Posted on 02/17/2008 8:03:54 PM PST by neverdem
Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, by Bruce Bartlett (Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pp., $26.95)
Two years ago, on his Daily Kos website, Markos Moulitsas asked: “Is it any wonder the GOP is the party of racists?” While Moulitsas conceded that “not every Republican is a racist,” he maintained that “the opposite—every racist is a Republican—is just about right.”
Such sentiments typify a common view that racism is the soul of the Republican Party, and that black Republicans are traitors to their race, or at least peculiar. Bruce Bartlett sets the record straight in Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, in which he observes to the contrary that “virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” Democrats are today best known as the party of the “little man,” but the party’s original agrarian base included plantation owners distinctly uninterested in the abolition of slavery. The Democratic Party, then, was home to politicians determined to maintain blacks as possessions.
Bartlett begins his history, naturally enough, with the now-familiar contradictions in the life of Thomas Jefferson—apostle of liberty, slaveholder, and founder of what would become the modern Democratic Party. He continues with former presidents such as Andrew Johnson, who welcomed prominent ex-Confederates back into Congress and fought civil rights legislation, and Woodrow Wilson, who segregated federal government buildings and barely allowed any black participation in his administration. Franklin D. Roosevelt, meanwhile, appointed a Klansman to the Supreme Court and largely ignored black concerns, reluctant to jeopardize his relationship with Southern committee chairmen.
John F. Kennedy’s racial priorities were similar to Roosevelt’s; his few progressive efforts on racial questions were due to political expediency. Kennedy would have done nothing significant for black Americans had the growing political and public-relations problem of Jim Crow in the South not forced his hand. The influence of television—and America’s ongoing propaganda war with the Soviet Union, in which the Soviets could cite American hypocrisy on human rights—made it imperative for Kennedy to act.
Bartlett also examines the roles of lesser-known figures like Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, an ardent defender of lynching who also spoke of his love for the “Mammy” who helped raise him. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi tirelessly advocated that blacks be given their own state in the West, in order to ensure that no one would force “our Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic nigger women.” All of these characters, and many others whom Bartlett profiles, were Democrats.
Some readers will value this book as an historical chronicle of American racism in the “never forget” vein, but Bartlett’s aim is more concrete: he hopes to dissuade black Americans from voting monolithically for “the party to which their greatest oppressors belonged.” Yet the number of black people who will start voting Republican upon learning that Woodrow Wilson didn’t like them is minuscule. The figures whom Bartlett covers were not only Democrats but Southerners, and it will be no surprise to contemporary readers that white Southerners tended to be open bigots back in the day. In addition, the Democratic Party’s platform has changed so substantially since then, and the political landscape with it, that treating the Democratic Parties of 1850, 1910, and 2008 as a single entity doesn’t make much sense.
Where Wrong on Race does have contemporary relevance is in clearing away myths about Republican racism. Bartlett debunks the widely held view, for example, that Richard Nixon courted racist white votes in the South in 1968. Nixon could not have pulled off such a thing, since George Wallace—who had the racism market pretty well cornered—was running as a third-party candidate. Once in office, Nixon helped initiate affirmative action and did more to desegregate holdout Southern schools than any president since the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In 1968, a year before Nixon entered the White House, 68 percent of black students in the South went to all-black schools; just two years later, in 1970, only 14 percent did. Similarly, Bartlett points out that Ronald Reagan was accused of racism largely because of his opposition to the government programs that many blacks had come to depend on since the sixties. Reagan developed his small-government convictions, however, long before he entered politics, and hardly with blacks in mind. Blacks’ median income actually rose during Reagan’s terms in office.
For all of their rhetoric on race, the Democrats, Bartlett argues, will likely concentrate most closely on the Latino vote in the near future—especially as the perceived anti-immigrant tendency in the Republican Party leads Latinos to the Democrats in greater numbers. He argues compellingly that if blacks increased their Republican vote by 10 to 20 percent, they would qualify as an important voting bloc in the party. So far, so good. But Bartlett also makes the dubious argument that reparations would make blacks feel welcome under a Republican Big Tent, which would pave the way for the elimination of affirmative action. More likely, blacks would indignantly regard the suggestion as a bribe, and incantations like “Katrina” and “Willie Horton” would continue to substitute for serious thought about how to make Black Power more than a slogan.
In fact, the younger generation of blacks, growing up in an increasingly multiracial America, will be less encumbered by the reflexive sense that voting Republican is somehow straying from racial authenticity. In the meantime, Bartlett’s book, especially its later chapters, provides a useful perspective for blacks interested in resisting, once and for all, the idea that any political party should own their votes.
John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Race and Ethnicity. His book on hip-hop music and culture, All About the Beat, will appear in May.
I occasionally hear someone on television, usually a leftist, talking about what a terrible injustice slavery was. No doubt about that.
I wish that once — just once — one of them would mention the fact that the Republican Party was formed to end slavery, while the Democratic Party fought tooth and nail to keep slavery in place.
Just once, I wish someone would mention that the so-called “radical” Republicans were called “radical” because they wanted to give blacks their full rights way back in the Civil War days. But who fought them? You got it.
Lincoln had selected Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, as his compromise running mate, but after Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson and the Democrats thwarted black rights, particularly in the South. Not until nearly one hundred years later did African Americans finally get the rights that Republicans had tried to give them immediately following the Civil War.
At that point, Democrat LBJ decided to take another strategy against blacks: make them as dependent as possible on government. And man did it ever work. It destroyed the black family, but it got blacks to vote 90+% for the rats.
They pitched Catholics off, now it’s the blacks turn because they are courting Hispanics.
They rely on stupidity, class envy, and no historical memory..
I’m one of those “traitors” the author speaks of. My family is huge, yet as far as I know, I am the only conservative Republican in the herd. Black sheep, as always, I guess.
I’d send this article to family, but they wouldn’t read it. If Thomas Sowell can’t convince them, no one can. I’m pretty sure they’re all voting for Obama with glee, and following the Pied Piper over the cliff.
Doesn’t seem to matter how many facts I present to them, they just cannot see that they’re inside the plantation fence, and I’m outside - a free man.
“....the Republican Party was formed to end slavery, while the Democratic Party fought tooth and nail to keep slavery in place.
Just once, I wish someone would mention that the so-called “radical” Republicans were called “radical” because they wanted to give blacks their full rights way back in the Civil War days. But who fought them? You got it.”
Boy, I wish I could get my liberally brainwashed family to understand that part of our history. If they would just digest it, it would probably break their programming, but no, they wouldn’t dare inspect the data.
The most key part of their indoctrination is; “Do Not Look”.
btt
Getting them to recognize that part of history would be a good start, but after reluctantly conceding that history, “liberals” often then just throw out some red herring.
The most common one is that the racist southern Dems all became Republicans in the past three or four decades. It is true that many southern Dems obviously switched parties to become Republicans, but what is not true (as far as I know, at least) is that southern Republicans are racists. I don’t see them trying to reinstate Jim Crow laws.
But of course we all know the modern liberal definition of a racist: anyone that they cannot compete with in a rational debate.
And vice-versa. Pretty much tit for tat.
But that's just another racist Republican talking...oh, wait!
I changed my registration this week, so I can vote in our June Dem primary, to have a little fun at their expense.
Some people prefer chains to freedom.
As the sky pilots teach us, “The sweet by and by will provide freedom. We shall all languish in our suffering for a little while longer. Let massa pay for our bread and our shelter. We are his burden. Over Jordon we will sing for joy in heaven while our oppressor benefactors burn in the fires of hell.”
Submitting oneself to slavery is the ultimate expression of racism. I would die a free man rather than submit to slavery.
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This is a splitting hairs type of thing to write of me but...those African Americans always had rights -- those rights were granted to us by our Creator, not by government. It's just that government was infringing on those God-given rights that it had no business infringing upon to begin with.
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200502180737.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
“Although African Americans were sometimes able to defend their communities, white militias were more heavily armed and had more military experience. In the 1870s, Democrats regained power through affiliated militia terrorism of black and white Republicans, assassination of community leaders and political activists, and intimidation and restriction of voters at the polls. Even after the Democrats regained power throughout the South, between 1880 and 1951 the Tuskegee Institute recorded lynchings of 3,437 African-American victims, as well as 1,293 white victims. Southern states completed disfranchisement of African Americans about the turn of the century. Their white Democratic representatives comprised such a powerful voting block in Congress that they consistently defeated Federal bills against lynching. “
It is disgusting the Senator Byrd has the position that he has. But Democrats are not ashamed of their ignorance, they revel in it. I suppose they rely on the argument that those “Democrats” became Republicans after the Civil Rights Vote in the 1960s.
If only the DBM would report the facts and blacks would listen, the dims would never win another election. I've sent this type of reports to black friends, and they still vote straight (D) in every election.
So its a wash?
Democrats have almost entirely become the party of Margaret Sanger, the racist eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood, an organization that has carried out Sanger’s evil intentions to exterminate blacks.
Thanks for the ping!
What is a wash?
Thanks for the links.
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