According to American history books, the American Civil War, 1861-1865, resolved fundamental questions of the central authority of the Federal government versus a looser confederation of sovereign states; and whether we were truly to be a nation where all “men” were created equal, instead of one that would permit slavery. But did it really?
While the war did officially end slavery, and affirm to some extent the supremacy of the Federal government, we never stopped fighting political, legal and cultural battles over the fundamental issues of states’ rights and just exactly who was, and who was not, entitled to the full benefits of citizenship — be they black, Hispanic, female, or LGBT. Since the election of a black man as president many of these issues have boiled up and perhaps provoked the Republican party, inheritors of the Confederate torch, into a last-ditch effort to hold on to white male, heterosexual political dominance and to nominate a racist, misogynist, authoritarian for President. We are on the cusp of the most important election in a generation, probably the most important since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The defenders of the old Confederacy are pissed. And well-armed. And now a woman, who would not have been allowed to vote less than a century ago, is on the cusp of becoming the leader of the free world. Could election 2016 mark the beginning of our second Civil War?
This essay considers the threads of racism, patriarchy, and hate, woven through the fabric of American social and political life since the end of Reconstruction. Two parallel Americas have never stopped fighting the first Civil War. It is entirely possible we are headed for a second American Civil War, with the election of our 45th President.
Reconstruction, the KKK, the Supreme Court and the Suffrage Movement
In order to resolve the indecisive election of 1876, Southern Democrats struck a deal with Northern Republicans, who had grown weary of the cost of maintaining an occupying force, to end Reconstruction in 1877. President Rutherford Hayes quietly withdrew the Union soldiers. Just like that, the South was back in business. Although the shooting war had ended, from that time forward the old Confederacy would prove over and over to be a powerful force off the field of battle. It staged a sustained assault on the victories won by the Union, working steadfastly to undermine the 14th and 15th amendments – “which granted African Americans the right to vote, equality before the law and other rights of citizenship.” (History.com) While they would never be able to reinstate slavery, the combination of share cropping (which continued into the 1930s-40s), Jim Crow laws, and the KKK (which was founded in 1865 and served as an extra-legal, paramilitary enforcement militia), they achieved pretty much the same thing.
The KKK, whose membership often included members of local law enforcement, imposed racial terror designed to subjugate black people through fear, according to a report from a five year study by the Equal Justice Initiative which cataloged every lynching in 12 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. The aftermath of slavery and the formation of the KKK created “the terrorism of lynching”.
Lynchings, in which mobs raided jailhouses to hang, torture and burn alive black men, sometimes leading to public executions in courthouse squares, occurred more often in the U.S. South than was previously known, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The slightest transgression could spur violence, the Equal Justice Initiative found, as it documented 3,959 victims of lynching in a dozen Southern states.
The group said it found 700 more lynchings of black people in the region than had been previously reported. The research took five years and covered 1877 to 1950, the period from the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction to the years immediately following World War Two.
The report cited a 1940 incident in which Jesse Thornton was lynched in Alabama for not saying “Mister” as he talked to a white police officer.
In 1916, men lynched Jeff Brown for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train, the report said.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Montgomery, Alabama-based EJI, said that while current events did not directly equate with lynching, “what happened then has its echoes in today’s headlines.”
He cited racial differences in reactions to last year’s shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer.
Twenty years after the end of Reconstruction, the Supreme Court handed the Confederacy another great win with its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, affirming that separate but equal was constitutional, thus affirming Jim Crow as the law of the land. This decision would be used to justify the institutional oppression of black Americans for fifty years by denying them their rights to the benefits of citizenship, including, but not limited to the right to vote, equal access to educational, employment, and housing opportunities, and to even marry someone of another race.
Although not a matter usually associated with the Civil War and slavery, women of course were also not allowed the rights of full citizenship, the most obvious being the right to vote.
Soon after the Civil War the women's suffrage movement began to gather momentum. Susan B. Anthony focused her efforts on fighting for political rights for women, arguing that until women had the right to vote, they would have no other [rights]. In January 1868, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began publishing The Revolution, a paper that supported suffrage for women.
In November 1868, the largest women's rights convention ever held in the United States to date met in Boston. Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Browne Blackwell, Isabella Beecher Hooker and Julia Ward Howe founded the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA) for the sole purpose of gaining the vote for women.
The Early 20th Century, Prohibition and Suffrage
During the early 20th century Prohibition and the Suffrage movement were closely linked. Susan B. Anthony first began her activism as a prohibitionist. It had previously been considered inappropriate for women to be politically involved. The fight for prohibition provided a certain amount of cover for female activists because it was a “family values” issue. Women and organizations that fought for temperance later fought for the right to vote. After the Civil War as the suffrage movement was beginning, support came from Republicans — still the party of Lincoln — because of common concerns, rooted partly in the abolition movement.
In part because of women's involvement and a lot because women were generally supportive of Prohibition, many temperance organizations would support women's suffrage since they knew the new votes would go in their favor. For that same reason, those who opposed Prohibition often opposed women's suffrage. Quora.com
But there was a lot of resistance to giving women the right to vote from anti-suffrage organizations, politicians, newspapers, men and women alike.
In fact, most women feared the vote in the early days, and worked against suffrage. They called it “the burden of the ballot,” and dreaded stepping down from their pedestals because they’d no longer enjoy “respect, tenderness, chivalry” from men. One California society lady said without irony, “Women are emotional creatures. If their vote is not merely a duplicate of their husband’s or father’s or brother’s, there will be terrible dissension in the family.”
Men who opposed suffrage (again, the majority) also foresaw the cascade of dominos. Letting women vote meant they’d also run for office, fretted one New Jersey congressman in 1895, and that would cause “the deterioration of Congress.” A South Dakota senator simply foresaw “chaos!” Lynn Sherr
The Prohibition movement was led by rural Protestants and social Progressives. It gained a national grass roots base through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. After 1900 it was coordinated by the Anti-Saloon League. Prohibition was mandated in state after state, then finally nationwide under the Eighteen Amendment, ratified in 1919, and took effect in 1920. Soon after implementation of the Eighteenth Amendment, women finally were granted the right to vote with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. While Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the right to vote has gradually empowered women in our country to the point were we are only a day or two away from electing our first woman as President, much to the dismay of many.
But at first women’s access to the voting booth did not appear to have much impact on electoral results.
No “women’s bloc” emerged. No party profited. And only some 9 million women (about 35 percent) voted in 1920, compared to nearly twice as many men, a situation that didn’t improve much over the few decades. Women, it seemed, were voting pretty much like the men. The headline of one of many similar articles echoed public sentiment: “Is suffrage a failure?”
It certainly did little for African-American women in the South, who (along with black men) struggled another 45 years to abolish poll taxes, literacy tests and other insidious means of voter suppression. By then the fight for civil rights was led by Democrats. Sherr
As we have seen, things changed over time, and women are now the majority in elections.
The Great Depression, the New Deal and the Federal Housing Administration
The Civil War had not completely resolved the battle over Federalism, and it wasn’t until the Great Depression that Americans required the federal government to assert itself.
Although the Civil War forever changed the nature of federalism, it did not destroy states' rights. Instead, the power of the central government remained quite limited until the economic crisis of the 1930s. The devastating effects of the Great Depression led many people to demand that the federal government take drastic action. The innovative programs of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" ushered in a new era in American politics.
But every silver lining has a cloud. One measure taken during the Depression, under the National Housing Act of 1934, was to establish the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), ostensibly to regulate interest rates and mortgage terms after the banking crisis of the 1930s. The forces of racism and defenders of raw capitalism were tenacious, and ironically under the authority of the national government, they employed the practice of redlining as a way to quite effectively deny blacks and people of color access to loans for the purchasing of their own homes. The effect of redlining was to deny blacks and other minorities the opportunity to accumulate wealth and climb the ladder of social and economic success, effectively locking them out of the American Dream. To make matters worse building owners would not invest in repairs and upgrades to their red zone properties leading to run down and empty buildings, urban decay which became fertile territory for despair, drugs and other criminal activity.
These maps which separated neighborhoods primarily by race paved the way for segregation and discrimination in lending. Many argue that it was the HOLC maps that set the original precedent for racial discrimination and allowed for it to be an institutional practice. Source: The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston
Redlining, and other urban planning conspiracies like the Cross Bronx Expressway, did indeed concentrate these populations, especially after WWII, into depressed inner city ghettos, creating self perpetuating centers of poverty, social neglect and urban decay. If wealthy landowners could no longer own slaves and house them in slave quarters, then at least blacks would be corralled into densely populated slums and tenements.
Urban planning decisions after World War II exacerbated the problem even further.
In the Bronx, Robert Moses, the so called "Master Builder" of New York, planned and built the Cross Bronx Expressway between 1948 and 1972, which effectively divided the Bronx in half. The South Bronx became a redlined ghetto, forced home to blacks and minorities while the middle and upper-class residents fled to the north.
The “Cross Bronx,” as it is known colloquially, was the brainchild of Robert Moses. But historically it has been blamed for bisecting the Bronx roughly in half causing a migration of middle and upper class residents to the north and leaving the south portion to become an underserved slum of low-income residents. It displaced as many as 5,000 families when an alternate proposed route along Crotona Park would have only affected 1-2% of that amount. Robert Moses is accused of favoring “car culture” placing an importance on building highways instead of subways in order to grow the city. This can be seen as a segregationist ideology since it ignores the needs of the large population in NYC that can not afford a car. Also the construction of large highways like the CBE shelved greater NYC Transit projects including the Second Avenue Subway. Not only did it have these ill effects, but to this day the expressway remains a headache for commuters with stacked and entangled roadways such as the Highbridge and Bruckner Interchanges. Source: untapped cities
The story of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, with its forced segregation and division of the city on either side of Canal Street into uptown and downtown in the 1890s, has undeniable parallels with the Bronx. Storyville, ironically named for New Orleans politician Sydney Story, was an attempt to control prostitution, drugs, but essentially divided the city along racial lines. The music that emerged from both New Orleans and the Bronx, sprang from the Diaspora of the slave trade, and of West African traditions imported to the Americas which resulted in the assimilation of and conflict with European/American culture and aesthetic traditions, was the unintended consequence of this kind of racist urban planning. The closing of Storyville during World War I in 1917, and the implementation of Prohibition in 1920, prompted New Orleans musicians to travel up the Mississippi River in search of work, thus spreading jazz and blues music upon the unsuspecting North. Blues, jazz, soul, funk and hip hop culture are the ironic flip side of segregationist ideology and racist public policies.
Harry J. Anslinger and the War on Drugs
After the repeal of prohibition in 1932, the government, or rather Harry J. Anslinger, pivoted from alcohol toward a new war on drugs. Anslinger was appointed to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the old Department of Prohibition, a division of the Department of the Treasury. He was clearly a racist and revived the agency, demoralized as it was by the failure of Prohibition, by exploiting the anxiety and fear that permeated the nation during the Depression. He focused his efforts on criminalizing drugs that formerly had been widely available in America, like marijuana, cocaine and heroin, deliberately targeting blacks and Hispanics, which led to the harassment, overwhelmingly disproportionate incarceration and intentional disenfranchisement of this demographic still extant today.
Harry Anslinger, the father of the war on weed, fully embraced racism as a tool to demonize marijuana. As the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anslinger institutionalized his belief that pot’s “effect on the degenerate races” made its prohibition a top priority. Huffington Post
This is one of his more widely disseminated quotations.
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
The Modern Conservative Movement’s Fight against the New Deal
Meanwhile, during the 1930s, a relatively small group of prominent businessmen formed alliances to protect their profits from what they saw as an assault on capitalism by the forces of big government and Socialism unleashed by Roosevelt’s New Deal. This cabal of very wealthy people was vehemently opposed to even minimal economic regulations, progressive taxation, and union power. Their ranks would include such notables as the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew, General Electric’s Lemuel Boulware, Ayn Rand, and William F. Buckley.
[This alliance] . . . played a critical part in supporting think tanks devoted to free-market ideas in the 1940s and 1950s, when they were out of fashion politically. These think tanks—such as the American Enterprise Institute, which was founded in the early 1940s—also helped to create networks of politically conservative businessmen. (And they were in fact mostly men—the world that I write about was populated by white men who were deeply convinced of their right to exercise social power.) Huffington Post
This movement, formed the cauldron of laissez faire, free enterprise economics, hatred of socialism and fear of the “nanny” state, with a heavy dose of white entitlement and feelings of racial superiority, eventually found their ideal spokesperson in Ronald Reagan. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Brown vs. The Board of Education; Bell vs. Maryland
After eight decades of many setbacks for the civil rights movement, came an important victory. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education officially repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson — “separate”, it turned out, was not really the same as equal. Tally a big win for the Union.
The unanimous 1954 Brown decision was a genuine hinge in American history. Although its mandate to dismantle segregated public schools initially faced "massive resistance" across the South, the ruling provided irresistible moral authority to the drive for legal equality that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts a decade later.
Coming nearly 60 years after the Supreme Court had upheld segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren's ringing opinion in Brown was the belated midcourse correction that began America's transformation into a truly multiracial world nation. The Atlantic
The Brown decision made possible access to educational opportunities once denied Blacks.
Just before Brown, only about one in seven African-Americans, compared with more than one in three whites, held a high school degree. Today, the Census Bureau reports, the share of all African-American adults holding high school degrees [diplomas] (85 percent) nearly equals the share of whites (89 percent); blacks have slightly passed whites on that measure among young adults ages 25 to 29.
Before Brown, only about one in 40 African-Americans earned a college degree. Now more than one in five hold one. Educational advances have also keyed other gains, including the growth of a substantial black middle-class and health gains that have cut the white-black gap in life expectancy at birth by more than half since 1950.
In 1963, when Civil Rights legislation began circulating through Congress, there was again sustained resistance. The Supreme Court had recently heard arguments in the appeal of 12 African American protesters arrested at a segregated Baltimore restaurant. The justices had caucused, and a conservative majority had voted to decide Bell v. Maryland by reiterating that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not apply to private businesses like restaurants and lunch counters—only to “state actors.” If this sounds like a familiar debate, well it should, but we’ll get back to that later. Justice William Brennan knew that this decision would kill the bill in Congress because a key provision in the Congressional bill outlawed segregation in public accommodations. “Taxing his opponents’ patience, he sought a delay in order to request the government’s views on the case. He all but winked and told the solicitor general not to hurry.” The Atlantic
While we expect the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter in issues of Constitutional significance, this time, thanks to Brennan’s tactical brilliance, the Court punted.
But in Bell, the Court vindicated civil rights by stepping aside. As Bruce Ackerman observes in The Civil Rights Revolution, Brennan realized that a law passed by democratically elected officials would bear greater legitimacy in the South than a Supreme Court decision. He also doubtless anticipated that the act would be challenged in court, and that he would eventually have his say. The moment demonstrated not merely cooperation among the three branches of government, but a confluence of personalities: Brennan slowing down the Court, President Johnson leaning on Congress to hurry up, and the grandstanders and speechmakers of the Senate making their deals, Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey foremost among them. In this age of obstruction and delay, it is heartening to recall that when the government decides to act, it can be a mighty force. The Atlantic
Civil Rights, Vietnam and Assassination of Progressive Leaders
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965. Designed to enforce the voting rights that had been guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments, it secured voting rights for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. Generally considered one of the most effective pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States, the battle was not won without taking significant casualties along the way. The era of the 1960s will forever be known as a time of great progress but also deep sorrow for America, as activists and innocents, black and white, Jew and Gentile, men, women and children alike were beaten, bombed and killed, and many of the most charismatic and progressive leaders in the civil rights movement were assassinated.
A prelude to the violence and political assassinations to come was the murder of Mississippi black civil rights activist, Medgar Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963), and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous works of art, music, and film. All-white juries failed to reach verdicts in the first two trials of Byron De La Beckwith. He was convicted in a new state trial in 1994, based on new evidence.
On a Sunday in September of 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast. Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing on September 5, 1963, he had told the New York Times:
The society is coming apart at the seams. What good is it doing to force these situations when white people nowhere in the South want integration? What this country needs is a few first-class funerals…
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the “Cahaba River Bridge Boys,” an especially violent faction of the local Ku Klux Klan. He was arrested and charged with the murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite. The case was reopened when it was discovered that the FBI had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss which had not been used in the original trial. In 1977 Chambliss was tried again and this time found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
More than any other single event, the bombing awakened the consciousness of Americans to the Civil Rights Movement and prompted governmental action that led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year. Weld for Birmingham
The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is undoubtedly the most notorious event of the Baby Boomer generation, for many reasons. “The assassination and its aftermath had a profound impact both culturally and politically that changed America forever.” The killing of the handsome young president was captured on film and the whole event and its aftermath played out on television for the nation and the world to see. Kennedy had won the election over Nixon by a few votes, and only served three years of his first term, and yet his impact was significant. The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the establishment of the Peace Corps, developments in the Space Race, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Trade Expansion Act to lower tariffs, the Civil Rights Movement, the "New Frontier" domestic program, and abolition of the federal death penalty in the District of Columbia all took place during his presidency. Kennedy did avoid any significant increase in the American presence in Vietnam, refusing to commit combat troops and keeping the level of others, mostly military advisors, to only 16,000, compared to the 536,000 troops committed by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, five years later.
Although the assassination and its aftermath embedded a permanent distrust of federal government into the social fabric of America for decades to come, the immediate results in Washington arguably produced one of the most progressive eras of legislation in U.S. history next to the 1910s and 1930s. Policy.Mic
Malcolm X (1925-1965), who harshly indicted white America for its crimes against black Americans, was accused of preaching racism and violence. But he is also considered one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. In February 1965, he was assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, is considered one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
When the Autobiography was published, the New York Times reviewer described it as a "brilliant, painful, important book". In 1967, historian John William Ward wrote that it would become a classic American autobiography. In 1998, Time named The Autobiography of Malcolm X as one of ten "required reading" nonfiction books. James Baldwin and Arnold Perl adapted the book as a film; their screenplay provided the source material for Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X.
Three years later, Martin Luther King (1929-1968), was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. Sparked by Rosa Parks, he had led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany Georgia (the Albany Movement), and helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C, when he was killed by a white racist gunman, James Earl Ray.
It was 50 years ago today that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made headlines by calling Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the “most notorious liar in the country." Hoover made the comment in front of a group of female journalists ahead of King’s trip to Oslo where he received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest recipient of the prize. While Hoover was trying to publicly discredit King, the agency also sent King an anonymous letter threatening to expose the civil rights leader’s extramarital affairs. The unsigned, typed letter was written in the voice of a disillusioned civil rights activist, but it is believed to have been written by one of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan. The letter concluded by saying, "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. … You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." Democracynow.org
The Civil Rights Act signed into law in April 1968 — also popularly known as the Fair Housing Act–prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex. Intended as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill was the subject of a contentious debate in the Senate, but was passed quickly by the House of Representatives in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The act stands as the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
The final political assassination of the 1960s was of John F. Kennedy’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968). He served as a Senator for New York from 1965 until his assassination in 1968. He was previously the 64th U.S. Attorney General from 1961 to 1964, serving under his brother, and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. An icon of the modern liberal wing the Democratic Party, Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination for President against Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy In 1968, his entering the race after McCarthy, who had finished a strong second against incumbent President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, forced Johnson to drop out of the race. Kennedy became the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, appealing especially to African-American, Hispanic, and Catholic voters, and ran as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. RFK’s impromptu and mostly improvised speech in Indianapolis announcing the death of Martin Luther King, is considered one of the greatest speeches of its kind. One is struck by the contrast in tone and message from what might come from the 2016 Republican nominee for President. There were riots in all the major U.S. cities, except for Indianapolis.
Almost exactly two months after giving this speech, shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, after defeating Senator McCarthy in the California presidential primary, Robert Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, and died the following day.
Although many victories had been won by the progressive civil rights movement, the cost had been high. Certain that McCarthy would lose the general election, and desperate for a candidate who could beat Richard Nixon, the Democrats turned to the “Happy Warrior” and sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey to be their standard bearer.
Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy
The ensuing Democratic convention in Chicago nominated Humphrey but was marred by extensive rioting which was violently quelled by Chicago police, under the authority of corrupt Democratic mayor Richard Daley. The Happy Warrior went on to lose the 1968 general election to Richard Nixon in an Electoral College blow out but only by about 500,000 in the popular vote. Nixon ran on a law and order platform and effectively exploited the fears of southern whites with his notorious “Southern Strategy”. Also running as a third party candidate, George Wallace managed to carry five states in the deep south.
Upon signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ predicted that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. Under Richard Nixon, the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” aimed to ensure LBJ’s prediction upon signing the Civil Rights Act, that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation, by systematically making coded racist appeals to white voters. “From now on,” Nixon aide Kevin Phillips told him, “the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need any more than that.” The Southern Strategy would guarantee delivery of the Southern states that had voted for Wallace in 1968 to the Republicans. The defenders of the Old Confederacy would break completely from the Democratic Party and ironically find a welcome home in the deeply changed Party of Lincoln.
The Southern Strategy succeeded beyond what even Nixon could have imagined. It set off—or hastened—a political realignment in which the Democratic “Solid South” abandoned an attachment dating to the Civil War. In 1980, Ronald Reagan carried the entire South except for Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia. In 1994 a gain of 19 House seats in the South enabled the Republican takeover of Congress.
Two generations later, the Deep South is reliably Republican. The last rural white Democrat in Congress, Representative John Barrow of Georgia, was defeated in the November midterms. In its right-wing politics, cultural outlook, and relationship with racial minorities, the Republican Party is thoroughly Southernized. This has alienated former Republican voters on the West Coast and in New England, an historical bastion of the Grand Old Party that’s almost as bereft of congressional Republicans as the South is of Democrats. Bloomberg
In a 1981 interview while he was working for Reagan, Republican strategist, Lee Atwater, explained how coded language was used win over white southern voters.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” The Nation
Nixon and his henchmen were all too happy to pick up on the racist drug war Harry J. Anslinger had begun forty years earlier. In an interview with author Dan Baum, former Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman provided further insight into the strategies the Republican Party has implemented ever since.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Harpers
In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. - Source: Policy.org
After Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal, and the election of Jimmy Carter, it was up to Ronald Reagan to restore the winning formula that had made the Southern Strategy and the “Law and Order" War on Drugs such an electoral success for the Republicans. He did so by teaming up with Jerry Falwell to bring evangelical Christians into the fold, re-energizing the Southern racists with his coded tale of a fictional Welfare queen, foreign policy hawks, and melding them with his already solid conservative base, and an ironic combination of blue collar workers and their wealthy corporate overlords, drunk with the elixir of anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-union, “Invisible Hands", free market, trickle down economics. The conservative fraternity of wealthy businessmen that had emerged in the 1930s as a reaction against Roosevelt’s New Deal saw in Reagan an ideal front man for advancing their ideology. Even though Reagan didn't really reduce the size of government, with annual spending averaging 22.4% of GDP on his watch, above today's 40-year average of 20.7%, and above the 20.8% average under Carter, his conservative backers generally were not disappointed. He delivered for them what they were after, discrediting the “Nanny” state and a significant transfer of wealth upward from the middle class to the wealthy barons of industry. The deficit and the size of government were apparently not that important. This was the perfect bait and switch.
When Reagan took office the top tax rate was 70% and after tax cuts in 1981 and 1986 that rate was slashed to 28%.
After Reagan's first year in office, the annual deficit was 2.6% of gross domestic product. But it hit a high of 6% in 1983, stayed in the 5% range for the next three years, and fell to 3.1% by 1988. Reagan was certainly a tax cutter legislatively, emotionally and ideologically. But for a variety of political reasons, it was hard for him to ignore the cost of his tax cuts," said tax historian Joseph Thorndike. Two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together "constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime," Thorndike said.
All this “trickle down” economic engineering resulted in a massive trickle up reality. Since the 1940s the median household income had kept even pace with worker productivity, but when Reagan took office the median household income leveled off while worker productivity continued to grow, thus began our “race to the bottom”.
Perhaps even more insidious was the Reagan administration's funding of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s through profits gleaned from the dumping of cheap crack cocaine in black neighborhoods in Los Angeles. This illegal activity was brought to light through Gary Webb's expose for the San Jose Mercury exposing the complicity of the White House and the CIA, which was chronicled in the movie "Kill the Messenger".
Webb's reporting uncovered the story of how tons of cocaine were shipped into San Francisco by supporters of the CIA-backed Contras and then distributed down to LA to a Nicaraguan named Danilo Blandon, who sold it to a street dealer from South Central, Freeway Rick Ross.
Through this connection Freeway Rick became a crack kingpin and also used his contacts with LA's Crips and Blood street gangs to help distribute crack to many other cities across the country. Huffington Post
Webb's official cause of death in 2004 as a suicide was dubious as he was shot twice in the face. The CIA has since admitted that it ruined Webb's career.
New documents released by the CIA show how the agency worked with some of the country’s largest newspapers to destroy San Jose Mercury News’ Gary Webb, a journalist who famously exposed the CIA’s connection to the cocaine trade in the “Dark Alliance” investigation. Prison Planet
Concurrent with the Iran Contra affair was the beginning of the increased penalties for drug offences in a ratcheting up of the War on Drugs by the Reagan Administration. These penalties focused heavily on crack rather than powder cocaine and therefore a disproportionate number of blacks were arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned than whites. While the Reagan Administration was dumping drugs into black ghettos, with the help of Congress they were passing new drug laws and harsher penalties, including the first mandatory minimum drug sentences in 1986 since the Boggs Act in 1951, and federal sentencing guidelines.
Under this new method of sentencing, which went into effect in 1987, prison time is determined mostly by the weight of the drugs involved in the offense. Parole was abolished and prisoners must serve 85 percent of their sentence. Except in rare situations, judges can no longer factor in the character of the defendant, the effect of incarceration on his or her dependents, and in large part, the nature and circumstances of the crime. The only way to receive a more lenient sentence is to act as an informant against others and hope that the prosecutor is willing to deal. The guidelines in effect stripped Article III of their sentencing discretion and turned it over to prosecutors. Alternet
Also, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 established a federal death penalty for "drug kingpins." President Reagan called it a new sword and shield in the escalating battle against drugs, and signed the bill in his wife's honor.
The Era of Mass Incarceration
The obsessive implementation of clearly racist drug policies has resulted in the U.S. achieving the dubious distinction of being first in the world in incarceration.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63. Source: New York Times
Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of those incarcerated are African Americans and Latinos. Between 1985 and 1995 the American prison population of drug offenders increased from 38,900 to 224,900 with African American males at the top. Approximately 12–13% of the American population is African-American, but they make up 35% of jail inmates, and 37% of prison inmates of the 2.2 million male inmates as of 2014 (U.S. Department of Justice, 2014). According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African Americans constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, and have nearly six times the incarceration rate of whites. At the end of 2012 of the convictions involving illegal drugs 64,800 (30.83%) were non-Hispanic white, 79,300 (37.73%) were non-Hispanic black and 41,100 (19.55%) were Hispanic. Source: Facts.org The leading cause of incarceration of an African American male is a non-violent drug offense. www.drugwarfacts.org/...
Bush, Clinton, Bush
The last 20 years between Reagan and Obama, saw many setbacks. What progress was achieved was hard fought and excruciatingly slow to develop. George H. W. Bush ran on the “Read my lips, no new taxes!" meme, but had no choice but to compromise with Congress to implement moderate tax increases in order to deal with the Reagan deficit. And with the Willy Horton ad which his 1988 campaign used to bludgeon Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, was another truly disgusting example of dog whistle politics which played to the racists’ fears for the state of white America.
Bill Clinton’s legacy is a mixed bag of progress, compromise, and co-opted conservative policies, and while his 1992 election had been seen as a ray of hope for liberals, their optimism faded during his two terms. He passed tax increases with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, stabilized and grew the economy while slowing the growing gap between worker productivity and median household income, eventually handing off a strong economy and budget surplus to George W.
The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries. Factcheck.org
Clinton also worked with Congress to pass the assault weapons ban in 1994, watered down and temporary as it was, it was the best anyone had done before or has since. But reviews are mixed on his support for NAFTA and his signing of anti-gay DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t tell were clearly setbacks for LGBT rights. Clinton also has had to answer for his anti-crime legislation and Welfare reform bill which both have had very clear regressive outcomes for minorities.
In 1994, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in history, which allocated $10 billion for prison construction, expanded the death penalty, and eliminated federal funding for inmate education. The act intensified police surveillance and racial profiling, and locked up millions for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession. It helped usher in the era of mass incarceration that devastated communities of color (for which Clinton himself has recently apologized). Jacobin
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ended traditional welfare by turning a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), into block grants, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) is been considered by many progressives as racist and anti-poor, and a victory for the Old Confederacy.
George W. Bush was a truly unmitigated disaster for this country. The circumstance of his “selection" by the SCOTUS was a defeat of existential proportions for the Democrats and the nation. He squandered the surplus he was handed by Clinton, cut taxes for the wealthy, cut regulations, ignored warnings about 911, started a completely unnecessary war in Iraq which he did not pay for, destabilizing both the Middle East and the U.S. with the Great Recession. We will be cimbing out of the hole he dug for decades to come.
And yet, Bush was a darling of Christian conservatives.
In early 2001, he worked with Republicans in Congress to pass legislation changing the way the federal government regulated, taxed and funded charities and non-profit initiatives run by religious organizations. Although prior to the legislation it was possible for these organizations to receive federal assistance, the new legislation removed reporting requirements, which required the organizations to separate their charitable functions from their religious functions. Bush also created the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. Days into his first term, Bush announced his commitment to channeling more federal aid to faith-based service organizations. Bush created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to assist faith-based service organizations. Critics claimed that this was an infringement of the separation of church and state.
Bush toed the line for “values voters” by opposing any progress in civil rights for the LGBT community.
As Governor of Texas, Bush had opposed efforts to repeal the criminal prohibition on "homosexual conduct", the same law that the United States Supreme Court overturned in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas. During the 2000 campaign he did not endorse a single piece of gay rights legislation, although he did meet with an approved group of Log Cabin Republicans [the gay Republican sub-group], a first for a Republican presidential candidate.
He maintained the status quo with DOMA and Don’t Ask, and threatened to veto the Matthew Shepard Act, which would have included sexual orientation in hate crimes.
On civil rights for blacks and other minorities, Bush generally opposed government sanctioned racial quotas, and affirmative action, but was all for paying lip service to private sector attempts to diversify their workforce. He did make some gains with African Americans by appointing Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice to the office of Secretary of State. Despite this, a 2009 report by the Congressional Budget Office citied a significant drop off in enforcement of civil rights laws during his administration.
The report represents a comprehensive review of the division’s litigation activity in the Bush administration. When compared with the Clinton administration, its findings show a significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws. For example, lawsuits brought by the division to enforce laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination in employment fell from about 11 per year under President Bill Clinton to about 6 per year under President George W. Bush.
The study also found a sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects, from more than four cases a year under Mr. Clinton to fewer than two cases a year under Mr. Bush. NYTimes.com
The Obama Effect
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 will go down as a turning point in the history of our nation. The fact that a mixed race, self-identified black man could become President seemed proof that, almost 150 years after the end of the Civil War, we had finally overcome the scourge of racism and discrimination in this country. Reasonable people of course knew that the singular event of electing Obama would not automatically end racism, but for one shining moment, anything seemed possible.
But the inheritors of the Old Confederacy, demoralized as they may have been, circled the wagons and decided they would not let this man, this black man, succeed. They would do anything to obstruct his policies and attempt to ensure that he only serve one term.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, quoted in National Journal, November 4, 2010
But the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House, at least for two years, and by the time Obama signed his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) into law on March 23, 2010, it was clear Obama had the Republicans back on their heels. Presidents had tried for over a century to pass comprehensive healthcare legislation, most recently when Bill Clinton tasked his wife, Hillary with the task, and failed. If the ACA worked as well as its model in Massachusetts, the whole conservative philosophy of small government and social Darwinism would be fatally wounded. Their cornerstone of tax cuts and minimal government regulations had already been roundly discredited by the Bush’s Great Recession, and this monumental achievement could be the end of modern conservativism and therefore the Republican Party. To rub salt in the wound for the Republicans was the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act.
Tucked into the parliamentary maneuver that rescued his health care law was a similarly radical reform of the trillion-dollar student loan program. When Biden’s wife, Jill, a professor at Northern Virginia, introduced Obama that day, she called it “another historic piece of legislation.” The House Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, complained that “today, the president will sign not one, but two job-killing government takeovers.”
Obamacare wasn’t really a government takeover, but the student loan overhaul actually was; it yanked the program away from Sallie Mae and other private lenders that had raked in enormous fees without taking much risk. The bill then diverted the budget savings into a $36 billion expansion of Pell Grants for low-income undergraduates, plus an unheralded but extraordinary student-debt relief effort that is now quietly transferring the burden of college loans from struggling borrowers to taxpayers. It all added up to a revolution in how America finances higher education, completely overshadowed by the health care hoopla and drama. Politico.com
And so the Republicans have spent almost eight years trying unsuccessfully to repeal “Obamacare” and obstruct every other program and initiative he has put forth. While they have managed to block Obama on many fronts, including refusing to consider his nominee for the Supreme Court, yet he has managed to turn many of their victories Pyrrhic. And oh, yeah, they also failed utterly to limit him to one term.
It’s true that Obama failed to create the post-partisan political change he originally promised during his yes-we-can pursuit of the White House. Washington remains as hyperpartisan and broken as ever. But he also promised dramatic policy change, vowing to reinvent America’s approach to issues like health care, education, energy, climate and finance, and that promise he has kept. When you add up all the legislation from his frenetic first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress, and all the methodical executive actions from the past five years, after Republicans blocked his legislative path, this has been a BFD of a presidency, a profound course correction engineered by relentless government activism. As a candidate, Obama was often dismissed as a talker, a silver-tongued political savant with no real record of achievement. But ever since he took office during a raging economic crisis, he’s turned out to be much more of a doer, an action-oriented policy grind who has often failed to communicate what he’s done. Politico
Now here we are. Obama’s tenure is coming to a close and the economy is solid, unemployment is under 5%, manufacturing has experienced the best growth since the 1990s, he saved the American automobile industry with record sales since he took office (in 2015 Detroit set an all-time record of 17.47 million vehicles sold), the stock market tripled, and 20 million people have gained health insurance for the first time. He has pulled it off with no scandals and in the face of unprecedented Republican obstruction.
This kind of record will place him in the pantheon of Presidential greats, and that is a source of great frustration to Republicans. Their briefs have been pulled up into a very serious wedgie.
Is Another Civil War Coming?
After two successful Obama terms and the impending ascendance of Hillary Clinton as the first woman President, the Republican Party is in shambles. The coalition of economic and social conservatives, Evangelicals, and racists they have relied upon for almost 50 years has blown up on them. Their Southern, white, racist, homophobe, misogynist base has been lied to repeatedly. They were assured Obama could not win one term, let alone two, that he was a Muslim born in Kenya, that he would be impeached, Obamacare would be repealed, their guns were going to be taken away, gays would never be allowed to marry, the economy was going to tank, Benghazi was the worst thing to happen since . . . well, since slavery, Hillary was going to be indicted for Benghazi, or her emails, or for the Clinton Foundation, and that she would be in jail by now. They are quite pissed. I’d be pissed too, if I were them. But fortunately, I’m NOT them.
And the GOP mainstream, mainly the Economic conservatives, who leveraged the Southern Strategy to enable their trickle down, build from the top down, policies, are panicking. They have nominated a completely incompetent racist, misogynist, sexual predator, racketeering, reality TV personality as their nominee. If projections hold true, they are about to lose not only the Presidency but the Senate as well. They still have their gerrymandered lock on the House of Representatives — at least they hope they do. The only thing they have left is complete war, another American Civil War. Paul Waldman of the Washington Post writes:
. . . something truly frightening is happening, something with far-reaching implications for the immediate future of American politics. Republicans, led by Donald Trump but by no means limited to him, are engaging in kind of termite-level assault on American democracy, one that looks on the surface as though it’s just aimed at Hillary Clinton, but in fact is undermining our entire system.
Consider his main points. There appears to be sort of mini civil war going on already within the FBI, and certain agents within the agency are Trump supporters who are actively leaking information in a effort to derail Hillary’s campaign. This is not unlike the harassment MLK experienced at the command of J. Edgar Hoover.
They succeeded in their apparent goal of making FBI director James Comey a tool of their campaign — and the basis for their investigation is an anti-Clinton book written under the auspices of an organization of which the CEO of the Trump campaign is co-founder and chairman. Pro-Trump FBI agents now seem to be coordinating with Trump surrogates to do maximal possible damage to Clinton.
The Russians are blatently hacking into Democratic National Committee computers in an effort to undermine the election, especially Hillary Clinton. Trump has encouraged it and regularly praised Putin, and except for a minor rant by Marco Rubio, they seem okay with it. And high-ranking Republican officeholders like Wisconsin Senator, Ron Johnson, are “now suggesting that they may impeach Clinton as soon as she takes office.” And as they can not bear the thought of Scalia’s replacement being appointed by Hillary, they are upping their ante of obstructionism by indicating they will block any nominee of Clinton. This would hobble the SCOTUS with a 4-4 ideological split, and give Republicans at least better odds with some of the conservative leaning lower courts, when the upper court is unable to reach any majority decision. This will effectively unbalance the federal government as they undermine one of the three essential branches of government, put in place by our founding fathers as necessary to the system of checks and balances. This would be a grand victory for states rights proponents.
Although Republicans constantly complain about the Democrats committing voter fraud, they are the only ones actually engaging in it.
State and local Republican officials are engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans and other groups likely to vote disproportionately Democratic; in many cases officials have been ordered by courts to stop their suppression efforts and they have simply ignored the court orders.
And finally many Republican leaders, including Trump, seem to be suggesting Hillary be jailed and even assassinated. Trump has suggested a 2nd Amendment solution and his supporters are frequently quoted as saying she will be taken out “by any means necessary”. Of course these Trumplicans are cut from the same cloth as the paranoid, anti-government, racist, armed militia members who staged the stand-off at the Bundy Ranch and who seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. They are angry, ignorant, armed to the teeth and itching for a fight.
Are there left wing extremists out there, ready to fight? Sure, a few. Like the black vet who shot and killed five police officers in Dallas this year. But they are not a part of the Democratic party, or the Black Lives Matter movement for that matter, and the party is not embracing violence and wild conspiracy theories like the Republicans. It is the Republicans and their zombies warriors who are the actual belligerents in all this. This from Waldman’s closing.
But there’s only one party that is so vigorously undermining core democratic institutions in this way. You may not like what Democrats stand for, but they aren’t engaging in widespread official vote suppression, chanting that should their candidate win her opponent should be tossed in jail, promising to prevent any Republican president from filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, suggesting that they’ll try to impeach their opponent as soon as he takes office, cheering when a hostile foreign power hacks into American electronic systems, and trying to use the FBI to win the election. Washington Post
In a profound irony, the Democrats have become the defenders of the Union while the former Republicans, the Party of Lincoln; and the current perversion of Republicans have likewise become the rebel Confederates— the Democrats. It has taken a century-and-a-half to develop. Some of the civil rights issues of today, were not even on the proverbial radar during the first Civil War, but almost all of these arguments today have a linear connection to issues of civil rights, rural vs. urban economies, and the power of the federal government over states. Regardless who wins this election, we may facing not only protracted political battles, but some genuine kind of shooting war, a second Civil War if you will. Maybe not. Hopefully not.
The election is tomorrow. We will know soon enough. But, sadly, it seems closer to reality now than anytime in modern history.