Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (13 page)

How did they do this? The great postbellum invention of the Democratic Party was the institution of white supremacy. After the war, writes historian George Fredrickson, “The one thing that held the Democratic Party together was a commitment to maintaining white supremacy.”
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White supremacy is an elaborate ideological structure for justifying racism, in the same way that the “positive good” school was an elaborate ideological justification for slavery.

Now I am obviously not suggesting that the Democrats invented racism, any more than I am suggesting that they invented slavery. Obviously slavery existed for a long time before the Democrats made their “positive good” arguments in favor of it. Similarly racism existed long before the Democrats developed the comprehensive ideology of white supremacy.

The purpose of an ideology is to reinforce a practice by defending and systematizing it. The “positive good” defense strengthened slavery by giving it an ideological foundation, and white supremacy did the same for racism. In fact, the supremacist ideology did more for racism than the “positive good” ideology did for slavery. “Positive good” arguments, after all, didn’t create the plantation system. That system already existed, and the “positive good” school was simply a southern Democratic rationalization for it.

By contrast, white supremacy created a whole new set of laws and practices that became the institutional embodiment of racism: the Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregation, and a network of terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Together these institutions created what historians bluntly refer to as the “re-enslavement” of blacks.

The term “enslavement” is an important one that will recur in this book. As I said in the last chapter, enslavement isn’t slavery—it is a
transmission belt for moving people in the direction of slavery. Enslaved people are not property but they are in captivity.

By historical analogy, serfs were not slaves because they weren’t literally owned by their masters. On the other hand serfs were so captive to their masters in every aspect of their lives that we can fairly describe serfdom as a kind of enslavement. Having previously specialized in slavery, the Democratic Party soon specialized in enslavement—a strategy the party employs to the present day.

The institutions of black enslavement and white supremacy did not exist before Democrats in the South created them. The very same institutions then became the mechanisms that Democrats used to build their power, and also to repel and defeat attempts by Republicans to extend rights and opportunities to black Americans.

A NEW RACKET

After slavery, the Democrats needed something new in order to continue their tradition of theft, oppression, and power-seeking. They found a replacement for slavery in the form of white supremacy. Once Democrats were no longer allowed to buy and sell people and force them to work for free, racism and white supremacy became the preferred mechanism for Democrats to exploit black people, recruit new supporters, and secure the party’s power and control in the South.

But how? How did racism and white supremacy consolidate the Democrats as the ruling party of the region for nearly a century, from the 1860s through the 1960s? White supremacy may be a racket, like slavery, but we all know how slavery pays—it pays in the form of getting other people to work for you for free. How does white supremacy pay? What do the people who support it get out of it?

Let’s consider the situation facing the poor white man in the South. What does this guy stand to gain from segregation—from forcing blacks to drink from separate water fountains or to use separate restrooms? What would make a man who would seem to derive no economic
benefit from it nevertheless join that institution of Democratic terror, the Ku Klux Klan? To put it bluntly, what’s in it for him?

We can resolve this conundrum by answering a similar question that historians have raised about the Civil War. Why did poor whites, the vast majority of whom didn’t own slaves, fight on the Confederate side? Of course we know why the slave owners fought—to protect the value of their “property.” But how did they convince the non-slaveholding whites to join them? Seemingly these poor whites had nothing to gain by extending the life of the “peculiar institution.” What, then, were they fighting for?

A clue to this question is provided in an address delivered in 1860 by South Carolina planter John Townsend. Speaking on behalf of secession to a group called the 1860 Association, Townsend directly addressed the issue of how the southern plantation system benefited whites who didn’t own slaves.

        
The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations to the Negro. Although Cuffy or Sambo may be immensely his superior in wealth, may have his thousands deposited in the bank, as some of them have, and may be the owner of many slaves, as some of them are, yet the poorest non-slaveholder, being a white man, is his superior in the eyes of the law, may serve and command in the militia, may sit upon juries, to decide upon the rights of the wealthiest in the land, may gave his testimony in court, and may cast his vote, equally with the largest slaveholder, in the choice of his rulers.

              
In no other country in the world does the poor white man occupy so enviable a position as in the slaveholding states of the South. In countries where Negro slavery does not exist, as in the Northern states of this union and in Europe, the most menial and degrading employments in society are filled by the white poor, who are hourly seen drudging in them. Poverty, then, in those countries, becomes the badge of
inferiority, and wealth, of distinction. Hence the arrogant airs which wealth there puts on, in its intercourse with the poor man.

              
But in the Southern slaveholding states, where these menial and degrading offices are turned over to be performed exclusively by the Negro slave, the status and color of the black race becomes the badge of inferiority, and the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. The poorest non-slaveholder thinks and feels and acts as if he was, and always intended to be, superior to the Negro.
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A RACIAL CASTE SYSTEM

Here we see beautifully enumerated the social and psychological benefits that poor whites derived from white supremacy. White supremacy created a racial caste system in which the poorest, meanest, and stupidest white guy belonged to an aristocracy of color that elevated him above the most intelligent, decent, and productive black man.

George Orwell saw the same phenomenon in Burma (now Myanmar) when he served as a colonial officer there. Relaxing at the whites-only club, Orwell saw arrogant British twenty-somethings ordering and kicking around dignified Asian Indian servants in their fifties and sixties.

I remember hearing similar accounts from my grandfather, who suffered the indignity of hearing white-skinned youths call him “coolie” and “boy.” My grandfather was a mechanical engineer in his forties. As a consequence of his humiliating experiences at the hands of uncouth Britishers, he became embittered for life against white people.

These uncouth Britishers, Orwell knew, were losers in their own country. They were at the bottom of the British caste system. In fact, they had been dispatched to India and Burma largely to get rid of them. In India and Burma, however, they found that their social level had been raised.

As a consequence of the colonialist distinction between the ruling class and the ruled, the low men on the British totem pole became the
high men on the Indian and Burmese totem pole. Suddenly their whiteness made them members of an elite and privileged caste. They could now have fun kicking other people around.

Yet—and this is the most amazing part—Orwell noticed that these very same abusive jerks would sound off to each other about how they were in India for the benefit of the Indians. Orwell termed this “the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them.” Orwell concluded that, “We Anglos could be almost bearable if we’d only admit we’re thieves and go on thieving without any humbug.”

Even as an Englishman, Orwell was appalled at the condescending hypocrisy he witnessed at the colonial club. Yet he understood it. The young Englishmen were enjoying the twisted pleasures of aristocracy. They took pleasure in demeaning and lording it over the brown people below them—even while pretending to be magnanimous toward them—because in this way they confirmed and ratified their superiority.
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Precisely the same benefit that the British government offered to its white expatriates, the Democratic Party in the United States offered to its poor white supporters. From the 1870s through the 1960s, the Democrats established their political hegemony in the South by granting whites the full social and psychological enjoyments of white supremacy.

Blacks paid a costly price for this, because the Democrats unleashed a fury of violence against them. In fact, had the Democrats been the only political party in America, it’s hard to image what would have become of the black population of the South. Blacks, however, had during most of this difficult period a single ally. That ally was the Republican Party.

For nearly a century following the Civil War, the Republican Party made valiant efforts, often against near-impossible odds, to protect blacks from the Democratic onslaught and to secure their basic rights. At times these measures worked; at other times, they proved far too feeble to control the vicious racists in the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, in the long run the GOP succeeded. Just as the Founders’ constitutional principles eventually supplied the necessary foundation for America to realize the principle that “all men are created equal,” so too the GOP-sponsored amendments of the 1860s supplied the
indispensable basis for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s to overcome white supremacy and actually exercise their rights. Blacks today owe their basic rights of liberty, equality, and justice to the GOP—rights that Democrats withheld from them for almost a century.

THE ORIGINAL CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION

Let’s begin by examining the first civil rights revolution in America—the civil rights revolution of the 1860s. This was a Republican revolution, which is why progressive Democrats ignore it and pretend that the later revolution of the 1950s and 1960s is the only one. Yet of the two civil rights revolutions, the first—the ignored one—is actually more important.

To see why, consider the meaning of the term “civil rights.” What is a “civil right” and why are civil rights important? Civil rights are actually distinguished from natural rights. Imagine if you and I lived in the jungle, removed from society. Philosophers call this the “state of nature.” In the state of nature, we would have natural rights: the right to defend ourselves, or the right to pick fruit from trees and eat it. These are rights that we have by virtue of being human.

Civil rights, by contrast, are rights that we derive from society. They arise out of a social compact whose legitimacy derives from the consent of the people. While blacks were slaves, they had no civil rights. Even when they were emancipated, this merely returned them to freedom, to the state of nature. Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society.

The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865.

Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of
Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue.

In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the
Dred Scott
decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it.

Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.”

It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice.

When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation.

Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a
Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”
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Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession.