Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (18 page)

Black was also known as a Klan lawyer, both representing Klansmen and making effective appeals to Klan-dominated juries. In court cases,
Black specialized in appeals to racial prejudice, asking questions in court like, “Was he standing at the door where this nigger woman came in?” When Black ran successfully for the Senate, his campaign manager was James Esdale, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan.

Republicans protested Black’s nomination. Echoing Bill Clinton’s justification for Robert Byrd, Black protested that he simply joined the Klan in order to advance his career. “The Klan,” he said “was in effect the underground Democratic Party in Alabama.”
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Here Black was telling the truth, and what a telling truth it is!

One might expect northern Democrats to be outraged at this candid confession of Black’s participation in the Klan for self-advancement. This, however, was not the case. Democrats across the country backed Black’s nomination. One of them, Senator William King of Utah, said he saw no reason why membership in the KKK should disqualify someone for elevation to the Supreme Court.

FDR did not directly address the issue, but the president’s private feelings were later revealed by Black himself in a 1968 memo. “President Roosevelt told me there was no reason for my worrying about having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said that some of his best friends and supporters were strong members of that organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.”
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The southern Democrats had a second demand for FDR. They demanded that a disproportionate share of New Deal programs be steered toward the South and that blacks, who mainly worked as domestic servants and farm laborers, be excluded from those programs. No “New Deal” for the blacks!

Again, FDR agreed. As Katznelson describes, he wrote his New Deal legislation in such a way that the South received a large fraction of the goodies. A telling example was the TVA Act, which involved the construction of huge power and navigation dams on the Tennessee River. The program benefited Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. An elated Mississippi Democrat, John
Rankin, boasted that TVA would produce “power that will exceed the amount of physical strength of all the slaves freed by the Civil War.”
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Keeping up his end of the bargain, FDR also ensured that the two main occupations involving blacks, namely domestic and farm labor, were excluded from federal benefits. This is a fact that progressive historiography usually omits, because of its devastating significance. Most blacks were excluded from New Deal programs! The grim consequence of FDR’s diabolical pact with the racists was that millions of blacks were ineligible to receive Social Security, unemployment, and a host of other benefits that were being offered to workers in every other type of industry.

One might think that blacks, seeing all this, would indignantly repudiate FDR and his progressive pact with bigotry. But during the 1930s blacks were desperate. The Depression hit blacks harder than anyone else. So the black leadership decided that the crumbs being offered by the progressive Democrats were at least more than they were getting before.

New Deal programs like the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were segregated and offered the best jobs to whites. Even so, blacks saw they at least offered employment to tens of thousands of blacks. The administration denied FHA loans to blacks seeking to move into white neighborhoods, but they did assist blacks in buying homes in black areas. Other federal projects backed by the Works Project Administration (WPA) also alleviated black unemployment.

Recognizing that FDR was steering benefits their way, blacks during the New Deal era moved steadily toward the Democratic Party, in a sense selling their votes for a mess of pottage. By 1936, 75 percent of blacks became Democrats. This trend has only continued since then, so that today around 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic and only 10 percent vote Republican. From 1865 to 1936, the trend was exactly the reverse: approximately 90 percent of blacks voted Republican and only 10 percent voted Democratic.

So this was a switch: blacks switched from Republican to Democrat. Democrats could scarcely believe their good fortune. They found that
they could continue to exclude, exploit, and subjugate blacks, and still get the black vote. Democratic strategists at the time expressed their amazement and delight that blacks votes came so cheap. In subsequent decades, progressive Democrats recognized that they could secure a virtually permanent hold on the black vote by creating plantation-style dependency on the state.

Later, Obama added a finishing touch to this macabre picture of welfare dependency by offering people free Obamaphones. This way, you see, he could even text you messages about how to support progressive Democrats and keep the benefits flowing in your direction.

LYNDON JOHNSON’S UPPITY NEGROES

The third member of this progressive troika—building upon Wilson and FDR—was Lyndon Johnson. During Johnson’s tenure the Democratic Party completed the tilt away from old-style racism toward progressivism. In his early career, Johnson was a typical racist southern Democrat. But over time Johnson evolved.

What shape did this evolution take? Johnson came to understand that keeping blacks and other minorities in the Democratic camp required him to be more creative, more flexible. Not that Johnson became a convert to the idea of black improvement. On the contrary, he was convinced that keeping blacks poor and dependent was essential to maintaining long-term Democratic supremacy.

Why was this? Part of the reason was to retain the black vote. If blacks became independent they would have no more reason to vote Democratic. There was also a second reason. Black suffering gave Democratic progressivism a continuing claim to “social justice.” In other words, black hardship provided a fund of moral capital that Democrats could use to cajole and intimidate voters into supporting a centralized progressive state and keeping progressive Democrats in power.

Johnson and his fellow Democrats cynically recognized that as long as blacks were beholden to them—as long as they stayed on the Democratic plantation—anyone who dissented from the progressive program
could then be accused of being anti-black. Republicans who opposed progressivism could be charged with being racist! Blacks themselves—politically beholden to their providers—could be counted on to make these accusations. They could also be counted on to keep other blacks on the progressive plantation.

In an incredible twist, black conservatives and the party of black emancipation and of civil rights could now be tarred with the charge of bigotry and being against civil rights. Of course black leaders needed help to sustain these charges, especially with young people. So progressive historians and pundits kept up a drumbeat of progressive Democratic propaganda. To this day, they continue to recite those mantras, hoping that young people will swallow their story line about Republican perfidy and Democratic virtue.

What Lyndon Johnson actually thought about blacks was something else entirely. Here’s what Johnson actually said, in a conversation with Democratic Senator Richard Russell of Georgia: “These niggers, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they got something now that they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” Otherwise, Johnson concluded, blacks may start voting Republican and “it’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”
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This was not the only time Johnson—even after his evolution from a racist Democrat to a progressive Democrat—used the N word. Traveling on Air Force One with two Democratic governors, Johnson told them how important it was to him that they vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The governors asked why. Johnson replied that it was part of his long-term strategy. “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
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We can see from this statement that Johnson—hailed as a progressive civil rights hero—remained a thoroughgoing racist. I don’t mean to place him in a special category; rather, he belongs in the same category as a multitude of other Democrats. The significance of Johnson’s
statement is not in his predictable bigotry, but in his recognition that, for the first time, Democrats needed the black vote.

Previously Democrats sought to prevent blacks from voting in the South, and maintained Democratic majorities by monopolizing the white vote. This was done, as we saw, through boisterous appeals to racism and white supremacy. But as the South became more prosperous economically during the 1950s and 1960s, the racist appeal lost its currency and white southern Democrats realized that they had more in common with the Republican Party. They identified with the GOP idea of controlling your own destiny and improving your own life.

In a remarkable book,
The End of Southern Exceptionalism
, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston make the case that white southerners switched to the Republican Party not because of racism but because they identified the GOP with economic opportunity and upward mobility. As the agrarian South became more industrial and then post-industrial, white southerners switched parties not because of race but because of economic prospects. Interestingly, whites moved to the Republican Party for the same reason blacks moved to the Democratic Party: both groups saw the journey as congruent with their economic self-interest.

Shafer and Johnston show how Democrats tried, and failed, to keep southern whites in the fold by appealing to racism. Southern whites, however, migrated to the GOP as the party that better represented their interests and aspirations. Shafer and Johnston supply reams of data to substantiate their claim that the poorest, most racist whites remained Democratic, while more prosperous whites who were not racist were more likely to become Republicans. To the horror of the Democratic Party, the South moved in the Republican direction as white southerners embraced the GOP as the non-racist party of economic opportunity and patriotism.
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Johnson grew up in rural Texas; he fully understood the politics of the South. He knew that if the Democratic Party were to maintain its viability in the region, it would have to rely on the black vote as never before. This is the basis of Johnson’s insistence that the Democrats, however reluctantly, offer blacks something. Johnson wanted to give as
little as possible—he needed the blacks poor and dependent, rather than self-reliant and upwardly-mobile—but he was candid that the rules had changed and blacks had to be bought off with new benefits in order to keep them on the Democratic plantation.

Now we can understand Johnson’s motive for championing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson fought hard for it because his party depended on it. He also knew that the main resistance would come from his own party, as indeed it did. A later generation of progressives would rewrite textbooks creating the false impression that the Republicans were the ones in opposition. Johnson knew better. He actively recruited Republicans across the aisle to help him defeat his fellow Democrats who feverishly tried to block the landmark laws of the Civil Rights Movement.

WHICH PARTY OPPOSED CIVIL RIGHTS?

The voting rolls of the Civil Rights laws speak for themselves. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House with 153 out of 244 Democrats voting for it, and 136 out of 171 Republicans. This means that 63 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans voted “yes.” In the Senate, 46 out of 67 Democrats (69 percent) and 27 out of 33 Republicans (82 percent) supported the measure.

The pattern was similar for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It passed the House 333–85, with 24 Republicans and 61 Democrats voting “no.” In the Senate, 94 percent of Republicans compared with 73 percent of Democrats supported the legislation.

Here’s a revealing tidbit: had Republicans voted for the Civil Rights laws in the same proportion as Democrats, these laws would not have passed. Republicans, more than Democrats, are responsible for the second civil rights revolution, just as they were solely responsible for the first one. For the second time around, Republicans were mainly the good guys and Democrats were mainly the bad guys.

Here’s further proof: the main opposition to the Civil Rights Movement came from the Dixiecrats. Note that the Dixiecrats were Democrats; as one pundit wryly notes, they were Dixiecrats and not Dixiecans.
The Dixiecrats originated as a breakaway group from the Democratic Party in 1948. For a time, the Dixiecrats attempted to form a separate party and run their own presidential ticket, but this attempt failed and the Dixiecrats reconstituted themselves as a rebel faction within the Democratic Party.

Joined by other Democrats who did not formally ally themselves with this faction, the Dixiecrats organized protests against desegregation rulings by the Supreme Court. Dixiecrat governors refused to enforce those rulings. Dixiecrats in the Senate also mounted filibusters against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson’s Democratic allies in Congress required Republican votes in order to defeat a Dixiecrat-led filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Leading members of the Dixiecrat faction were James Eastland, Democrat from Mississippi; John Stennis, Democrat from Mississippi; Russell Long, Democrat from Louisiana; Strom Thurmond, Democrat from South Carolina; Herman Talmadge, Democrat from Georgia; J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas; Lester Maddox, Democrat from Georgia; Al Gore Sr., Democrat from Tennessee; and Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia. Of these only Thurmond later joined the Republican Party. The rest of them remained Democrats.

The Dixiecrats weren’t the only racists who opposed civil rights legislation. So did many other Democrats who never joined the Dixiecrat faction. These were racists who preferred to exercise their influence within the Democratic Party, which after all had long been the party of racism, rather than create a new party. Richard Russell of Georgia—who now has a Senate Building named after him—and James Eastland of Mississippi are among the segregationist Democrats who refused to join the Dixiecrat faction.