Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (15 page)

The Democrats wanted to be the party of the white man, but they didn’t want the Republicans to benefit from being the party that protected the rights of black people. The Democrats were determined to keep Republican influence out of the South, and after Reconstruction, they were largely successful in doing so. Republicans watched in dismay as Democrats used their virtual monopoly in the South to visit terror and destruction upon a vulnerable black population.

The Klan may have been the poster organization of Democratic racism, but it didn’t operate by itself. The group’s racial terrorism occurred, and was legitimized, within a political context in which racism was the accepted discourse of the Democratic Party. This was an era in which Democratic writers published books with titles like
The Negro a Beast
;
The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective and Delinquent
;
The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization
; and
America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro
.
¹⁰

The racist Democrats weren’t just out in the culture writing books—they also served in the halls of the U.S. Congress. “What does civilization owe to the Negro?” the racist Democrat from Georgia, Tom Watson once said. His answer, “Nothing!” Watson was later elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1920.

Watson, a Klansman himself, deployed the Klan against his political enemies and advocated lynching blacks, Catholics, and nonwhite immigrants. When he died, his memorial service was organized jointly by the Ku Klux Klan and the Georgia Democratic Party.

Another outspoken Democratic racist was James Vardaman of Mississippi, who served both as governor and then U.S. senator. When Republican president Teddy Roosevelt agreed to have dinner with the distinguished black leader Booker T. Washington, Vardaman fumed, “I am just as opposed to Booker Washington with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon Andy Dotson who blacks my shoes every morning.”
¹¹
Notice how Vardaman maintains the racial caste line so that poor whites among his constituents can feel superior even to Booker T. Washington.

Another Democrat, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, offered an even more outrageous response. “Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back to their place.”
¹²
That’s how Democrats talked back then; they want us to forget about it now. We can see from Tillman’s threat why Democrats needed and relied on the Ku Klux Klan. The Party needed a domestic militia to carry out its racist projects of mayhem and murder.

THE SEGREGATION SOLUTION

In addition to the Klan, another institution of white supremacy that the Democrats created across the South was state-sponsored segregation. This took longer; while the Klan was in full operation in the 1860s, segregation was institutionalized in the 1880s and comprehensively established only by the early twentieth century.

The Democrats did it because they knew they could get away with it. By the 1890s, the Democrats had consolidated their power in the South and the party was strong enough to prevent the federal government from intervening in the way it did during Reconstruction. Thus Republicans in the North were limited in what they could do. Northern Republicans knew that they could not perpetually rule the South; at some point, the southerners would have to govern themselves.

In 1896, the Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson
affirmed the constitutionality of segregation. The Court considered a Louisiana railroad segregation statute that was euphemistically titled, “An Act to Promote the Comfort of Passengers.” A Democratic legislature passed the law, and a Democratic governor signed it.

Homer Plessy, a Republican who was seven-eighths white, refused to sit in the railroad compartment reserved for blacks and when he was cited for breaking the law, brought suit to challenge the constitutionality of the Louisiana statute. A largely though not exclusively Democratic Supreme Court upheld the law, with the sole dissent coming from Justice John Harlan.

Harlan famously stated that “our constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
¹³
Here—in the Republican tradition of Frederick Douglass—is a further affirmation of the color-blind ideal, more than half a century before King’s “dream” speech. Harlan’s dissent is justly famous; less well known is the fact that he was a Kentucky Republican.

Gradually, Democrats in the South segregated everything. Hotels, taverns, and inns were segregated. Schools were segregated, as were public water fountains. Prisons were segregated, as were public theaters, public libraries, and public parks. Hospitals, jails, and cemeteries were segregated. Movie theaters and opera houses were segregated, and also the professions. Black barbers could only cut the hair of other blacks; black plumbers could only do repair work in black homes.

Let there be no doubt about this: all the Jim Crow laws mandating segregation were enacted by Democratic legislatures and signed into law by Democratic governors. Democratic judges upheld those laws, and Democratic sheriffs and public officials enforced them. Segregation was solely and entirely the handiwork of the Democratic Party. The party may as well have adopted the motto of Democratic segregationist Governor George Wallace who notoriously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Over time, as racism became less defensible and fashionable, some Democrats insisted that segregation laws were not racist; rather, they were neutral on their face. After all, segregation laws merely separated the black world from the white world, while making no explicit statement about which one was better.

This “separate but equal” argument was concocted way back in the late nineteenth century. A Democratic majority on the Supreme Court declared in the
Plessy
decision that if blacks feel inferior as a result of segregation it’s because they choose to view it that way, not because of anything in the law itself.

Yet everyone, black and white, who lived under segregation knew that it was an instrument of white supremacy. Separate was not equal. No one knew this better than the Democrats. In fact, the Democrats
counted on their white supporters to see it that way. The whole purpose of stamping the black race with inferiority was to enable the Democrats to confer privilege on their white constituents. Yet notice how Democrats consistently claimed that these mechanisms of exploitation were “fair” and “just.”

The racist Democrat, James Vardaman, speaking on the floor of the Senate, admitted that “separate” didn’t actually mean “equal” and went on to explain why blacks should not be given the same education as whites. “Educating the black man simply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed. The only effect is to spoil a good field hand, and to make an insolent cook.”
¹⁴

Segregation wasn’t limited to the South. Following his election, Woodrow Wilson mandated segregation for all the agencies of the federal government. This had never happened before. In a sense, Wilson was burying the ghost of Lincoln, who would have been appalled beyond measure. The black community was apoplectic. Black leaders like Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter protested Wilson’s racism, but the Democratic president was unmoved.

Wilson indignantly told these black leaders that they had no reason to complain, because segregation was in fact beneficial to blacks. Wilson also echoed the argument from
Plessy
that segregation was just, since whites were being separated from blacks just as much as blacks were being separated from whites.

By now these themes should be familiar: oppression is good for you, and it also promotes social justice. The Democrats had been down this road before. Recall that Andrew Jackson told the Indians that it was good for them that the government was taking their land. Jackson also insisted that his land confiscations were Just—a term that he typically spelled with a capital letter. Of course knowing what we do about how Jackson and his cronies made off like bandits, we may be pardoned in sarcastically quipping that “justice” for Jackson actually meant “just us.”

Today, too, Democrats make the same bogus claims when they exploit people by taking their money and turning them into second-class citizens. Naturally Americans get upset about being demeaned and
ripped off. The thieving Democrats then inform them that they should feel good about being stolen from, because in this way they are being cured of greed, selfishness, and materialism. Democrats also justify their confiscations in the name of “social justice.” Now, as in the past, the Democratic Party counts on its victims to be suckers.

THE PROGRESSIVE LIE

Summing up, we can see from this chapter that Hillary Clinton’s arrogance before Senator Brooke was utterly misplaced. Brooke’s indignation over the incident was completely justified. Brooke was actually the good guy, and Hillary’s attempt to talk down to him was condescendingly racist.

Of course, it was no more racist than Hillary’s Democratic ancestors. But this is the point: Hillary was pretending to a different pedigree. She was basing her actions on a progressive narrative that is itself a lie. She was posing as the poster child for civil rights while her actions—and her party’s actions—qualify her as a poster child for white privilege and the degradation of blacks and other minorities.

“America” doesn’t have a long history of white supremacy, the Democrats do. Democrats are the party of racism while opposition to racism came mainly from blacks and Republicans. From the Civil War onward, Republicans have been the party of equality and civil rights while Democrats have been the party of racism and opposition to civil rights.

Did that change? In the next chapter, we explore this question. Let me just say at this point that the answer will surprise you. For now, we can take it as established that the Democratic Party, through the dark night of slavery and the long period of racism and white supremacy, has been the systematic oppressor of blacks. Instead of demanding that blacks be grateful, what Democrats owe them is restitution—and an apology.

CHAPTER 5

THE PROBLEM OF USELESS PEOPLE

THE LOW, DISHONORABLE ORIGINS OF MODERN PROGRESSIVISM

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly-spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all
.
¹

—Margaret Sanger,
The Pivot of Civilization

I
n 2009, Hillary Clinton came to Houston, Texas, to receive the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and the award is its highest prize. In receiving the award, Hillary said of Sanger, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly.”
²

What was Margaret Sanger’s vision? What was the cause to which she devoted her life? Sanger is known as a champion of birth control, of providing women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But the real Margaret Sanger was very different from how she’s portrayed in Planned Parenthood brochures. The real Margaret Sanger did not want women in general to limit their pregnancies. She wanted white, wealthy, educated women to have more children, and poor, uneducated, black women to have none. “Unwanted” for Sanger didn’t mean unwanted by the mother—it meant unwanted by Sanger.

Sanger’s influence contributed to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor blacks were deliberately injected with syphilis without their knowledge. Today the Tuskegee Project is falsely portrayed as an example of southern backwardness and American bigotry; in fact, it was a progressive scheme carried out with the very eugenic goals that Margaret Sanger herself championed.

In 1926, Sanger spoke to a Women’s Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey about her solution for reducing the black birthrate. She also sponsored a Negro Project specifically designed, in her vocabulary, to get rid of “human beings who should never have been born.” In one of her letters Sanger said, “We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population.”
³

The racists loved it; other KKK speaking invitations followed. Now it may seem odd that a woman with such views would be embraced by Planned Parenthood—even odder that she would be a role model for Hillary Clinton. Why would they celebrate Sanger given her racist philosophy? In this chapter I intend to show that their enthusiasm for Sanger is not despite but because of her philosophy. As Planned Parenthood and Hillary recognize, Sanger’s philosophy is actually the foundation for modern progressivism. With slight tactical modification, it represents what modern progressives still believe.

This chapter is about the roots of the modern progressivism championed by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. What is this progressivism and where did it come from? Here we begin with the progressive myth. The progressive myth is that progressivism is simply another word for progress. In this view, progressivism is nothing less than a philosophy of the future. Its critics are stuck in the past.

Progressivism is allegedly about civil rights, human rights, human dignity, and social justice. The other side, progressives say, opposes civil rights and human rights and advocates social injustice. If this is true, it follows that all good people in America should be progressives and vote for the party—the Democratic Party—that embodies progressive ideals. Republicans are bad guys and bad guys are, naturally, attracted to the Republican Party.

Now it seems odd that a party that championed slavery and segregation for centuries can plausibly claim to be the party of civil rights and social justice. Progressive Democrats, even while they evade and downplay their party’s role in past oppression, have to admit that most of their forbears were vicious racists. When confronted with the evidence, they do admit it. Then they counter: but that was then, and this is now.

THE SO-CALLED BIG SWITCH

Progressive historiography relies on the claim that there was an historic big switch: Democrats saw the light and became champions of equality, while the racists in the Democratic Party became Republicans. Look, progressives say, at a segregationist like Strom Thurmond. Thurmond once ran for president on the Dixiecrat platform. Then he switched parties and became a Republican. Here is a classic example of the switch in action.

The switch narrative is supported by two important pieces of evidence. First, blacks, who used to vote Republican, now vote Democratic. This would seem to prove that whatever its past, the Democratic Party is now the party of racial justice. Second, the Civil Rights Movement was championed by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, and supported by progressives like Martin Luther King. From this perspective, Republicans are, at least since the 1960s, enemies of civil rights.

The switch narrative, plausible at first glance, becomes problematic when we realize that the Thurmond case is anomalous. The Dixiecrats emerged from the Democratic Party and they returned to it after the presidential election of 1948. Thurmond did not become a Republican until 1964, and he was virtually alone among his Democratic colleagues in changing parties.

Southern Democrats throughout the 1960s remained the party of segregation, and three of the most nationally prominent southern Democrats of the postwar era, President Harry Truman, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, were former members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Later I’ll say more about Black, but here I want to focus on Truman and Byrd. Some historians today downplay Truman’s Klan membership, insisting that he did little more than pay his membership fee and quit the group shortly thereafter, reportedly because of its antagonism to Catholics.

This attempt to exculpate Truman is too hasty, however. In researching Truman, historian William Leuchtenburg recently uncovered some very interesting statements by the former Democratic president. In 1911, Truman wrote his future wife Bess, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.”

Truman added, “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

More than twenty-five years later, as a U.S. senator from Missouri, Truman wrote a letter to his daughter calling White House waiters “an army of coons.” In another letter to Bess in 1939, Truman used the phrase “nigger picnic day.” In an interview with a reporter in 1963, he asked, “Would you want your daughter to marry a negro?” This is the same Harry Truman who gets credit from progressives for desegregating the armed forces, typically without any mention of what he really thought about blacks.
⁴

Byrd joined the Klan at age twenty-four. In the early 1940s he organized a 150-member chapter or Klavern in Sophia, West Virginia, and was chosen as its leader. In later years, Byrd admitted it was Joel Baskin, Grand Dragon of the Klan, who advised him to go into politics. “Suddenly lights flashed in my mind,” Byrd later wrote. “Someone important had recognized my abilities.”

During World War II, Byrd wrote Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi that he would not join the U.S. military because he refused to fight alongside black people. “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old
Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
⁵

Byrd’s racist past wasn’t a youthful flirtation. More than two decades later, he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by speaking on the Senate floor for fourteen hours. Byrd also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet Byrd became a revered figure in Democratic politics, endorsing Obama and eventually winning a 100 percent approval rating from the NAACP. When he died in 2010, media reports made only a bare mention of his KKK membership and opposition to civil rights. Hillary Clinton issued a statement praising her “friend and mentor” Robert Byrd.

Bill Clinton and Obama were at his memorial service. Obama emphasized how much Byrd learned and changed, noting that “the arc of his life bent toward justice.” Here is another version of the progressive switch narrative. Byrd is presented as a living example of a bad southerner who became a good Democrat. He grew. He learned. He became one of us. To a point, I agree. But what exactly Byrd learned Obama did not specify. In this chapter, I will.

Bill Clinton, the only speaker to directly address Byrd’s KKK association, dismissed it. “What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected.” This is revealing. Clinton admits that in some states Klan membership was a political asset—perhaps even a political requirement—for success in the Democratic Party.
⁶

Yes, people can change. But I find it bizarre, to put it mildly, that men like Byrd made such a seamless transition from being in the Klan to being champions of civil rights. It’s equally strange that a party long devoted to owning and subjugating blacks and other minorities would suddenly become the dedicated advocate of equal rights and social justice. When reversals of this magnitude occur—and they do occur—some sort of moral accounting is required.

Consider the example of Whittaker Chambers, who used to be a communist but then became an anti-communist. Chambers didn’t just
leapfrog from one to the other. He produced a massive work,
Witness
, in which he searchingly examined what attracted him to communism, what he saw in the Communist Party, how he became disenchanted, why he left the party, how he exposed Alger Hiss as a communist spy, and why ultimately he feared, wrongly as it turned out, that he was joining the “losing side.”

Where are the comparable accounts for why Truman, Black, and Byrd went from being Klansmen to being champions of civil rights? Where is the Democratic Party’s story of how it went through soul-searching in order to achieve moral conversion? These accounts simply do not exist. There seems to have been no soul-searching, raising the question of whether there was in fact a conversion. This too-easy progressive switch story raised my suspicion. I decided to look into it, and discovered it was largely bogus.

PROGRESSIVE RACISM

In this chapter I’ll show that the Democratic Party never abandoned racism—it figured out a way to integrate it into its new progressive philosophy. Progressivism didn’t replace racism; rather, northern progressivism worked in tandem with southern racism to create a successful Democratic coalition that pushed through the New Deal and the Great Society.

I’m not alone in thinking this; progressive historian Ira Katznelson admits as much in a powerful recent book,
Fear Itself
. Katznelson focuses his indictment on the central figure of modern progressivism, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I expand the indictment to the other two central figures: Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. And of course we see the same general trend in the entire Democratic Party. Through this investigation, we’ll discover what Byrd learned that enabled him to make the easy transition from being a racist Democrat to being a progressive Democrat.

It may seem heretical to link the three great progressive champions of the twentieth century—Wilson, FDR, and Johnson—with racism. But the indisputable fact is that all three were either racist themselves or made
their peace with racism. Progressive historiography has had to work overtime to conceal the actual facts.

There is some debate about whether Wilson was himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Whatever the truth about that, Wilson was unquestionably a Klan sympathizer. By showing
Birth of a Nation
at the White House, Wilson contributed to the Klan revival of the early twentieth century. FDR didn’t despise blacks in the way Wilson did, but he did serve as Navy Secretary in the Wilson administration, never objecting to the de jure segregation that Wilson had imposed throughout the federal government.

When FDR became president, he made a bargain with racist southern Democrats that required him to block anti-lynching legislation and exclude blacks from New Deal programs. A surge in lynching during the 1930s had no effect in altering FDR’s commitment to the pact. One might expect to see FDR liberalize on race relations over his multiple terms, but he never did. His bargain with the worst racists in the Democratic Party endured throughout his presidency, from 1932 to 1945.

Lyndon Johnson was himself a member of the racist group of southern Democrats that FDR worked with and cut deals with. Johnson vociferously opposed civil rights in the early part of his career. Later Johnson appeared to change, but in this case the appearance was deceiving. Even as president—during the very period he was promoting the Civil Rights Act of 1964—Johnson called blacks “niggers” and spoke of civil rights legislation as tactical measures for keeping blacks on the Democratic plantation.

What about the Republicans? I will show in this chapter that Republicans throughout the 1950s and 1960s supported civil rights, while the main opposition to the Civil Rights laws came from Democrats. Blacks, starting in the 1930s, did switch from voting Republican to voting Democrat, but this was not on account of racism. On the contrary, blacks in joining the Democratic Party found themselves in the same camp with the segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan. Far from escaping racism, blacks threw themselves into the party of racism.

Why did they do it? The best insight into this question comes from Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Civil War journal. Chesnut observed that even though all the able-bodied white men were away fighting the Yankees, the slaves had not left the plantations. Chesnut found this odd because the slaves were alone with the women and children. They could leave if they wanted; there was no one to stop them. “If slavery is as disagreeable to negroes as we think it,” she wrote, “why don’t they all march over the border where they would be received with open arms?”
⁷
Chesnut implies that whatever their antipathy to slavery, the slaves must have liked the security provided by the plantation.