Political Hypocrites
I recently ordered a book “by” my Congressman, Troy Nehls, which I thought was going to be about the events of January 6 in which he played a part. (Congressman Nehls, who was formerly our sheriff and is a retired US Army reserve officer, dissuaded the protestors from entering the House chamber.) Excited when I received the book, I was dismayed when I started reading and realized it was probably ghost-written by “conservative” Indian immigrant pundit and self-styled conservative Dinesh D’Souza. Rhetoric in the book is identical to D’Souza’s rantings in his films, particularly his attempts to associate the Democratic Party with slavery and “white supremacy” and the Republican Party with freeing the slaves. D’Souza wrote the forward to the book. (I personally wish Congressman Nehls hadn’t got mixed up with D’Souza, whose reputation is less than stellar.) I understand that Nehls, who I like and support, would follow the anti-slavery line since, although he’s spent much of his adult life in Texas, he is from Wisconsin where the Republican Party was born, and which was strongly anti-slavery.
Slavery has become the whipping boy of both black politicians and activists, especially those seeking reparations, and some Republicans who seem to think that linking the Democratic Party to the antislavery movement of the 1850s, the Civil War and Reconstruction, gives them some kind of moral high ground. (For the record, although I tend to vote for Republicans – and detest Democrats – I consider myself independent. Texas is one of about twenty states that doesn’t register voters by political party. The only connection to party is which primary one votes in.) They try to somehow connect slavery to the American South, which was actually only one part of the world where slavery existed. In fact, there were slaves in ALL the colonies, and it continued in the states. (Although northern states passed laws abolishing slavery, in many, emancipation was gradual. There were slaves in “free states” into the 1840s. New York’s abolition law provided that slavery wouldn’t end until 1827.) Slaves became more prevalent in the South because of the warm climate and its suitability to the production of certain labor-intensive crops, particularly tobacco, rice and cotton. (For the truth about slavery, read my article on my Word Press account – The Truth About Slavery.) Contrary to the claims of the New York Times, slavery did not originate in Virginia when the White Lion traded some twenty slaves it had captured on a Portuguese slave ship to the Jamestown colony for provisions. Slavery actually goes back to the beginnings of the human race and was common throughout the world until the nineteenth century when Great Britain and other European countries began abolishing it. Spanish and Portuguese colonists made slaves of Amerindians then began importing slaves from Africa. The first slaves in what is now the United States were in Florida. The White Lion’s “cargo” were slaves who were on their way to Mexico on a Portuguese slave ship when it was captured by an English ship sailing under a Dutch letter of marque. (Considering the climate of Mexico and the harsh conditions imposed on slaves by the Spaniards, the Africans were probably better off in Virginia.)
Democrats may have slavery, but Republicans have a bigger problem – the party was founded by socialists and Marxists. The Republican Party was established in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin by politically progressive men. Many were socialist and some were communist, though not necessarily with a capital C. Founder Horace Greely was a long-time socialist and had communist leanings, if he wasn’t an outright communist. A New Englander, Greely had made his mark as a newspaper publisher. Alvan Bovay, the other founder, was also a New Englander who had moved to Wisconsin and was a diehard abolitionist. The stated goal of the new party was to bring an end to slavery. What Republicans don’t acknowledge (and may not know) was that the party was heavily influenced by none other than Karl Marx, who had adopted communism and, along with Frederick Engels, wrote and published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Marx and Engel’s pal, Joseph Wedemeyer, who was head of the League of Communists in Frankfurt before he immigrated to the United States, was charged with getting Marx’s Communist Manifesto published in the US. Marx told him he could pocket the profits.
Wedemeyer is not the father of communism in the United States, however. The Communist League of America, made up primarily of German immigrants, was established in New York and Philadelphia in the late spring of 1847. Wedemeyer founded the American Workers League in 1853. He joined the Republican Party and campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. He was an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War but continued working for Marxist/communist causes. He died an untimely death from cholera at age 48 a few months after the Union victory. Wedemeyer was hardly the only Marxist to come to America and join the Republican Party. Its ranks were full of them, and many would become high-ranking officers in the Union Army. (The Union Army was heavy with immigrants, particularly Germans, many of whom barely spoke English. Years after the war, Annie Hawkins, who was a teenager during the war in Carroll County, Tennessee, wrote of her experiences. She described the Union troops who ransacked her family’s farm and brutally slaughtered their livestock as foreigners with strange accents.) The attitude of the German officers was expressed by one who accosted Confederate General Richard Taylor after he surrendered his troops. Taylor’s surrender came almost a month after Appomattox, and after Lincoln’s assassination by a disgruntled actor. The German general, who was subordinate to General Canby to whom Taylor surrendered, began lecturing Taylor on how they would teach him what America was about. Canby and other officers tried to stop the German immigrant, but he rambled on until Taylor, whose ancestry in America went back to 1608, his ancestors fought in the Revolution, and whose father had been president and who had been a member of the Louisiana legislature before the war, shut him up by advising him who he was.
In 1848, revolution erupted in Europe where groups of socialist intellectuals attempted to overthrow the monarchies and establish central governments instead of states. The revolutions failed. Many of the revolutionaries fled their countries to avoid prosecution and possible execution. Many of them, particularly Germans, immigrated to the United States where large numbers of Germans had previously immigrated. Thousands of German revolutionaries, as many as many as 4,000, many with Marxist leanings, came to the United States. (Marx was a German intellectual and revolutionary. He fled Germany when the revolution failed and ended up in London.) The Forty-Eighters, as they called themselves, settled in regions populated by German immigrants and began an effort to convert German-Americans to the revolutionary cause. Several established German language newspapers in which they advanced their socialist views. Many of the Forty-Eighters had adopted the principles of Karl Marx and some were members of the League of Communists. The Forty-Eighters, most of them, were staunch abolitionists, although their true motives are somewhat in doubt. Their goal seems to have been to continue the revolution in the United States using northern factory workers and slaves in the South, which they intended to free, to establish a political party to take over the American government. Many of them, perhaps most, joined the fledgling Republican Party.
There has been a German presence in what is now the United States since long before the Founding. I have German ancestry myself. My German ancestor was an Anabaptist who left Germany for Pennsylvania early in the eighteenth century to avoid persecution by Catholics and Lutherans. He later migrated southward to Carolina and settled in what is now South Carolina just south of Charlotte. His daughter, my paternal grandmother’s ancestor, married a Scottish immigrant. Large numbers of Germans and Irish immigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Germans who were attracted by low-cost land in the Northwest and Irish fleeing the Potato Famine. I also have Irish ancestry, although I’m not sure if they were Irish or Scots-Irish. They were in the US by 1840 so their immigration predated the Potato Famine. While large numbers of Irish settled in New England, Germans moved further west into what was then the Northwest, a region formerly part of Virginia, and settled in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin. Some settled in the South, particularly in Texas. Earlier German immigrants had settled in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia while others made their way further south, as did my ancestors.
German revolutionaries had a large influence, particularly in the Republican Party, but America had its homegrown socialists, one of whom was Horace Greely who had been influenced by Fourierism, a set of beliefs that is basically utopian socialism. More than a hundred groups, many headed by European immigrants, formed communes in New England and the Midwest. Many espoused socialism. One such colony, established by Welsh utopian socialist Robert Owens in New Harmony, Indiana, is said to have influenced Abraham Lincoln who lived near there as a boy. Greely, a declared socialist, is credited as the founder of the Republican Party. He published articles by Marx, who he had met on a trip to Europe, in his paper, the New York Tribune, which became the official newspaper of the Republican Party. The Tribune editor was Charles A. Dana, who was close to Marx and leaned toward communism if he wasn’t an outright party member. Dana had studied in Germany then lived on the Brook Farm commune in Roxbury, Massachusetts for five years, where he was heavily involved in the administration and published the commune newspaper. He had also been exposed to Fourierism. He was in Europe in 1848 and wrote articles about the revolution for The Tribune. He met Marx in Cologne. Marx was a regular contributor to the paper until 1862 when Dana was forced to resign and the paper changed its editorial stance from the staunch abolitionism of Greely and Dana to a more moderate position calling for a negotiated end to the costly and extremely deadly war with slavery left in place. After leaving the Tribune, Dana went to work for Secretary of War Stanton, who used him as a special investigator. He would become under-Secretary of War in the Lincoln Administration and was personal friends with General U.S. Grant. He pushed Grant to Stanton and Lincoln to be given command of the Union Army.
Although he is often called an economist, a philosopher, intellectual, novelist and whatever, Marx was foremost a revolutionary. He saw himself as fostering a worldwide revolution, the last world revolution during which the “working man” would take over the world. He was violently opposed to “aristocrats,” meaning landowners. He sought a worldwide revolution against the aristocracy (landowners) and saw the United States and Russia as the two places best suited to begin it. He sought the abolition of slavery in the United States after which the freed slaves would unite with factory workers in the North to establish a socialist/communist government. Marx and Engels, who wrote or translated some of Marx’s missives, were strong abolitionists. They argued that Lincoln should make the Civil War an effort to free the slaves rather than to restore the Constitutional Union, a typical revolutionist attitude. They were far from alone, abolitionists and Radical Republicans were also pushing Lincoln to make the war about slavery rather than restoring the Union. Many of Marx’s articles were aimed at preventing the British from recognizing and supporting the new Confederacy. England needed cotton to keep its mills running and Marx and Engels feared the British, who openly proclaimed the legality of secession (England’s North American colonies had seceded from the British Empire) would recognize the Confederacy to get Southern cotton. Marx claimed that Manchester mill workers were willing to lose their jobs to fight slavery. There’s no doubt that Marx and Engels’ articles were read by members of the new Republican Party. The New York Tribune was the “official” newspaper of the Republican Party, and it was widely read. Its articles were republished in other newspapers.
Although Quakers in Pennsylvania first proposed the abolition of slavery in the late seventeenth century along with their English fellows, the abolitionist movement in the United States came out of New England, which had been populated by the descendants of English Puritans. Most Americans associate Puritans with passengers on the Mayflower (who had a number of indentured servants with them, including children). However, they were two separate entities. The Mayflower passengers were Separatists, who had separated from the Church of England and left England for Holland. Fearing that their children would become Dutch, they decided to obtain a charter to establish a settlement in America. Their charter was not for New England, but rather for Virginia which extended north to the Hudson River. They were blown off course and landed first near Cape Cod but didn’t debark. They attempted to continue their journey to the Hudson but were unsuccessful. Rather than attempting to sail to Virginia, where they had been chartered to settle, they decided to establish a settlement in Massachusetts, which was not part of Virginia. They had no charter to settle there but they established the Plymouth Colony. Meanwhile, Puritans, who believed the Church of England should be “purified’ and included Oliver Cromwell, feared they were losing ground in England, so they sought a charter from the Massachusetts Bay Company to establish a settlement in Massachusetts. They landed at Salem in 1630 – a decade after the Separatists landed at Plymouth – and spread out from there. The Puritans would eventually overwhelm and absorb the Separatists at Plymouth.
There is only one term to describe the Puritans – self-righteous. Although they professed to believe in the grace of John Calvin, they were actually religious dictators, as were the Separatists although not to the same degree. Their government was only by members of the church. Incidentally, Puritans owned slaves as well as indentures. Their self-righteousness and radicalism led to the Salem Witch Hunts of the 1690s. The movement began having problems when the children of the original settlers didn’t exhibit the religious conversion experience of their parents, so they established the “half-way covenant” allowing church members who had not shown evidence of conversion. Puritans later became Congregationalists because of their form of church government, although some adopted Presbyterianism, church rule by elders at various levels as opposed to local church governance. A characteristic of the Puritans was their tendency to dictate to others. Some of the Puritan descendants who had become Presbyterians and Congregationalists became rabid abolitionists. Abolitionist preachers such as Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, whose sister Harriet would write the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, began referring to slavery as “the sin of America,” a phrase commonly used today by leftists. (It wasn’t – if America has a sin, it was the treatment of the natives who were here when the Europeans came in and took the land, by Papal and royal decree.) Beecher, who shipped rifles to Kansas for John Brown and his band in crates marked “Bibles”, saying they would do more good than Bibles, would later be accused of and tried for the actual sin of adultery.
The Republican Party was founded largely in response to Senator Stephen A. Douglas’ Nebraska-Kansas Act, which established that the question of slavery should be left up to the residents of the new states established in US territories. The act nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which decreed that slavery would not be allowed in any territory or state north of 36’30”, a line corresponding to the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. Kentucky was a slave state but it was already part of the Union when the compromise was instituted. Most of Missouri lies north of the line but Congress allowed it to come into the Union as a slave state while Maine was admitted as a “free”, or non-slave, state. Kansas lies immediately to the west of Missouri and that’s where the problems arose. “Free-soilers,” who were opposed to slavery, recruited groups of New Englanders to move to Kansas so they could vote against slavery. The imports even formed their own government in opposition to the pro-slavery government that had already been established. Missourians, who the free-soilers called “border ruffians”, only had to cross the border into Kansas, and many did, and take their slaves with them. Some free-soilers, particularly those affiliated with John Brown, a radical New Englander, were violent. Some Forty-Eighters supported them. Abolitionists in New England shipped Sharps rifles to Kansas in crates marked “Bibles.” To conceal the contents, a layer of Bibles was placed on top and the rifles were underneath. Famed Congregationalist preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher raised money to purchase the rifles. Beecher’s New York City church came to be known as “Beecher’s Bible and Rifle Company.” Brown and some of his followers brutally murdered slave-owners in front of their families in Pottawatomie, a Kansas settlement near the Missouri border. Brown and his men were retaliating against the “sacking” of Lawrence, a settlement established by free-soilers from Massachusetts. Although the raid on Lawrence was bloodless, except for the accidental death of one of the pro-slavery raiders, Brown used it as an excuse to draw blood. Even though Federal and state governments made it illegal to raise money for organizations in Kansas, which was a Federal territory, the Federal government refused to send troops to end the carnage. As it turned out, the situation in Kansas wouldn’t be settled until Southern members of Congress left after secession and the remaining members voted Kansas into the Union as a free state. Brown was hung for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia for attempting to incite a – failed – slave revolt. He was lauded after his death by Republicans, particularly German Forty-Eighters, some of whom had supported him in Kansas.
Horace Greely’s goal when he established the Republican Party was to take over American politics. He hoped to build a party so strong that it would be able to overcome the power of Democrats and somehow eliminate slavery by legislative action. Some Republicans, particularly Thaddeus Stevens, not only wanted to eliminate slavery, they also wanted to eliminate the Southern white population and repopulate the South with Northerners. (Although this sounds outlandish, it is an established fact. Stevens even told former Confederate general Richard Taylor, the son of President Zachary Taylor, that his goal had been to kill all the Southern white people and distribute their lands among the freed slaves.) It was said of Stevens that “he wanted to see the white men, especially the white women, of the South writhing under negro domination.” Although none of the Congressional Republicans known as “Radicals” were Forty-Eighters, there is no doubt that they were supported by some of the former European revolutionaries and were influenced by them. Horace Greely was a radical and his paper was the Radical Republican rag. This raises a question – how much was Lincoln influenced by Marx?
For all practical purposes, Lincoln was a socialist although once he became a lawyer, he was heavily involved with corporate interests as a lawyer for the railroads. He supported the European revolutionaries and welcomed their support in his bid for president. Abraham Lincoln is touted as a self-educated man but his education must not have included the Constitution. Lincoln somehow developed the convoluted opinion that the Federal government and the Union was superior to the states. His view was in contradiction to those of Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who actually wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, who believed individual states had the right to “nullify” laws passed by Congress. They were opposed to President John Adams’ – Jefferson was Adams’ vice-president – Alien and Sedition Act and influenced Kentucky to pass legislation nullifying the act. Madison even wrote the legislation for the Kentucky legislature. The issue was not settled and nullification would again become an issue when South Carolina passed legislation nullifying tariffs on cotton imposed by Congress. Southerners believed the tariffs were implemented to benefit northern industry (which they were). President Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, threatened to send troops to South Carolina to force the state to comply with the tariffs. “States Rights” became a major issue and stood in the way of Republican plans to abolish slavery politically. States Rights, not slavery, became the primary reason for the secession of the Southern states. Although the Constitution and Federal law did not address the issue, Lincoln adopted the belief that “the Union” existed before the Founding and that the rights of the states were bestowed by it, rather than the states having control over the Federal government, as both Jefferson and Madison believed.
After the Civil War ended, the Radicals wanted to punish the South, although this had not been Lincoln’s intent. In fact, the Radicals broke with Lincoln over his stated policies. Lincoln, who was a moderate although some of his views were convoluted, wanted to restore the Union. Radical Republicans, who believed seceded Southerners no longer had Constitutional rights – they passed a bill requiring Southerners to swear a loyalty oath that they had never supported secession, which Lincoln promptly vetoed - did not want to see the Constitutional Union restored, they wanted to destroy the South – and, once they got Andrew Johnson, who sought to follow Lincoln’s policies, out of the way, they set out to do just that. They would probably have been successful except for one thing – the former Confederate soldiers, who had taken a loyalty oath to the Union, were not about to allow it.
One of the most radical of the radicals was Tennessee governor William G. “Parson” Brownlow. So-called because he had once been a circuit-riding Methodist minister as well as a newspaper publisher, Brownlow, who became Tennessee governor after Andrew Johnson became vice-president, wanted to severely punish his state’s residents who had supported the Confederacy. Although he had once supported slavery, he changed his views and became an abolitionist. An ardent Whig, he attacked his political opponents in his paper. He was imprisoned for a time during the war but was released. His first act as governor was to submit the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery, for ratification. The legislature, which was essentially a puppet organization propped up by the Union Army, ratified the Amendment and Tennessee was readmitted to the Union. Brownlow then submitted legislation enfranchising freed male slaves, but he also prohibited anyone who had supported the Confederacy from voting for at least five years.
In May 1866, a group of former Confederate officers got together in the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones in Pulaski, Tennessee. The judge was not present. His son, Calvin, was the host. The young men, who had been made idle after the war, decided to form a social organization made up of Confederate veterans and invite others to join. They appointed committees then adjourned to meet again at another location. One of the men was house-sitting for a prominent citizen who had gone on a business trip and took his family. At the next meeting, they discussed what to call their organization and one of them suggested the term Ku Klux Klan, a term based on the Greek word kuklos which means a band or circle. Most, if not all, of those present were staunch Presbyterians of Scottish ancestry hence the term “klan”. The name was meaningless. The new organization’s purpose was purely social. They decided to make it secret for entertainment. When they next met, the rules committee revealed their ideas. They were modified and accepted. Officers with meaningless names would be selected. Allegedly, the Grand Cyclops was former Confederate cavalryman General Nathan Bedford Forrest, but Forrest denied membership in the organization. Another general, General George Gordon, who was from Pulaski and under whom many of the founders had served, was alleged by his wife to have been the Grand Wizard. There is no doubt that Gordon, who was from Pulaski, played a large role in the formation of the organization. Reports of Forrest’ involvement are more conjecture than fact. It was allegedly revealed many years after his death that he was in charge. Since the Klan was a secret organization, details have never been revealed. Leftists today represent the Klan as being made up of “white supremacists” but it was actually an organization of Confederate veterans who resorted to secrecy to oppose Brownlow and his Radical Republicans who were seeking to destroy them.
At first, the Klan was purely social. They discovered by accident that local negroes were afraid of them. They changed their meeting place to an abandoned mansion outside of Pulaski that had been partially destroyed by a tornado and posted guards in outlandish costumes at the entrance road. When local negroes passed by and asked who they were, the guards would reply in a ghostly voice that “I was killed at Chickamauga” or some other famous battle. The superstitious negroes fled in terror. Members soon noticed that the negroes, who had been “disorderly” since emancipation, suddenly started acting properly. They also realized they could use their secrecy and costumes, which WERE NOT white sheets and pointed hoods, to fight back against Brownlow’s personal militia, which was made up of Unionists and former colored troops, and against carpetbaggers and the Loyal Leagues, who were causing all kinds of problems in Tennessee and throughout the South. The Loyal Leagues, which have been practically obliterated from history, were the outgrowth of men’s organizations organized during the war in the North to support the Union and the Republican Party. After the war, free black organizers from the North went south and began organizing new Loyal Leagues of freedmen. Emboldened by their new freedom and the knowledge that the Union Army was protecting them, Loyal Leaguers conducted a reign of terror as they burned barns and otherwise threatened former Confederates. Former Confederate soldiers had taken an oath of loyalty and could not fight back, but the cloak of secrecy of the Klan allowed them to retaliate against the Loyal Leagues, which were affiliated with the Radical Republicans. (Noted black activist and NAACP founder Ida B. Well’s father was a member.) They could also intimidate Northern “carpetbaggers” and Southern “scalawags,” men who had been Unionists, and Brownlow’s militia. Klan tactics were intimidation but if that didn’t work, they were not above resorting to murder.
Violence broke out throughout Tennessee, particularly in counties where there had been strong Southern sympathy. Brownlow retaliated with his militias, who insured that former Confederates could not vote while former slaves could. Republicans talk about how blacks were elected to office after the war, while leaving out that most whites were prohibited from voting – by the United States Army in most states. Tennessee was an exception because Reconstruction did not apply there. Brownlow’s militias, however, did. Brownlow put a number of Tennessee counties under martial law, which only increased the Klan’s power. The violence finally ceased – and the Klan disbanded – in 1869 after Brownlow had himself appointed to the Senate and left Tennessee for Washington. His successor, Dewitt Clinton Senter, initially supported Brownlow’s initiatives but changed his mind after he became governor and came to realize they were causing harm to the state. He consequently undid most of Brownlow’s work and restored the right to vote to former Confederates. Senter was ostracized by Radicals, who effectively ended his political career.
Although the Klan no longer existed, violence continued in the South and Northern newspapers blamed it on the non-existent Klan. (A second version of the Klan would organize, but not until 1915 when Southerners felt the need to organize in opposition to the relentless efforts of Northern Jews to exonerate convicted murderer Leo Frank, an effort that led to the founding of the Jewish Antidefamation League.) Former General U.S. Grant, who had been elected president, knew the Klan had disbanded as did his cabinet and members of Congress but Congress passed three laws aimed at the no longer existent Klan and his attorney general, Amos Ackerman, a former Confederate colonel, used them to prosecute Southerners for impeding the rights of freedmen. Congress passed a law establishing a new Department of Justice and elevated the role of the attorney general to that of chief prosecutor, an effort aimed at prosecuting Southerners during Reconstruction.
Grant initially planned to carry out Lincoln’s aims toward the South but fell under the influence of the Radical Republicans and began catering to them, including maintaining a military presence in the South to oversee Reconstruction.
A number of Republicans broke with Grant and the Radicals and formed the Liberal Republican Party. One of their points was that Grant had gone too far in the South and it was time to end Reconstruction and the use of the military to protect freedmen. The party was formed by Carl Shurz, a Forty-Eighter who had managed to win election to the Senate from Missouri. Shurz had come to believe that Grant was corrupt and that the need for a military occupation of the South was past. He also opposed Grant’s plan to annex the Dominican Republic. The party chose Horace Greely, the founder of the Republican Party, to run against Grant. Greely was defeated and died within a month. Alvan Bovay, who founded the Republican Party with Greely, also left the party and called for it to be disbanded since the party had achieved its goal of abolition. Radicals kept him in office, but evidence came to light during his second administration of corruption. Grant’s vice-president, Henry Wilson, was accused of taking bribes from the Union Pacific Railway and the Credit Mobilier Construction Company. Wilson admitted to buying stock in his wife’s name and the Senate accepted his explanation, but Grant’s administration was already achieving a reputation for corruptness.
Nehls, or his ghost-writer, refers to the Compromise of 1877 as prematurely ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Federal troops from the South. In reality, except the Radicals, most in the North had long-felt that Reconstruction should have ended, and troops should have been withdrawn. While they may have signed up to free the slaves, they hadn’t signed up to have the US Army protect their rights. Only the Radicals wanted to continue Reconstruction in their attempt to remake the South to their image, with a subdued white population and freed slaves prominent. Radical Republicans had been using the Army to carry out their plans since the beginnings of the Grant administration. (It is probable that Grant changed his views because he saw the military subjection of the South as a guarantee of maintaining Republican power.) One of the main reasons Radicals attempted to impeach President Andrew Johnson and remove him from office was because he was in the way of their goals. Once he was out and Grant was on, they were able to proceed. It is a fact of history that the Radical Republicans managed to alienate the South and turn it into what came to be known as “The Solid South” as Democrats took control of each state and maintained control until the 1970s when Southerners started voting Republican. They also drove a wedge between the two races, a wedge that still remains.
The Republican Party continued to attract those with social and even communist beliefs well into the Twentieth Century. However, they began losing the support of the Southern blacks they had been depending on to stay in power. Popular wisdom is that blacks were prevented from voting by the Klan, which had disbanded decades before, and lynching but the reality is that many blacks were voting, they just weren’t voting for Republicans. Southern Democrats formed coalitions with prominent blacks and rewarded them with political favors. This was particularly true in Tennessee where Democratic Party boss E.H. Crump joined with black funeral home director J.N. Ford. Although, except for six years as mayor of Memphis, Crump did not run for political office himself, he was the power behind Tennessee Democrats, and thus Tennessee politics, for more than half a century. Crump and Ford sponsored barbecue and watermelon feasts on election day, then Ford’s lackeys went around Memphis with fake voter registrations and voted multiple times. Crump developed a system of political bosses throughout Tennessee. On election day, they sent out people to round up poor voters, black and white, and take them to the polls and tell them who to vote for. The voters were paid with a pint of whiskey or money. Political bosses dished out favors to their supporters, favors such as government jobs. During World War II, they arranged draft exemptions.
The Republican Party lost the black vote almost completely during the Roosevelt years when his social programs benefited blacks as well as poor whites. Although some blacks remained nominally Republican, they tended to vote for Democrats. Progressives controlled the party, particularly in the North. The civil rights programs of the 1950s and 60s were supported by Republicans while Democrats opposed them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, laws enacted to benefit blacks, were passed with overwhelming Republican support. Blacks have since rewarded them by joining the Democratic Party in droves.
Pundits credit New Dealer Ronald Reagan with turning the Republican Party conservative but it was actually Richard Nixon. The Democratic Party became increasingly chaotic in the 1960s as young leftists began taking over, partly in opposition to the Vietnam War, which was largely a Democratic War. JFK decided to fight communism in Southeast Asia after the disastrous Bay of Pigs. After his death, Lyndon Johnson escalated the American role in the conflict. There were racial problems at home, as black radicals stirred mobs to riot. Marxist student organizers Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman organized students to oppose the war. When riots broke out at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, many conservative Democrats decided they had had enough and left the party. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won five of the eleven Southern states. He probably would have won them all if Alabama Governor George Wallace hadn’t run on the American Independent Party ticket. Four years later, Nixon not only won all the Southern states, he won every other state in the Union but Massachusetts. Incensed Democrats managed to force Nixon out of office over the Watergate break-in.
Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party was the more conservative of the two parties, even while FDR was in office. FDR managed to stay in office by sponsoring pork barrel projects in rural states. With the exodus of conservatives from the Democratic Party, the party has become more “progressive,” a euphemism for Marxist, while the Republican Party has become generally conservative. Modern Republicans have no clue that the party they now support was once the haven of socialists, Marxists, even Communists. Democrats know their party was once “the party of slavery.” They don’t care.