Demonic (28 page)

A friend of Wilson said that with him running the country, “Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race.”
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There’s your post-racial Democratic Party.

A crucial part of the Democrats’ victim folklore is that they have been losing the South to Republicans over the past half century because the Democrats stood on principle to oppose race discrimination, while the Republican Party pandered to racists in the South—a region of the country liberals believe is composed primarily of Klan members. (That might be your first clue as to why Southerners don’t like liberals.) The Republican Party’s allegedly racist appeal to Southerners is darkly referred to seventeen times a day in the mainstream media as the “Southern Strategy.”

In 1996, R. W. Apple, then–New
York Times
Washington bureau chief, casually referred to “the Republican Party’s recent record as the vehicle of white supremacy in the South beginning with the Goldwater campaign and reaching its apex in Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ in 1968 and 1972.”
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Apple continued, “Republicans appealed to Nixon Democrats (later Reagan Democrats) in the northern suburbs, many of them ethnic voters who had left the cities to escape from blacks, with promises to crack
down on welfare cheats and to impose law and order, and they fought against affirmative action.”
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It never dawns on liberals that people might actually want to crack down on welfare cheats, impose law and order, and abolish racially discriminatory “affirmative action” plans. In any event, Nixon wasn’t one of them: He invented affirmative action. Apple’s statement was the opposite of the truth.

In 2002, Jack White, which I believe is a pen name for Keith Olbermann, wrote an article for
Time
magazine online accusing the Republican Party of having a “four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting.” White said Reagan “set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.”
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To insult Republicans, liberals compare them to Democrats.

In 2008,
Newsweek
matter-of-factly reported, “In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like ‘law and order’ to exploit racial fears as part of his ‘Southern Strategy.’ ”
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In fact, it was Eisenhower who broke the Democrats’ hold on the South in 1952, and if anyone was appealing to bigots that year, it wasn’t Eisenhower. Democrat Adlai Stevenson, known to experience “personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes,”
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chose as his running mate John Sparkman of Alabama, a Democrat segregationist.

And yet the Old South—which according to mainstream media accounts voted Republican solely out of racial resentment—suddenly started voting Republican in 1952. Ike carried Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida outright, and nearly stole Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia from Stevenson. (Eisenhower lost Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent and lost West Virginia and South Carolina by fewer than 4 percentage points.) This was just four years after Democrat-turned-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond won four Southern states. But running with a segregationist didn’t help Stevenson in the South a few years later.

Then, in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
that desegregated public schools; the Democratic platform did not, and would not, as long as Democrats were winning elections by appealing to the racist mob. This led the black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to break with his party and endorse Eisenhower for president.

Governor Orval Faubus, progressive New Deal Democrat, blocked the schoolhouse door to the Little Rock Central High School with the state’s National Guard rather than allow nine black students to attend. In response, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out of Faubus’s hands. Then he sent the 101st Airborne Division to walk the black children to school and stay with them throughout the day.

Eisenhower implemented the 1948 executive order President Truman had issued—but then ignored—desegregating the military. Also unlike Truman, Eisenhower hired blacks for prominent positions in his administration, such as assistant secretary of Labor (J. Ernest Wilkens), chairman of the U.S. Board of Parole (Scovel Richardson), UN delegate from the United States (Charles Mahoney), administrative officer on White House staff (Fredrick Morrow), minister to Romania (Clifton R. Wharton), and members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (George M. Johnson and J. Ernest Wilkens).
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It was Republicans who overwhelmingly introduced, promoted, and passed every civil rights act from the end of the Civil War right up to and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Eisenhower pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, written by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, guaranteeing black voting rights, to be enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice.

During the endless deliberation on Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats, “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again.” Senator Sam Ervin, another liberal luminary—instrumental in the destruction of anti-communist Republicans Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon—told his fellow segregationists, “I’m on your side, not theirs,” and advised them to face up to the fact that “we’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.”
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As president of the Senate, Vice President Richard Nixon “came down strongly on the side of civil rights,” as even Robert Caro admits, by issuing an advisory opinion that the filibuster could be stopped with a simple majority vote changing Senate rules.
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Meanwhile, Democrat Lyndon Johnson gutted the enforcement provisions of the 1957 bill to nothing: Anyone accused of violating a person’s voting rights was
guaranteed a jury trial—and, consequently, jury nullification by Democratic juries.

Republican senator Charles Potter stood on crutches in the well of the Senate, having lost both legs in World War II, to denounce LBJ’s killer amendments, saying, “I fought beside Negroes in the war. I saw them die for us. For the Senate of the United States to repay these valiant men … by a watered-down version of this legislation would make a mockery of the democratic concept we hold so dear.”
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Even in its watered-down form—thanks, Democrats!—all eighteen “nay” votes came from the Democrats.

The following year, President Eisenhower introduced a bill to create the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and to fix the enforcement provisions of the 1957 civil rights bill that had been gutted by the Democrats. In response, Democrats staged the longest filibuster in history—more than 125 hours. But in the end, the bill passed and was signed into law by Eisenhower on May 6, 1960.

The Senate vote on the 1960 Civil Rights Act was 71–18. Once again, every single vote against a civil rights bill came from a Democrat, including legendary liberal, hero of Watergate, Sam Ervin.
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Representative George McGovern voted “present.” He would also be the Democrats’ candidate for president in 1972.
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The vote of the Tennessee delegation in the House was typical: The two Republicans from Tennessee voted for the 1960 civil rights bill, the six Democrats from the state voted against.
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Until 1964, every civil rights act had presented no possible constitutional problems—those federal laws were fully within Congress’s enumerated powers to enact because they were directed at government officials (Democrats) who were violating the Constitution by denying black citizens the right to vote.

Federal laws aimed at discrimination by government actors are expressly within Congress’s authority under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Democrats opposed these civil rights laws not because of any questions about Congress’s authority to enact them—they couldn’t care less about the Constitution—but because they wanted to keep discriminating.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was again supported overwhelmingly by
Republicans and less so by Democrats. As with the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, it was Republicans who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act by huge majorities, with a distinctly smaller majority of Democrats supporting it. In the Senate, for example, 82 percent of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared with only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans supported the ’64 bill, compared with only 63 percent of Democrats.

The only reason Democratic majorities were beginning to support civil rights for blacks was that by 1964—thanks to Republican voting rights acts—more blacks were voting. Democrats couldn’t keep winning elections in some parts of the country by appealing to the racist mob. As Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia had explained years earlier, “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” saying the Democrats sought to “remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally,
without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate
.”
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The Democrats’ position on civil rights depended on where the votes were.

Of course, there were some serious civil rights champions among Democrats in the twentieth century—we’ve been hearing endless panegyrics to them our entire lives. This is the history you’ve never read.

Although Democrats act as if the 1964 act was the only civil rights act that ever mattered, it is a curious fact that, as Thomas Sowell says, “the rise of blacks into the professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in all the years following passage of that act.”
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Once the Democrats got involved, civil rights became just another racket with another mob. Unlike previous civil rights laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included provisions aimed at purely private actors, raising the hackles of some constitutional purists, notably Barry Goldwater, the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee. Goldwater, like the rest of his party, had supported every single civil rights bill until the 1964 act. But he broke with the vast majority of his fellow Republicans to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Like many other conservatives opposed to a living, growing, breathing Constitution, Goldwater actually opposed only two of the seven major provisions of the bill—those regulating privately owned housing
and public accommodations. But there were other provisions he would have made tougher. For example, Goldwater wanted to make it mandatory that federal funds be withheld from programs practicing discrimination, rather than discretionary, as President Kennedy had requested.
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Goldwater was a vehement foe of segregation. He was a founder of the NAACP in Arizona, donating the equivalent of several thousand dollars to the organization’s efforts to integrate the public schools. When he was head of the Arizona National Guard, he had integrated the state Guard before Harry Truman announced he was integrating the U.S. military. As the
Washington Post
said, Goldwater “ended racial segregation in his family department stores, and he was instrumental in ending it in Phoenix schools and restaurants and in the Arizona National Guard.”
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But he was also a believer in limited government. It was, after all, racist Democratic politicians in the South using the force of the government to violate private property rights by enforcing the Jim Crow laws in the first place. As Sowell points out, it wasn’t the private bus companies demanding that blacks sit in the back of the bus, it was the government.
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Goldwater not only had personally promoted desegregation, he belonged to a party that had been fighting for civil rights for the previous century against Democratic obstructionism. Lyndon Johnson voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure in the Senate. But by the time he became president, he had flipped 180 degrees. Appealing to regional mobs wouldn’t work with a national electorate.

Unlike mob-appeasing Democrats, Goldwater based his objections to certain parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on purely constitutional principles. Along with other constitutional purists in the Republican Party, Goldwater opposed federal initiatives in a lot of areas, not just those involving race. By contrast, segregationist Democrats routinely criticized the exercise of federal power and expenditure of federal funds when it involved ending discrimination against blacks—but gladly accepted federal pork projects for their states.

It would be as if, after fighting the Democrats for a hundred years over the issue of abortion, Republicans finally got
Roe v. Wade
overturned, and then, out of pure political calculation, Democrats jumped
on the bandwagon and demanded a federal law outlawing abortion. Some pro-life Republicans would probably object that federal law outlawing abortion is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers. On the basis of Republicans’ constitutional objections, Democrats would then reverse the entire history of the pro-life movement and start claiming the Democratic Party alone fought to end abortion in America. That is exactly what they have done with the history of civil rights.

This is why idiots like Bill Maher can make jokes like this (about the 2010 Republican sweep of Congress)—“I haven’t seen Republicans so happy about taking seats since they made Rosa Parks stand up.”
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When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the mayor of Montgomery enforcing segregation on the buses was—of course—a segregationist Democrat, William A. “Tacky” Gayle.
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