The recurring history of segregationist subversion in the US

Heather Cox Richardson in her Facebook post of July 2 refers to the unfortunately successful to disenfranchise African-American voters which set the foundation for 90 years of "legal" racial voter suppression and segregation after the series of events she describes:

The association of sitting Congress members with someone who was apparently part of an insurrection is particularly audacious at a moment when the House of Representatives is in the process of forming a select committee to investigate that series of events.

Once before, in 1879, a political party behaved in a similarly aggressive way, trying to destroy the government from within. Then, too, Congress members took an extremist position in order to try to steal the upcoming presidential election. They hoped to win that election by getting rid of Black voting.

In that case, it was the Democratic Party that was leading the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments in the South.

There's is a widely-accepted conventional date for  when Reconstruction was successfully overthrown. The editors of History.com date the end in 1877. "The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election and marked the end of the Reconstruction era." (Compromise of 1877 1172772019)

But James Oakes (In response to: An Unfinished Revolution from the December 5, 2019 issue New York Review of Books 03/12/2020 issue) write about:

... a concern I’ve long felt about the conventional use of 1877 as the year Reconstruction ended; 1875, the year Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, strikes me as a better date for the effective end of federal Reconstruction policy. But in the Southern states, Reconstruction in many ways continued as long as blacks could vote and hold office, which is why another reasonable date for the end of Reconstruction might be 1890, when the Mississippi Plan inaugurated the sweeping policy of disfranchisement that eventually engulfed most of the South. With good reason William Archibald Dunning [founder of the neo-Confederate "Dunning School" of history] described disfranchisement as “the undoing of Reconstruction.” Either date — 1875 or 1890 — would probably be better than 1877, when ... not much of anything actually happened. (my emphasis)

Eric Foner also alludes to the lack of any one clear moment that definitively marked the end of Reconstruction (Historian Eric Foner On The 'Unresolved Legacy Of Reconstruction' NPR 06/05/202):

Reconstruction is usually dated as 1865, when the Civil War ends, to 1877, when the last federal troops are removed from the South or, strictly speaking, from political participation in the South. But actually, in my book and other writings, we now really begin Reconstruction during the Civil War because efforts to remake Southern society really begin even when the Union army occupies parts of the South during the Civil War. So it begins somewhere in the early 1860s. And then it doesn't just end in 1877. It goes - in some places, these rights that blacks had achieved, are still enjoyed into the 1890s. (my emphasis)

But none of this should divert anyone's attention to the central role that voter suppression played in establishing the segregation system that succeeded Reconstruction. At least the intellectual architects of the Republican's neo-segregation efforts currently underway in various Republican-run states, Congress, and, of course, the Supreme Court. In an article that accepts the conventional dating of 1876-7 for the end of Reconstruction ("America's Second Sin" Time 04/15/2019), Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes:

In addition to their moves to strip African Americans of their voting rights, “Redeemer” [anti-democracy white supremacist] governments across the South slashed government investments in infrastructure and social programs across the board, including those for the region’s first state-funded public-school systems, a product of Reconstruction. In doing so, they re-empowered a private sphere dominated by the white planter class. A new wave of state constitutional conventions followed, starting with Mississippi in 1890. These effectively undermined the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the right of black men to vote, in each of the former Confederate states by 1908. (my emphasis)

Prime Minister Joe Manchin goes full segregationist

Prime Minister Joe Manchin declared in a new published op-ed that he supports segregation and opposes democracy: Why I'm voting against the For the People Act Charleston [WV] Gazette-Mail 06/06/2021. The For The People Act, also known as H.R.1, is the main piece of legislation passed by the House and now pending in the Senate, which would give the federal government the authorization to reverse many of the segregationist voter-suppression laws Republicans are continuing to pass across the country.

His "argument" is that the Republican are passing blatantly partisan voter-suppression laws, so any federal law to prevent that should also be supported by the Republicans whose party is so completely committed to voter suppression. No, it's not an actual argument. It doesn't even rise to the level of gaslighting. It just means that PM Manchin supports the Republicans' segregationist voter-suppression laws.

And, to re-emphasize his commitment to the Democratic Party of Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett, he writes, "I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster."

That also means that his claim that he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a bill designed to remove the objections that the Supreme Court used to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is effectively meaningless. Unless the filibuster is adjusted or abolish, the Senate Republicans will just kill it with the filibuster.

A nominal Democrat, PM Manchin is all on board with the Republican program to "Orbanize" the US by extreme gerrymandering like that in Viktor Orbán's Hungary to insure the Republicans always win a majority of seats even when Democrats win a majority of votes, by suppressing African-American and Latino votes and restricting voter access for poor whites, and by setting aside the rule of law, at least when it comes to members of the Republican Party or the oligarchs who support them.

I'm going to start using the word "segregation" a lot more for our current political situation. The core of Southern segregation was the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in defiance of the 13th and 14 Amendments to the Constitution.

The segregated schools and the endless number of official restrictions designed to restrict and demean black citizens are probably what comes to mind for most people when the word "segrgation" is mentioned. But the foundation, the core of the segregation system was the suppression of the rights of African-American voters. It was dominant in the South for at least 80 years, depending on what post 1875 date your pick as the end of Reconstruction.

Reuters reports on the latest from PM Orbán-Manchin, Manchin to oppose voting rights bill pushed by Democrats 06/07/2021:

TYT's Cenk Uygur expressed his disgust at PM Orbán-Manchin on Twitter:

Joe Biden’s first term is now over with Manchin saying he’s against both filibuster reform & For the People Act. Biden doesn’t have the inclination to fight back. They’ll get almost nothing done from now on. Manchin just handed Congress back to @GOP. He’s worse than a Republican.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) June 6, 2021

Here is Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison responding to PM Orbán-Manchin's latest reaffirmation of his support of segregation and his hostility to democracy, DNC Chair With Direct Response to Sen. Joe Manchin Bill Decision 06/6/2021:

Woodrow Wilson, segregation, and naming Army bases for Confederate generals

Michel Paradis gives us a sketch of Woodrow Wilson as segregationist and promotor of Lost Cause idolatry in The Lost Cause’s Long Legacy: Why does the U.S. Army name its bases after generals it defeated? The Atlantic 06/26/2020:

As president, Wilson imposed Jim Crow–style segregation on the federal civil service and the Navy, which had been integrated for the previous century, and when he hosted the first-ever screening of a feature film in the White House, the honor went to The Birth of a Nation. An adaptation of the Thomas Dixon Jr. novel The Clansman, the film brought the myth of the Lost Cause to the silver screen in a racist paean to the defeat of Reconstruction through the terrorist violence of the KKK.

Woodrow Wilson, looking very white and a bit Dracula-ish

This is one of several reasons that I generally find Woodrow Wilson an unsympathetic character. He did pass reforms to limit abuses by corporations. And his ideas on international law were tremendously influential in shaping the United Nations and today's international structure. Anticolonial leaders like Gandhi and many more were inspired by his ideas on national independence, even though he had little interest in seeing them applied outside of Europe.

But he was also a rigid moralist, which badly distorted his view of other countries. And his morality obviously did not include a meaningful notion of racial equality. He's remembered as kind of a tragic hero because the Versailles Treaty with his Fourteen Points idea was rejected by the Senate and he suffered a crippling stroke while campaigning for it. But the truth is that Versailles, and the other treaties at the end of World War I, were a mess, and did a lot to bring on World War II. Hungary to this day still has (far-fetched) notions of taking parts of Slovakia, Rumania, and Serbia that they lost then. Part of the problem was that Wilson fell seriously ill with the Spanish flu when he was in Paris for the peace conference and never got his normal focus on the negotiations back. Pandemics cause all kinds of problems.

The article focuses on how Wilson used Confederate symbolism to recruit Southern men to the US Army for the First World War:

The peculiarity of naming Army bases after Confederate generals did not go unnoticed at the time. A pointed op-ed in e Cleveland Gazette lamented, “Since 1861 to 1865, the South has won back all that it lost in that memorable struggle except its slaves.” And e Boston Globe reported the announcement of the new bases with a raised eyebrow: “In the list of names announced tonight, Lee, Gordon, Beauregard, and Wheeler take their places beside Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade and more than a score of others who fought for the Union.”

The Lost Cause had won. Fort Bragg and Fort Benning were established the following year. Then, in the mobilization for the Second World War, new Army bases built in the states of the former Confederacy were christened with the names of Confederate generals — including Fort A. P. Hill, Fort Hood, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk, and Fort Rucker.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: the later heritage of John Calhoun

In his biography John C. Calhoun (1966), Richard Current talked about the later 20th century manifestation of "the genuine ghost of the Great Nullifier." He talks about attempts to rehabilitate Calhoun's theory of government as some kind of deep insight into the American political system. But Calhoun's theory of government was basically an elaborate justification for preserving slavery, framed as a way to protect minority interests within the American system. But the only minority interest he really cared about was that of slaveowners.

Some conservatives tried to spin Calhoun's theory as being relevant to various other minority interests in the compromises that various factions and interests group make in American politics. But, Current explains, "the new interpreters of Calhoun have been careless in their reading of his philosophy and superficial in their description of current politics."

On the whole, he seems to have taken a dualist, not a pluralist, view of politics. Though he mentioned the existence of various interests in society, he made no attempt to list and describe them, and certainly he never specified racial or religious minorities, or the working class, as deserving of the veto power. Generally he ignored the variety of possible groupings. When he got down to theorizing, he really thought about only two groups at a time, not several. On occasion he dealt with the duality of capital and labor. Most often he had in mind the twofold grouping of North against South, free states against slave states. These were, to him, the majority and the minority, and this was the minority he sought to protect-the minority of slaveholders. [my emphasis]

The real successors of Calhoun were the segregationist groups involved in their "massive resistance" campaigns against legal and political pressure for racial integration:

Wherever a White Citizens' Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face a problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institutions based upon a belief in human inequality. [my emphasis]

In 2020, Calhoun's heritage can be seen especially in the voter-suppression campaign against blacks, Latinos, and poor whites that have been a key part of the national Republican Party's electoral strategy for the last two decades. The Democratic Party hasn't given up all its own Calhounian legacy, as illustrated by the Yellow Peril campaign ads the Joe Biden campaign released over the last week.

But the party of Lincoln the Great Emancipator has become the devoted party of Calhoun the Great Nullifier.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 14: The American white surpemacist world view in 1945 (Nazi comparisons included)

Stetson Kennedy was "a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, 'I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan'." (William Grimes, Stetson Kennedy, Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94 New York Times 08/30/2011)

Kennedy also has an unusual distinction of Woody Guthrie having written a song praising him and his work, interpreted here by Billy Bragg (Stetson Kennedy 06/08/2015):

Grimes cites a verse not included in the Billy Bragg version here:

Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:

Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;

Walks and talks across our land;

Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.

For every fiery cross and note;

I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.

One of Kennedy's books was Southern Exposure (1946) about Southern politics of the era. This was published the year after the Second World War, in which official US war aims and war propaganda stressed the superiority of American democracy and equality over the kind of dictatorship and racism represented by the Nazis.

He included this table illustrated the results of a poll done by Negro Digest in 1945 on the question of "Are all men reated equal?" He notes that the respondents included a 10:1 ratio of white respondents.



He calls attention to the dramatic "extent to which presjudice obtains throughout the nation." But he also stresses the other obvious result of this poll. "The fact that 61 per cent of the Southern respondents agreed that all men are created equal, and then only 4 per cent would admit that Negroes are equal to whites, is just one indication of the insanity produced by the Myth of the Master Race."

No doubt a point well taken! But I also can never resist thinking about alternative poll interpretations. In this case, if the Southern respondents were 10:1 white, i.e., 9% non-white and mostly African-American in the South, that means that something like half of the Southern black respondents declined to say that blacks were equal to whites. Which calls attention to the questions themselves. The first question "Are all men reated equal?" uses the wording of the US Declaration of Independence, which most Americans in the last year of the Second World War would have been inclined to reflexively affirm.

On the other hand, the percentages who affirm even that phrase with its patriotic and all-American connotations was 82% in the West, 79% in the North, and 61% in the South. So a fifth or more of the respondents nationwide were unwilling to endorse even a throwaway patriotic truism like that. And in the South, over a third of them.

But the second question isn't structured in a parallel way, i.e., it doesn't ask, "Are Negroes created equal to whites?" Insted, it asks a more factual question without the patriotic aura of the Declaration, "Are Negroes equal to whites?" The 92% Southern response of "No" was factually accurate! And about a two-thirds majority in the North and West answered the same way.

But Kennedy is right in calling attention to the disparity between the professed American and democratic ideal of equality and the perceived reality as shown in the polling results.

This is significant in light of what I called attention to in yesterday's "heritage" post, Kenneth Stampp's stressing the importance of the 14th and 15th Amendments as both law and official ideals, even when their effect was widely nullified under segregation and Jim Crow.

Kennedy goes on in the same chapter to challenge the American reality with the American ideals, specifically with the professed American values of the Second World War. James Whitman has a recent book called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). But Kennedy was also writing in 1946:

It has been generally supposed that Nazi Germany sank lower than any other nation in giving official sanction to the Myth of the Master Race, but in reality the myth enjoys its greatest legal status in the United States of America. While the Nazis adopted all manner of legal restrictions against the economic, political, and civil rights of Jews (more or less rigorous than the South's restrictions on Negroes), they did not go so far as to prohibit intermarriage between Nordic Germans and Jews. On the other hand, thirty states of the United States (including all Southern states) have statutes which provide that "All marriages between white persons and persons of Negro descent are forever prohibited and shall be void always." As an added precaution, Arkansas proceeds to state that concubinage between whites and Negroes is likewise verboten. Florida, displaying a nice regard for the double standard, provides a $1,000 fine and three months' imprisonment for any white woman who has sexual intercourse with a Negro man, but makes no reference to such relations between white men and Negro women. [my emphasis]

Which reminds me, the general equality question in the poll cited above used the generic Declaration language about all men being created equal. It would be interesting to know how the respondents would have answered a question about gender equality in that poll.

He continues with the German comparisons:

In defining racial purity many American states also go further than did the Nazis. The infamous Nazi Laws of Niirnberg permitted cultural and spiritual "Nordification" of Germans with one Jewish grandparent, but the only hope for a child born of an Aryan German mother and a Jewish father was for the mother to formally swear that the child was not the issue of her Jewish husband, but of an adulterous liaison with an Aryan. The Nazi Civil Service Law of 1933 prescribed that no German could be considered a bona fide Aryan if he had more than one eighth Jewish blood (more than one Jewish great-grandparent).

But the Laws of Nürnberg had nothing on the laws of some American states. Long before the Nazis adopted the same formula in defiance of all the laws of biology, South Carolina and Maryland defined colored persons as "Any person possessing one eighth or more Negro blood." However, South Carolina went on to provide that children of mixed parentage having less than one eighth Negro blood are entitled to the rights of whites; but if full-blooded whites object to their attending white schools, the state is obligated to provide them separate schools, neither white nor colored.

Florida imposes the Jim Crow line against all persons having as much as one sixteenth Negro blood. Arkansas and Virginia have preferred to vest discretionary power in the duly delegated (white ) officials via the definition: "Any person having any ascertainable Negro blood." In Texas and Tennessee, Negro blood does not have to be either ascertainable or in any specific proportion, as the laws read: "Any person of mixed blood descended from a Negro." Georgia - all-out for white supremacy - includes among "colored persons": "Any person having Negro, West Indian, Asiatic, or Indian blood, and all descendants." [my emphasis]

Those citations are also reminders of how race in America - and everywhere else - is very much a social construction.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 9: The long shadow of John Calhoun's white supremacist ideology

This is the second of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. I originally posted this April 20, 2011, as part of that year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, which gave particular attention to the group of pro-segregation writers who were known as the Southern Agrarians, aka, the Nashville Agrarians. (This is a somewhat modified version of the original post.)

In the first post of those three posts (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 19: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (1) 04/19/2011), I talked about the contemporary concerns Owsley's piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to commit "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In this post, I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)

The first crusade in Owsley's historical trilogy of grievances inflicted on the white South by the damnyankees was abolition. Owsley's Lost Cause perspective dictated that he had to deny that slavery was in any way really the cause of the Civil War. As usual, such claims don't bear up under close scrutiny. Owsley's twist is to argue there was a basic competition between the industrialists of the North and the beautiful agrarian society of the South. The fact that one was based on free labor and the other on chattel slavery is somehow supposed to be incidental in this particular Lost Cause twist. But in Owsley's construction, the anti-slavery movement in the North was a sinister plan by the evil Yankee industrialists against the white South:

In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.

The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it.

For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South. Owsley, typical of Lost Cause partisans, echoed the slaveowners' pre-Civil War accusations against the damnyankees. Given the ideology of racial superiority that became stronger and stronger over time in the slave South, the reality of slaveowners fathering their own children with their slaves was a particular embarrassment to the owners of human property. Owsley takes up their cause retrospectively by pointing to Yankee hypocrisy:

... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation. Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.

He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War. Since, as we saw in the last post, Owsley was especially worried about alleged Communist influence over civil rights agitation in 1933, it's appropriate here to quote an observation by Communist Party leader William Foster from his 1954 book The Negro People in American History (1954):

The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:

There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.

That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.

What Calhoun hoped for was an enduring alliance which would include working class Northern voters and Southern slaveholders. And in the service of that goal, Calhoun elaborated a nominally pro-labor viewpoint which, not coincidentally, also served as an indictment of the Northern system of free labor that increasingly competed directly against the slavery-based Southern agricultural economy. Current writes:

"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."

And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.

For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.

It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).

Calhoun's condemnation of the evils of industrial capitalism was entirely cynical politics and reactionary political theory. Which is not to say he wasn't correct in some of the things he had to say on the subject.

But the Lost Cause ideology expounded by Owsley in this essay is a direct descendant of Calhoun's pro-slavery positions. What may sound in isolation like perceptive criticism of the evils of the American form of capitalism circa 1933 - the failings of which were painfully evident in the early years of the Great Depression - are embedded in a defense of a Southern Agrarian ideal, which was really a dystopian vision meant to defend the existing system in the South: segregation, sharecropping, thoroughly corrupt politics that were democratic more in form than content, poverty and hopelessness for the majority of the rural population white and black. Owlsey was taking his stand on the grounds John Calhoun and other defenders of slavery had lain out years before the Civil War.