Letters from an American – October 29, 2022
“October 29, 2022“, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, (substack).
“Democrats Aren’t Moving Left. They’re Returning to Their Roots.” The Democrats have been leftists for a long time, It took a while before they would come out as supporting Black America to the same level as White America. The column gives an accurate history of how civil war Republicans became the Democrats of today.
This week, news broke that as a guest on the right-wing Real America’s Voice media network in 2020, Republican candidate for Michigan governor Tudor Dixon said that the Democrats have planned for decades to topple the United States because they have not gotten over losing the Civil War. According to Dixon, Democrats don’t want anyone to know that white Republicans freed the slaves, and are deliberately strangling “true history.”
Dixon’s was a pure white power rant, but she was amplifying a theme we hear a lot these days: that Democrats were the party of enslavement, Republicans pushed emancipation, and thus the whole idea that Republican policies today are bad for Black Americans is disinformation.
In reality, the parties have switched sides since the 1850s. The shift happened in the 1960s, and it happened over the issue of race. Rather than focusing on party names, it makes more sense to follow two opposed strands of thought, equality and hierarchy, as the constants.
By the 1850s it was indeed primarily Democrats who backed slavery. Elite southern enslavers gradually took over first the Democratic Party, then the southern states, and finally the U.S. government. When it looked in 1854 as if they would take over the entire nation by spreading slavery to the West—thus overwhelming the free states with new slave states—northerners organized to stand against what they called the “Slave Power.”
In the mid-1850s, northerners gradually came together as a new political party. They called themselves “Republicans,” in part to recall Jefferson’s political party, which was also called the Republican party, even though Jefferson by then was claimed by the Democrats.
The meaning of political names changes.
The new Republican Party first stood only for opposing the Slave Power, but by 1859, Lincoln had given it a new ideology: it would stand behind ordinary Americans, rather than the wealthy enslavers, using the government to provide access to resources, rather than simply protecting the wealthy. And that would mean keeping slavery limited to the American South.
Prevented from imposing their will on the U.S. majority, southern Democrats split from their northern Democratic compatriots and tried to start a new nation based on racial slavery. They launched the Civil War.
At first, most Republicans didn’t care much about enslaved Americans, but by 1863 the war had made them come around to the idea that the freedom of Black Americans was crucial to the success of the United States. At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reinforced the principles of the Declaration of Independence and dedicated the nation to a “new birth of freedom.” In 1865 the Republican Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ending enslavement except as punishment for crime (we really need to fix that, by the way).
After the war, as southern Democrats organized to reinstate white supremacy in their states, Republicans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment, giving the federal government power to guarantee that states could not deny equal rights to American citizens, and then in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing Black men the right to vote. They also established the Department of Justice to defend those rights. But by 1871, white Republicans were backing away from federal protection of Black Americans.
Democrats continued to push white supremacy until 1879, when former Confederates took over Congress and threatened to destroy the government unless the federal government got out of southern affairs altogether (it’s a myth that the army left the South in 1877). Voters turned so vehemently against the former Confederates trying to impose their will on the nation’s majority that national Democrats began to shift away from their southern base, which dominated the southern states. In 1884 they ran New Yorker Grover Cleveland for office and won.
For the next fifty years, both national parties would waffle on race, trying mostly to ignore it.
But World War II changed the equation.
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun to offer some economic protections to Black Americans with the 1930s New Deal, but Black soldiers coming home from the war demanded true equality. The blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard in 1946 by South Carolina law enforcement officers woke Democratic president Harry S. Truman up to the need for equal protection of the laws.
Unable to get civil rights laws through Congress, Truman worked to desegregate federal contracting and military installations. Immediately, racist southern Democrats, led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, broke away from their own president to form their own short-lived “Dixiecrat” party backing racial segregation.
Then, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower put Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, at the head of the Supreme Court. It promptly used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare the segregation of public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It seemed both parties had come around to supporting racial equality.
But white supremacists in the South responded to desegregation by attacking their Black neighbors. So in 1957, with a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a civil rights act to protect Black voting. Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop it.
Republicans who hated the government’s postwar regulation of business saw an opening to get the Dixiecrat contingent on their side. In 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative, published under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, called for getting rid of the business regulation and social safety laws passed since 1933, and claimed that the Supreme Court’s protection of civil rights was unconstitutional.
When Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he gave a rousing inaugural address promising to bring freedom to the world but, afraid of alienating southern Democrats, didn’t mention race at home. World War II veteran James Meredith promptly decided to test just how committed to human rights Kennedy actually was. Meredith sued for admission to the University of Mississippi, and when the courts ruled the state had to admit him in 1962, Kennedy had to choose between the northern wing of his party that supported civil rights, and the southern racists. Pushed by his brother and attorney general Robert, Kennedy backed Meredith’s registration with federal troops.
Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking Black Americans and their white allies as they tried to enroll Black voters. In 1964, Republicans ran Goldwater for president on a platform calling for slashing federal power and empowering the states to run their affairs as they wished. Goldwater lost the election, but Strom Thurmond publicly switched parties, and Republicans picked up the five states of the Deep South (as well as Arizona) for the first time since Reconstruction.
Democrats, meanwhile, went all in on racial equality. Kennedy had come around to calling for civil rights legislation, and after his assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed hard first for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which Congress passed while FBI agents were searching for three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi—and then, after law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, attacked voting rights advocates as they crossed a bridge named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Democrats had become the party of equality. But the votes for the civil rights laws had been bipartisan, and it was not at all clear that the Republicans wouldn’t also back civil rights. After all, Goldwater had gotten shellacked when he made common cause with white supremacists.
But in 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon knew he had a hard fight ahead of him. He figured he needed to pick up the old Dixiecrats, who were now politically homeless. He went to Thurmond with a quiet promise not to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South in exchange for his support. This “Southern strategy” worked. Thurmond publicly backed Nixon.
From then on, white supremacists made up a key part of the Republicans’ base, and the party increasingly pushed on old racial themes—Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, for example, or George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad, or the trope of “makers” and “takers”—to keep them on board.
The parties had switched positions over equality and hierarchy. Since 1964, Republicans have always won the majority of the nation’s white vote, while Democrats rely on Black voters, especially Black women.
And that is the actual true history of how it happened that a Republican candidate for office, representing a party that once defended civil rights, made white power rants on public media.
Run
I only got a little way into this….and i will come back and finish it later when i have time.
But the professor has her history a bit wrong.
Of course the modern Republicans calling themselves the party of Lincoln is nonsense and a lie.
And of course Nixon’s “southern strategy” had a lot to do with that. as did LBJ’s civil rights legislation. Not to mention the War On Poverty: for some reason the Southern Democrats were always in favor of poverty. but so were the Republicans…and so they still are.
There are details in the rise of the Lincoln Republicans, and the anti-slavery movement, that the professor either does not know or chooses to ignore.
Run,
I am going to throw this at AB as a place holder. It is very general. I like to think I know more of the details. But it’s fairly hard work getting them on paper and reasonably fact checked. The video I sent you yesterday about the history of slavery might also help some people rethink their conviction that Americans invented slavery and the Lincoln Republicans were only accidentally anti-slavery, which they took up, I suppose, to get the Black vote.
From Wikipedia:
“The Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soilers such as Salmon P. Chase. The first anti-Nebraska local meeting where “Republican” was suggested as a name for a new anti-slavery party was held in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on March 20, 1854.”
..
History of the Republican Party (United States) – Wikipedia
The southern Democrats of the post-FDR era took the opportunity created by LBJ and facilitated by RMN to overwhelm the GOP, getting over their hatred for Abe Lincoln in the process (somehow). Probably, erasing Lincoln from their collective memory. (They are a borg-like collective after all, are they not?)
But FDR had essentially taken over the Dem party, after having been the Dem governor of NY despite the tendencies of his Progressive GOP uncle Teddy.
So it goes in American politics.
So, which party encourages people to wave pro-slavery Confederate flags at its rallies?
kaleberg
addressed to me?
i thought i was saying that whatever they call themselves, they are not the party of Lincoln.
I didn’t say, but I thought I was implying that whatever the parties call themselves, or called themselves, is not a subject that can tell us anything about what the parties are up to now.
Even Wiki refers to “the solid south” in reference to the 1850’s, which is an anachronism.
I misspoke: I said it didn’t matter what they called themselves then, Actually there was no they then. “they” were not born yet.
What’s in a name? not much, really. but swindlers and liars will use a name to make you think they are talking about the same thing. by about 1872 or so, anyone who wanted to be elected*knew he needed to call himself a Republican. They have evolved since then to become Fascists. They don’t call themselves that though.
[*oh what a tangled web: of course that was only true in the North. It took the solid south, who were the fascists then, but called themselves Democrats because they couldn’t think of another name. It took them a hundred years to learn to call themselves Republicans.]
I think the GOP roots date back to the 19th century Transcendentalists & Abolitionists of the Northeast, who found a charismatic candidate in ex-Whig Abe Lincoln, who in principle was an abolitionist. They were backed by northeastern industrialists with wealth who abhorred the idea of the South driving its economy with slave-labor, perhaps more than they detested slavery.
Wikipedia: After serving a single term in the House of Representatives, Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, where he worked as lawyer. He initially remained a committed member of the Whig Party, but later joined the newly-formed Republican Party after the Whigs collapsed in the wake of the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act. …
Technically, the modern GOP are mainly Thom Jefferson fanatics (or his disciples.)
The roots of the Dem party are really complicated, in the states-rights yearnings of Thomas Jefferson, slave-holder & polymath. But let’s try to forget that. The modern-day Dems are anything but that.
They are not entirely progressive either. A (slight?) majority are centrist, and many are even disgruntled ex-GOP types. A genuinely big tent. Not the circus tent of the GOP. Let’s not dump the bath-water just yet.
But then, the roots of the GOP were with abolitionist Abe Lincoln. They seem to have gotten over that.
Actually, I suppose the roots of the GOP are far more complex.
The roots of the Dem party are quite simple, but the roots seem pretty irrelevant today. Given the southern origins. They got an assist from the Progressive GOP which went defunct after Teddy Roosevelt.
Nelson Rockefeller & others tried to resurrect the Progressive GOP but that didn’t work out too well.
Some would argue that the Dems got another big assist when the GOP turned hard right after Nixon. Others would say it got polluted. So be it. I am thankful for the truly big Dem tent. It is sad to see what’s become of the party of Abe Lincoln.
Dobbs,
you might enjoy this article about Lincoln and “the Party of Lincoln”
anyone wanting to hear an intelligent take on Supreme Court “originalism” should definitely read it.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/184101
The best trick the devil ever pulled … Cavaliers, England’s younger sons (and daughters) of the landed gentry for whom there was no land left to inherit awarded “grants” to lands that didn’t belong to them and brought their 16th and 17th century baronial lifestyle to Turtle Island a hundred years before the “Puritans” got kicked out of Belgium. They started with what peasantry they could bring with them, which wasn’t nearly enough to sustain the life they were accustomed to, so they turned to enslaving the locals, which didn’t turn out well at all. That’s when they started importing Africans. Right about the same time the Captain of the Mayflower dumped his unruly passengers (who had drank all the beer) at the first rock he got to before the now beer-less crew killed them all … which is of course “America’s” founding myth, the devil’s best trick.
The Cavaliers of course brought more than their lifestyles, they brought the attitude; the caste, evolving, amplifying into the antebellum south and echos, haunts, the project today, but all we ever hear about are those damned “Pilgrims.” Well, and the “cowboys,” but that’s another myth. We’ve been kissing the south’s ass over their peculiar attitude from the very start and like WWII I’m starting to wonder who actually won those conflicts.
Sources: my recollections of Albion’s Seed. Nine Nations of North America and, of course, my unique, perhaps even peculiar perspective …
Ten Bears
A post on this at your site which I will place on Angry Bear a week later would be kool and educational.
I just cooked that up not too long ago in comments @ Calico Jack’s, though have alluded to it obtusely a time or two. It’s still a work in process.
I’ll post this though; thanks …
Ten Bears
Depending on how long you want to make it, it could be a long post. I am assuming you may be pulling from experience too.
Bill
Vaguely related?
In New England, Republicans Push to Flip More Seats as Moderates
NY Times – Oct 31
A handful of Republicans are making headway in traditionally Democratic strongholds by distancing themselves from the right wing of their party. Can they succeed?
(One wonders if many voters in New England – outside of NH – would fall for this.
The article mentions three GOP candidates who have a chance. 1 each in RI, Maine & CT. All seem to be Trumpists.)
GOP candidate for the Senate ex-general Bolduc is close to a win over incumbent Dem Senator Hassan. Around heah, Dems are reminding voters that that will be sufficient to put the Senate under full GOP control in 2023 (assuming that enuf Dems don’t win elsewhere.)
The full headline is
In New England, Republicans Run as Moderates, Pushing to Flip More Seats
A handful of Republicans are making headway in traditionally Democratic strongholds by distancing themselves from the right wing of their party. Can they succeed? …