And then Hearst saw Hitler. He at once told him (by his own account) that he did not approve of dictatorships. Hitler thereupon explained that his dictatorship had arisen from democracy, first by a narrow victory, than a three fourths majority, then a four fifths majority, so that he “must not allow a small minority to interfere with the will of the majority.” Even so, Hearst repeated he was opposed to autocracy. So he did not, so far as we know, explain the new Americanism and tell how the San Francisco strike had been smashed. But he came away from Hitler and Hitler’s Germany with a clear idea which he expouned in an interview on landing, 9-28-34:

“The fascist party of Italy was organized to quell the disturbances and disorders of Communism. The fascist party of Germany was organized for the same purpose. It was intended to and very likely did prevent Germany from going Communist and cooperating with Soviet Russia. This is the great policy, the great achievement which makes the Hitler regime popular with the German people, and which enables it to survive very obvious and very serious mistakes.” […] […] […]

Having established this basis for fascism, Mr. Hearst launched his winter campaign against academic freedom and the Communist meanace. […] This was just the time when the suppression of crime was a national theme. Agents of the Department of Justice were shooting down “public enemies.” Hearst was shooting them down intellectually, sending spies to college professors trying to trap them into sympathetic statements about Russia. The story of this espionage in the universities has been adequately told. It is noteworthy that for all his campaign for more money for elementary education, he has no use for academic freedom. “Academic freedom is a phrase taken over by the radical groups as a new camouflage for the teaching of alien doctrines.” […]

Ostensibly he was still fighting fot he old democracy, but he was not thinking about it. The most revealing flash into his real mind came in an interview he gave a French correspondent about the Phillipines. (12-17-34) “If we had a system of government of the date of the aeroplane, or even the automobile, we never should have abondoned the Phillippines.” Now what system of government dates with the aeroplane? At any rate not democracy. “Our nation for the first time begins to shrink,” he grieved, “and when a nation begins shrinking there is no knowing when it will stop. Only decadent nations contract; vigoroug nations expand. Japan is expanding.”

Japan’s government is near fascism. Hitler would never abandon the Philippines. Hitler’s Germany is expanding, not contracting. But America, which expanded under the democracy of Hearst’s youth, now is “decadent.” That is, unless it can be rejuvenated, like Germany and Italy.

In Louisiana the dictatorship already is absolute; Huey controls all three functions of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Is he resented? Certainly, by some people, just as Hitler and Mussolini are resented by some people in Germany and Italy. But not by all the people one might expect. This was brought home to me here, in a conversation with a young instructor at Louisiana State University. “I am troubled, too,” he admitted. “There are many things he Huey does that I don’t approve of. But on the whole he has done a great deal of good. And if I had to choose between him without democracy and getting back to the old crowd without the good he has done, I should choose Huey. Aftar all, democracy isn’t good if it doesn’t work. Do you really think freedom is so important?”

This was not a German talking to me about Hitler, or an Italian about Mussolini. The argument was the same, the conclusion the same. I have heard scores of such confessons from equally intelligent Germans and Italians. The only new fact was the geography of the conversation. I was walking across the campus of an American university. And here it was I came face to face with the full menace of Huey Long. The man is waiting who is ruthless, ambitious, and indeed plausible enough to Hitlerize America.
…………………………….

On the other hand, the results of Huey Long’s and Father Coughlin’s electoral venture for 1936 was pretty meager.. So my question of “Why did we not just become like Germany?” remains.

I confess to be utterly fascinated by this book. There’s a degree to which I simply accept the premise: if Fascism were to come to 1930s America, it would come through the political figures profiled. The startling realization is the suggestion that for 1934 and 1935 that the “New Deal has failed”, and now America will turn elsewhere for its salvation. Yes? No?

I can’t say there are any real implications for American politics as of this precise moment. But I have to add, seeing as how I just received a response to this post from December of 2004, and seeing as how the first response takes the suggestion of “assassination” in this thought experiment and goes from Hitler to Bush…

The opinions expressed by people who are not me do not necessary reflect the opinions expressed by people who are me.

I do have the answer to the question I was wondering of why someone asked me for my age. My frame of reference for an example of the “Good Samaritan Law” was the series finale Seinfeld. That doesn’t necessarily explain the second questioning, to a more recent post, asking for my age — though I cannot ascertain whether it is the same person asking. There was this odd moment on, probably a message board, where I mentioned Herbert A Armstrong and the World Church of God, and got a response from someone who was of age in the 1950s, aware enough of my age, asking “Why would you even know this?” The answer was esoteric enough: “through Basil Wolverton”. In the game of Trivial Pursuit — none of the categories stand out as weaker or stronger for me than any other category, I know things that it doesn’t seem I should know, and I don’t know some things that it seems that I should know.

ANYWAY…

2-10-1937: Texas State Senator TJ Holbrook: “It is the purpose of the President to eliminate from the governmental structure one of its foundation stones and to place the Supreme Court under his power. If the plan should be adopted, it would destroy the government and establish a dictatorship equal to that of Hitler or Mussolini. Throughout the ages we have many examples of governments wrecked by these methods.”
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2-9, Letter to the Editor Elmer Davis: The last election may not have been a mandate for any particular alteration of the judiciary, but it certainly was a general mandate to catch up with the times, to make social and industrial reforms which other capitalist democracies made years ago. In the next four years, we have an opportunity for orderly and moderate reform; if they are blocked by technicalities, as orderly and moderate reforms so often were in the later years of the Roman Republic, what happens thereafter may be less moderate and less orderly. Men of property ought to be the first to insist that we do our reforming now.
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A. Lawrence Lowell, President Emeritus of Harvard: “In the Declaration of Independence, one of the charges against George III was that he has made judges dependent on his will alone for tenure of their offices, and by the Constitution our forebears provided that no one should be able to do anything of the kind again in this land of ours, at least they attempted to do so. Are we now to return to the claim of the Stuart Kings that judges should be lions under their throne?”
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Dean E Clark, Yale Law School: Urging support of amendments proposed by the Liberal Party, he said that President Roosevelt’s plan, while it might have the immediate result of saving a few pieces of legislation, would be at long range only a retirement and pension scheme. Failure to liberalize the Constitution would bring “absolute government” because the way to dictatorship is much more nearly in the way of refusing to change in line with the times than any of the other courses now open.
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Herbert Hoover, 2-21: “If Mr Roosevelt can change the constitution to suit his purposes by adding to the members of the Court, any succeeding President can do it to suit his purposes. If a troop of ‘President’s Judges’ can be sent into the halls of justice to capture political power, than his successors with the same device can also send a new troop of ‘President’s Judges’ to capture some new power. That is not judicial power. That is force. In less than a score of years, the courts in a dozen nations have been made subjective to political power, and with this subjection, the people’s securities in those countries have gone out the window. And mark you this: In every instance the persuaders have professed to be acting for the people in the name of progress. As we watch the parade of nations go down that suicide road, every American has cause to be anxious for our Republic.”
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2-12: Governor Earle (D) of Pennsylvania declared tongight that “the cause of human welfare has been advanced beyond calculation by President Roosevelt’s proposal to break the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”
“Lincoln faced the problem of a Supreme Court assuming more than its rightful powers. He fought it bitterly. He put an additional member on it. The Supreme Court needs change. President Roosevelt is going to do it, and the people are going to support him. I hope hereafter we can maintain not government by one supreme court justice who casts the deciding vote in 5-4 decisions, but government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. This we cannot do with the court of present constituted.”
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2-10: The far seeing men who fashioned our Constitution and established our government 150 years ago provided a system of checks and balances which should insure the perpetuity of the government.[…]
This system worked perfectly until 1933. Then the President demanded and received from Congress extraordinary powers, which he has never surrendered. Congress, because of the overwhelming Democratic majority, ceased to be a deliberative body. The vast majority of members did not even read the bills submitted, much less debate them. It was enought to know the President wanted them, and they were passed without debate, and frequently even without submission to a committee. There remained then but one check upon either the Executive or Congress — The Supreme Court. Now the President proposes to “pack” this court by increasing the number of justices and filling the new vacancies with men of his own way of thinking and removing all justices over the age of 70. Both Congress and the Supreme Court would then become mere Presidential “rubber stamps.”
The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law. The law is a good deal older than 70 years, but under a New Deal dispensation the established law is but rightly held and must be bent and twisted to conform to New Deal requirements. Witness within the past few days the Secretary of Labor demanding of Congress that it pass “with all possible haste” an act establishing the legality of “sit down strikes.” Witness too a president demanding of Congress the passage of a certain bill with the instruction “not to be deterred by considerations of its constitutionality.” This is the blackest phrase on the records of this government.
This is the most critical moment in the history of our nation. If the President has his way and is permitted to Emasculate the Supreme Court, the US may classify itself as a nation of puppets. Was it for this that we re-elected Mr. Roosevelt by such an overwhelming majority?
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(#1): As it turned out, Governor Earle, Roosevelt was quite happy with 5-4 decisions, because he dropped the fight once the Supreme Court started making 5-4 rulings on his behalf.
(#2): Congress as a Rubber stamp. Roosevelt had huge majorities in Congress, and won by huge land-slides. What’s the current Republican Party’s (and Democratic opposition’s) excuse?
(#3): Consider Roosevelt’s creation of a Constitutional Crisis, which resolved itself in what seems like an uncomfortable Compromise that the Supreme Court behave itself, in light with the Constitutional Crisis of sorts where the Republicans threatened to get rid of the Democratic Right to Fillibuster Judges, which resolved itself when “The Gang of 14” came out and … um… agreed to behave themselves. History is full of sleights of hands masquerading as Noble Victories.
(#4): Hoover would go on to make a play for the 1940 Republican Nomination, on the basis that Hitler was going to win WWII with the US staying out of it, and he had the Business Credentials to deal with Hitler. So it’s kind of weird to hear Hoover make Hitler Comparisons.

1-6-1954: But while Senator McCarthy denied any shift in emphasis from Communism to other investigating fields, he did say that Communist issues would not predominat in the next two major investigations he had planned for this year. The next big inquiry, he said, will be of “disturbing” tax settlements made during the Truman Administration. Another, which he refused to identify, will deal with graft, inefficiencies, corruption, and mismanagement with Communism as a minor element, he declared. That one will not be ready for hearings for another six months.

“Just before the elections?” a reporter asked. “You go to Hell,” Senator McCarthy replied with a broad grin. […]

But while Senator McCarthy denied reports that Senator John McClellan, Democrat of Arkansas, was considering reintroducing a five-year old resolution to create a joint House-Senate committee to deal with subversion in place of the three committees now handling the problem: “I have too much respect for McClellan to think he’d be the tool of left-wing elements of his party.” Asked why a joint committee would play into the hands of “left wing elements”: “That’s too obvious to require an answer.”

1-23: The strategy of Democratic leadership in the Senate is to avoid a major clash with Senator McCarthy and allow public attention to focus on the decline in farm prices, the rise in unemployment, and other “pocketbook” issues. On this basis the Democrats figure to win the November election, but it has lead them into an awkward conflict between politics and principles. In private they are the bravest drawing room critics of McCarthy in the city, but in public they say very little and are remarkably casual about their responsibilities as minority representatives of McCarthy’s Permanent SubCommittee on Investigation. […]

They walked out of the subcommittee last July in protest against McCarthy’s dictatorial administration of the committee and they are still out, though they have not carried their complaints to the floor of the Senate, and all three [Democratic Senators of the Subcommittee] have recently voted in favor of giving McCarthy another $200,000 to cary on his work for another year.

2-6-1954: Senator McCarthy called the Democrats “the party of communism, betrayal, and treason” in a fiery speech before McComb County Republicans tonight. He appealed to “all good Democrats to desert the ‘party of betrayal’ and join the Republicans to do the job which is so far from completed.” The Senator linked what he called the “ADAers” and “Adlaiers” […] “Decent Democrats have repudiated ADA because it so often parrots the Communist line.”

[I assume you remember from your history books, or a few blog entries back, that Adlai Stevenson gave a speech calling the Republicans “half Eisenhower — half McCarthy” — a description that describes Richard Nixon perfectly, actually. Consider “McCarthyism” as — at base — the issue of “National Security”, and understand the nature of historical dejavu. As per: Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado sayeth “[Feingold] has time and time again taken on the side of the terrorists that we are dealing with in this conflict.”]

3-7: Some of the leaders attending the dinner expressed privately their belief that Mr. Stevenson’s speech contained political elements for a “parting of the way” among those Democrats who differ strongly on the technique for leveling criticism at the Eisenhower Administration. […] Some Democrats, notably in the South, are said to prefer to base the 1954 and 1956 campaigns on issues other than Senator McCarthy.

3-9: The Senate Democrats dew together today in support of policies that forecast an attempt by them to fight the coming Congressional Campaign almost wholly on economic issues. […] In their first caucus, the Senate Democrats made no move in support of the apparent decision by Adlai Stevenson to make “McCarthyism” and Eisenhower’s alleged tolerance of it a major issue in the fall. […] Instead, they took up a series of positions, sometimes loosely defined, that amounted to an effort to appeal to large farmer and consumer groups.

For what it’s worth, the History books tell us that once Nixon gave the response regarding McCarthy (and the big brohaha was that Eisenhower tapped Nixon to give the “equal time” response and snubbed McCarthy in the process), McCarthy faded into history. The newspaper accounts of the time tell us that Nixon then proceeded, through the Autumn mid-term elections, to call every Democratic Candidate and high profile Politician a traitor and a Communist. Curiously, Nixon was the most powerful vice-president in history up to that point… this since been by-passed by Mondale, Bush I, Gore, and especially Cheney… All this means is that the President of the United States started to give a role and have their vice-president do stuff. Nixon’s role was political hatchet man, so that Eisenhower could remain above the fray. The Demise of McCarthy was simply a passing of the baton on title of Chief-Hatchet Man.

……………….

howie – Adlai the Unusual… I did not vote for him because I thought him to be some kind of mishmosh mouthed nothing. I believe that may have been the first time I ever used the term “an empty suit”, certainly not an original with me but it fit so well I believe I used it in something I wrote at the time. I have to agree with you on the Sainted Adlai, I don’t know what he was either. I do remember the boys in Poly Sci thought he was the best thing to come along since Pepsi Cola, though. His GREATNESS was completely lost on me.

“I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide…too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues…[Democrats shouldn’t] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question administration, you’re helping the terrorists” — Russ Feingold

In 1954, Adlai Stevenson threw himself in the Joseph McCarthy controversy and attacked President Dwight D Eisenhower for not dealing with McCarthy, saying that Eisenhower’s midterm election strategy was a healthy dose of McCarthy-smearing — having it both ways and appearing “above the fray” by not engaging in anything personally. (Well, it worked alright in the 1952 Presidential Campaign against himself, so why not? It probably picked Eisenhower up two or three states, furthering the landslide.) But Eisenhower was the “Golfer-in-Chief”, so I guess it fit his image anyways. The whole fracus resolved itself with Richard Nixon giving a weak speech chiding “Men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue rather than the cause they believe in so deeply.” And everyone clapped. Yay! Eisenhower reigned in McCarthy!! Kind of. Sort of. HUH?

Now, if you go back to 1954 and read what the Democrats in the Senate and House were saying about all this — they kept Adlai Stevenson’s speech at arm’s length. Southern Democrats held the Democratic Chairs, and (1) these were the “Democrats for Eisenhower” bunch, and (2) They needed to shore up their “anti-Communist” credentials. Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Leadership wanted to focus on Economic matters (as they did in, say, 2002 — wanting no part on the issues of Security, which not bothering with helps with the other party’s smearing of you as “weak” on “defense”, such that it is)– and, because it was such a diverse group that couldn’t agree, really only tackling Economic matters in a fairly vague manner. To be fair, Eisenhower was a popular politician (unlike President Bush), and the Democratic strategy of tangoing with him as someone other than Republican seemed to do the organization of “DNC” some good as it passed through the 1950s. It’s curious to note Joseph McCarthy defending himself in the most bellicose manner that “if you want to get rid of me, you have a midterm election coming up” — which I guess is largely what happened when the narrow Republican Senate Majority flipped over to a narrow Democratic Majority in the midterm election. A referendum on an individual Senator as opposed to a Referendum on a President… that’s kind of neat.

I may go back and post up the relevant news articles that show what I say to be the case.

So, sorry Greg Saunders and Oliver Willis… the correct tagline is since at least 1954, not since 1994.

(BTW: I really can’t figure out what Adlai Stevenson offered up to American politics in the 1950s. He’s sort of a mystery figure to me.)

2-23-1950: Asked if he saw no danger to the two party system in a sweeping Democratic victory, Mr. Truman replied he did not like a one-party system but that anyway, we did not have two parties, but about four. […]

It is the President’s overriding aim to wrest domination of the Democratic Party’s program from Southern Democrats by increasing Northern and Western Democratic strength. […] Later, Mr. Truman enumerated the four parties as follows: the Dixiecrats, who he said were one-half Republican; the Republicans; what was left of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party; and the real national party — the Democrats.

About as perceptive as can be, that Mr. Truman, but then again he just came out triumphant from a victory over all three of those parties, and had to map out throughout all of 1948 how the heck to pull off that hat-trick. For the Wallacites, it is believed that by so utterly defeating Wallace, the cause of McCarthyism was helped immensely and the Liberals were able to be attacked as Commies because the Liberals no longer had the Wallacites to pass the attacks onto. For the Southern Dixiecrats, it remains so (look at the record of the Southern Contingency of Southern Democrats in the past decade), and is instructive to ponder how we go from 1938 when the plan was to replace them in the South with “New Dealers”, to 1950 when the plan was to swamp them with new people from the North and West, and on to the situation today when we dare only elect Democratic Presidents from South of the Mason-Dixon Land (and for the most part Republicans as well), and fret over how to win over the quote-in-quote “Half-Republicans” to maintain some strength for an organization called the “Democratic National Committee” within that which we call the National Government.

11-2-1951: The Virginian [Senator Harry Byrd] said the South might be called upon to adopt a political remedy requiring “very firm and forthright measures” […] He characterized the National Administration as “a heterogenous crowd of Trumanites, which, if it could be called a party is one of questionable ancestory, irresponsible directory, and predatory purposes.” The Senator then departed from his prepared text to describe how he and other Southern political leaders at the Democratic National Convention in 1944 had agreed to vote for the nomination of Mr. Truman as running mate with Roosevelt . “We wanted only to prevent the renomination of Henry A Wallace. Sometimes you have to make a choice between two evils, and I don’t want to be held to the responsibility of Truman because we only did it to block Henry Wallace.”

He charged that President Truman had formed “an unholy alliance” with “tin-horn political incompetents and socialistic do-gooders”. The Civil Rights legislation on July 25 by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Byrd declared, represents a “mass invasion of States’ Rights without historical precedent, What about Lincoln, and the “Emancipation Proclamation”? Is that a good historical precedent for a “mass invasion” of “States’ Rights”? and they represent the President’s feelings on the matter also.” The South has been “slugged with a civil rights club,” Senator Byrd said, and it was only through effecting a coalition between Southern Democrats and some Republicans in Congress that these proposals and other “socialistic legislation” were defeated temporarily.

If Mr. Truman and his ideological adherents are re-elected, Senator Byrd warned, it will be regarded by them as a mandate to push through their “wholly unconstitutional socialistic program.” Consequently, he said, the South must consider that “there are ways to register opposition when we vote in November 1952.” The South must take “courageous action, even if this means reformation and reorganization of the national Democratic Party.” […] Demand at the next Democratic National Convention that civil rights be withdrawn from the platform and the two-thirds nominating rule be restored.

In the whole “Senator Trent Lott hearts Strom Thurmond” controversy, we had Pat Buchanan defend Lott by saying that “the Democrats nominated a segregationist in Adlai Stevenson”, which makes you ponder what the point of that would be. But even there, Senator Harry Byrd threw his chips behind Eisenhower, who gingerly advanced the cause of civil rights… sort of… at behest of the Supreme Court and a Bus Boycott. So it was the 1950s– both parties walked through the cavern of trying to appease both Racists and Blacks with somewhat enlightened Whites — and What is that that Happens to a Dream Deferred, again?

As for Henry Wallace… First recall that the Soviet press wrote him up again and again during 1948. Now, I proceed to inform you that he split with the Progressive Party and came out, more or less and with some caveats, for US involvement with the Korean War and against the Soviet Union’s “act of aggression”. And so, we get from the Pravdas…

10-3-1950: The press Soviet peace campagin was coupled by writers of the newspaper Literary Gazette with a strongly worded attack among American and other “war-mongers”, among whom were listed “the political business-man Henry Wallace”. Mr. Wallace’s name was mentioned in an editorial titled “Enemies of Mankind.” The editorial proposed the establishment of “The Book of Death” in which would be listed “names of all those monsters and cannibals who openly preach destruction of millions of human lives and of the greatest value of world culture.” […]

“The special favor of the warmongers is won by those politicians, literateurs, and scientists who in their day committed the sins of radicalism and who occasionally allowed themselves to criticize individual points of imperialist policy and then at the moment most convenient and profitable have dropped the mask, as has done the political businessman Henry Wallace.”

(1)”I am very sorry for President Harrison, but I cannot see that our interests are going to be affected one way or the other by the cahnge of Administration.” — Henry Clay Frick

“Well, we have nothing to fear, and perhaps it is best. I fear that Homestead did much to elect Cleveland. Very sorry– but no use getting excited.” — Andrew Carneigie
(Homestead refers to this strike, which helped make election a blow-out for Grover Cleveland over Benjamin Harrison. Carneigie Steel being a supposed supporter of Harrison and the Republicans.)

(2) Hoover’s secretary of commerce Roy Chapin, on the election of FDR: “The mood the country was such that […] perhaps we are lucky that we didn’t get a Socialist or a Radical instead of Roosevelt.” (That’d be Norman Thomas or the Communist candidate, Foster.]

I believe you can call the “Gilded Age” of post-Reconstruction America a time when the two parties collided into being about the same entity. Perhaps you can say the same thing for post-World War America, wherein the two parties clamored to both have Eisenhower as the nominee. The 1892 selection of quotes shows the Captains of Industry aware that the party in the White House does not matter. Cleveland made an impassioned State of the Union address (written, mind you) concerning Big Business being out of control in running American’s lives into the ground. But he wasn’t about to do anything about it. The 1932 quote shows the Captains of Industry reconciling themselves to our new era. I believe anyone who has read Howard Zinn’s neo-Marxist History (A People’s History of the United States) knows the quote, I believe quoted from Richard Hofstadter, of Paranoid Style fame, is that every American president has been bound by American land-owners and that has the understanding that they are furthering American Capitalism. But we’re practical in America and just want a working system we can swim under. In the case of that semi-Socialist Capitalist Reform movement of “The New Deal” — it reaches its limit and will have to be reined in sooner or later, or the nation is going to just keep marching toward Centralization. Thus, consider that as soon as the system found a working order under Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, those oh-so-evil “Captians of Industry” will… well, here’s how the British Left put it:

(3) Manchester Guardian, reported in the NYT on July 23:
Both parties show the same trend. The “old guard”, in other words the “bosses” and “machines” of the Republican Party would not stand Wendel Willkie’s liberalism (actually, more importantly, neither would the rank and file Republican voter), so they turned with some reluctance to Mr. Dewey, and with some positive enthusiasm to Mr. Bricker as his running mate. The party ‘bosses’ of the Democrats, the by no means impeccable machines and the conservatives of the South, could not stand Mr. Wallace, who in the popular mind embodies the New Deal and racial equality. So they turned to the colorless Truman who has never upset anyone’s prejudices. […]
The New Deal is dead, whatever lip service may still be paid to it. Labor in the defeat of Mr. Wallace has been pointedly ignored, and those reactionary influences in the South which put a narrow rationalism above broad human rights have been appeased.

I note that “Labor”, was happy with Truman’s selection. And the South was happy to be done with Wallace. The “negroes” on the other hand…

(4) 7-23-1944: The National Negro Council, meanwhile, attacked the nomination of Mr. Truman and the platform adopted by the Democratic Convention as “poison to the Negro Citizen.” Edgar S Brown, national director, in a special statement said Mr. Truman as chairman of the Senate War Investigation Committe “has defeated every honest and insistent effort to secure consideration for Negro war workers.” Mr. Brown also charged that Mr. Truman was silent on anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation despite the fact that responsible Negro leaders urged him to protest. Other attacks by Negroes on the racial plank in the Democratic platform were made by [bunch of names I assume few people remember.]

Skip back to the Strom Thurmond posts on the 1948 election to see how things changed in four years amongst these two Democratic constituencies. I note for your consideration that in the year 1944, there was low-level rumouring that if Roosevelt picked Wallace as his running mate, the Southern States would bolt and have a “Jeffersonian Democratic Party”. But this probably didn’t get very far from the head of… Virginia Senator Harry Byrd. Keep in mind that in the Olde South when you elected a Senator, he’s Senator for life. Strom Thurmond, anyone? All of which raises a puzzling question: are we in America moving rightward or leftward? Go from Roosevelt at his New Deal high-point in 1936, on to 1940 with he and Henry Wallace, on to 1944 with Truman, then to Kennedy, theoretically Johnson as viewed in the 1950s– but that was a deception, Carter, and Clinton… and every Democratic Presidential Administration has been a step toward the right. Except that it really hasn’t been… Civil Rights would be advanced by Truman (as a big surprise to anyone watching his career before his presidency), Eisenhower with the help of Majority Leader in the Senate Lyndon Johnson (a surprise of sorts, note he was a segregationist when elected for his first term), and through his presidency (I’ll get to Kennedy on a later post). And back on economic matters, there are sleights of hands going on. For example, for the Manchester Guardian and its belief that the “New Deal” was dead after the dumping of Wallace in favour of Truman — wasn’t the “New Deal” killed in 1938?

(5)11-9-1938: As the final returns are counted, the New Deal has been halted; the Republican party is large enough for effective opposition; the moderate Democrats in Congress can guide legislation; the third term movement has been strongly checked; Federal relief money in elections has ben overcome by voters in several states; the White House Circle, which invented the Supreme Court bill and the “purge”, has been discredited; a barrier against New Deal extension program and candidates has been set at the gate of the 1940 Democratic Convention; the sit-down strike and the Democratic – CIO alliance have been emphatically rebuked; the Farm Belt has revolted; the country is back on a two-party system; the McNutt Presidential boom in Indiana has collapsed with the McNutt State ticket; and legislative authority has been restored to Congress.

Cross out some things and replace them with more contemporary items and perhaps we can have Bush’s sixth term blues. Though with Roosevelt, his two presidential elections and his first mid-term elections were massive; Bush has made the most of narrow victories. But consider the “McNutt Presidential boom has collapsed”, and I’m having trouble envisioning a President McNutt. After the first Tuesday of November in 2006, we will almost certainly see the Presidential ambitions of Santorum dead, we may end up seeing the Presidential ambitions of current-co-frontrunner George Allen dead, and toss in a curtailed Mitt Romney if his Republican successor cannot win the Massachusetts governorship.

The “What If” Scenarios of a Henry Wallace Presidency. I believe that the US Military, and Corporate Interests, would have overthrown Wallace in a coup. Part of my thinking here is because Roosevelt was aimed at for a coup. Now, in FDR’s case the would-be-leader of our nation would have been Respected Military General Smedly Butler. Let’s assume Wallace comes to power after Roosevelt’s death at the end of World War II. Who would be put in charge of the Nation? I give you two options of Respected Military Generals: Douglas MacArthur — perhaps a bit too polarizing for the nation to accept. Option two is a bit more likely, as he’s so congenial everybody will love him forever. Dwight D Eisenhower. Try to guess how firmly my cheeck is in my mouth here.

(6)3-6-1960 “Society for the Exposure of Political Nonsense, supposed electronic truth detector “Uniquack” on some political contrarianism that looks pretty prescient today:

Almost every political idea widely accepted in America today as true is either largely untrue or palpably false. […] For example, the general impression is that the civil rights debate in the South is a hopeless mess. As a matter of fact, it will probably do more in the end to enfranchise the colored people in the South than anything since the Emancipation Proclamation. […]

Kennedy, who has a reputation as a glamour boy, is developing into the toughest operator in the field. Or at least his father was. Nixon, who’s supposed to be a conservative, is nearer to a Dewey liberal than anything else. Today, some will point to him with irony as our “Last Liberal President”, some bits of rightism — his Supreme Court picks, for instance — notwithstanding. Johnson, who is tagged as a conservative, has done more for liberal causes than most of his liberal detractors. Indeed.

And the beat goes on…

11-30: James Knight of four Texas electors chosen in the general election election said yesterday he had received three letters urging him to join a movement to keep Senator Kennedy from becoming President. Mr. Knight said one of the letters was signed by Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi, another by ML Harris – a Montgommery, Alabama attorney, and a third by two Alabama electors.

He said the letters asked him to join a a “Southern Revolt” by backing candidates other than Kennedy and Johnson. One of the letters, Mr. Knight said, urged him to vote for a ticket comprised of Senator Harry F Byrd of Virginia and Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

12-13: Mississippi’s eight and Alabama’s six unpledged presidential electors agreed after a five hour session today to vote for Senator Harry F Byrd in an effort to bar John F Kennedy from the presidency. The fourteen electors said in a statement that they had not chosen a vice presidential candidate because that would do no good. The 840 word statement laid down an ultimatum. It said:

“Whether such a man [Byrd] will be inaugurated as President or not depends upon whether or not the people of the South, who have expressed their dedication to the principles of Constitutional government and the right of a state to determine for itself the questions of segregation and freedom of association are sincere in the continued expression of such dedication.” […]

The statement said that if Kennedy were denied a victory in the Electoral College the matter would go to the US House of Representatives, where the choice would be among the top three voted in the Electoral College. Once there, the statement continued, Senator Byrd would win because “it is incredible that any congressman from any of the Southern States could refuse to cast his vote and that of his state as a unit for a Southerner such as Senator Byrd, who has been recognized over the years as one of the strongest champions of the principles of constitutional government.”

“In this situation, the Republican delegation recognizing the inevitable defeat of Nixon and being fundamentally opposed to the liberalism of Senator Kennedy– would join the Southern Congressional delegations in assuring the election of Senator Byrd. Successful oppostion to vice presidential candidates Lyndon Johnson or Henry Cabot Lodge would be impossible because the Senate chooses the vice president from the top two in the list.”

The electors met in a session closed to the public, but open to WJ Simmons of Jackson, editor of a pro-segregation monthly newspaper, The Citizens Council. Also present at the meeting were some segregationist assholes from some organization of the same name as that assfart segregationist newspaper.

9-6: “There’s no doubt about it — we’re at our low point now,” conceded William C Battle, director of the Democratic Presidential campaign in Virginia. An “uphill battle” for Senator John F Kennedy was forecast by Governor Ernest F Collings.

“I think it is a little too close,” said Govern0or Luther Hodges of North Carolina.

“Tennessee looks like a toss-up right now,” said one of the state’s most respected political observers.

Florida will be lost unless the state’s Democratic officeholders join in a unified campaign, according to Governor Leroy Collins and James Jilligan, the party chairman.

And although Texas is the home state of Senator Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Republicans claim the lead there. […]

There is also evidence of erosion of the tradional loyalty to the Democratic Party in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. However, few were willing to predict that vice president Richard Nixon could carry any of those five states.

The Republicans have moved quickly to capitilize on the South’s growing conservatism, a by-product of industrialization and urbanization. Party leaders voiced confidence that 1960 would bring the first big Republican victory in the South since Reconstruction. This is the situation facing Senator Kennedy as he prepares for his first extended campaign in the region:

— A negative reaction of unexpected proportion to the liberal Democratic platform and his Roman Catholicism
— The refusal of many Democratic officeholders to actively support the national ticket.
— Enthusiastic receptions for Mr. Nixon and such conservative members of his supporting cast as Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. […]

Opposition to the platform is generally assumed to lie behind the failure of Senator Harry F Byrd of Virginia to endorse the Democratic ticket. If his silence continues, many observers believe that it may cost Mr. Kennedy the state. They attribute President Eisenhower’s two victories there to Senator Byrd’s refusal to speak out for Adlai Stevenson. […]

Mr. Kennedy can expect little more than token support from many Democratic officials and not even that from some. A number of those actively campaigning have shown little enthusiasm for their work.

Governor Hollings is the only South Carolina official of prominence who has taken the stump in an attempt to blunt the Republican drivel. Senator Olin D Johnston endorsed the ticket, but Senator Strom Thurmond announced that he was “not in the bag this election.”

C Farris Bryant, Florida’s Democratic Gubernatorial nominee, served notice that “my principal concern is my own campaign.”

Neither of Georgia’s two Senators — Richard Russel and Herman Talmadge, has spoken out for Kennedy. Much of this reluctance, explained a leading Virginia Democrat, stems from a fear of local repercussions.

“Sure, I’ll endorse the ticket sooner or later,” Louisiana Governor Jimmie H Davis said, “But when I do, I’ll have to spend 25 minutes of a 30 minute speech denouncing the platform.”

In the current campaign, the Republicans are encouraging the Southerners to think that the Northern liberals are the party bolters. “The Kennedy organization has run off with the party. By Kennedy organization I refer to that broad alliance that managed to corral all the different shadings of the left — an alliance in which every member of that Left is both represented and happy.” [Republican Southern Campaign Chairman Potter.]

An important catalyst in the process of late has been the dawning realization that they cannot expect concessions from the Democratic Party on racial issues.

9-10: Georgians were surprised during the Atlanta appearance when James V Carmichael, president of Scripto Inc and a 1946 Democratic Gubernatorial candidate, announced that he would campaign for Richard Nixon. […]

J. Oliver Emmerich, editor of the State Times of Jackson, Mississippi, has written, “Many loyal Mississippians out of respect for the past give loyalty to the Democratic Party. But it is a ghost, a skeleton of what it once was. Some Mississippians say, ‘It is the party of our fathers and grandfathers’ yet we know and they know that those honored fobears would be in rebellion were they alive today and confronted by the irresponsible Democratic Party of today.”

9-24: Religion and “radicalism” have emerged as the major factors in the Presidential Contest in Virginia. both favor Nixon over Kennedy in this overwhelmingly Protestant state. […] Virginia’s Catholic population is only about 200,000, less than 5% of the state’s total, and in the “southside” the percentage is much smaller. Fundamentalist Protestant ministers in that area have been preaching against a Catholic President. Anti-Catholic literature has been circulated there and elsewhere.

The issue of “radicalism” cuts deeply through most of the state. This issue is chiefly responsible for the refusal of Senator Harry Byrd, patriarch and titular leader of the State Democratic organization to endorse the ticket. The position of conservatives such as Byrd is that Senator Kennedy and the Democratic party platform stand for a high-spending, centralized, labor-controlled administration. Mr. Nixon and the Republican platform are also regarded as too liberal, but they are considered preferable as the lesser evil.

10-27: President Eisenhower cautioned Virginians against following “false leaders to their destruction.” […]
Some observers saw in the President’s remarks an effort to advance the Presidential election prospects of Vice President Nixon. However, more political significance was seen in the introduction to the President to the campus audience by Senator Harry Byrd.

11-8: [Nixon won Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and Florida. Mississippi voted for a slate of uncommitted Democrats ahead of Kennedy, ahead of Nixon.] […]

With important exceptions, civil rights never became an issue. Most voters seemed to believe they had little choice between the two parties. However, the pledge made and later withdrawn by vice presidential nominee Henry Cabot Lodge that a negro would be named to the cabinet undoubtedly cost the party southern votes. Some white southerners were alienated by Mr. Kennedy’s expressions of interest in the case of Reverend Martin Luther King, a negro integration leader jailed in Georgia on a traffic charge. Most observers contended that these losses were offset by the negro support he picked up.
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It’s a bit bemusing to see how the wikipedia article shortens that sidenote into meaningless: —–In the 1960 election, also as a non-candidate, he received 15 votes from unpledged electors: all 8 from Mississippi, 6 of Alabama’s 11 (the rest going to John F. Kennedy), and 1 from Oklahoma (the rest going to Richard Nixon). —– The moral of that being that there’s a story behind every fogged-up fuzz.

There’s probably a book worth reading within Zell Miller’s A National Party No More, if someone could just edit out the damned hopefully affected folksy metaphors and aphorisms. If nothing else, Miller stands before us with a particularly insidious conventional wisdom that demands to be cut through. I wonder about that which is Historical Amnesia, and to what extent it inflicts myself.

The biggest problem with the party leadership is that they know nothing about the modern South. They still see it as a land of magnolias and mint juleps, with the pointy-headed KKK lurking in the background, waiting to burn a cross or lynch blacks and Jews.

Let’s leave aside for a moment our occasional “Ain’t this a Riot” news-stories of Segregated High School Proms. Or Bob Jones University’s controversial policies, and what exactly his namesake was all about. (Feel free to consult my entry on the 1928 presidential election.) You don’t have to stray far from Zell Miller’s career to see that his “Profile in Courage” was a stand against the Georgian flag’s Confederate Flag emblem. His book features his “State of the State” address where he spends the 75% of his time pleading Georgians to allow the flag to be changed. He nearly lost his re-election of 1994 because of the issue, and that the great Democratic break through for the state in 2002 came on behest of this same damned racial “Confederate Flag” wedge issue.

And, as always, the question for Trent Lott : Just what problems were you referring to with “We wouldn’t have had all these problems” had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1944? (Feel free to consult my entries on Strom Thurmond’s 1944 campaign.) By the way, renaming an organization from “White Citizens Council” to “Christian Citizens Council” doesn’t do any good, because the acronym “CCC” is this creepy soft-case version of the acronym “KKK”.

None of this is to say that “The North” has its racial problems, but in this equation I have to say I could care less about the “magnolias and mint juleps” factor, and I fixate on the other factor of the equation. And, yes, Zell Miller, I am aware that the economy of Atlanta, Georgia is more advanced than the economy of Portland, Oregon. I also find the following passage kind of interesting.

Gone are the days when Japanese Americans were herded into camps because we were at war with Japan. Gone are the days when African Americans in my state of Georgia were denied access to lunch counters.

Nay. We just herd some Muslims into Guantanamo based on spurious claims by spurious tribesmen in Afghanistan — out to make a fast buck or out to settle a score with an old enemy. And we just figure out ways to throw African Americans off the voter roll. History is not working in a vacuum. When Zell Miller says that “Jefferson and Jackson would sue the modern Democratic Party” for libel if they saw what it had become, I wonder if he doesn’t realize he’s echoing the sentiments of 1948 (and 1964, and as I’ll show you even 1960), when we have the Dixiecrat bolters shout out to audiences of Dixiecrats entreating “all true White Jeffersonian Democrats”, and when mindful that there are border states watching they carefully left out the “white” part of the phrase.

I never managed to get the quote down from Zell Miller (as I started to merely skim through the book), but he suggests that “Franklin Roosevelt knew this was a ‘big tent party’.” who “understood that 70, 80, 90% was better than none.” Perhaps Roosevelt said something to that effect… I imagine after his unsuccessful purge attempt at non-New Deal Democrats in 1938… the Conservative Democrats who were starting to have a problem with the Centralization of Government… read: the Southern Democrats. I ponder something, and it’s something that makes it a laugh-riot when somebody like Zell Miller says that they are Democrats in the Spirit of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy (and I’ll get to Kennedy in a moment). In 1940, Roosevelt selected Henry Wallace as his running mate. And, indications are he would have done the same thing again, if not for the cries from more Conservative forces in the Democratic Party. Harry Truman was deemed acceptable. Wallace than ran to Truman’s left on a Party that was… um… subsidized by the Soviet Union… probably. And the Southern Democrats who brought Truman to power bolted from Truman. Think about that. There’s a weird parable there that I can’t quite put into words.

In 1960, the state of Georgia gave the Democratic nominee, John F Kennedy, a higher percentage of its vote than John F Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts. “You can look it up,” as Casey Stengel used to say. Only the percentage in Rhode Island was greater. And Georgians were not disappointed in Kennedy’s performance as a chief executive. He stared down the Russians over Cuba and he cut taxes in a significant way that stimulated the economy. Had he not been assassinated, he could have carried Georgia a second time.

The conventional wisdom is that Kennedy was the last Democratic Presidential, and certainly the last Democratic Northern Presidential Candidate, that the South took to naturally… that something in his make-up (he not being oh-s-liberal liberal liberal) drove the South to love and revere him. Let the Record show that he did not pick up the bulk of the Southland easily, and let the record show that for most of the presidential campaign the polls were showing that Nixon was going to pick up the Southern States that went to Eisenhower, and let the record show that the Democratic and Republican platform on the issue of Civil Rights was… kind of close to identical. And let the record show also that the Nixon – Lodge ticket botched their one effort to pick up the anti-segregation vote.

Take a look at the 1960 Presidential Election map. Somebody named “Byrd” won the states of Mississippi and Alabama. The presidential ballot for the state of Mississippi had on it Kennedy, Nixon, and “Unrestricted Democratic Slate”. The last ticket won. Nobody won Mississippi. I’ll have to check Alabama. And there’s a curious footnote here in how Mississippi and Alabama’s electors attempted to, post election, convince the rest of the South to Rise Up and convince the Republican electors to cast their lot with… Senator Byrd of Virginia.

And I will get to that post at a later time.