Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (12 page)

Democrats despised abolitionists like Sumner and John Brown, but most of all they hated the Republican Party. That’s because the Republican Party, unlike the abolitionists, was actually capable of winning a national election and preventing slavery from going into the new territories. Many Democrats feared that if slavery were not permitted to expand, it would inevitably decline. The relative power of free states would continually increase, and slavery’s tenure would soon be over. This fear is why the slave states seceded, thus precipitating the Civil War.

The firmness of Lincoln and the Republicans, from the time of Lincoln’s election through the conduct of the war, should be an example for Republicans today. Lincoln could probably have prevented the war by compromising his position that slavery could continue in the South but would be barred from extending into the new territories. Several such compromises—including the so-called Crittenden Compromise—were advanced to avert the danger of secession and war.

The Crittenden Compromise guaranteed the permanent existence of slavery in all states and territories demarcated by the Missouri Compromise line. It also affirmed popular sovereignty as the mechanism by
which new territories could become slave states or free states. Historians recognize that perhaps the only way to avert the Civil War in that late stage was for Lincoln to embrace the Crittenden Compromise or something akin to it.

Yet Lincoln refused to do this, and in this sense he refused to do the one thing that could have avoided the war. Lincoln would not bend even one iota on his position—he refused to concede any ground to the Democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty. Lincoln argued that for him to do so would be to negate the very result of the 1860 election.

In effect, Lincoln would be allowing the very people who lost the election to win it simply by making their demands the necessary condition for them staying in the union. Lincoln would be selling out the American people in order to appease disgruntled Democrats. This he would not do.

In 1863, Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederacy. Solid Republican majorities in the House and the Senate supported this proclamation. The Copperheads or Peace Democrats opposed it, making it clear they favored maintaining the union but not freeing the slaves. The slogan of the Copperhead Democrats was, “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is.” In other words, let’s keep the union and let’s also keep slavery.

Today’s progressives blast Lincoln and the Republicans for the limited scope of the Emancipation Proclamation, sarcastically noting it freed slaves not under union control, while at least for the present keeping in captivity slaves who were. Once again, Lincoln’s actions can be understood as preserving union power. For Lincoln to have freed slaves in the border states would have risked further secession or at least widespread political division. Lincoln’s challenge was to keep the union forces together so that the war could be prosecuted to a successful conclusion. Winning the war was the sine qua non of permanently abolishing slavery.

Throughout the war, Lincoln’s Democratic opponents in the North—the Copperheads or Peace Democrats—sought to undermine him and the Republicans. The Copperheads sought to weaken Lincoln so that he could not be reelected. They called him a “nigger in principle” and urged
Americans to defeat his “negroism.”
²²
This was the vocabulary in which the Democratic campaign of 1864 was conducted.

FIRE IN THE REAR

Lincoln recognized the threat from the Copperheads. He called these Peace Democrats the “fire in the rear” and he regarded them as just as dangerous as the armies of the Confederacy. If Lincoln had been defeated, the Copperheads would undoubtedly have sought to reconcile with the Confederacy, largely on Confederate terms. Lincoln’s reelection sealed the fate of the Peace Democrats, and also the fate of slavery.

But even after the surrender of the Confederacy—a surrender that presaged the final destruction of slavery—there were Democrats who refused to accept the outcome. One of them, John Wilkes Booth, decided to take action. Booth was a Confederate sympathizer from Maryland. Earlier Booth had joined a volunteer militia of Democrats in attendance at the hanging of abolitionist John Brown. Booth and the Democrats came armed to prevent abolitionists from rescuing Brown from the gallows.

Two days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln gave a speech at the White House in which he suggested that some blacks should get the vote. That did it for Booth, who gathered a group of likeminded Democrats who resolved to assassinate not only President Lincoln but also the vice president and the secretary of state. This was nothing short of an attempted coup.

The coup failed. Booth did kill Lincoln, who became the first president in American history to be assassinated. But the co-conspirators did not kill Vice President Johnson or Secretary of State Seward—although Seward was gravely injured. There was a national backlash against the conspirators. Booth was killed in a shootout with the authorities, and eight co-conspirators were tried and four were hanged.

Thus the last effort of Democrats to save the institution of slavery ended in ignominy. But the Democrats were not finished. They were down but not out. Soon, as we will see in the next chapter, the Democrats
moved on to a new nefarious scheme of oppression and theft, one that was almost as despicable as slavery.

CHAPTER 4

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION FOREVER

HOW DEMOCRATS USED LAWS—AND LAWLESSNESS—TO KEEP BLACKS IN THEIR PLACE

This is a white man’s country—let the white man rule
.

—Official Democratic Party slogan, 1868 presidential campaign

I
n 1969, twenty-one-year-old Hillary Rodham was selected to give the commencement address on behalf of graduating seniors at Wellesley College. Hillary came prepared with an address that included the familiar 1960s cocktail of left-wing idealism and pure blather. None of it is worth our attention. Here I want to focus on what Hillary said impromptu, once she had heard the speaker who preceded her.

The speaker was Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts and the first black senator to be popularly elected in American history. Brooke was a political moderate, as suggested by the title of his autobiography,
Bridging the Divide
. He had been chosen to receive an honorary degree by Wellesley that year.

Upon receiving the award, Brooke spoke briefly, expressing his empathy with the idealism of young people on issues such as the Vietnam War and civil rights. At the same time, Brooke cautioned them that they should stay within the law and not engage in “coercive protest” because that would risk alienating people otherwise sympathetic to their cause.

Brooke’s unobjectionable remarks stirred Hillary into high dudgeon and she ascended the podium. Attempting to speak for her generation, Hillary said, “We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.”

Responding directly to Brooke, she added, “Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything.” Hillary went on to say, “We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy.” Hillary didn’t say it but her implication was clear: we’ve heard enough from you, old black man!

Hillary added that her generation had been asked to wait for too long, and now it was feeling used. “We feel that too long our leaders have said politics is the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice making what appears to be impossible, possible.” Hillary didn’t say whether Brooke was a false friend using young people, or whether he was, as a supporter of Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam, himself a case of a black man being used. The audience could draw its own conclusions about that.

Hillary concluded her address by reading a poem that referred to “the hollow men of anger and bitterness” who must be left behind. Senator Brooke took offense to that, recognizing it as a reference to him. Hillary’s point didn’t escape anyone in the audience. She and like-minded young people were ready and willing to take over the country from the likes of Senator Brooke.

Hillary’s speech was met with a thunderous ovation by her fellow students, and her professors enthusiastically joined in. The
Boston Globe
reported the next day that Hillary had upstaged Brooke. Hillary was profiled that year in a
Life
magazine feature, “The Class of ’69,” that highlighted student speakers across the country. Clearly the young star had struck a chord, and her career was on its way.

Even today, young leftists claim to draw inspiration from what Hillary said more than thirty-five years ago. And Hillary herself has never repudiated her remarks; on the contrary, returning to Wellesley during her husband’s presidency, Hillary said that her original commencement
speech “reflected the hopes, values and aspirations of my classmates.” Then she confessed, “It is uncanny to me the degree to which those same hopes, values and aspirations have shaped my adulthood.”
¹

LETTING THE BLACK MAN HAVE IT

Ponder the extraordinary spectacle that young Hillary created at her graduation address. Here was a white girl, scarcely in her twenties, delivering a public scolding and tongue-lashing to a highly accomplished fifty-year-old black man. Hillary lectured him with a tone of evident contempt and from a position of presumed superiority. Yet Hillary had no accomplishments that could compare with Brooke’s; her superiority was clearly not based on anything that she had done. Where, then, did it come from?

It came from history. Hillary placed herself squarely on the “right side” of history and, by implication if not outright assertion, placed Senator Brooke on the “wrong side.” Hillary didn’t quite say it, but both in her tone and in her remarks, she left the clear impression that Brooke was a kind of Uncle Tom. He was a sellout to the system—to the existing way of doing things—while she represented a moral challenge to the system.

Here Hillary did not merely assert the obvious, if tedious, truism that the future belongs to the young. Much more than that, she appealed to a progressive consensus that she could rely on. That consensus declared that left-leaning Democrats are the good guys and Republicans—even moderate Republicans—are the bad guys. Consequently, white liberals should feel no qualms about giving it to black Republicans, fully confident that academia will applaud and the media will cheer.

Let’s examine the main themes and story line of the progressive consensus. According to this story line, America has a long history of racism that was especially virulent in the South. Although Republicans may have played an important role in ending slavery, the South basically created new institutions of racism in the postbellum period. This southern oppression is epitomized by the Black Codes, segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Who—the progressive story line continues—fought to end this oppression? The progressive Democrats! It was a Supreme Court dominated by progressives that ended segregation beginning with
Brown v. Board of Education
. The Democratic Party took Martin Luther King’s lead and championed the cause of civil rights, first for blacks, and then for women and other minorities. A Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Johnson administration also convinced a Democratic Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968.

Meanwhile, according to the progressive story line, conservatives and Republicans have proven themselves the consistent enemy of civil rights. The Republican South, in particular, is the home of American racism. No wonder blacks and other minorities vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers. African Americans and other persons of color aren’t stupid; they know who their friends are. Here, in sum, is the fund of moral superiority that Hillary Clinton drew on when she gave it to Senator Brooke.

The central issue, therefore, is which is the party of racism and which is the party of civil rights? This question cannot be answered simply by invoking the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement was itself parasitic on an earlier civil rights movement that took place a century earlier.

Didn’t know there were two civil rights movements? That’s because the progressives don’t say much about it. They focus on the later movement and pass over the earlier one. The earlier civil rights revolution is downplayed today because it has become politically problematic. It disrupts the progressive party line. Even in the second civil rights revolution, however, the roots of the first one are clearly apparent.

Let’s enumerate the rights supposedly conferred by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The
Brown
decision, in ending school segregation, allegedly established the right of blacks to freely avail themselves of public facilities without legal restriction or prohibition. In other words, it was a freedom decision.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 famously guaranteed blacks, women, and other minorities the right not to be discriminated against in jobs and
government contracts. The Fair Housing Bill of 1968 extended this antidiscrimination provision to housing. So these two pieces of legislation provided equal rights under the law. They were social justice provisions.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed to blacks and other minorities full enfranchisement, in other words, the same right to vote that whites enjoyed. It was an equality provision.

WHERE THESE RIGHTS COME FROM

Yet what was the constitutional basis for these actions? Desegregation and anti-discrimination laws both relied on the notion that blacks weren’t slaves any longer; rather, they were free and could make their own choices. This freedom, however, had been secured for blacks by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which permanently abolished slavery. Thus, the Thirteenth Amendment was the original freedom charter for African Americans.

The desegregation court rulings and the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Bill were also based on the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Amendment granted citizenship to blacks and established equal rights under the law. It was the original social justice manifesto for blacks, women, and other minorities.

Finally, the Voting Rights Act attempted to secure for blacks full enfranchisement, the right to vote. But blacks already had the right to vote. That right was specified in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment declared that, as citizens, blacks had the same prerogative to cast their ballots as whites and all others. The 1965 Voting Rights Act merely sought to enforce an equality provision that had been constitutionally affirmed much earlier.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were passed by the Republican Party. The Republicans enacted these measures then to secure the freedom, equality, and social justice that Democrats keep harping on today. To further promote these goals, Republicans also implemented a series
of Civil Rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, “It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.”
²

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP’s call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced “an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed.”
³

Notice that the GOP program—articulated by Douglass and affirmed by black leaders—is none other than the color-blind ideal outlined in Martin Luther King’s famous “dream.” King envisioned a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. This is substantially what Douglass and other black Republicans called for, more than a century earlier.

How interesting that the Democrat, Martin Luther King, is identified with a principle that the Republican, Frederick Douglass, expressed even more eloquently so much earlier. How bizarre that the Democrats are presumed to be the party of civil rights when the very content of civil rights was formulated and developed by the GOP.

Very few young people know this history. Most of them haven’t even heard about Douglass; who hasn’t heard of Martin Luther King? Am I suggesting that the scandalous neglect of Douglass and the excessive praise heaped on King is part of the progressive whitewash? You bet I am.

But, say the Democratic and progressive historians, wait a minute! While King’s program moved forward and was enacted into law,
Douglass’s program was halted in its tracks. We cannot forget about the backlash!

Yes, indeed. The Democratic storytellers are right that there was a powerful backlash against blacks in the South, so that the constitutional provisions of freedom, equality, and social justice became a dead letter. The Civil Rights laws were stymied, and even the provisions that passed were ignored. Blacks were reduced to new forms of subjugation not identical with, but reminiscent of, slavery. This re-enslavement of blacks was enforced by a juggernaut of violence epitomized by that institution of domestic terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan.

This part of the story is true enough. What the storytellers omit, however, is that the Democrats are the ones who caused the backlash! They are the ones who from the beginning opposed black freedom and black equality, undermining voting rights and equal treatment under the law. They were the true enemies of racial and social justice.

Moreover, the Democrats did those things not just through political and legal measures but also through domestic terrorism. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan was a licensed instrument of terror and intimidation unleashed by Democrats and operating for the benefit of the Democratic Party.

Consequently, it was Democrats who, from the 1860s through the 1960s, prevented blacks as a group from enjoying their rights through political opposition and violent acts of terror. Democrats now claim credit for allowing blacks to have the civil rights that they themselves violently prevented for a hundred years.

BLAMING THE SOUTH

Today’s Democrats try to shift blame from themselves by blaming “the South.” The South is supposedly responsible for espousing racist views and implementing racist practices. Yet the detractors of the South neglect to point out that after Reconstruction, the Democratic Party was the dominant, almost the sole, political party in the South.

One prominent Democrat, South Carolina governor (and later senator) Ben Tillman, explained how this came about. “Republicanism means
Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is superior. That’s why we Southerners are all Democrats.”
⁴

How did the South become so uniformly Democratic? Basically the Democrats used racist ideas and practices to establish a lasting political hegemony there. So racism wasn’t incidental; it was an essential part of the Democratic Party’s strategy. The Democrats won the South by appealing not just to the former planter class but also to poor whites.