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Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History
Here’s what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator:
We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better . . . In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century’s most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes.
So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man who was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.
Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)
When he was running for president in 2000, former Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Senator Al Gore, Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story — except it’s false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court.
Al Gore’s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic Party in microcosm. The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, of Reconstruction, of anti-lynching laws, of the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.
As recently as 2010, the Senate president pro tempore was former Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd (D., West Virginia). Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it.
You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.”
The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all of the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican Party were suburban, prosperous, “New South” types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist.
Is it unforgivable that Bill Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history.
What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn’t get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience that “What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another . . . Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” She was presumably referring to voter ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support.
Racism has an ugly past in the Democratic Party. The accusation of racism has an ugly present.
Published in Politics
Do you feel the same way about Clinton’s praise for Orval Faubus? That always struck me as the more damning of the links.
The Democrats’ legacy of racism is at the party’s very core – it goes back to its very foundation.
The roots of the Democratic Party are completely forgotten today, too. It rose from the concept of white suffrage, the spoils system (for whites only, of course), and “states’ rights,” which the exalted Steve Inskeep of National Propaganda Radio claimed this week is nothing more than a “discredited” code for racism. The first Democrats had no tolerance for the East Coast city folks’ whining over humanitarianism; they were especially cruel in their policies toward American Indians. The Trail of Tears? You can thank the Democrats for that.
Anyone who knows American history – and there are not many of us left in American today – knows that the Republican Party was originally formed largely around the cause of abolitionism; it was formed to end slavery. Fewer recall that the the base that split from the Democrat-Republicans to form the Democratic Party did so to protect the concerns of the rural, agrarian population from the interests of the northern elites, largely in the frontier and South. Long story short, the Democrats were formed to protect slavery.
I’ve told this to my black friends time and time again. It goes in one ear and out the other…
All true Elephas.
James of England: I’m not aware that Clinton praised Faubus. Do you have a link?
I don’t have a link of Bill Clinton’s praising Faubus, but I did find this site titled “7 Things Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Want You to Remember About Bill Clinton” that lists “Orval Faubus, an avowed racist segregationist and former Arkansas governor, was front and center, invited by Clinton himself, to the new governor’s inauguration” at number two. (And that’s from a Lefty website!)
I seem to recall that Jay Nordlinger mentioned something about Bill Clinton and Orval Faubus – maybe Faubus’ being at the 1992 Democratic Convention? – on one of your podcasts not too long ago?
Coulter talks about him doing so in Mugged, but I only have the audiobook version and the googlebooks version won’t let me look for the footnotes easily. It’s a footnote “11” somewhere, about his embrace of Faubus at his gubernatorial inauguration (he’d beaten Faubus in the primary). Most of the other references on the web seem to be through her, though; there’s a friendly conversation between the two, with a pic, but I’m not sure that’s damning.
Huh, I may have over-extended my trust to Coulter. I’ll add it to my list of questions when next I see her.
That was what I thought Mugged said, but I’m not finding it either in google searches of the book or in independent sources.
One thing I’ll say for the Democrats – their policy positions may change, but their tone never does:
1861: Slavery is the law! That’s final! No more discussion!
1954: Segregation is the law! That’s final! No more discussion!
1973: Abortion is the law! That’s final! No more discussion!
2010: ObamaCare is the law! That’s final! No more discussion!
2013: Gay marriage is the law! That’s final! No more discussion!
Let’s not forget Progressive icon and devout racist Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson reversed post-Civil War Republican reforms that integrated the federal civil service. His resegregation of existing employees and racial discrimination in hiring endured as official federal policy for decades.
And now that I think about it, Japanese-Americans were “excluded” from their homes and removed to euphemized concentration camps by executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt. The bill authorizing reparations to survivors was signed by President Ronald Reagan.
The Akaka bill wanted racial segregation in 2007. Biden thought segregation would bring peace to Iraq in the same year, and people continue to support the idea today. Gentrification opposition has the same impact, as does much opposition to cultural appropriation and assimilation. You don’t have to go back into history to find Democrats applauding segregation, just not in its classic Jim Crow flavors.
Heck, while putting a woman on the currency (other than those like Anthony already on it) might be a desegregationist step, but announcing beforehand that this bill will be the woman of color bill and then choosing the specific WoC afterwards is pretty clearly a step in the direction of separate but equal, of quota systems.
Regarding a woman of color on currency, when the dollar coins that everyone just loves were changed to feature all the presidents on the obverse, the law still designated that coins featuring Sacajawea continue to be struck because it would be wrong, wrong, wrong to remove the only woman and person of color from American money in favor of all those white men. So the Treasury minted a whole bunch of surplus coins featuring both the presidents and Sacajawea – neither of which the American people wanted and which now sit stockpiled, never used, in the New York City Federal Reserve, if I recall correctly.
I really like the Presidential coins. I have a little pile of them on my desk. I was sad when they stopped producing them for circulation well before Harding.
The obvious connection is that FDR was Josephus Daniels’ Assistant Sec of the Navy in the Wilson administration. Daniels, a progressive North Carolina newspaper publisher, introduced segregation and Jim Crow to the Navy. But it’s doubtful that FDR imbibed much of that feature of Southern politics, since he discounted the espionage threat immediately before WWII (as did J. Edgar Hoover) and was probably only bending to the (race-based) opinion of local commanders and to a longstanding anti-asian peculiarity of California politics. Earl Warren, as California Attorney General and of all people, was lobbying for the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.
If Democrats have whitewashed their participation in racism, so have Republicans. Weren’t the most important of the eugenicists Republicans? And didn’t they support Nazi eugenics? After the holocaust, there were no mea culpas. Rather, it was all whitewashed from history and erased from memory. Republicans and Democrats both remember what is convenient and whitewash or rewrite what is not.
No. Mostly, this was a state matter. Hiram Johnson, the biggest eugenicist in the party, who set up the State Commission for Lunacy, left it for the Progressive Party. After California, the next biggest states were Virginia, and North Carolina, both dominated by Democrats. Michigan came next, and was split between Democrats and Republicans during its expansion. Next came wholly Democratic Georgia.
In terms of rhetorical support, there was no one to match Wilson, who also passed Eugenics laws as governor of New Jersey. In philosophical terms, the charge was led by Herbert Croly, co-founder of The New Republic. The institution of Tenure was partly created by Democratic Progressives to protect E. A. Ross, creator of the concept of race suicide. Judicially, obviously, Oliver Wendell Holmes is the most prominent in the field.
It’s true that Teddy Roosevelt had regrettable views on the subject, and we ought not to respect politicians who claim to idolize him, not to mention any names*cough*Gingrich*cough*. Like Hiram Johnson, though, Roosevelt eventually found the party not to his tastes, a disapproval that I feel a certain pride in.
Could you name names? Robert Reynolds stands out, but he was a Democrat.
Democrats and Hollywood don’t allow us to whitewash our side. Politically, this is a problem, but ethically it has its upside.
These deep cultural attitudes are inertial, they do not change in just one generation, so how is it the racist Democrats were allowed the get away with saying that all racist Democrats became Republicans overnight. Are minimum wages, affirmative action, welfare, public housing not deeply racist? When LBJ said he’d have those negras voting Democrat for the next hundred years was he just referring to the Civil Rights act even though it was the Democrats who had opposed it, or was he referring to the war on poverty? If the dystopian nightmare of our inner cities is just an unintended consequence why have Democrats not learned from it’s obvious failures? Why do Republicans act embarrassed and guilty when the history is so unambiguous?
Here’s a link about eugenics movement in America. Enough blame to go around, but progressives ought to be especially modest about throwing stones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton approved a new state flag design that included a star commemorating the Confederacy.
Progressives and unions originally supported minimum wage laws because they priced blacks out of the job market.
The lingering legacy of eugenics in America can best be summed up with two words: Planned Parenthood. Avowed socialist Margaret Sanger’s disgusting organization was born in the midst of the Progressive era’s eugenics craze to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” Her first clinic was opened in a section of Brooklyn that was inhabited by new immigrants, especially Jews: Any guesses as to which kind of people she was trying to stop from breeding? In fact, she was all in favor of essentially letting the government decide who could and could not breed.
Oh, and one of her earliest supporters was the women’s auxiliary league of a Democratic Party “booster club” that had found resurgence in the 1910s and 1920s. That group’s name? The Ku Klux Klan.
The most egregious of these – and the one that keeps government labor unionized and the costs sky high – is the Davis-Bacon Act, a.k.a., the “We Don’t Want Black Laborers Law.” The Party of Racial Harmony and Social Justice® passed that in 1931 as a sop to white construction workers in the North who were complaining about Southern black laborers undercutting their pay and taking work from them.
I’m working my way through five books at the moment. Several are on the history of eugenics in America and its influence on and coordination with the Nazi programs. One is the only biography of Madison Grant. And then there’s the two bibles of “scientific racism” by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Grant and Lothrop were both progressive Republicans, as were (it seems from my reading) most of the movement’s leaders. Plenty of Democrats were certainly involved, too. And there was Margaret Sanger, a socialist.
Republican progressive Madison Grant would seem to have been both the spiritual leader and main political coordinator behind the eugenics movement. Despite his pro-eugenics sympathies, Wilson vetoed the anti-immigration laws supported by eugenicists and scientific racists (who were basically the same people) for political reasons. Anti-immigration was a major part of the eungenics program, since Ellis Island immigration was from easterm and southern Europe, and included Jews, rather than from the desired Nordic countries. Grant and the leaders of the movement supported Theodore Roosevelt, a good friend of Grant, for Prez in 1916, especially after the Republican candidate Charles Hughes came down clearly on the pro-immigration side, a great shock to eugenicists.
In any case, arguing about whether Republicans or Democrats are better on the eugenics/race issue is like, as they say in Japan, two acorns arguing about who’s taller. Both sides supported it. Both sides whitewashed their participation once the Holocaust revealed what it could lead to.
It’s true that Eugenics was a Progressive thing, but during the height of the Eugenics movement, they were found more frequently in the Democratic party than in the Republican.
Although he was interested in sterilization, too, Madison Grant’s chief contribution was to miscegenation laws, which I assume you agree were primarily Democratic. Grant’s home state, New York, sterilized 42 people. Compare this to Democratic North Carolina (6,297) or Virginia (7,162).
Stoddard, likewise, focused on race rather than the disabilities that American Eugenics laws focused on. If that’s what you’re meaning to talk about, then, sure, we should talk about that, but the subject is mandated racial segregation, not generally discussed today as a heading of eugenics, and not generally a matter on which learned people ascribe the bulk of the blame to Republicans.
Thanks for the input, James. I was hoping you could provide some to help keep me on track. Eugenics is, after all, a new area for me to delve into.
As for those learned people, of course I learn from the learned. But at the same time I always assume that since they, too, are human, their teachings are infected by the desire to raise themselves. In other words, a great part of their program is to prove that they are the tallest acorn. But they’re still just acorns, most of the time, even when they happen to be taller. Is the bulk of the blame with the Democrats or Republicans? At the upper and intellectual levels I’m suspecting it was Republicans. Thanks to your input I will certainly consider that at lower levels it might be Democrats.
As for mandated segregation laws, those were Jim Crow, therefore southern, and therefore Democratic. Ending them was a great victory. But for either modern party to take a great deal of credit for that strikes me as the pontifications of acorns. The parties now are different animals than the parties then, and the parties then and now were MUCH different animals than the Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century. In fact, the two parties have pretty much flip-flopped ideologies, at least in terms of domestic policy, since the rise of the progressive movement.
And we need to consider unmandated segregation along with mandated. Before the Great Migration of blacks to northern factories, the North had no need of Jim Crow. After the Great Migration they used redlining in the cities and sundown town policies in the countryside, along with prowhite financing of de facto whites only suburbs after WW2, to build a solid wall of de facto segregation across much of the North and West.
I see few good guys (outside of classical liberals!) in this story. Just acorns arguing among themselves as to who has been the better acorn.
Hey, James, I’ve been intentionally provocative, even possibly overstating my case, in hopes that I can provoke some really good info on all of this from you.
G’ day!
Sure. I was just debating the data you were giving me. Whereas the Democrats have maintained strong connections with their racist past, though, you’re right that Republicans have little connection to either side of the debate today.
It may just be my legal and political focus, but to my mind there is no higher level in this stuff than the top of the government, and it was Democratic and/ or Progressive Party governors that passed and implemented these things. Dismissing Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes as not being in the upper levels seems very hard to justify to me.
At the level of academia and media, again, I don’t think you’ll find the Republicans in the lead, although they’re closer to parity there. You have the foreign influences, which were always closer to Democrats, both European and British (Webb, H.G. Wells, etc.), Charles Davenport and his branch of Nazi affiliated Democrats, Herbert Croly, The New Republic, and others. The Democrats had a longer history of arguing for racial difference as a priority and for many of them it had the virtue of both being (in their view) sound policy and of arguing for the rightness of their side in the Civil War. It’s no coincidence that these views were bound up so tightly in the renewal of the Klan during this period.
Sure. This is an excellent book on the subject of redlining if you’re keen on something a little more like a novel your hard work on Eugenics. If it leaves you with the sense of equivalency between North and South, though, I’d urge you to read this, which explained to me why Republicans were so good on race for so long. African Americans were not able to vote in the general, but they were in Republican primaries. Because essentially all AAs who voted voted in them, and so few whites did, freed slaves played a major role in the selection of Republican Presidents.
Read Slavery By Another Name, the latter of those two books. Not only did we have fewer Progressives (and more classical liberals!) than they did, but our Progressives were less awful on race. Teddy Roosevelt was a terrible President in many ways, but he was much less terrible on African American issues than many of his peers.
Many thanks James. As always, a fountain of information and wisdom. Arc of Justice I will certainly look at. Slavery By Another Name is already on my kiindle and heavily annotated.
I was thinking that Charles Davenport, along with Madison Grant, was a Republican. He was a Democrat? And I was assuming Croly was a Democrat, but didn’t know for sure. I can take your word on that, I assume.
I will keep all the names and connections you mention in mind as I continue my journey into the dark alleys of eugenics.
And Mona, thanks for suggesting the Wiki article. Wiki is generally the best place to start an investigation on something new, to get a frame for the mainstream understanding. I hadn’t done that yet, but will.
Somewhat apropos the comparison of southern mandated segregation vs northern unmandated, here’s a list, in order, of the most segregated cities in America. It would seem to be from the book American Apartheid, published 1993. Am curious as to what an up-to-date list would look like.
1. Gary
2. Detroit
3. Milwaukee
4. New York
5. Chicago
6. Newark
7. Cleveland
8. St Louis
9. Cincinnati
10. Birmingham
11. Philadelphia
This was from a long forgotten note to myself. No idea why it is, oddly,the top eleven.
Sorry, I’d meant to reply to this. Yes, Davenport was an (elected!) Democrat, albeit to minor office. Lifelong. Croly was a founding figure for the modern Democratic party. I gather from your having to assume this that you haven’t read Liberal Fascism which, along with the Bible, excludes ethnic gentiles from the top 2 greatest books list. If you give me your email address…. holy cow! There is no Liberal Fascism Kindle! Okay, give me your snail mail address and I’ll mail you a copy, or I could send you an audiobook for audible if you prefer.
James, you are too kind! However, it is, in fact, on kindle. I had avoided it partly out of contrariness (it’s just too talked about) and because the 16 dollar price is not exactly kindle appropriate. However, on your recommendation, I have just purchased it. It’s downloading as we speak.
You won’t regret it. I don’t know why my searching of the Kindle Store wouldn’t find it, but now that I think about it, maybe because I own a kindle copy (which I’d forgotten about), I can’t buy it as a gift for others?
Anyway, you have a treat in store. Speak to your tomorrow, or when you finish it if you have other unavoidable commitments that take you away from it.
James: “You won’t regret it.”
That’s an understatement of huge dimensions! Jonah had me from the get-go. Which is a problem because I really do have those priories you mentioned. But I can read quite a bit on the train. (A subtle plug for those who know where I’m coming from!) I googled Jonah Goldberg and discovered he has more than a passing connection to Ricochet.
Coming into Tokyo this morning I learned…
The liberal definition of democracy: egalitarian statism (all these differences in definitions, including that of fascism, are why the two sides so often talk past each other.)
The French Revolution as the origin of fascism (not exactly a surprise but the all inclusive historical and psychological edifice with which he justifies this assertion is superb)
And as I pulled into my station, the religion of liberalism (again not a suprise in itself, that it is a religion, but I’ve never considered the aspects he mentions)
Many thanks, J
I’m having lunch with him on Thursday (I fell in love with LF before I met Jonah, though), so it’s really nice to bring a fresh convert to the cause.