined is forgotten by so many people. What was the turning point from, say, that summer of ’92, when Carter was actually more popular than Reagan, to where we are today?

There was always an effort on the right, starting from 1989 on, to try to give Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. The funny thing was, at first the public didn’t really buy into that because the public was following the day in and day out of the news very carefully and felt what I think most scholars feel, which is that the credit for the Soviet Union collapsing largely belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev — that it was Gorbachev pressing for these reforms and Reagan was an external force that wasn’t quite as important. I quote in “Tear Down This Myth” a USA Today poll that was taken after the Berlin Wall collapsed (in October 1989) and a majority of Americans credited Gorbachev and only 14 percent credited Reagan.

How the myth gets started is that memories get softer and you have one group that gets very aggressive in pushing this notion that it was all Reagan’s doing, that it was because of his defense buildup. The other thing is, during the 1990s, it was a great time economically — probably better than it should have been because of the dot-com boom. At least among one class there was a lot of affluence in America — and there were improvements that reached down to lower income. Black unemployment, for example, dropped during Clinton’s presidency. It created this feeling that America had been on a roll and people forgot the recession of the early 1990s and how bad things had been and their anger with Reagan. They were more willing to say, “Well, this all started with Reagan,” forgetting all those bad things that happened in the ’80s and ’90s.

It’s no accident that the push to glorify Ronald Reagan started in 1997, because it was the year that Bill Clinton started his second term. He had just defeated Bob Dole overwhelmingly and things looked bleak for the broader conservative movement. They didn’t seem to have anybody on the horizon to be a leader of the party, so there was this very conscious and calculated effort to look back. Something else that you can’t overlook is that in 1997 Reagan was still alive and he announced with a lot of class and dignity in 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s, so the public hadn’t actually seen Reagan for three years. And the public impression of Nancy Reagan softened quite a bit, for good reasons — she was out there pushing for stem cell research and other things. It would have been very difficult to criticize Reagan because of his health, a situation that engendered personal goodwill.

And that was something else conservatives could use as they launched this campaign to build up the Reagan legacy. They call it the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by Grover Norquist. It was this aggressive push to rename as many things as possible across the country for Reagan. It started with the airport in Washington, which they successfully renamed Reagan Airport. And it’s funny to see news from that time, because a lot of Democrats were biting their tongues because they had no good memories of Reagan’s presidency, but because of his health nobody was going to vote against renaming the airport for Reagan. Not all of the ideas have been enacted. We still don’t have Reagan’s picture on a $50 bill, or alternating on the dime with FDR, as some people proposed. But there are an increasing number of Ronald Reagan statues across the country, and you can almost drive across the Sun Belt continuously on some sort of Ronald Reagan boulevard or freeway or highway. Not surprisingly, the push to rename things for Reagan has been more successful where conservatism is the most popular. 

It seems that a lot of people aren’t even aware of what Reagan actually did as president, and you can point out areas where he clearly didn’t do things that you would call conservative — immigration comes to mind, with the amnesty in 1986. Do the Reagan deifiers even know what they’re worshiping?

Especially now that Reagan’s passed away, I think they’re able to purport this idyllic, mythological version of Reagan who happens coincidentally to support all the pillars of the modern conservative movement. Political movements need a hero and Ronald Reagan — the word “roles” is often associated with him because of his acting career, and his final role has been hero. But to do that, this movement had to do a rewrite, and things like the amnesty for undocumented immigrants had to go to the cutting room floor. He increased taxes on a number of occasions, either to undo the damage of his first tax cut, or because — unlike modern conservatives — he would actually engage in negotiations and try to compromise with Democrats on certain issues. All these things get lost because they don’t fit the storyline that they’re trying to push out there.

What goes through your head when you hear conservatives talk about Ronald Reagan now?

Well, I think they’re misusing Reagan to push policies that in 2011 are destructive and could continue to be destructive to America. The whole tax thing is kind of insane — that you can never raise taxes, which is not anything like what Reagan actually did. Even when he was governor of California, he actually signed the biggest tax increase that the governor of any state had ever signed at that time. So Reagan never subscribed to the idea that you can never raise taxes. The other thing that really rang true in the Bush years is using the great sound bites Reagan produced — like “tear down this wall” or “evil empire” — to justify things like the war in Iraq.

I don’t know if you saw “The Social Network,” but there’s a line in it about how every good creation myth needs a devil. Does this help explain why, just as Reagan’s popularity has gone up in the last two decades, Jimmy Carter’s has taken a hit? Is he a casualty of the creation of the Reagan myth?

Yeah. The issue that was really the centerpiece of Carter’s presidency was energy — trying to promote useful alternative energy. And I don’t see how you can look at what’s happened over the last 25 years and not say that Carter was right: that we should have been researching alternative energy the whole time, and as a result we’ve fallen behind other countries; that we’re addicted to oil and unable to shake that. But if you listen to talk radio, Jimmy Carter is reduced to wearing the sweater and turning the thermostat down at the White House. They’ve done such a good job creating Carter as kind of an anti-Reagan — that part of Reagan’s greatness was that he saved America from the malaise, which, by the way, is a word that Carter never actually uttered. This has become the modern equivalent of waving the bloody shirt was for the post-Civil War Republicans: waving the Jimmy Carter cardigan sweater.