An old man (relatively recently deceased) I conversed with somewhat over the Internet once suggested that he has argued with black Americans that they oughta all hang one giant picture of Lyndon Johnson in their houses for all he did for them, in doing the legislative legwork that brought about the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1965. I found it a somewhat patronizing statement, but at the same time it sort of raised for me the question of how one relates to the cynical and duplicitious politicos and the incorrigible system they can’t help but promote by being a part of — indeed, an integral cog in the machinery.

I placed this book on a half revamped sidebar book link. (Have to change those things every so often.) It is an important book, and offers much by way of our nation’s political history. Several months ago I did read a blogger, I believe at the washington monthly blog, rail against it saying he’s tried to read it, and asking who the heck could actually read this — as it runs into the minutiae of the Senate at the mid-point of the last century. Maybe it might be a little dry, but there is no other way. But feel free to skip the first thousand pages or so and go to the final 400 pages, which is the most important — how Johnson manuevered a civil rights act through the Senate in 1957.

Understand, Lyndon Johnson came to the position of Senate Majority Leader by toadying up to the Southern Dixiecrats. Senator Russel, the baron of the Southern Caucus, ended with the goal of making Johnson president, to redeem the Southland. Hence, his allowance for Johnson to pass a civil rights act. So long as it didn’t mean anything.

So Lyndon Johnson thread the needle very finely in pushing a civil rights act with the tacit approval of the 22 Filibuster and delay obstructionist happy Southern Caucus. (The two Senators from Tennessee — Gore and Kefauver — broke the mold.)

But, by way of showing the cynicism and duplicity of Lyndon Johnson, it is important to note that he set up the system that forced the very fine needling, from the review in The Nation of this book:

Johnson’s first maneuver was to help defeat an effort by Republicans and liberal Democrats to rewrite Senate Rule 22 in order to short-circuit the expected Southern filibuster. At the opening of the 1957 session, pro-civil rights senators sought a ruling from Vice President Richard Nixon, acting in his capacity as the Senate’s presiding officer, that the Senate was not a continuing body and therefore was not bound by previous rules. That would mean that a majority of senators could establish a new rule allowing debate to be shut off with only a simple majority, not the usual and nearly unobtainable sixty-four votes. Indeed, Nixon, hoping to swing black votes to the GOP, would have issued such a decision. But before he could do so, Johnson used his prerogative as majority leader to move to table the proposed rules change. Using all the skill and power he had amassed as majority leader, Johnson managed to get a majority for his motion. But it was a 55-38 tally. If only seven votes had gone the other way (the three absentees having announced against Johnson’s motion), the motion would have lost, Nixon would have issued his decision, the filibuster would have been broken and an effective civil rights bill would have been passed in 1957, not 1964.

And with that cynical manuever, the Democrats became party of civil rights. And held onto the South for another handful of years. Interestingly enough, the 1958 midterm elections — where the Democrats triumphed with corruption in the Eisenhower administration and a severe recession — swamped norther Democrats into the two branches of Congress, which is sort of where the Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn quote on not wanting so many Democrats elected because it’s harder to control them comes into play — Johnson (or any future Senate majority leader) could no longer play the facilitator between the Dixiecrat Segregationists and the civil-rights oriented northern Democrats as easily, out of necessity for party.

… all of which is a sort of “I wish I had this down in my online discussions with elderly male” thing to suggest that, no, no, no giant portrait of LBJ is required in the homes of black Americans.

Former President Bill Clinton has sharply criticized the Republican presidential frontrunners for snubbing an African-American voter forum this week.

“This says more about the evolution of the Republican party than anything,” Clinton told Tavis Smiley on his Public Radio International show, which will air this Friday. “Keep in mind that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House. And after Theodore Roosevelt, the parties began to switch places.”

It is interesting to look back and see how black Americans and civil rights figured into the two political parties through the ages, and here we ask the question of how we have come to the post-Civil War point where the vast majority of black Americans, or those who were not disenfranchised via Jim Crowe, voted for the Republican party to the point where the vast majority vote for the Democratic Party.  I am tempted to list the diverging point, on the national level — aka the election of presidents– as the 1924 election.

The problem with Bill Clinton’s statement on “parties began to switch places” is that rolling into the 1912 election, various black leaders (W E B DuBois) getting a little angry at the diminishing level of return in supporting the Republicans — and DuBois generally thinking that Booker T Washington was making himself a patronage king within that party and not advancing anything– gambled by endorsing Woodrow Wilson.  Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was probably the low point in terms of civil rights in the post-Civil War.  Rolling into the 1920 election, the Democratic candidate — desparate– degenerated into a lot of race-baiting.  So, on that score, we can count out a 12 year interugum between Theodore Roosevelt and 1924’s John Davis (and a strange convention debate over the KKK) as the shaking of the two parties in terms of the black vote — where the interests of the black vote collided with the interests of the traditional democratic admittedly machine-controlled urban immigrant (Catholic) vote.  Followed by another intergum of 40 years, up to 1964 and the Voting Rights Act and Barry Goldwater — within which the Democrats slid forward and backward in advancing civil rights.

While Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, two of the state senators had an argument, which ended in one telling the other that he could “go to Hell.”  The insulted politician went to see Coolidge to ask him to do something about it.  Coolidge said calmly, “I have looked up the law, Senator, and you don’t have to go.”

…………………

During his presidency, Coolidge was taken around the horticultural conservatories of Pierre S Du Pont’s estate at Longwood, Pennsylvania.  The party passed through greenhouses containing magnificent orchids, extraordinary and grotesque cacti, and exquisite tropical ferns, none of which brought a word of comment from the president.  At last they came to the conservatory devoted to tropical trees.  The president gazed about him for a few seconds and observed with interest, ‘Bananas.”
…………………….

Coolidge was once invited to break ground for the cornerstone of a public building.  Having performed his ceremonial duty, he was expected to make a speech.  Pointing to the broken earth, he observed solemnly, “That’s a mighty fine fishworm,” and then departed.
……………………..

President Coolidge had a group of guests on the presidential yacht cruising the Potomac.  As he stood alone at the rail, looking at the expanse of water, someone exclaimed, “Look at that sight and slender figure!  Look at that head, bowed over the rail.  What thoughts are in the mind of this man, burdened by the problems of the nation?”  Finally Coolidge turned around and joined the others, saying, “See that  sea gull over there?  Been watching it for twenty minutes.  Hasn’t moved.  I think he’s dead.”

Blipping on the screen the other day, which I left unread, was the title to an article at lewrockwell.com entitled “FDR: Our First Fascist President”.  I thought nothing of it — (#1:)  Hadn’t they already declared Lincoln that?  (#2)  The CCC has widely been declared fascist.

The latest issue of Reason, behind the cover that posits the “4 Biases of Stupid Voters” toward an article that tend to tell us more of their particular brand of libertarian bias than anything else –  (“Anti Market bias”.  Really?) — is a review of a book on “3 New Deals” — them being Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Roosevelt’s.  Careful to note, of course, that to compare is not to equate — ie: oppositional democratic forces held.  Perhaps because… FDR was not a fascist?
My basic reading of the Great Depression period always leads to a certain starkness, and randomness of options.  I believe the writers at lewrockwell and Reason would have had the US head down a model set down by the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge to handle the hardships of the Depression — ie:  nothing, let the Free Market work itself out, which is to say that whatever his faults — and there were any number of cynical lessons to be gleaned from Roosevelt (ie: the meaning gleaned from when the economy turned sour again in 1937 when Roosevelt tapered down federal spending), and whatever items from the New Deal we would be wise to never replicate — we’re better off than if we were in the hands of the contemporanious ideological idols of the lewrockwell or Reason staff.

It has been a long time since Economic Depressions have been considered a part of the natural economic cycle in the United States, and anywhere else in the industrialized (or post-industrialized) world, and I am weary of what would become of us if it did.  Just cite it as The age of Demagoguery, and move on.

“What you have right now is partisanship on Capitol Hill that quite often boils down to insults, insinuations, inquisitions and investigations.” — mouthed by Tony Snow, penned by To Be Revealed sooner or later.
“nattering nabobs of negativity.”
“pusillanimous pussyfoots”
“hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”
“vicars of vacillation”
— Spiro Agnew, penned by William Safire and Pat Buchanan.

The two sort of conventional “unconventional claims” on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt are either contradictory, or weirdly compatible.

I am not speaking of the anti-Roosevelt faction meted out in the occasional George Will column — the conservative actions against Big Government — which lines up to “The New Deal didn’t get us out of the Great Depression”.  I tack to a couple of positions that could be described “progressive”, perhaps a progressivism measured out with conspiranoia, but it aligns itself there nonetheless.

The BBC has recently aired a program, I believe because a new book has just been published (as well the old book has recently been republished) — on “The Fascist Plot to Sieze the White House“.   The key name that has been dropped into this fracas, which was not mentioned in any mention of Smedley Butler’s claims between the 1930s and through — probably until today, but certainly through the 1970s — Prescott Bush.

And thus FDR is the bulwark against Mussolini’s mode of Fascism, as represented by the Bushes — who weaved themselves through the Republican Party and through the Government Apparatus — and which shows itself in the current administration.  Who were, at the time, deafly afraid of the courageous reforms and changes he was bringing to bear on the established order.
If you must.  Everything stems from the question “If they attempted it rather crudely with Smedley Butler, who’s to say they didn’t just keep on going with more sophisticated tactics.”

Any number of CIA experiments come to mind.

Or else you may go to, say, Walter Karp and his book Indispensable Enemies.   FDR kept the old order going, serving as a bulwark against the angry masses — handing “Big Business” every single thing they wanted, beyond even what Herbert Hoover dared grant these Special Interests — all the while making sure to let the Republican Party off the hook and back into the Political Game.  Then he started preaching warfare in 1937, and ended whatever goodness emenated from “The New Deal”.

At a more conspiratorial angle than Walter Karp dares offer, this has FDR looking the other way to, well, in the current political climatology we end up focusing in on Prescott Bush.  But the names have to be rather temporal — even if they are part of the same basket from 1933– based on who on that ledger is up or down.

There’s a bit of “I Want to Believe” in these crevices of the mind.  But the secret sometimes stares a bit closer and clearer in one’s face.
So what was Roosevelt?  Both and neither, I suppose.

I ran into a book the other day, I’m tempted to call it a historical curiosity and not much more — but I know better. The 1962 publication Men of the Far Right by Richard Dudman, which — whatever else it does — defines lines of political demarcation as viewed from the vantage point of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.

The Men of the Far Right include

Senator Strom Thurmond
Senator Barry Goldwater
National Review founder William Buckley, Jr.
John Birch Society founder Robert Welch
General Edwin A. Walker
McMarthy backer Gerald Smith
American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell

If I’m at first tempted to play the game of “Which of these things is doing its own thing?”, ot figure out which you cannot connect to any other, I am stalled because I do not really know the answer. Likewise, these divergent figures do not a coherent movement make, even a fledgling one. To see George Lincoln Rockwell placed next to Barry Goldwater is a wee bit jarring. But, I suppose I can connect them through the “5 Degrees of Seperation” ploy — scratching about for thematic ties if not actual ties. Easy enough to tie him to Thurmond; easy enough to tie him to Welch — from either direction there you can tie to Smith, and from there to Rockwell.
Goldwater appears today as the harbinger of the future. From the vantage point of 1962, we are working through the strands of a hyper patriotic marked anti-communism which lined Joseph McCarthy as a pre-eminent figure of the “Right” in Eisenhower’s America — and lines General Edwin A. Walker as a key figure, and we are sorting out the strains of the Depression-era politics — meaning that Gerald Smith was a sort of Ghost from the Past.
In a previous decade, Strom Thurmond would be characterized as relatively moderate on racial issues compared to his Southern Dixiecrat Governor compatriots. By the time he jumped ship to the Republican Party, flagged at the press conference with Barry Goldwater, his role had changed, though I suppose would end up being overshadowed by George Wallace and/or Lester Maddox.

These days, Barry Goldwater’s image has been refurbished somewhat, an erstwhile maverick crypto-liberal, albeit with libertarian predilications. The semi-haliography is partially the result of shifting political alliance shifting and resulting political issues, and partially historical amnesia. Never mind — nothing is ever one dimensional, even if we try to conceptualize things as such. He is cited as someone who represents the “old Republican Party”, a decent sort where the current crop has “lost his way” — which seems disingenuous enough, seeing as he would have been the figure placed where we place Bush and the neo-cons and theo-cons today, and belly-ache on how the Republicans have lost their way and gone crazy in nominating this nutcase–

who had the fancy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

From “The Republicans Face a Great Decision”; NY Times 6-20-1937; Delbert Clark.
These are the questions that are now agitating the more thoughtful members of the party, the politicians who, after three disasterous defeats at the polls in the space of five yeras, are now thinking less of the immediate fruits of officeholding and more of the broader aspects of political theory.  The party is, in short, in the position of a man with heart disease, whose problem has become not “Shall I play golf?” but rather “Shall I live to play golf again?”

[…] Between 1932 and 1936 the Republican leaders still had hopes and many of them, by November of last year, had by a species of self-hypnosis convinced themselves that the party would squeak through and beat Roosevelt.  The overwhelming New Deal victory dispelled all illusions and today the party’s leaders, in and out of Washington, are wondering aand discussing among themselves what the next step shall be.  Of one thing most of them are convinced: the party must find iron leadership and a valid set of principles if it is not to vanish as a name and as a political entity.

Yet so uncertain are they concerning particulars, so confused by the variety of immediate issues presented and teh conflicting types of leadershiup all climing to have communed with the burning bush, that none of any responsibility will publicly discuss their thoughts.  Vandenberg, Borah, Hamilton, Snell, Ogden, Mills, Wadsworth and such self-constituted leaders will talk volubly in private, but for public consumption will utter nothing but generalities — and very few of those.  They are too busy thinking.

From private discussions with some of these real or putative leaders one startling fact emerges.  There is a willingness, inconceivable four years ago, to consider the possibility of discarding the party, as Republican party, altogether and of issuing a new manifesto under a new name with the salutary purpose of eliminating fundamental antagonisms and starting afresh on a solid, if small, basis.

A number of factors have incduced this revolutionary thought.  It is not merely that the shell of the Republican party is filled with warring elements who agree on nothing but the party name and who cannot be counted upon at the polls.  That  would perhaps lend plausibility to the theory that the party is dead already and must inevitably disintegrate and disappear in fact as well as name.  But the factor that adds hope to teh future is the knowledge that the Democratic party, while in overwhelming majority at the moment, is in almost as serious a state of internal disintegration as the Republican.

With the indutbitable fact in mind, some of the more thoughtful Republicans believe that a new conservative party, sprung from the remnants of the Republican, would rally to its standard innumerable Democrats who would never vote for the Republican label but who are sufficiently disaffected from the New Deal leadership to join a new party that represented their true convictions.

These Republican leaders know that the Democratic party, so far as its national aspects are concerned, has become the Roosevelt party.  They know also, from public manifestations and private conversations, that large numbers of conservative Democrats, with sufficiently outstanding leadership, would welcome a way out of the dilemma.  They would prefer, for sentimental and traditional reasons, to remain Democrats and get rid of the New Deal, but to many of them that begins to look like the tail’s attempting to wag the dog.

To many political observers in Washington it is apparent that the object of President Roosevelt and his closest advisers, from the very day he formally accepted the nomination in 1932, has been to reconstruct the Democratic party alon gliberal, up-to-date lines.  He has appointed well-known Republicans to high office; he has publicly , and courted the support, of politicians who have been high in the Republican councils.  He has, it is true, given public aid and comfort to old-line Democratic leaders who violently distrust the New Deal, but he has sought steadily to vitiate their influence by adopting a legislative program generally anathema to them.  He has appeared to be seeking to build up  anew liberal nucleus within the Democratic party in the hope that eventually it will be strong enough not to need the unfailing support of the Solid South.  Eventually the Democratic party would become once more a truly national party, the logical split would occur and the Republicans could have the conservatives.  Up to now the old-line conservative Democrats have rallied around at telection time, and have not deserted the party label.  They cling, for sweet sentiment’s sake, to that label, but they may not cling for many more years, and it is upon their expected defection that the Republican planners are coutninng to fortify their new party, if and when it is announced.

[…] Some time between then [1938] and 1940, following this line of reasoning, they would work out a mutually satisfactory declaration of principles, laid down under a new party name, and go to the country in that year united and revitalized.  They are frank to admit that they might not be able to swing the [1940] election, short of a great popular revulsion against Roosevelt, but they would not be too dissatisfied if they could make as good a showing as the Republican founders did in their first Presidential campaign back in 1856.

If such a new party were to be proclaimed, however, its founders would have no authority to pronounce the last rites over the GOP, and they would find at the very outset determined opposition to such a cavalier jettisoning of the old name and tradition.  But the opposition would find itself divided into two bitterly antagonistic groups: […]  The very fact of their initial split, of course, would weaken the force of these groups, and it readily to be assumed, in the opinion of some who are thinking of a new party, that one of these dissident groups would presently lose itself in the Constitution Party, the Liberty Party, or whatever it chose to call itself.    But this very question of which way the new party would lean, other than in general opposition to the Roosevelt political dynasty, is one which is agitating its would-be-founders most.  Among them are men who are by the standards of the current decade ultra-conservative, and others who would go far down the line with much Roosevelt legislation, but who oppose with all their souls the political tactics of the New Deal and the administrative authoritarianism which they profess to see animating Mr Roosevelt.  Some of these men honestly believe that civil liberty in the United States is in grave peril; that we are headed in the direction of an American brand of fascism, and that it is their patriotic duty, regardless of prior party affiliations, to oppose that trend.
[…] There is still another ground however, more fatalistic, more studious of historical precedents, which predicts the early demise of the Republican party without a successor.  They reason it this way: [back to James Monroe and a one-party state, more or less, Republican Party anomolie.]

……………………………

I probably posted too much from this article.  Main focal points are the terms “Liberal” (and its cousin – slash – mask in terms of the current political dichotomy “progressive”), what to make of a “Conservative Project” at its lowest ebb, as well the slow political alignment that held the Solid South until the Republicans now have — not quite a “Solid South” but a dominance nonetheless that holds the South as a political bloc in presidential elections (and Congressional pluralities).
Next up (or probably not “next” but sooner or later), if I can find it, 1938 polling — the conservative – liberal labels (self described) are at parity.  Meaning what, precisely –?

It was in this period that w ran into a whole group of cultural anarchists, the extreme wing of what became the yippies, a radical prefigurement of the punks.  The group was succiently known as the Mother Fuckers, and they spent most of their time, when they were not high on something and lying around on a tenement floor, painting appropriately obscene slogans on the walls of the East Village.

The Mother Fuckers liked us.  They would come to our weekly class series in our small office on 10th Street and stand in the back (even if there were empty seats) as we went on and on about imperialism and revisionism and internationalism and several other isms, combined with a very heavy dose of contradictions and opposites within opposites and transitions and leaps.  Then came the discussion period, and up went the hand of the leading Mother Fucker.  We would recognize him and he would shout out in his loudest, proudest voice:  “Up against the wall, Mother Fucker!”  The group shouted their agreement and then they left.  They never said anything more or anything less.

 Tim Wohlforth, The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American Left, page 147.

I was having trouble breezing my eyes through the Democratic debate to find the totality of Mike Gravel’s comments regarding Oil. I first stumbled upon this analysis from a professional pundit:

My vote for the least politically savvy statement from last night’s debate goes to former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who offered a tough-love approach for America’s pain at the pump: “There’s nothing I would do as president to lower the price of gasoline right now. We Americans have to grow up.”

Pandering is clearly not Gravel’s strong suit.

“Political Saavy” my asphalt. We have found the reason that the debates, 17 months out from the actual Election, need the Mike Gravels of the world. To keep at least one meaningful statement into the equation, meaningless equating to political saavy.

The rest of Mike Gravel’s statement to that question of what he would do about high gas prices — the answer is “nothing” — and more importantly, the hidden price of gasoline:

If we want to get off of the dependency in the Middle East, we have to own up to the problem. These things cost money. They’re controlling our society.

And the sooner we stop fighting these wars — here, stop and think. You only see $3. Just watch those wheels turn. There’s another $4, which is what we spend to keep American troops around the world to keep the price.

So you’re paying more than seven dollars a gallon; you just don’t know it.

I am reminded of an answer Eugene McCarthy gave to a question during his 1968 bid for the White House.  As written by Tom Wicker in a preface to a Eugene McCarthy book released in 1975, this passage comes to the old refrain about a gaffe being the telling of unwanted truths:

On the eve of the Democratic convention, when McCarthy still might have had a chance to be nominated, the Warsaw Pact powers invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to the “Prague Spring”.  It chanced that McCarthy had a Washington news conference scheduled for the next day, and when it commenced, the reporters demanded to know what, as president, he would have done about events in Eastern Europe.

Nothing, McCarthy replied, in a few unexcited words to that effect.

Astounded, the reporters demanded to know why he would have done nothing, against every tradition of the Imperial Presidency.

Because,  McCarthy replied candidly, there’s nothing I could have done.  He went on to suggest that the lights that had burned late in the White House the night before, the agitated comings and goings of LBJ and his cohorts were mostly window dressing.  Johnson was not going to do anything either, could do nothing, but was making a great show of doing something anyway — managing the crisis, firing off cables, phoning up bureaucrats, solemnly briefing Senators.  When all that was finished, McCarthy observed, the Prague Spring still would be over and the Warsaw Pact in charge of Czechoslovakia — as they were, a subsequent fact which failed to dispel the outrage and disdain of reporters used to imperial bluster from every president back to Harry S Truman.