Reply #23: For the same reason that Booker T. Washington fought with W.E.B. DuBois.. [View All]

Gradualism v. immediate redress. Lenin's Socialism in One Country v. Trotsky's Eternal Revolution. The DLC v. the Progressive Dems of America.

It is the eternal question of whether "slow and steady" really has ever won any race or not. Whether or not a "gradual increase as the people become accustomed to the idea of total emancipation" over a more radical "root and branch" approach.

Both are claiming to achieve the same results, the only draw back is that gradualism is often met with as much if not more resistence than is immediacy, witness desegregation of the schools and public facilities in the US. One might argue that the results of Radical Reconstruction were less unsettling to the status quo than were the near century long efforts of overturning the revolution beginning with Redemption in 1877.

The US did not rid itself of a meddling well intentioned by basicly mad king with a series of gradual measures. They addressed the issues head on and attacked. Were we to have approached the American Revolution as we do glbt rights, we would have a viceroy or Governor General in New York!