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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsToday’s GOP is the party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln
Charles Jaco ?@charlesjaco1 24m24 minutes ago150 years ago today, the Confederacy surrendered, changed name to GOP. Great article. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-longer-the-party-of-lincoln/2015/04/08/bcc46068-de19-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html?tid=HP_opinion?tid=HP_opinion
____The emancipation of the slaves that accompanied the Norths victory ushered in, as Abraham Lincoln had hoped, a new birth of freedom, but the old order also managed to adapt itself to the new circumstances. The subjugation of and violence against African Americans continued apace, particularly after U.S. Army troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction. Black voting was suppressed. The Southern labor system retained, in altered form, its most distinctive characteristic: unfree labor. As Douglas A. Blackmon has demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study Slavery by Another Name, numerous corporations many of them headquartered in the North relied heavily on the labor of thousands of black prisoners, many serving long sentences for minor crimes or no crimes at all.
Indeed, one reason the race-based subjugation of labor was so resilient was that it was a linchpin not just of the Southern economy, but also of the entire U.S. economy. For much of the 20th century, the prevailing view of the North-South conflict was that it had pitted the increasingly advanced capitalist economy of the North against the pre-modern, quasi-feudal economy of the South. In recent years, however, a spate of new histories has placed the antebellum cotton economy of the South at the very center of 19th-century capitalism. Works such as Empire of Cotton, by Harvard historian Sven Beckert, and The Half Has Never Been Told, by Cornell University historian Edward E. Baptist, have documented how slave-produced cotton was the largest and most lucrative industry in Americas antebellum economy, the source of the fortunes of New York-based traders and investors and of British manufacturers. The rise in profitability, Baptist shows, resulted in large part from the increased brutalization of the slave work force.
Lincoln understood this how could he not? The traders and investors in New York rendered that city a center of pro-Southern sentiment, so much so that its mayor, Fernando Wood, actually suggested that the city secede from the Union to preserve its ties to the Southern slaveholders. British commercial interests pressured their government to extend diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln termed slavery not a Southern sin but an American one, for which both North and South were condemned to a form of blood-soaked, divine retribution. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, Lincoln said, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?
Even today, one of Americas most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The five states that have no minimum wage laws of their own are in the South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Southern-based corporations such as Wal-Mart are among the leading opponents of workers right to organize, and as Wal-Mart has expanded into the North and West, so have the right-to-work statutes of Southern states been enacted by Republican governments in the Midwest.
The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Streets brand of shareholder capitalism over the nations economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers...
read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-longer-the-party-of-lincoln/2015/04/08/bcc46068-de19-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html?tid=HP_opinion?tid=HP_opinion
brooklynite
(94,827 posts)They became State's Rights Democrats up until the Civil Rights Act was passed. THEN they became Republicans.
cali
(114,904 posts)bigtree
(86,010 posts)I changed the title of the post to the intended one of the article
bigtree
(86,010 posts)...it's clear the author believes that they were Democrats in name only and that the modern republican party's politics has roots and history in the manner in which emancipated blacks were treated in labor and other aspects of our economy and society.
merrily
(45,251 posts)It's indisputable that Lincoln was a Republican. However, yes, today's Republicans are not, by any stretch, the more pro equal rights of the two major parties.
bigtree
(86,010 posts)...and had a hand in Reconstruction. Would he have put up with the behavior of Southern whites, appeasing them, like Andrew Johnson did, for example, in trying to abolish the Freedman's Bureau? Or, would the hostile Congress have impeached Lincoln if he survived? If he had managed Reconstruction to the benefit of Southern blacks successfully, we might have a different Republican party today.
Anyway, the frame of the article is distracting from the point about the disenfranchisement of the Southern blacks and the emancipated Northern blacks, as well, in the labor force and in other empowering aspects of society. Still, it's a further hurdle to span the history from 150 years ago to today's Southern resistance to the federal government. Is it an actual institutional divide with real and influential economic disadvantages for Southern whites (who make up the GOP base), or is it still just a matter of mere antipathy and resentment over the empowering and enfranchisement of their black population?
merrily
(45,251 posts)For example, I never thought about what might have happened if Lincoln had not died.
I find "Follow the money," though terse, was some of the best advice in understanding the US.
As an aside, in an anecdote attributed to Lincoln, Lincoln alludes to Democrats being the wealthier party. So, that, too, shifted over time (and may be shifting again).
merrily
(45,251 posts)It's against an older background that the fight for the civil rights act must be seen. After Republican Lincoln ran against Democrat Douglas, the South became solidly Democratic and remained that way for a long time.
Despite prodding from Eleanor, FDR feared what equal rights would do his party at the polls. Still, Eleanor made her own views as plain as she could by, among other things, having Marian Anderson sing at the Lincoln Memorial. (Later, she would visit the White House to urge Ike to enforce Brown v. Bd. of Ed.)
http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/lesson-plans/notes-er-and-civil-rights.cfm
http://www.blackhistoryreview.com/biography/ERoosevelt.php
In 1948, Truman got challenged for the Presidency by the right of the Democratic Party (POS Strom Thurmond, running as a Dixiecrat) because Truman had integrated the military.
Truman also got challenged from the left in that same election by Henry Wallace, running as a member of the Progressive Party of 1948, not to be confused with the Progressive Party of former Republican Theodore Roosevelt's era.) He beat them both, along with Dewey, his slick Republican challenger. Yet, you will often see Truman described as a weak candidate that year.
So before the Civil Rights Act, the rifts had begun. However, it was the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson that really began turning the tide. And then came Goldwater, with his "Southern strategy" of the dog whistle of "states' rights" and then POS Lee Atwater and his "Southern strategy" of various kinds of dog whistles.
See also
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6478282
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_election_results_by_state
And, most of the founding members of the DLC were from Southern states.