Craig writes:
> As Mr. McCoy pointed out Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation
> Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, the height of the Civil War. But let's
> look at history and not fantasy.
You quote a history that is superficially correct, but one that otherwise is
quite shallow and completely misrepresents American history. I wrote earlier,
"Prior to Nixon, the Republican Party was the still hated party of the Lincoln
Reconstructionists -- and no good white Southerner would be caught dead
calling himself a Republican. But all of that changed during the Nixon
administration. The segregationist, intolerant, bible-thumping Dixiecrats bolted from the
Democratic Party en masse, to no one in the Democratic Party's dismay, in
great part because of the civil rights advances foisted on them first by
Eisenhower but most especially later by Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and they
have formed the basis of the "Solid South" on which the Republican Party has so
heavily depended ever since."
The question on the floor at the moment is of "state's rights". The phrase
"state's rights" was imbued into the Southern lexicon in 1894 by a former
Confederate general and then US Congressman, Joseph Wheeler, in a speech entitled,
"Slavery and State's Rights". He wrote in part:
=======================================
"If the Northern States refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into
effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive
slaves, and Congress provides no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to
observe the compact...
"Then followed the election of Abraham Lincoln...The South was of necessity
alarmed. They were seized with the fear that the extreme leaders of the
Republican party would not stop at any excess and would deprive them of their
property [property meaning slaves].
Wheeler then quoted from Webster, "Look at the proceedings of the
anti-slavery conventions in Ohio, Massachusetts, and at Syracuse, in the State of New
York. They pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to violate
the Constitution; they pledge their sacred honor to commit treason!"
-- http://www.fact-index.com/s/sl/slavery_and_state_s_rights.html
========================================
The phrase "state's rights" has been a code phrase ever since. In a review of
a book by Forrest McDonald arguing for a more neutral interpretation of
"state's rights", Brian Dirck writes:
========================================
Few American ideas carry as much historical baggage as state's rights. The
creed of choice for most slaveholders, secessionists, un-reconstructed "Lost
Cause" southerners, segregationists and modern-day neo-Confederates (to name a
few), state's rights has often been associated with unsavory causes in American
history. Of course, well-respected Americans such as Thomas Jefferson have
made eloquent pleas for preserving state autonomy in the face of nationalizing
and centralizing tendencies, and (as Forrest McDonald points out), radical
abolitionists used state's rights arguments in the 1850s to protect runaway slaves
from white Southerners wielding the plenary powers of an odious federal
fugitive slave law. But Americans more often remember the disagreeable devotees of
state's rights. The phrase conjures a variety of negative images: John C.
Calhoun as he mounted a state's rights defense of slavery which resonated through
the halls of Congress and his home state of South Carolina; Jefferson Davis,
who led the effort to destroy his own country over slavery and state's rights,
and who at the end of his life wrote an interminably bad two-volume defense of
Southern constitutionalism; and George Wallace, who concocted a poisonous brew
of racism, Jim Crow and state's rights in a vain effort to stem the tide of
civil rights reform in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern defenders of state's rights,
however well-intentioned, are forced to acknowledge the unavoidable (and
sometimes unfair) visceral response of many Americans who automatically couple
state's rights with the worst angels of our collective nature. In other words,
most Americans identify state's rights with a problematic region (the South) and
that region's chief problem (race relations).
-- http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=9435993148135
========================================
In the 1970's, the Republican party adopted, at least in winks and code
phrases, the segregationist policies of the Dixiecrats, first in response to
Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and later Reagan's courtship of the South,. A reasonably
neutral political commentator, James Hall, wrote this brief summary of that
history:
========================================
Yes, some conservatives remain segregationist, hiding behind conservative
ideology... These segregationists call themselves conservatives and profess to
believe in conservative values like "states' rights," "freedom of association,"
and "less government."
A whole generation of Southern segregationists used these concepts to fight
against civil rights, integration, and the removal of laws discriminating
against blacks in the 1960s. 1970s, and 1980s. For these segregationists "state's
rights" meant the right of states to pass Jim Crow laws regulating the conduct
of the races; "freedom of association" meant separating the races; and "less
government" meant less federal interference in integration and court-ordered
desegregation plans.
Today's conservatives, for the most part, repudiate these interpretations of
conservative doctrine. But even conservatives without a bigoted bone in their
body must recognize the Republican Party's recent debt to segregationism.
After the Democratic Party's ideological commitment to civil rights in 1964, many
Republicans closed their eyes to their ideological differences with
segregationists and accepted them into the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan's famous
visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi was emblematic of that moral ambiguity. And it
paid off --- within a couple of decades Southern white voters, once
predominantly conservative Democrats, became conservative Republicans instead.
-- http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/2002/hall/qtr4/1220.htm
=======================================
Many of the Dixiecrats of the first half of the previous century are now the
philosophical leaders of the Republican Party, people such as Trent Lott, Tom
Delay, Mitch McConnell, Dick Armey, and until recently Strom Thurmond.
Thurmond ran for president as an independent Dixiecrat in 1948 solely on the basis of
segregation of the races, to which Trent Lott said just a little while ago,
"You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess
we are today."
In 1980, still arguing the segregationist cause, Thurmond said, "We want that
federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states."
Wirt Atmar
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