[Updated, 12/28/2007: Welcome, Matthew Yglesias readers (and Matthew Yglesias, who evidently is a Matthew Yglesias reader). Also, if you’re looking here too, welcome Bruce Bartlett. Please, y’all, feel free to look around and comment.]
Possibly if you are not crazy, or ignorant, you know this, but: The Democratic Party was the party first of slavery, and then of white supremacy. You see, the Republican Party was created to oppose the spread of slavery, and the election of Abraham Lincoln — without a single southern state’s support — occasioned the secession ultimately of eleven southern states.
And then beginning in around 1889-90, partly to keep down the Populist, or People’s, Party, Democrats in the South promoted the disfranchisement of African Americans. And racist southerners hewed to the Democratic Party so long as — and only so long as — the Democratic Party remained the party of white supremacy.
The Republicans, unsurprisingly, knew this, and for decades portrayed the Democrats as the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion — because the Democrats were also the party not so keen on temperance, and not so hateful of the Catholic immigrants, as well as the party identified with the secession of the South.
The Democrats couldn’t actually afford to be too much the party of Rum or Romanism. If they were, as when they nominated Al Smith for President in 1928 — they lost southern votes to the Republican Party.
At the same time, they couldn’t take even a baby step away from Rebellion — as they did in 1948, after Harry Truman asked what it would take “To Secure these Rights” — lest they lose southern votes to splitter Dixiecrats.
Then, in the 1960s, under Kennedy and Johnson, the Democratic Party began to repudiate this past, ultimately passing Civil Rights legislation. The splitter segregationist candidate George Wallace sundered the southern Democratic Party and ultimately delivered the white South to the Republican Party. Where it remains, because Republicans have taken over care and feeding of the Confederate heritage.
I only mention this because, for some reason, Bruce Bartlett appears to think this history should make you prefer the modern Republican Party to the modern Democratic Party. I do not understand this reasoning. Let’s concede this story puts the Democratic Party in something of the position of a man who actually has to give a precise answer to the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” Perhaps you would not trust such a man around women. But would you trust him more or less than a man who has decided to start?
Possibly Bartlett is writing for the crazy, or the ignorant. He must be, if he thinks he can describe the modern association between Republicans and neo-Confederates as embracing “a single mention of states’ rights 27 years ago.”
The inexplicably more charitable Brad DeLong writes on the same subject here.
24 comments
December 26, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Ben Alpers
The more interesting question is why the Republicans place such great importance on obscuring this history and claiming the Democrats are (present tense) the real party of racial intolerance.
Do today’s white supremacist voters, unlike their forebears, for some reason need to be told that their opponents are the real racists? Or are items like the Bartlett piece important reminders that the GOP, like most major parties in US history, is a complicated coalition, much less monolithic than its leadership suggests, and that there are important blocs of current Republican voters who need to be able to deny the importance of the “Southern Strategy” to keep voting Republican?
December 26, 2007 at 3:25 pm
eric
Do today’s white supremacist voters, unlike their forebears, for some reason need to be told that their opponents are the real racists?
I think, given the extent to which certain Republicans will go to call their political opponents the real fascists, the answer to this must be “yes.”
December 26, 2007 at 3:39 pm
matt w
Rove’s favorite tactic is to attack candidates on their strengths — to make up accusations that are so outlandish and contrary to fact that they beggar belief. This sort of raw projection is right out of the GOP playbook.
And, I think most of today’s racist voters need to be told that they’re not racists, and today’s less racist voters* need to be told that they’re not really allying themselves with racists when they vote for their tax cuts. So, yes to both of your questions.
*Not trying to be self-righteous here, it’s just that “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” as the puppets say.
December 27, 2007 at 11:45 am
Dean
I don’t think Truman’s Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the armed forces, is fairly regarded as a “baby step.” That order was issued a couple of weeks after the Democratic convention of 1948 and ensured that Strom Thurmond, as the candidate of the Dixiecrats, would be more than just a fringe candidate. 9981 was a major milestone on the road to full civil rights for all. And it meant that the southern Democrats were just biding time in the party, awaiting a better alternative.
December 27, 2007 at 11:48 am
eric
Thanks, Dean, that’s a fair point. I do try to err on the side of conservatism when writing about what presidents and congresses have done, though — if you are an immediatist interested in justice, you won’t particularly take heart from a milestone so far shy of your destination.
December 27, 2007 at 2:44 pm
andrew
Didn’t Lincoln and Douglas argue a bit about who was the real proponent of policies that would lead to miscegenation?*
*I wanted to write “the real miscegenator” but honesty forbade me. Also, I think they used the word “amalgamation.”
December 27, 2007 at 2:49 pm
eric
I’m confident you want that post to go elsewhere, Andrew. But are you thinking of “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife,” and related comments?
December 27, 2007 at 3:02 pm
andrew
I just looked it up: it’s in Lincoln’s speech on Dred Scott. I’m not sure why I would have wanted that post in another thread, although it is a bit tangential to this thread. I was just thinking it was a case where being – or wanting to seem like – the real racist was a desirable position to hold.
December 27, 2007 at 3:06 pm
eric
Oh, I gotcha. I thought you were thinking of the Paulvolution.
December 27, 2007 at 3:07 pm
andrew
“Desirable” from a vote-getting standpoint, that is.
December 27, 2007 at 3:11 pm
andrew
If I used the term “Paulution” I would face the wrath of many commenters, wouldn’t I? So I won’t.
December 27, 2007 at 8:22 pm
eric
No, you should. Because it’s funny, see.
December 27, 2007 at 8:25 pm
ari
Don’t drag poor Andrew into our mess. That’s just not nice.
December 27, 2007 at 8:29 pm
eric
“our mess”? I’m not the one who ungepotchkeyed the nice history blog with Ron Paul posts.
December 27, 2007 at 8:32 pm
ari
Anti-semite.
December 27, 2007 at 8:39 pm
ari
Also: fine, my mess. I couldn’t help myself. Sorry.
December 27, 2007 at 8:41 pm
andrew
You guys have libertarians in the attic. (N.B. I don’t have project muse access any more, but that looks like the review essay I remember reading a few years ago, and which the Pauluted discussions, which I’ve only skimmed, made me think of.)
[This comment probably really is in the wrong thread.]
December 27, 2007 at 8:47 pm
ari
I’m away from home, so I can’t get it either. But I will when I get back and have access to on-line databases.
December 27, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Holiday Bowl Blogging « blueollie
[…] An article about the Democratic Party and its “evolution” from racist/populist to being pro civil rights. […]
December 28, 2007 at 5:27 pm
edmund
the facti s more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights act than Democrats-(this was even more disproportiatly true for the Voting Rights acts) and prevous similar acts had been backed by the Eisenhower administrioan but stopped by Democrats including LBJ.
As for the George Wallace claim – areas where Wallace did well where actually less likely to move to the republicans than strong NIxon or by and large even strong Humphrey areas see
http://www.amazon.com/End-Southern-Exceptionalism-Partisan-Postwar/dp/0674019342/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198891406&sr=1-
some of their arugns which are strongest on the idea the GOP didn’t rise due to race are found here
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=6CvvMjI2Hc0C&dq=johnston+and+shafer&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=-219DdEIFF&sig=tQOWGkPpcyT5jSrjxlL8EGTVWGY#PPR8,M1
NOte also that’s it only when southern racial unity ojn race issues started crackign -the 40’s and post when they started being things like desgregating swiming polls, anti-lyniching laws enforced and the abolition of poll taxes that the swing to the Republicnas started. when the soth was most racist it was when it was the heart of the support of Bryan, Wilson and Roosevelt
December 28, 2007 at 6:14 pm
eric
Thanks, Edmund. I’ve read the Shafer and Johnston with care, and I like the book a good deal; the argument is not of course that racism doesn’t matter, but that increasing wealth in the South matters a lot, possibly a lot more, than racism.
But note that Shafer and Johnston show a strong correlation between party identification and racial attitudes. Which means Lassiter’s point is well taken: there’s a different kind of racism to be found among suburban voters, but it’s still racism.
Finally, I would give politicians like Bush, Reagan, and Goldwater the benefit of the doubt: these are not bad politicians, they’re men who know what their audience needed to hear, and they said it.
December 29, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Dabney Braggart
To paraphrase Al Gore, “You fools! You foolish fools!”. What is the relevance of this supposed “racism” you keep on paying so much attention to? Nothing in American politics has ever been about race. All supposed efforts to improve the lot of property and their descendents are actually just poor covers for the real _goal_: increasing the power of the Evil Gummint.
That’s as true today as back when the cowardly Potomacans marched to war screaming “Increase our tariffs to oppress the South!” and “Never let the Scotch-Irish fulfill their God-given Destiny!”
March 26, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Richard Mellon Scaife: As Bad as the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Or the Fugitive Slave Act? « The Edge of the American West
[…] took more than three-quarters of a century before the Democratic Party began regaining, in fits and starts, its moral standing on the issue of […]
July 17, 2008 at 6:47 am
At least there’s an answer to “when did you stop.” « The Edge of the American West
[…] have dealt with this issue directly before, and indirectly […]