By: Chet Martin
My favorite waitress is named Peaches. It’s hard not to adore anyone so kind and competent, and I’m fairly confident that liking
someone named “Peaches” is a requirement buried somewhere in Georgia’s 89-page constitution. She works at the corner of Milledge and Lumpkin, an intersection of Greeks, firemen, coffee-shop hippies, and those that are finally 21. Her workplace provides caffeine and calories for locals, tourists, and inebriated independents. She works, to borrow a phrase from UGA’s own Dr. James Cobb, at the Most Southern Place on Earth.
Waffle House was founded in 1955 in Avondale Estates, Ga., just east of Atlanta in DeKalb County and is currently headquartered in Norcross. The company was the brainchild of Joe Rogers, Sr., a native of Tennessee with experience as a short-order cook and Tom Forkner, a Georgian lawyer who served in the Second World War. Born in the boom years of Eisenhower and Ozzie and Harriet, Waffle House came of age while similar restaurants like Woolworth’s became a national embarrassment for refusing to seat black customers. The restaurant now has over 1,600 franchises in 25 states, most of which know the correct plural of “you.”
According to this brilliant Deadspin analysis of Waffle House and IHOP America, Waffle House dominates only in those states that prefer their tea sweet and their vowels extended. The dividing lines between the two regions—the term “border state” would be a bit too incendiary, don’t you think?—fall exclusively in the nation’s swing states. Northern Florida remains loyal to Waffle House, while everything south of Tampa might as well be Pennsylvania. WaHo reigns in Virginia south of Richmond, but once you drive north of the Confederacy’s capital and into the suburban counties that gave Obama the state in 2008 and 2012, IHOP takes over. Midwestern swing states like Ohio and Indiana are predictably split. Because Texas is Texas, it’s the only state that does not conform to my model, which I think is part of a personal effort to annoy me. Here’s the one credible example of the long-held liberal dream to “turn Texas blue.”
Waffle House America is the Confederacy with the colonized bits (Northern Virginia, Southern Florida) lopped off. Take that map, throw in a few Mountain West and Great Plains states with more electoral votes than people and you’ll find the reliable red states, those that stood with the GOP even during the wave election of 2008. This is Reagan Country, or in the unkind words of a 2004 viral email, Jesusland.
Anyone who wants to drone on about the polarization of American politics should dwell on that map. For the first time since the Civil War, the South is in a party that makes sense. Long tied to urban immigrants and the northern poor within the Democratic Party, Southerners—Waffle House Americans—were repulsed by the Republicans largely due to their involvement in abolition, Reconstruction, and efforts to ensure that Lost Cause was never found. But in 1964, with President Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights and Republican nominee Barry Goldwater’s libertarian-fueled rejection of it (the notion that Goldwater was a racist is a vicious lie; the man was a founding member of the NAACP in Arizona), the Deep South voted Republican for the first time in its history. The Republican “Southern Strategy,” led by men like George H.W. Bush’s advisor Lee Atwater, was born. If you want to hear the origins of this strategy according to Mr. Atwater, click here; the man’s language is too repulsive for us to print.
It’s not a coincidence that 1994, the year Republicans finally took control of the Congressional delegation of most of the Southern states, was also the year that they took control of the House of Representatives. In the next few years you’d see presidents from Arkansas and Texas, a Speaker of the House from Georgia, Senate Majority Leaders from Mississippi and Kentucky, and the Olympics in Atlanta (that’s not relevant, but still fun.)
According to a study recently released in The Atlantic, the areas represented by House Republicans (Waffle House America + Where the Buffalo Roam) are eight percent more likely to be married than Democratic counterparts, have three percent more high school graduates, 2.4 percent more veterans, are two years older, and an astonishing 15 percent more likely to have been born in the United States. Statistician Nate Silver predicts that by 2020, the only states whose populations won’t mostly support gay marriage are Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia (to our shame), and South Carolina. The Solid South is back.
No one who lives north of DC or west of El Paso is capable of hearing a single word that comes from Ted Cruz. Democrats delight in giving us the same warnings about “dog whistles” that Lee Atwater praised, but it’s hard to believe you would hear something like that from a first-generation American (Cruz’s father fled the Castro regime.) No, Ted Cruz’s language isn’t coded, but it’s Southern to the core. His religiosity, his obsequious devotion to manners and diction, his way of pronouncing every phrase as if it’s a request for agreement- as if every sentence is a plebiscite on Our Values- is distinctly and self-consciously Southern.
There will come a day in the next year or so where Ted Cruz or someone like him will speak to the American people, raising enthusiasm and hope within the Republican base and confused stares from Acela corridor liberals. If a New York friend decides to ask you how it is that men like Ted Cruz become so popular, remind your friend that she just can’t expect to understand. She doesn’t have Waffle House. She doesn’t have Peaches.
