Republicans: Bit' by Their Own Dawg

Showing more of an almost infinite capacity of the Republican Party to shoot itself in the foot, a so-called “Republican activist” in South Carolina said something almost unbelievable the other day. He referenced a news story about an escaped gorilla.
“It was probably harmless,” quipped the appropriately named “Rusty”, “no doubt it was an ancestor of Michelle Obama.” Oh boy.
Two things come to mind immediately. Republicans are paying the price for a decision they made in the early 1950s. The “Roosevelt Coalition” that held the White House from 1933 to 1953 was made up of four parts. Northern urban Immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and southern whites.
In a brilliant stroke, FDR bound together the Ku Klux Klan and everybody it hated in one party. It controlled the White House and Congress for decades. By 1952, Republicans were desperate to break off some part of the coalition and use it to win back the White House.
Truman had bought the Jewish vote by backing Israel in 1948. Catholics and urban immigrants had been with the Democrats since the early 1800s. But the new Civil Rights movement that had began—largely among Democrats—after World War II made southern whites vulnerable to Republican inroads.
They went after them with a vengeance. Within a few decades the Confederate South was as solidly Republican as it had been Democratic after the Civil War. Republicans rode to victory on that cushion in 1952, 56, 68, 72, 80, 84, 88, 2000. They finally took back Congress in 1994.
The Grand Wizard of the Klan was now, vociferously, a Republican. Like it or not, the Klan had become “family” to the Republicans—a black sheep, a cousin to be ashamed of, but nonetheless kin. It has to be an embarrassment. “Rusty” certainly was.
The second thing that comes to mind is how the pro- and anti-slave arguments developed during the first half of the 1800s. When the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, there were black slaves in all Thirteen Colonies.
Over the next 80 years, attitudes and economic necessities changed. Drastically and uniquely compared to all of human history, Economically: Eli Whitney turned the north toward industrialism and factory labor with his invention of interchangeable parts.
Eli Whitney turned the South toward almost total dependence on slave labor with his invention of the cotton gin—which made it profitable to grow cotton down south. Cotton was desperately labor intensive. Dreams some southerners had of freeing their slaves back in the 1700s went glimmering as the region turned to cotton growing.
The North could abolish slavery because owning slaves as valets, house cleaners and cooks was a luxury that could be done without or replaced with immigrant servants. The South depended on slave labor in the cotton fields as a necessity of life.
Britain freed her slaves. So did France. There was pressure on Russia to free her serfs. Suddenly the mores of the world turned upside down. The slave owning South found that it was no longer in the mainstream of civilized behavior. Slave owning was increasingly seen in the rest of the Christian world as immoral.
(I must stress that this change in attitude and behavior was unique to the Christian World—Europe and the Americas. Slavery continues to this day in much of the rest of the planet. As recently as the 1950s, the UN seriously tried to develop an international legal code for the treatment of slaves.)
The South reacted to this new attitude in the rest of the US and the world by trying to counter it. All right, if enslaving humans is immoral—then black slaves aren’t human. They are subnormal, closer to apes. No one had viewed slaves in such a light before—but the South needed to find some rationale for hanging on to its economic model: slave labor.
Pseudo scientific theory after theory was put forward to prove the evolutionary backwardness of Africans. Slave owners were actually doing society an enormous favor by giving these sub-humans useful occupations—and by keeping them under control so that they did not endanger more elevated white human society. Rather like keeping dangerous dogs penned up.
This attitude continued after the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment. Northerners really had no higher opinion of blacks as free men. They were very content to have most of them stay in the South, working on their old plantations as share croppers—raising cotton.
(It must be pointed out that northerners did not realize the significance of their own industrialization. Our largest export in 1860, the last year before the war, and biggest currency maker was cotton. No one could imagine immediately after the war that industrial exports would soon far outstrip our agricultural exports.
It was widely believed that the only way we could pay our huge Civil War debt was by growing more cotton. To grow cotton took labor. The only people we could force to do it were the freed slaves. We put them back on the plantations--after a brief experiment with reconstruction.
Blacks did not gain their freedom until mechanical devices for picking cotton were invented in 1950. This made the Civil Rights movement possible and acceptable.)
The defense Southerners created for their “peculiar institution”—that blacks were not human and therefore not subject to the new anti-slave morality—is with us yet. It remains an article of faith among Klanners and white supremacists.
Good ol’ Rusty was just putting a new face on an old rationale. Never mind that she is now the First Lady of the United States—and is exuding more charm than anyone since Jackie Kennedy. (Frankly, Michelle seems a bit nicer.)
When Republicans made their bid for the unreconstructed southern whites, they allowed them to bring along a lot of baggage. It could bite the whole Party in the future.