Almost President by Scott Farris is a
fun, yet provocative book. An early
chapter stresses the importance of the loser’s concession speech. Farris notes that when Vice President Gore outpolled
Gov. George W. Bush in November 2000, some Democrats shouted “Gore or blood,”
but Gore abided by the decision of the US Supreme Court, effectively giving
Florida’s electoral votes, and the Presidency, to Bush. Similarly, in 1824 and 1876 Presidents were
chosen who came second in the popular vote.
There may have been bitterness, but there was no civil war as a
consequence. The only civil war occurred
when Lincoln won a clear majority of the electoral vote, but only a plurality,
a mere 40% of the popular vote. Some 60%
of the citizens had voted against Lincoln.
Generally, Farris’s point is accurate – in America’s democratic republic,
it is important for the defeated candidate to be a good loser and concede the
election when the returns indicate he has lost, even if he has won the popular
vote.
The chapter
on Henry Clay is more than a recounting of his “American System,” of high
tariffs to protect industry, mainly in the North, so the federal government
would have funds for internal improvements, like building canals, roads, and
later railroads, which would improve the ability of all to get their goods to
market. Farris provides a far friendlier
picture of Clay than in Schlesinger’s pro-Jackson histories.
Most interesting is the praise
afforded by Farris upon Clay for developing the Compromises of 1820, 1832, and
1850. “Had civil war come in any of
those years, it goes without saying that American history would be very
different. In those years, the North did
not enjoy the advantages in population and industry that virtually insured
victory when the war would come.”(p. 22)
Thus, Clay’s skill at compromise kept these united states united until
the North could do so forcibly.
Yet, a few
decades ago some prominent historians claimed that when the Civil War did come,
it was BECAUSE of the failure of the politicians of 1860 to achieve
compromise. If only the leaders of 1860
could have been more like Henry Clay, then the blood bath could have been
averted. Should Lincoln, who had
received only 40% of the popular vote in 1860, have compromised with Kentucky’s
Sen. Crittenden, Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, and the South? Remember, more American lives were lost in
the Civil War than in almost all the other American wars combined. If delay through compromise was such an
admirable strategy in 1820, 1832, and 1850, why not delay through a new
compromise in 1860? Why not wait until
the North was even stronger? In 1880
perhaps? Or 1900? The North would have been even more developed
then. Perhaps then, the war would have
been swift, with few casualties.
Perhaps. Of course, slavery would
also have endured another generation or more.
Weigh that against the lives lost.
The underlying question is, what is the cost of freedom? Of unity?
Each of us may answer differently.
But Farris seems unaware of that underlying question when he praises
Clay and his compromises.
The chapter
on Lincoln’s chief political opponent in 1860, Illinois Democrat and Sen.
Stephen Douglas is quite illuminating.
Douglas, rejected by the Southern wing of the party, bravely campaigned
in the South anyway to stress national and party unity. He was sometimes met with rotten eggs and
tomatoes. Perhaps, the hostility he
encountered there would harden him against the South, for when Lincoln received
40% to Douglas’s 29%. Douglas conceded the election. When Lincoln sent troops to reinforce Ft.
Sumter in South Carolina, the first shots of the war were fired. Douglas openly supported Lincoln. “There can be no neutrals in the war, only patriots – or traitors.”(46) Farris concludes that the Douglas policy of
speaking for the Democrats was a success for “there was no ‘fifth column’ of
disaffected Northern Democrats undermining the war effort.”(49) This was certainly not the view of Lincoln’s
Administration, which imprisoned a national Democratic Congressman from Ohio,
and then exiled him, which dismissed the Maryland legislature, which abolished
traditional rights like that of habeas
corpus, and which under Union General Grant, expelled all the Jews from his
area of command.
While
Farris lauds Douglas for his patriotism, laying the groundwork so that the
Democratic Party could survive the Civil War as a national institution, he does
not question beyond that success in salvaging institutional continuity. While Farris is good at discussing the race
issue which emerged in the contested race for Senator in Illinois between
Republican Lincoln and Democrat Douglas, Farris fails to relate the views
expressed in those debates to the larger picture.
The
prevailing view of the US from its foundation was that this was a white man’s
country. Even Roman Catholics were
suspect, though Jefferson promised them equal rights when he purchased
Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803. Indeed,
prior to 1803, there was not a single, legal Protestant church in the massive
Louisiana territory. Could Catholics be
regular Americans? But aside from fringe
areas, like the newly acquired territories of Louisiana and then Spanish
Florida, Catholics were few. America was
composed of Protestants, some more skeptical than others. Indeed, the very first 3rd Party
in the US, was not directed against Catholics, but against Masons (a group that
had been most influential in founding this new nation.) When Catholic immigrants from Ireland and
parts of Germany began to come in large numbers, especially after the potato
famine in Ireland, anti-Catholic feelings rose.
During the war with Catholic Mexico, some of the American troops of
Irish Catholic heritage, switched sides and fought against the US and for the
Mexican dictator. When the Whig Party began to collapse on the issue of
slavery, a new, 2nd party rose, the American Party, or Know Nothing
Party, that was generally anti-Catholic.
However, the American Party also sought to evade the burning issue of
slavery. By 1860 most of the Know
Nothings in the North were voting for the new Republican Party. The Catholic question would dominate the
presidential campaign of 1928 when the Democrats chose New York Gov. Al Smith to
lead their party. And it would also be a
significant factor in the election of 1960 when the Democrats chose
Massachusetts Sen. John Kennedy.
Though
Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other, smaller religious groups might have
difficulties in the US, the Protestant majority in America was still far more
tolerant than nations in Europe or elsewhere in the New World, where membership
in the state approved religion was often required. This general religious tolerance did not
extend to the issue of race.
America’s race relations
varied. One of the reasons for the
American Revolution against King George is that his government sought to stop
British settlement at the Appalachians and preserve the land beyond for the
Amerindians. By contrast, the Americans believed
that one reason they had fought the French and Indian War was so that they COULD
settle beyond the mountain range. The
Indians and the French had lost, so now it seemed only right that the British colonists
settle the lands won. When King George
sought to be protector of the Indians, he became the enemy of the
colonists. Later, when Black slaves
escaped to Spanish/English Florida and joined Osceola and his Amerindians, Gen.
Andrew Jackson invaded, put down the Indians, and claimed Florida for the
United States. In Gerogia and other
southern states, Cherokees, Creeks and three other tribes were known as
civilized tribes, using the alphabet for their own language, publishing newspapers,
even owning slaves. But when a law was
passed requiring their removal from their lands, Jackson sent troops to do
so. The US Supreme Court ruled against
Jackson, but he responded, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let them
enforce it.(Marshall was Chief Justice)
The Court could not do so, and Jackson had the Amerindians removed on a
“trail of tears” to a new Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Whig leader Henry Clay denounced Democrat
Jackson for his cruel action, but the American people reelected Jackson, not Clay’s
Whigs. (Incidentally, during the
American Civil War, most of the Amerindians in Oklahoma chose to side with the
Confederacy).
What about Blacks? Following the American Revolution most Blacks
in the northern colonies either were or would become free, some immediately,
some as in New York, over time. They
were free, but in most northern states they were not granted equal citizenship. Most Blacks lived in the South, and after the
invention of the cotton gin, their labor was deemed essential for the expansion
of this cash crop. While slave-holder
Thomas Jefferson proposed the anti-slavery section of the Northwest Ordinance,
prohibiting slavery from what would become the MidWest, slavery spread westward
to Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri,
(and the Indian-owned slaves in what became Oklahoma.) Conflict over pro-and anti-slavery politicians
would determine if America went to war to conquer Cuba and make it a slave
state, or incorporate Texas and alienate Mexico, or add California and other
western lands following the successful war with Mexico.
Most Blacks lived in the American
South, and most of these were slaves. There were free Blacks, and some of these also
owned slaves. Some of the Free People of
Color in New Orleans were well educated and travelled to Paris and were active
in the arts. Some FPCs were quite
light-skinned, and the Quadroon Balls in the French Quarter were an attraction
for all. But in the 1850s, Louisiana
enacted laws so as to clarify the situation by requiring FPCs to wear certain
identifiable clothing (not yellow stars, as in fascist Europe, but head bandanas). Despite the discrimination, when war came,
the FPCs marched in New Orleans hoping to be included in the Confederate
army. They were rejected.
In the South, many distrusted the
free Negroes out of fear that they might spark slave rebellions. The first country in the New World to expel
its European rulers was the United States.
And the second to do so, just a few years later was Haiti. The slave rebellion – an extension of the
Jacobin beliefs of the French Revolution of liberty, equality, and fraternity,
presented another aspect of the Reign of Terror. The French sent 40,000 troops to regain
control, restore “order’’ and slavery, but the rebels, disease, and guerilla
warfare burst the dream of Napoleon for a French Empire in the New World. If he could not quell Haiti, why was he
fantasizing about the Louisiana Territory?
So Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States.
The Haitian slave revolt was
certainly known in the US. By 1810
perhaps a fourth of the population of New Orleans consisted of refugees from that
revolution. In Haiti, most whites were
killed, or fled. The new nation, what
had been one of the richest of the New World, “the jewel of the Antilles,” became
the hemisphere’s second independent nation.
But it was one that shed a shadow over the American South similar to that
cast after Castro took power in Cuba in 1959.
After Haiti, many Southern states
either feared slave conspiracies, or believed actual revolts were plotted, and therefore
those states enacted restrictive laws to prevent any such rebellions in the
United States. The free Negro was
considered a security risk. In the
North, he was considered an unequal, and not really a citizen. So, many prominent Americans, including Henry
Clay enrolled in the American Colonization Society, to repatriate free Blacks
to Africa, Haiti, Guyana, or some other area away from the US. They believed this would be the best way to
end slavery – free them and send them “home.” Britain evolved similar schemes, and some of
the slaves who left the colonies during the American Revolution when promised
freedom by the British, were unhappy living in Canada. Some left for Africa and settled Freetown in
Sierra Leone. The American Colonization
Society also sent its ships to West Africa
where the nation of Liberia was established, and its capital, Monrovia,
named after a slave-owning President of the US from Virginia. Implicit in these efforts, British and
American, was the view that in the long run, Blacks and whites could not live
easily together. America was a white
man’s country.
As late as the famous
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, neither leading Democrat Stephen Douglas, nor
upcoming Republican Abraham Lincoln called for equal rights for Blacks. Farris is honest to quote Lincoln stating
that he did not believe the races were equal nor could they live together
except as one dominant over the other.
Lincoln, like Clay, supported the American Colonization movement, and
even as the Civil War was ending,
President Lincoln was still seeking to send the Blacks to other lands.
Was America a white man’s
country? Is it? The US Supreme Court decided the issue in
March 1857, in a ruling written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, an appointee of
Pres. Andrew Jackson, the man of the people: Blacks had “no rights which a
white man was bound to respect.”(60) The
Civil War and Lincoln’s resort to the use of Black troops to insure Northern
victory, would do much to revise that view.
Nonetheless, that view remained the dominant ideology of the Democratic
Party even after the Civil War.
One wonders about the praise Farris
lauds on Stephen Douglas for assuring that “the Democratic Party would survive
the [Civil] war as a viable independent political party.”(47) By 1864 the candidate of the Democrats was
Gen. George McClellan, but his running mate was a Copperhead, and the party
platform urged peace with the Confederate States of America.(291) McClellan’s campaign song, written by the
popular composer Stephen Foster, included the exhortation to defeat “Lincoln
and the nigger heads.”
While there were some white
Republicans in the South AFTER the Civil War [Lincoln had not received a single
popular vote in the region.], the Republican Party in the South soon became
predominantly Black; the Democrats, white.
When Republicans in the South sought
to
organize their party after the defeat of the Confederacy, they were met with
extreme, murderous, hostility, exemplified by the “riots” of 1866 in New
Orleans and Memphis. The brazenness and
brutality by the Democrats caused reaction in the North, which now elected
Radical Republicans to the national Congress, men determined to aid the new
occupation governments in the South and prevent the old Confederates from resuming
power. Farris praises Stephen Douglas
for saving the Democratic Party as a nation institution. But after the Civil War, the Democrat Party
proudly proclaimed what kind of party it was in the Democrat’s campaign song of
1868, titled “The White Man’s Banner.”
The lyrics opened: “Raise high the white man’s banner,” and part of the
chorus: “Let, then, all freeborn patriots,
Join with a brave intent
To vindicate our Father’s choice,
“A white man’s Government.”
Soon, a
guerilla war erupted between the newly organized Republican state and local
governments, and the Democrats who resisted what they saw as an occupation
government. The Democrats, with their
party militias, [Ku Klux Klan, the White Camellia, etc.], scared, threatened,
beat, and killed white Republicans and Blacks.
The KKK, through the national Democratic Party, had its friends in the
North, and as a consequence of the disputed election of 1876, Democrat Sam
Tilden yielded the Presidency; Republican Rutherford Hayes was inaugurated; AND
the North withdrew its troops from the South.
[This is similar to what happened in 1990 when Gorbachev made clear he
would no longer use Soviet troops to intervene to save the Peoples’ Democracies
of Eastern Europe. Soon thereafter,
Europe’s people’ democracies crumbled with the wall.] Republican Reconstruction governments were
physically overthrown by the Democratic-Ku Klux alliance. The last Black Republican to sit in the
nation’s Congress from the South lost in North Carolina in 1898 when the
Democrats physically seized power in that portion of the state also.
Farris praises Douglas for
preserving the Democratic Party as a national institution. In the South, there was guerrilla war between
the DemoKuKluxers and the Republicans.
The deal of 1876 sealed the fate of the Republican Reconstruction
governments; the North would no longer intervene to preserve them. By 1898 all the Black Republicans were
ousted. To rephrase: one consequence of retaining the Democratic Party as a national party
was to destroy the Republican Party in the South so that the Republicans were
no longer a national party by 1900.
Farris’s chapter on William
Jennings Bryan is provocative – but not provocative enough. Farris is a liberal, and his ideology blinds
him to what was scientific by 1900.
Farris treats Bryan far better than the popular image created in the
1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Edwin Lee, and amplified in the 1960 film by
Stanley Kramer, Inherit the Wind. Both the play and movie presented the
“Monkey trial” about teaching evolution in 1920s Tennessee in a most partisan
manner.
Farris sympathetically portrays
Bryan, explaining his liberal, reformist agitation was an outgrowth of his
fundamentalist Christianity. From his
1896 speech at the national Democratic convention, “You shall not crucify mankind
upon a cross of gold,” to his leading the prosecution against the teaching of
evolution in Tennessee, evangelical Christianity was at the core of Bran’s
political world view. Yet Farris
criticizes Bryan: “Had Bryan focused on how evolutionary theory was being
abused,…,he might have seemed the prophet [in 1925] he appeared to be in 1896.”(92) And, “Had Bryan…read the textbook,…,which
Scopes had used in his class, he would have discovered the author…arguing that
human beings should be bred more like horses to improve ‘future generations,’
and lamenting that the feeble-minded indeed,…,were only placed in
asylums…[rather than being eliminated].”(92)
Was “social Darwinism” really an
abuse of Darwin’s theory? Darwin was an
abolitionist who spoke highly of his Black friend. Yet, was his theory necessarily
egalitarian? Recall the original full title
of Darwin’s most famous book, On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a
fellow scientist, believed that Blacks were inferior. Many leading scientists of the era, like
Harvard’s Prof. Louis Agassiz, firmly believed that Blacks were innately
inferior to whites. These beliefs would
have ramification among progressive, pro-science political leaders. Farris rightly states that many progressives
believed that racial segregation was a “reform.” It was not merely Bryan who tended to avoid
criticizing racial segregation.
Republican Theodore Roosevelt sought to win the Republican nomination in
1912 against his successor, William Taft.
Roosevelt sought to replace the Taft delegates from the South, mainly
Blacks, with lily white delegates favorable to TR. Losing to Taft at the GOP convention,
Roosevelt withdrew and formed the Progressive Party of 1912, but in the general
election both Taft and Roosevelt lost to progressive Democrat and academic
Woodrow Wilson. Wilson as President then
segregated the federal civil service – another progressive reform. Wilson also praised the popular film Birth of a Nation, and showed it in the
White House. D. W. Griffith’s immensely
popular epic portrayed the tragedy of the war between North and South, and the
foolishness of Northern Radical Republicans, whose Reconstruction policies,
based upon ignorance of natural differences between the races, led to
destruction. Only the heroic actions of
the Ku Klux restored sanity to the defeated South. The film helped to revive the Ku Klux Klan in
the 20th century. Pro-abortion
reformer Margaret Sanger even addressed the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan in
New Jersey (though she addressed various groups, and worked with many Blacks.) Bryan, the Bible believer, rejected such
progressive ideals.
The chapter on Democrat Al Smith is
informative: the Catholic versus the Quaker Republican Herbert Hoover. Farris might have given more thought to the
role that radio was beginning to play in politics. The very strange accent of Smith must have
made him seem even more alien. But it
was his Catholicism that roused so many in the South to vote Republican, and
various states, like North Carolina went Republican for the first time since
Reconstruction. Farris does not mention
the hostility to Quakers. As Pres. Wilson
had whipped up the American people for WWI, many Quakers were seen as
slackers. Of course, Wilson’s
“neutrality” had been so un-neutral and so pro-British, that Sec. of State
William Bryan resigned. Many Quakers
refused to serve in the army, which caused resentment. On the other hand, the fighting Quaker in
Wilson’s Cabinet, A. Mitchell Palmer, was nearly killed by a Left-wing
terrorist bomb in April 1919. He then
cracked down on the radicals, in what is often called the “first Red
scare.” In doing so, Palmer’s agency
employed the services of a young J. Edgar Hoover, to round up radicals. Not all Quakers were pacifists. Still, had Herbert Hoover not been running
against a Catholic, he might have suffered from anti-Quaker and anti-pacifist prejudice. But in 1928 most Americans felt more
comfortable with a Protestant, even a Quaker, than a Roman Catholic as
President. Nevertheless, Smith greatly
increased the Democratic Party’s vote; for Protestant Davis in 1924 –
8,386,000; for Catholic Smith in 1928 – 15,007,000. Each lost to their Republican opponent by
some 7.3 million votes.
The chapter on Republican Thomas
Dewey is one of the most important, which I shall return to it later in this
essay.
Like most historians, liberals,
Farris admires Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
In 1952 Stevenson, Governor of Illinois, was chosen to succeed the by-then
unpopular President Harry Truman.
Stevenson wrote his own speeches using a larger vocabulary, so he soon
had the reputation as an intellectual, or negatively, as an “egg head.” Some allege this was a turning point for the
Democrats, with them turning their backs on their traditional working-class
voters who were more accustomed to simple, slogan-type rhetoric. Stevenson replaced that with speeches appealing
to the better educated middle class and to intellectuals. About Stevenson, I invoke the question Walter
Mondale asked rival Democrat Gary Hart, “Where’s the beef?”
On several of the major issues of
the 1950s, contrast the positions of Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat
Stevenson. On the war in Korea, Ike
declared, “I shall go to Korea.”
Stevenson appeared to have no idea how to end the quagmire war, the
“police action” in which Truman dispatched American soldiers but was unwilling
to expend full power to win the war.
Meanwhile, casualties mounted daily.
Once elected, Ike kept his promise and brought a stalemated ceasefire to
the peninsula, which most found preferable to the stalemated hot war of the
Democrats.
Farris praises the “courage” of
Stevenson for attacking the demagoguery of conspiracy theorists like Republican
Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy blamed
much of the expansion of Communism abroad on Communist traitors at home. He was an example of the “paranoid view of
history,” yet one with power to smear innocent Americans. This is the common view of McCarthy held by
liberal Democrats and historians. But
are the liberals correct?
In early 2012 Russian leader
Vladimir Putin praised the Western atomic scientists who delivered to the Soviets
suitcases filled with secret material which aided the Soviets to develop their
own atomic and hydrogen bombs. There
were conspirators in the US serving Soviet interests. There were spies. Recently, on PBS I watched “The War”
part 8, by Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick. The installment begins in spring
1945. American President Franklin
Roosevelt is ailing, and then dies. The
very new Vice President, Harry Truman, is suddenly President. Only then is the super secret information
about the atomic bomb provided to Truman.
The next scene is the post V-E conference in Potsdam, Germany with
Britain’s new Prime Minister Atlee, the new President Truman, and Soviet
Marshall Stalin. I laughed. Truman had only just been told about the
American bomb, but Stalin, because of his spies, knew about the super secret
weapon before Truman. More, Stalin knew
not only THAT America had the atomic bomb, he was receiving data on how to
construct one.
McCarthy and others charged that
traitors in the US State Department had “lost” China to the Communists. There seems good evidence that Alger Hiss at
Yalta did not present State Department material to FDR concerning Japan’s Sakhalin
Islands. The DoS wanted them to remain
Japanese; yet the northern island was given to the Soviets. Was this FDR’s gift, or did Hiss purposely
withhold information from Roosevelt so he would accede to Stalin’s island request? Farris dismisses the charges against Hiss –
Hiss was convicted of perjury, not espionage.(162) But Farris ignores the newer information
found in Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR.
People can and do disagree on
foreign policy, and not all dissent is treasonous. Yet ??? and ???? make strong cases that many Asia
experts connected to the US State Department in the 1940s were far more
sympathetic to Mao Tse-tung and the Communists than to China’s Nationalists and
its leader Chiang Kai-shek. In China’s
civil war between Communists and Nationalists following WWII, the Communists
received military supplies from the Soviets, who had quickly occupied the
former Japanese “ally” of Manchukuo. In
the US Dept. of State, a cabal of the Left successfully stalled financial and
military aid from reaching Chiang’s forces until it was too late. Were Leftists in the American government responsible
for the failure to reinforce Chiang, and thus responsible for the “fall” of
China? It is a fair question.
Was Stevenson “brave” for
denouncing McCarthy? Or was McCarthy
brave for trying to expose treason inside the US government? Perhaps the “paranoid style” of American
politics was more realistic than that of the liberal “state of denial” –
concerning possible treason, and many other issues.
Once in power, Eisenhower and the
Dewey wing of the GOP turned on McCarthy, condemning him and curtailing his
power. There is much that the Deweyites
must answer for.
Finally, the issue of race. Ike tried to and did make inroads in the
South, appealing to the Dixiecrat elements that had bolted the Truman
Democratic Party in 1948. Indeed, the
American county that had voted most heavily Republican in 1952 with some 96% of
the vote was Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, which was dominated by
segregationist Democrat Judge Leander Perez.
Yet, what about Adlai? Both in 1952 and 1956 Stevenson’s running
mates were Southern Senators who
supported segregation. Alabama Sen.
Sparkman signed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing the US Supreme Court’s
school integration decision of 1954, a decision that reversed six decades of
legal precedent. While Tennessee’s Sen.
Estes Kefauver refrained from signing the Southern Manifesto, in Congress he
had voted against FEPC and anti-lynching laws.
Thus, neither of Stevenson’s running mates were civil rights advocates. It is noteworthy that Farris is honest enough
to write: “During the 1952 presidential
campaign, he [Stevenson] tried to appear equally sympathetic to…white
Southerners and African Americans and ended up pleasing no one. Four years later, worried about Southern
reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown…decision to integrate public schools,
Stevenson had suggested…that civil rights activists take a one-year moratorium
on any further agitation. Stevenson
believed prejudice could only be addressed by changing minds, not laws – a
position very similar to Barry Goldwater’s.”(168)
By contrast, what did Ike do as
President?
When Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred
Vinson died, Ike offered the post to liberal Republican Thomas Dewey (Dewey had
pushed New York to pass the nation’s first state Fair Employment law in the
mid-1940s). Dewey declined the offer,
and the post went instead to Dewey’s 1948 running mate, California Governor
Earl Warren. Eisenhower later regretted
this appointment, and made no speeches in support of the 1954
anti-school-segregation ruling. None the
less, what did Ike do when physical resistance to the decision rose? In 1957 liberal Democratic Arkansas Governor
Orville Faubus attempted to halt court-ordered integration of Central High
School in Little Rock. In response, Ike
nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent federal troops to Little Rock
to maintain order. What would Adlai have
done? No Democratic President had ever sent troops to the US South in support
of integration. Ike also signed a
mild civil rights law and created a civil rights employment committee headed by
VP Richard Nixon.
On the big issues of the 1950s, it
is clear Ike was a far better choice for
President than Adlai, even though Stevenson may have been wittier and delivered
more inspiring speeches that appealed to intellectuals. Adlai had the image, but not the beef.
Farris’s chapter on Goldwater is
generally good. I ask, was the huge
Democratic victory of 1964 with 61% of the vote inevitable? I think not.
In 1964 the civil rights legislation was debated and filibustered in
Congress for months. Farris notes that
staunch segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama entered several northern
states in the Democratic presidential primaries, running against favorite son
stand-ins for President Lyndon Johnson, who openly supported the civil rights
proposals. These primaries became
referenda on the civil rights movement itself.
Wallace received from 25% to 40% of the Democratic vote in Wisconsin,
Indiana, and Maryland. Goldwater voted
against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed the Congress and was signed
by President Johnson July 2. Black
protests and riots, especially in the North, were making some Democrats wonder
about the wisdom of the law. Could
Goldwater use the issue to win the election?
Yet, Goldwater was reluctant to run as a Wallace segregationist. At a rally at Tulane stadium in New Orleans,
Goldwater spoke about a TFX plane and other issues, but NOT the issue that the
crowd wanted to hear – about the issue of integration and protest. And liberal historians often neglect the
counter by the Democrats. In the New
Orleans newspapers the Democrats placed full-page ads urging people to vote for
Johnson, a fellow Southerner who understands the Southern way of life, rather
than Goldwater, who had supported an Arizona state FEPC law. But there were other issues in the campaign,
and the image of Goldwater as a loose cannon, not with a cannon, but with
nuclear war-heads, rallied many voters to LBJ.
Also, Johnson seemed more reasonable on the growing conflict in Vietnam,
also.
Farris makes the major point, however,
that in 1964 the Democratic Party began to lose the South. Goldwater carried only his home state of
Arizona, Georgia, and the four Dixiecrat states of 1948. Farris adds that Goldwater won 55% of the
total white vote of the South (184), [but does not elaborate if Texas, for
instance, was considered “South” in the tabulation.] Nationally, Johnson carried a majority of the
white vote, the last Democrat to do so in a Presidential election. In that sense, 1964 was truly a turning point
– for thereafter, the vast majority of the Black vote would go Democratic; most
white Southerners voted Republican by sizable margins, while nationally whites
vote Republican but by smaller percentages.
Farris credits South Dakota
Democrat George McGovern with creating a new Democratic coalition of “’identity
politics,’ or , a motley collection of ‘special interests,’ but the potential
of this coalition, first envisioned by McGovern, was finally realized with
Obama’s election in 2008.”(205) Obama
was the first Democrat since LBJ to receive the majority of the popular
vote. Changing demographics. That is an understatement!
First, let me challenge what Farris
wrote about Goldwater. “Goldwater’s
candidacy was the tipping point that remade the Republicans into a fundamentally
white, conservative party with virtually no liberal and few minority members,
while the Democrats were converted into a fundamentally liberal party that
draws heavily on the overwhelmingly support of racial and ethnic minorities.”(175)
Changing demographics. As late as 1960 some 60% of the Blacks in the
US resided in the South, where many were disfranchised, and of those who could
vote, many were Republicans opposed to the Democrats, the party of legalized
segregation. Blacks composed 10.5 11% of
the American population; Hispanics were often not a separate category but
classified as either white or Blacks.
Asians and Amerindians were a tiny percentage of the population. In 1960 a McGovern strategy of identity
politics would have been utterly disastrous.
Even in 1972, it was a losing proposition, for McGovern did not even
receive 40% of the vote and carried only Massachusetts and the Columbia
District. Of course, there were other
issues, and Farris quotes a quip that called McG’s campaign that of the 3 A’s:
“acid, amnesty, and abortion.”(205)
President Nixon, who had defeated Humphrey and Wallace in a 3-way
contest in 1968, smashed McGovern and the New Politics in 1972 with over 60% of
the vote.
And this is where one must question
some of Farris’s assertions. Farris
writes: ”Goldwater’s [1964] candidacy was the tipping point that would remake
the Republicans into a fundamentally white, conservative party with virtually
no liberals and few minority members,…”(175)
Farris contradicts this assertion when he writes about President Nixon,
but he obscures the contradiction by describing Nixon’s Presidency, not
chronologically, but in the earlier chapter on Thomas Dewey!
In 1952 Dewey led the forces
opposed to the nomination of “Mr. Republican,” Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. At the convention Dewey forces disputed the seating
of Southern delegations where most of the committed delegates were party
faithful, many were Black, and they were for Taft. Dewey wanted the party to appeal beyond party
members, and General Eisenhower should be the candidate and new, white members
should also be seated as delegates. It
was close, but the convention votes on disputed delegates indicated Taft did
not have a majority of delegates. After
these important preliminary skirmishes, it was clear that the anti-Taft forces
could muster a majority in the convention.
Ike won the nomination. Dewey
suggested the young California Senator as the running mate, and Richard Nixon
was chosen. When a scandal erupted about
Nixon accepting gifts from Republican contributors, some demanded he resign
from the ticket. Dewey persuaded Ike to
give him a chance. Nixon appeared on
television with his confessional speech; yes, he had even accepted gifts, even
the dog Checkers, for his daughters. He
was a poor man, and his wife wore a cloth coat, not a vicuna coat like the
graft-ridden Democratic wives. The
speech won the nation’s approval; Nixon remained on the winning ticket; he
served for 8 years as Ike’s Vice President.
Nixon lost the Presidency to John
Kennedy in 1960 by a slim margin, and lost the governorship in California to Democrat Pat Brown by a wide margin. In 1964 Goldwater was the nominee, and
consequently, according to Farris, there were virtually no liberals left in the
Republican Party.(175)
Yet, Farris also writes: “The Nixon administration [1969-75] was the
last truly liberal administration of the twentieth century. That legacy is obscured by liberal antipathy
toward Nixon because of his history of Red-baiting, his policies in Vietnam,
the Watergate Scandal, and Nixon’s conservative rhetoric. But the words were not matched by deeds. As liberal congressman Hugh Scott, a Dewey
ally, said of Nixon’s administration, ‘The conservatives get the rhetoric, we
get the action.’”(147)
Moreover: “Under Nixon, wage and
price controls were implemented, the EPA was created, the food stamp program
was begun, affirmative action was put in place, and tax reform essentially
freed the poor from having to pay income tax.
Nixon even called for comprehensive national health insurance, though he
pursed the idea half-heartedly.”(147)
All this occurs after Goldwater’s candidacy allegedly
purges the liberals from the GOP!
Now to connect Sen. Ted Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon to McGovern’s new politics and new demographics. President John Kennedy was assassinated in
November 1963, and the new President Johnson pushed the civil rights
legislation that was debated during the first half of 1964. LBJ signed the bill into law in July
1964. Johnson’s election victory in
November 1964 was overwhelming, and he had a powerful majority in the Congress
as well. The new Congress wanted to end
racism, and it passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to insure that thereafter Blacks
in the South would be permitted to vote.
Congress also passed a major revision of the immigration law. Whereas the objective of the previous act,
passed in the 1920s, was to protect American labor and to retain the ethnic make
up of the nation’s past (thus excluding most Asians, and inconsistently, most
Africans), and even Europeans had to come according to their nation’s quota of
immigrants. In addition, there were
tests concerning the physical and mental health of the applicants. They might also require sponsors who would
pay for them if they became a burden to society.
To many liberals of the 60s, this
seemed cruel and racist. The Kennedy
family, familiar with the horrors of the Irish famine, sought a more open
immigration policy. Jews, stung because
many of their brethren had been denied entry to the US and elsewhere when they
desperately sought to escape Hitler’s Europe, had been lobbying for a more open
immigration policy for decades. Catholics also believed more of the new
immigrants might be their co-religionists.
While proponents of the new immigration law of 1965 assured America
there would be no massive influx of immigrants and no change in the ethnic
composition of the nation, this was typical of liberal assurances. Liberals had also assured America that civil
rights would not lead to hiring by quotas, to racial balance, and to racial and
ethnic preferences that discriminated against white people.
By the end of the Johnson
Administration in 1968, in response to
Black protests and riots, there had evolved “the Philadelphia Plan,” for the
construction industry whereby firms that wanted government contracts, were
required to hire by quota (even though the Civil Rights Act had outlawed
quota-hiring.) When Democrat Hubert
Humphrey lost to Nixon in November 1968, everyone assumed that was the end of
the Philadelphia Plan, and quota hiring.
However, Nixon and his new Labor Secretary George Shultz revived the
Plan, a policy opposed by many unions and many Democrats and Republicans in
Congress. Opposition was so fierce that
it seemed that the program would lose Congressional support. To retain the Philadelphia Plan, the Nixon
Administration lobbied the NAACP requesting its help to save the quotas. The program passed Congress by a handful of
votes, and Nixon celebrated the victory by extending the quota policy to the
entire nation, to all forms of employment, and finally extending the quotas
(called goals and timetables to pretend this was legal) to women, Hispanics,
Amerindians, etc. To hire by quotas,
standards were usually lowered.
Minorities and women received affirmative action preferences, white men
received negative action – no job, no promotion, no scholarship, no university
admission, no government contract. This
affirmative-action quota policy began on a national plain with Republican Pres.
Nixon, continued under Republican Ford, Democrat Carter, Republican Reagan,
Republican G. H. W. Bush, Democrat
Clinton, Republican G. W. Bush, and onto Democrat Obama.
Though some said President Reagan
could stop affirmative action with the stroke of a pen, he never signed the
Executive Order revoking affirmative action.
While white men have voted Republican since Nixon, they have received
from these liberal Republicans only rhetoric and repression. Of course, they receive even worse from the
Democrats.
By 2012 articles appeared assessing
the GOP Presidential debates as harmful to the party because most of the
candidates openly opposed amnesty for illegal aliens. Some thought the GOP still had a chance to
redeem itself if Mitt Romney, the presumed nominee, would choose Marco Rubio,
an Hispanic, as his running mate. Rubio
had previously proposed a semi-amnesty program similar to that issued by
President Obama in spring 2012. And
thereafter some believed that Rubio could win the Hispanic vote for the
Republicans. If some action was not
taken by the Republicans to win the Hispanic vote, not only would it lose the
presidency in 2012, it would then be doomed to lose all elections hereafter
because of demographics. Whites were declining;
Hispanics growing. By 2050 whites will
be a minority inside America. A white
Republican Party was a prescription for it to join the Federalists and the
Whigs in Obliviland. One need only look
at California to see the future. Earl
Warren was a Republican governor there.
Nixon was elected a Republican Senator.
Reagan was a Republican Governor.
But because of demographic changes – Hispanics moving in and whites
moving out if they could, no Republican has carried the state in a presidential
election since Reagan. True,
Schwarzenegger won as a Republican, but it was literally a special election, a
recall election, in which the usual rules did not apply. And some Hispanics might have identified with
Schwarzenegger as just another immigrant.
Must the GOP embrace open borders to win the Hispanic vote? Must it win the Hispanic vote to survive?
While Farris credits McGovern with
his New Politics of appealing to ethnic and special interest groups – McGovern
lost decisively in 1972 to Pres. Nixon. Still,
it was liberal Nixon whose policies were to make McGovern’s New Politics so
successful later on. And now some
predict it has been so successful it will bury the Republican Party under the
votes of new immigrants and their children.
When Nixon extended affirmative
action preferences to Hispanics, this presented new immigrants with preferences
for jobs, scholarships, even university admissions, over white citizens. This approach encouraged Blacks and Browns to
come to America, some legally, many illegally.
By the 1980s there were public housing projects in New York City that
were mainly for illegal aliens. While
American citizens struggled to pay exorbitant rents for tiny apartments, the
illegals received subsidized apartments.
There were court decisions by liberal judges forcing hospitals to take
in illegals in emergency room, forcing schools to enroll illegals as students,
and when their proportion grew, to have them taught by Spanish-speaking
teachers, in special classes, where they might never learn English. Courts had to hire interpreters for the numerous
alien criminals. Driver’s license tests,
government brochures, forms, voting ballots, all had to be printed in Spanish
too, all at the expense of the tax payer.
No longer were immigrants expected to assimilate into traditional
American culture; Americans were expected to adjust to the preferenced, aliens
and their cultures.
Republican Nixon began much of
this. Then came Reagan, conservative
Reagan, rhetoric-at-its-best Reagan. He
refused to sign an executive order halting affirmative action. And Reagan granted amnesty to some 11 million
illegal aliens then in the US! This
simply encouraged millions more to come.
Although polls consistently showed most Americans opposed to massive
immigration, especially if it changed our culture; the courts, the bureaucrats,
the academedia complex all championed the changes in America. Suddenly, if you proposed making English the
official language, you were now a racist (and in the new America, there was no crime
worse than “racism.” If you objected to
having children with Spanish names (some of whom knew English and whose
families had been in the US for decades) being removed from regular classes and
enrolled in the Spanish speaking class, you were a racist. If in voting on a proposition, you preferred
to vote “no” or “yes,” rather than “no” or “si,” you were a racist. Multiculturalism became the new ideology constructed
upon the massive influx. Now, in
Orwellian terms, all cultures are equal, but some are more equal than
others. All were good, except Western
culture for it was imperialist, racist, sexist, etc. Similarly, with civil rights, all are equal
but some are more equal than others.
White men are oppressive, brutal, privileged, rich, (and Republican),
and so they deserve discrimination.
Preferences go instead to the privileged minorities and women.
“Diversity is our strength,” became
a mantra of the immigration open-door crowd.
This was used to justify immigration, legal and illegal. Minority racist groups received huge grants
from wealthy foundations – invariably dominated by liberals. So La Raza and the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, and other groups were created and subsidized by
the rich, liberal elite. As many of them
sat on boards of corporations, big business often contributed to these
also. (It is a left-wing myth that
corporations are conservative; they pay large sums to people like Rev. Jesse
Jackson, to the NAACP, and to various left-wing groups.) In addition to the financial elite, Catholic
charities often sought to aid the illegals, as many were Catholics. Jewish groups have wanted an open door,
especially because in the 1930s the door was hard to open, and many Jews were
unable to flee Europe. And in 2012
President Obama issues an order to provide semi-amnesty to more than a million
illegal aliens. These young illegals now
march to the front of the immigration line, AND MORE, they march to the front
of the employment line because they will receive affirmative action preferences
above white citizens.
What has happened to America?
Berthold Brecht was a radical
German poet and playwright who joined with composer Kurt Weill to give the
world the popular, extremely cynical “Three Penny Opera” in 1928. To this day, many know at least one song from
the production, “Mack the Knife.” Brecht
left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power.
Eventually, Brecht came to the US and wrote for the movies in
Hollywood. With the defeat of the Nazis
came the Cold War, and Brecht was of the far Left. He left America and returned to Germany, to
East Germany, where he was in charge of a theater near the Brandenburg Gate. Brecht was probably Germany’s leading
playwright of the century, so he was a star in the German Democratic Republic.
However, in summer 1953, the
workers in the GDR rebelled. Brecht
wrote a poem.
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The American elite became disillusioned
with the American people, and has been in the process of electing a new
people. This explains why preferences
are granted to aliens, even illegal aliens, over native citizens.
It is clear THAT this is
happening. The next questions are WHY? And WHO is behind it?
