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THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE TRIPOLI PIRATES: THE FORGOTTEN WAR THAT CHANGED AMERICAN HISTORY (New York: Sentinel, 2015) by BRIAN KILMEADE ...

Sunday, August 26, 2012

ALMOST PRESIDENT – ALMOST AMERICA

                                           Rev. by Hugh Murray
            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?

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