Jeffrey Lord:
Dear Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz:
I note with interest this statement from you with regard to the controversy over the flying of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol. You said:
For decades community leaders in South Carolina — and across the country — have been calling to get rid of this symbol of hatred, and action has been long overdue.
But this is just the beginning of a conversation we as a society need to have about race, bigotry and violence in this country — not the end of one.
Good enough. It’s good to know you wish to begin this conversation and I am happy to oblige. Let me begin with this question:
Will the Democratic Party finally apologize for supporting slavery, segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan?
Let me recall these lines from some of your party platforms.
From your 1840 platform:
Resolved, That congress has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states, and that such states are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the constitution; that all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions.
And again in your 1844 platform:
That Congress has no power, under the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States; and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything pertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts, by abolitionists or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our Political Institutions.
This staunch support for slavery — not to mention the unsubtle threat that accompanied it (there would be “alarming and dangerous consequences” if serious attempts to abolish it were made) is repeated again in your party platforms of 1848 and 1852.
By 1856, your party’s support of slavery was expanded in your newest platform, with several additional sections added including vowing: “That the Democratic party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.”
In 1860 your platform said: “Resolved, That the Democratic party will abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upon these questions of Constitutional law.” This was, in fact, an endorsement of the infamous Dred Scott decision by the Court, a decision which legal scholars say was designed to write slavery into the Constitution. And your party approved of it.
As the Civil War was ending your party opposed the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — which ended slavery. Among those who opposed ending slavery was Congressman Fernando Wood. Wood (as noted in Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past) was not only a member from New York, he was a former mayor of New York. Wood explained why he and the vast majority of the House Democratic Caucus — in which you now sit — opposed ending slavery.
The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and, sir, by no legislation, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction.…The condition of domestic servitude as existing in the southern states is the highest condition of which the African race is capable…
Likewise your party opposed not only the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments that gave legal rights to African-Americans as well as the right to vote, your party supporters banded together to form the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan being described by University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party,” while historian Eric Foner of Columbia University calls the Klan “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”
For decades your party gave free rein to the Klan and its rabid, racist violence. In 1924 the Klan ran your Democratic Convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden, known to history as the “Klan bake” convention. Time and time and time again your party selected Klan members to represent it in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House as well as state governorships and all manner of local officials.
Your party used this support to win the congressional power that passed everything from the creation of the Federal Reserve to Social Security. One of the latter’s notable supporters, in fact, was Mississippi’s Senator Theodore Bilbo, a proud supporter of Social Security who boasted of his membership in the Klan.
One troubling sign of just how close was your party’s relationship with the Klan was President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of Alabama’s liberal New Deal Senator Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Black held a “golden passport” — aka a lifetime membership in the Klan. Decades later, in 1968, Justice Black wrote:
President Roosevelt… told me there was no reason for my worrying about my having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said some of his best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were among members of the organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.
Black was far from alone with his Klan connections in your party. The notorious Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner who unleashed both police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protesters in 1963, was both a Klan member and a member of your Democratic National Committee. There isn’t enough space to list the elected leaders of your party who served under the hoods of the Klan and supported the savage violence inflicted on black Americans for decades.
Is blaming the Republicans for the evils and problems they, the Democrats, created, supported and defended, the same thing as apologizing?
The children of the victims of slavery have accepted apologies from many Democratic politicians. However, blacks have not forgiven Republikans for what has happened in the last 55 years as that party has been visibly the most racist.
NASCAR is now trying to do away with being in any way associated with the battle flag of the Confederacy. When you lose NASCAR that isn’t much support left except the Klan itself or its buddies like the Concerned Citizens Council
@john: Republicans should apologize for supporting civil rights while you think the Democrats were righteous to support the Klan and oppose civil rights, even murdering blacks? I hope your stupidity is not contagious.
@Bill:
Your an interesting character, Bill. At any given moment you’ll be on one thread ranting about the horrors of segregation, Jim Crow and the KKK (all the Democrats fault, of course), while on another you’re lecturing me about how slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and how wonderful the Confederate Battle Flag is. Are you schizophrenic, by chance?
@Tom: And you are a predictable left wing sycophant. The Civil war began over states rights, with slavery as a catalyst. However, once the North invaded the South (you do confess that that was the sequence of events, right?) then the PEOPLE fought for their homes. They had different views about their STATE then than exists today, though apparently you cannot open your mind enough to understand how someone other than you thinks or reasons.
I make no claims about “wonderfulness”. What I argue is how utterly stupid it is to remove the Battle Flag, pretending it represents racism and will assuage anyone’s ill feelings towards anyone else. It is a fool’s errand and it only serves to make people that cannot accomplish good by any means feel better about themselves.
And, as you argue about the evils of the south, you actually admit to the fact that, yes, the Democrats were, indeed, responsible for it. That, too, is an historical fact. Insisting some flag be lowered or a statue toppled can’t change the stain on the Democrats. Not the Republicans…. DEMOCRATS. And that is only significant because Democrats try so hard (and are, regrettably, so successful) to blame everyone but themselves for their racist past and their current exploitation of minorities today.
“As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race. As a national emblem (The Confederate Flag) it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race.”
William T. Thompson Designer of The Confederate Flag
@rich wheeler: Being discussed is the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia. One of the major impediments to intelligent discussion of the topics is ignorance.
“[We should be] determined….to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government…in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison
“The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several states of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies, and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint.
John Quincy Adams 1836
“The Union “was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states, and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people if one of the states would choose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right to do so.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right–a right which we hope an believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they may inhabit.”
Abraham Lincoln
Perhaps one of our modern day philosophers who seem to be intent in trying to remove all vestiges of history from the present day scene would like to argue that the very men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who help pen the Constitution, who acted as an impartial observer on the events of the day and who also, over 50 years later reiterated the same independent philosophy, were wrong in their belief that membership in the union of the united colonies was voluntary.
05 and Bill Does Texas have the guts to get out?
@rich wheeler: Get out of what?
It’s clearly time to ban this symbol of racism and hate.