Mark Kurlansky tells one half of the story of the Nixon election and the Republican "Southern Strategy" that has flourished since, calling the Grand Old Party on its shameless appeals to racism as an electoral tactic. The story he doesn't tell, however, is the simultaneous breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the agency of the Democrats in its collapse - a story that Democrats have too often obscured in working to expose the mendacious tactics of the right. It was four years earlier that the Democratic Convention sent the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party home.