Some historical events and processes occur with such power that they seem to obliterate the events surrounding them and create their own compact narratives. The shift of African Americans from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in the 1930s is one such episode. The figure of Roosevelt, and his New Deal, provide such a powerful explanation for this, and so convenient to fit into our survey lectures, that we tend to leave it at that, with Truman's creation of the Presidential Commission on Civil Rights as a closing.

Simon Topping, in a meticulous work of political history, has taken the trouble to look at the other side of this: not how the Democrats won African American votes, but how the Republicans lost them. He paints a picture of a political organization in disarray, led by dinosaurs out of touch with the changing times and more committed to ideological positions than to the needs of their constituencies. One of the villains, of course, is Herbert Hoover, who turns out to have been even more politically inept that most of us realized. Topping argues that a shift away from the Republicans can be seen first in 1928, well before the New Deal, because of Hoover's inattention to black issues, compounded by his 1930 nomination of John J. Parker to the Supreme Court, which also began the process of politicizing the notionally nonpartisan NAACP.

Later, Robert Taft comes out as the strongest opponent of key civil rights demands, especially a permanent Fair Employment Standards Commission, which occupies a larger position than anti-poll tax or even antilynching in Topping's story. Topping suggests that Taft was not precisely racist, but rather that he opposed most of the measures African Americans wanted on constitutional grounds (and also because of opposition from other key groups of Republican supporters). Set against Taft and other Old Guard Republicans are liberal Republicans sincerely committed to civil rights such as Wendell Wilkie and Thomas Dewey. Wilkie's problem was that he was far too much in favour of civil rights for his own party (or even the Democrats, for that matter) and had bad timing. Dewey is given full credit for his civil rights accomplishments in New York but rightfully criticized for his reluctance to prioritize these issues in his presidential bids. Topping avoids the temptation to attribute too much causal significance to his topic, carefully explaining in which elections the African American vote could have been decisive and in which it could not.

Simon Topping has filled in important details on a part of American political history that has too often been hurried over on the assumption that we already knew what was there.