georgeob1 wrote:Setanta, I would never challenge you in a contest of historical pedantry, and would certainly never throw such a challenge in your face.
I think you are insistent on finding dispute where there is none. I suggested that in 1942 some arguments were put forward claiming that the internment s were done with some due process, but none was even attempted claiming that the requirements of the equal protection clause were met. I also noted that neither proposition would be accepted today. It is also a fact that the legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination, particularly in the South, that today would be quickly struck down based on the avbove provisions (and others), stood unchallenged (in the legal system) in 1942.
I consider that a plausible statement, but just as in the case of attempting to excuse by reference to the actions of others, appealing to customary usage does not excuse such behavior.
In 1865, many people, who did not closely examine the political situation, thought and commonly said the Democratic party was dying. But that was a notion born of ignorance, and a shallow understanding of practical politics. In 1860, Lincoln garnered just over one and three quarters million votes--that was far above any other candidate (there were four). But Stephen Douglas and John Breckenridge combined polled nearly two million--it was precisely because Douglas and Breckenridge split the vote of the Democrats that Lincoln was able to win. Lincoln polled uner 40% of the vote, but won 180 of the 303 electoral votes. The traditional view is that Breckenridge as the southern Democrat ruined Douglas's campaign, but, in fact, Breckenridge garnered six times as many electoral votes as Douglas, even though Douglas had almost one and half million votes to about 800,000 for Breckenridge. Presidential elections are not a reliable measure of the strength of a party.
After the war, although many people thought the Democratic Party to be moribund, they provided a haven for "rehabilitated" southerners who intended to (and succeeded at) end the brief rise of black "politicians" who were brought forward as Republican candidates by supporters of the Freedman's Bureau working in the south--the notorious carpetbaggers. But that doesn't account for northern Democrats. In 1864, Lincoln polled 55% of the vote, while McClellan polled 45%. That speaks volumes about the strength of the Democratic Party in the north that they did so well without the votes of southerners.
So the Democratic Party became a home for southerners who would have died rather than vote Republican, and who had the political sense to know they'd need to be allied to an effective party organization to get political power at Washington. But that doesn't leave the Republicans "simon pure." Their support of the Freedman's Bureau had cost them in local elections in the
north after the war, and although we don't know hear about in history, there were race riots and "race wars" (as they were then known) between blacks and whites in many places in the north. It was not long before blacks found themselves shut out of both parties.
That racism was just a virulent in the north as in the south, and cannot be explained merely by an appeal to the prejudices of former slave owners. It was not restricted only to blacks, either. Thomas Nast is celebrated in American history as a great political cartoonists. But what is not taught is why he attacked Tammany Hall. To say that he was a virtuous political reformer would be a lie. He hated Catholics in general and Irish Catholics in particular, and that was why he attacked Tammany Hall, as a corrupt Irish Catholic political machine which was bent on destroying "true American values." In the cartoon below, he shows brave Protestant orphans attacked by crocodiles who were Catholic bishops, their miters the gaping jaws of the "crocodiles." Neither the state nor the city of New York had public orphanages, and he was railing against the Catholic orphanages, almost the only orphanages available.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. became involved in the Republican Party in the late 1870s, after he returned from Harvard. Private, he expressed the same contempt for Irish Catholics. He was considered a radical reformer, and the Republican Party machine never trusted him, even when he had become President, and in 1904, polled a greater percentage plurality than any other President in a contested election (Washington twice ran unopposed, and James Monroe was unopposed in his second term).
It was in the 1880s that the "Lily Whites" arose in the south, and became popular in the south and in the north. The Lily White agenda was white Protestant, and was anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-semitic. It was also immensely popular. Although Nathan Bedford Forrest had founded the Ku Klux Klan, he dissolved the organization in 1870 because of the depredations of "night riders." He and John Gordon of Georgia, both former Confederate generals, were accused of fomenting the terrors of the night riders, but were cleared by a Congressional committee (which is also a measure of how well the Republicans quickly learned to work with the Democrats). As a result of the Lily White movement, the Ku Klux Klan was "re-founded" in 1915 by a Georgia minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, William Simmons, who had, however, been suspended by the church in 1912.
The Birth of a Nation was an immensely popular motion picture, and Simmons himself said that he was influenced by it. It was based on the novels
The Clansman and
The Leopard's Spots, by Thomas Dixon, also immensely popular, and which glorified the clan. Even the movie posters for Griffith's film luridly depicted night riders . . .
. . . and Simmons based the regalia of the re-born Klan on images from the film. The new Klan was not just racist with regard to blacks, it was also "nativist" (meaning anti-immigrant), anti-Catholic, anti-semitic and homophobic. Another key motivator for Simmons, as he reported himself, was the murder trial of Leo Frank, who did not survive to be condemned, as he was lynched after being convicted. Newspapers all over the country were full of virulently anti-semitic accounts which claimed to describe the murder, and which attempted to lend a patina of justice to the circus trial which convicted him, and which deplored the method but not the result of the lynching.
The Klan became popular all over the country. The Urban League was founded in 1910 after an incident in which a black man was lynched--
in Springfield, Illinois. Even before that, the notion of the "white man's burden" had become popular in the United States, and racism was not just casual, it was a socially approved idea. Kipling had written the poem
The White Man's Burden as an address to the American people after the Spanish War, and with reference to the occupation of the Philippines.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
That's just the first stanza. Roosevelt attacked Margaret Sanger before the Great War, calling her a race traitor, because he believed white people should make lots of little white babies so as maintain dominance and to supply the needs of "the White Man's Burden."
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Appeals to tradition and history to justify such actions, are, however, just as bankrupt as it is to appeal to the viciousness of others to excuse our own viciousness. Although Roosevelt many have simply been expressing the prejudices of the majority of the nation when he spoke of a "race traitor," from the very beginning of our nation, there have been significant numbers of people who have opposed slavery, who have opposed the "nativists" like the Ku Klux Klan and the Know Nothings, who have called for religious and ethnic tolerance. That Jim Crow reigned still supreme in 1942 is hardly a reasonable argument to attempt to excuse the internment of the Japanese Americans. I still consider your arguments bankrupt, and on the basis of the morality implicit in the values we not only claim to hold dear, but have so claimed since the foundation of the nation.
As for my "pedantry," that was a cute remark, George, but it doesn't alter either my argument or its justification.
