Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (14 page)

Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.”

In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”
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These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

Outraged by Johnson’s words and his veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Republican Congress sought to impeach him. The measure passed the House but fell just short in the Senate—just as a century later there were not enough Senate votes to remove Bill Clinton from office. The GOP was, however, successful in over-riding Johnson’s veto, so that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law over the Democratic president’s objection.

Furious at Republican success in passing constitutional amendments and civil rights legislation for blacks, southern Democrats responded with the infamous Black Codes. These were approved through state legislatures and state constitutional conventions held throughout the South in the years following the war. Only whites participated in these sessions. These codes represented a new Democratic form of enslavement; some historians use the term “neo-slavery.”

Fairly typical is the code Democrats adopted in South Carolina. Blacks were permitted to work only in certain professions, thus granting whites a labor monopoly in the remaining ones. White masters could
whip young black servants. Blacks could not travel freely; if they did, they ran the risk of being declared “vagrants” in which case they could be arrested and imprisoned. Sheriffs could then assign hard labor or hire them out to white employers to work off their sentence. Black children could be apprenticed to white employers against their will.

In addition, blacks could not vote or serve on juries. Their testimony in court was only considered relevant in cases involving other blacks. Many crimes—such as rebellion, arson, and assaulting a white woman—carried the death penalty for blacks, but not for whites. Blacks were not allowed to sell alcohol or carry a firearm. While blacks could now marry, the code made it clear that “marriage between a white person and a person of color shall be null and void.”

THE GOP COUNTERATTACK

Indignant at what they perceived as a southern Democratic attempt to nullify emancipation, Republicans struck down the Black Codes and began the process of Reconstruction. Reconstruction was aimed at rebuilding the South on a new plane of equality of rights between the races. It wasn’t easy, but essentially Congress was attempting to control the internal affairs of southern states where the local Democratic Party mounted stubborn resistance. Even so, it’s remarkable what the Republicans achieved against daunting odds.

The GOP’s first step in this regard was to establish the Freedman’s Bureau. At one point the bureau considered a reparations bill modeled on one of General Sherman’s field directives. Sherman’s Directive 15 provided blacks with forty acres of land to farm on their own, plus a retired army mule. The bureau began to implement its reparations plan, settling blacks on the plantations that had been taken over by Union troops.

Today we hear occasional demands for black reparations, and those demands usually come from progressive Democrats. I find it interesting that these Democrats never suggest that they pay reparations for what their party did. Rather, they point the finger at Republicans, when
Republicans are the ones who historically supported and attempted to enact reparations. In a sense the GOP was trying to compensate blacks for their suffering at the hands of the Democratic Party.

Unable by themselves to thwart the Bureau’s reparations bill, Democrats appealed to President Johnson. Johnson undercut practical efforts at reparations by issuing pardons galore so that former Confederates could recover their property that had been lost during the war. Blacks who had been granted land by Sherman or the Freedman’s Bureau were forced to return it to the former plantation owners.

So the Republican reparations program died an ignominious death. The bureau did, however, open hundreds of schools for blacks. It also provided newly freed blacks with food, health services, and legal protection, and also helped unite the families of former slaves. These measures, although insufficient, showed African Americans that their only political ally in the country was the Republican Party.

The most aggressive move the GOP made under Reconstruction was to appoint military governors throughout the South. These officers had the power to override local authority. Thanks to Republican supervision, more than 1,500 blacks won federal, state, and local offices. A former slave named Blanche K. Bruce became the first black senator from Mississippi to serve a full term. John Langston became the first black congressman from Virginia. Every single one of these blacks was elected as a Republican.

No surprise that these African Americans are ignored in progressive historiography. Rosa Parks is well known to young people simply because she refused to sit in the back of the bus. (Actually this was no spontaneous act. Parks had been put up to it. Her “tired old black woman” story was largely invented to serve the needs of progressive propaganda.)

By contrast, Blanche K. Bruce was the real deal. Born into slavery in Virginia, Bruce was freed by his master and studied at Oberlin College before becoming a successful farmer and landowner. He is the only former slave to have served in the U.S. Senate. His story is vastly more impressive than that of Parks. Progressive historians ignore him because he was not a Democrat.

THE DEMOCRATS AND THE KU KLUX KLAN

The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South.

Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization.

Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause.

Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant.

These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually
helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.

In 1902 a prominent Democratic writer, Thomas Dixon, wrote a vicious anti-black novel
The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden
and followed it up in 1905 with
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
. Dixon’s book was a massive bestseller in the Democratic South. A few years later, Dixon collaborated with another Democrat, the film producer D. W. Griffith, to make
The Birth of a Nation
. This was one of the first full-length motion pictures ever shown in the United States.

Released in 1915,
The Birth of a Nation
caused a sensation with its dramatic scenes of ruthless northerner carpetbaggers looting the poor, honest families of the South as well as lusty black men preying with impunity on southern maidens. In later interviews, Griffith said he modeled the hero of the story on his own father, who is depicted as heroically if unsuccessfully trying to uphold southern gentlemanliness in the face of northern barbarism.

Interestingly enough Abraham Lincoln is portrayed favorably in the film; he is called the Great Heart and the story implies that Reconstruction would have gone better had he remained in office. The villain of Griffith’s story was a northern politician named Austin Stoneman, who was modeled directly on the Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.

The night-riding Klansmen were the film’s heroes, finally taking on the northern malefactors and protecting the honor of the South. The film made no reference to Republicans or Democrats—in a sense, Griffith was the original perpetrator of the progressive myth that party differences were inconsequential and that slavery and segregation were purely a North-South issue.

The Birth of a Nation
was strongly protested by northern Republicans such as Harvard president Charles Eliot and the feminist reformer Jane Addams, but also by Republicans in the South, such as the black educator Booker T. Washington. By contrast, the film was vigorously defended by Democrats across the country, including the former chief
justice of the Supreme Court, Edward White, who was a member of the original Ku Klux Klan.

In the year of the film’s release, the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, arranged a private screening in the Oval Office for his cabinet and other invited guests. After the screening Wilson declared that everything in
The Birth of a Nation
was accurate. In Wilson’s words, “It’s like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The film inspired a Klan revival, spawning Klan chapters not only in the South but also in the Midwest and the West. These Klans featured men in white costumes with titles like Giant, Cyclops, and Grand Dragon, gathering together for vigils and cross-burnings and meetings known as Klonciliums and Klonvocations. Wives too could participate in the Klan’s sister organization, the women’s division of the KKK.

If there seems to be an element of theater in all these Klan rituals—a kind of perpetual Halloween for participants—the reality for blacks was grimmer. The new Klan focused its hate and violence against blacks, killing thousands over the course of twenty-five years.

Between 1920 and 1925, Klan membership ranged between two to five million, making it one the largest fraternal organizations in American history. Its members included the governors of Texas, Indiana, and Oregon, as well as the mayors of several major cities, and innumerable sheriffs, councilmen, and local judges. The Klan is often described as the face of southern racism, but the group wasn’t exclusively southern. Rather, the Klan represented the racist face of the national Democratic Party.

In the fifty-year period starting from the Klan’s founding through the late 1920s and early 1930s, every prominent Klan leader was a Democrat. In fact, Democrats were so prominent in the Klan that the group sometimes held its own primaries to decide which Klansman should receive the Klan endorsement in the upcoming election, and the Klan role was so central to the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York that historians sometimes call it the Klanbake.

The Klan claimed to be devoted to justice, ensuring that blacks who propositioned or raped white women were punished through vigilante action. In reality, scholars of the Klan agree that much of the group’s terrorism was aimed at keeping blacks socially subservient to whites, and also in preventing blacks from voting.

To this end, Klansmen raided black workplaces, burned black homes, terrorized black families in nightly raids, and formed lynch mobs in an ongoing campaign of intimidation and terror. As a consequence of Klan mayhem—together with a series of Democratic measures such as poll taxes and literacy tests—black voting declined precipitously throughout the South.

THE TERRORIST WING

Historians now recognize that the Klan wasn’t going it alone; rather, it was acting on behalf of the Democratic Party. As I argued earlier, the Democrats attracted poor whites by establishing a fixed racial caste system in which every white, no matter how degraded, had a higher social position than every black, no matter how educated or refined. The Klan was the enforcement mechanism of this inflexible racial hierarchy.

The Klan also enforced a widely-echoed Democratic Party mantra, which is that whites refuse to allow themselves to be governed by Negroes. This position required the suppression of the black vote, not because blacks were the majority in most states, but because white Democrats did not want any blacks to have a say in how they were governed.

Today this may seem to us like an expression of mindless racism, but the Democratic Party didn’t see it that way. Democrats realized that the party’s political dominance, mainly in the South but also in areas of the West and Midwest, relied on stopping blacks from voting. Black votes, after all, only undermined the Democrats and helped their opposition. In the half-century following the Civil War, the vast majority of blacks who voted did so for the GOP.