Ahistorical History

Did you hear the one about the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party?

In light of Donald Trump's response to the support given him by former Grand Wizard David Duke, Rush Limbaugh on Monday claimed

David Duke is a hard-core leftist.  He's an anti-Semite.  The Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left.  It was the military arm of the Democratic Party.  Hello. ...

People at CNN think the Klan is far right, uber-right.  They're not.  The Klan, Jeffrey's right, they were the military of the Democrat Party back in those days.  They were the armed forces of the Democrat Party, the segregationist South. 

For crying out loud, do I need to give you the names?  J. William Fulbright, Lester Maddox, George Wallace.  Who are all these people?  They're all Democrats!

J. William Fulbright, Lester Maddox, and George Wallace, all deceased (making it much easier to slander them), never were members of the Ku Klux Klan.  But never mind; this thing about the KKK having been the "military arm" of the Democratic Party is making the rounds, including at CNN.

One of the network's contributors, Jeffrrey Lord, on Monday claimed on air  "Donald Trump isn't playing the game, although he certainly denounced him. I mean, David Duke is a hardcore leftist. He's an anti-Semite." He added "Yes, Margaret, the Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left. It was the military arm of the Democratic Party."

The following night, during an argument (video below) with Van Jones about Trump and the KKK, Lord contended ."Don't hide and say that's not part of the base of the Democratic party. They were the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic party according to historians."







Who are these historians? No one knows.   When in 2013 a Virginia state senator (before he retracted his statement) said "The fact is that both the KKK and Planned Parenthood are creations of the Democratic Party," Politifact-Virginia found

"To say that the Ku Klux Klan was started by the Democratic Party -- it’s not the Democratic party of today," Martinez said. "(From the) 1930s until today, you think of the Democratic Party being considered the party of the disenfranchised."

Other historians had similar takes.

Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, wrote in an email that various "Klans" that sprung up around the South acted as a "strong arm" for many local Democratic politicians during Reconstruction. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest -- believed to be the KKK’s first Grand Dragon -- even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, said Emberton, author of "Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence and the American South after the Civil War."

But Emberton added a major caveat:

"The party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today," she wrote to us. "Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th century, due in large part to white ‘Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By then, the Democratic Party had become the party of ‘reform,’ supporting a variety of ‘liberal’ causes, including civil rights, women’s rights, etc. whereas this had been the banner of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century."

Elaine Frantz Parsons, an associate professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh said that most post-Civil War southern whites were Democrats who were unhappy with Republican policies on Reconstruction while large numbers of newly-freed slaves were Republicans.

"So it is not surprising that the Reconstruction era Klan would have been very largely Democrats attacking Republicans," Parsons said in an e-mail. "But this simply does not map well at all onto the party structure we know today. Among other things, the Republicans (during Reconstruction) were condemned as the party of big government and as wanting to centralize authority on the federal level."

In 2013, Sarah Jones at Politics USA reminded us of the southern strategy initiated by Richard Nixon and perfected by Reagan adviser Lee Atwater, who

explained in an infamous interview that took place as he was serving under Reagan, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract now; you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

During the Civil Rights era, when there still were Democratic members of Congress in the south, there was a clear split between the northern and southern wings of the Party. The northern wing was dominant, especially after South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, responding to a speech (static in the original) by Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey supporting civil rights, led delegates out of the convention to form the Dixiecrat Party


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On Wednesday, Limbaugh returned to deceiving his listeners, maintaining "It's a foreign language to them that the KKK was a bunch of Democrats.  Even though you can them the names: Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Robert Byrd, all of that doesn't matter." LImbaugh can't help but know that in those days, the vast majority of southerners, of good will and otherwise, liberal and conservative, were Democrats: it was a part of the era of the "solid South."

In the 1940s Byrd, who grew up in a house with no electricity, running water, or bathroom, led a small-town, relatively inactive Klan chapter in rural West Virginia. Later, he would emphasize "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times, and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

At least Senator Byrd would have erased his errors if it were possible. The likes of Jeffrey Lord and Rush Limbaugh takea different approach. They never will regret highlighting events following the Civil War and ignoring those following World War II,  Humphrey to furious state-level attempts by the GOP to suppress voting rights.   Their efforts to rewrite history are deceitful and venomous, and thus bound to continue.








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More Limbaugh Nonsense

Disingenuous as ever, Rush Limbaugh, the day after inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the U.S.A.. briefly returned to his theme of Democrats as racists. On a rant about statements of broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw praising the election of Mr. Obama, Limbaugh stated

You are no different today than in the 1960s, except Mr. Brokaw conveniently forgets that the rednecks and bigots he's talking about were Democrats: Bull Connor, J. William Fulbright. All these segregationists were of the party that Tom Brokaw salivates over today.

Forget that Tom Brokaw, obviously a fan of our new President, does not "salivate" over the Democratic Party and rarely, if ever, does. it is only Barack Obama about which Brokaw was commenting, and frequently has. The Democratic Party to which Limbaugh refers was a party of urban, northern liberals and conservative southerners.... was a party including conservative southerners. Now, decades later, white southerners vote Republican and the Republican Party has become an arguably regional party based in the southeast while the Democratic Party has developed a more national appeal. And the GOP does not win in the south because of non-whites. Even in 1964- over 40 years ago- the Repub Party had assumed the mantle of the white right-wing of the South, as Barry Goldwater won five southern states (including 87% in Mississippi), his native Arizona, and no other.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson's effort on behalf of civil rights helped seal the deal for his party in the South, reflected in his comment after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "we have lost the South for a generation" (insufficiently pessimistic as it was). The seeds were sown earlier, perhaps most poignantly when at the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey embarked on an (successful) effort to insert a civil rights plank in the party platform. The Dixiecrat Party was formed by segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina after Humphrey famously asserted

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.


And where did Hubert Humphrey end up? As Vice-President to Lyndon Johnson and Democratic presidential nominee in 1968. And Strom Thurmond? As a Republican Senator until he retired in 2002 at the age of 100. One of his biggest supporters, we recall, was Repub Senator- and Minority Leader- Trent Lott, who, at Thurmond's birthday party in 2002 infamously declared

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.


The Democratic Party is in the midst of a modest comeback in the south, partly because of a slight moderation in the region's politics, but probably due more to the growing political power of blacks. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh's invocation of the names Bull Connor and J. William Fulbright was completely in character. It was a part of his ongoing effort to tar the Democratic Party- and its voters, who nominated Barack Obama- with the brush of racism, in the only way Rush knows how- few facts, details, or context, but a lot of narrow-mindedness.

The Palin Effect

In a column he describes as an "easy postmortem," syndicated neocon Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post Writer's Group analyzed the loss of John McCain, attributing it primarily to the economic collapse. That collapse was especially destructive to McCain's candidacy because the selection of Sarah Palin to be the "heartbeat from the presidency" exposed the weakness of the ticket in addressing the economic crisis and of the vacuity of the "America First" slogan.

Krauthammer had criticized the selection of Sarah Palin for vice-president but adamantly endorsed the GOP ticket shortly before the election because he much preferred McCain to Obama, especially on the matters of national defense. In like manner, he notes now

Palin was a mistake ("near suicidal," I wrote on the day of her selection) because she completely undercut McCain's principal case against Obama - his inexperience and unreadiness to lead. Her nomination not only intellectually undermined the readiness argument, it changed the election dynamic by shifting attention, for days on end, to her preparedness, fitness and experience - and away from Obama's.

I obviously believe(d) the Illinois senator is sufficiently prepared, fit, and experienced to be President. This is one reason I always thought choosing the Alaska governor as the running mate for John McCain was a mistake. Unable, then, to harp on his experience (as I have on the Palin Blunder) and patriotism (yes, Obama is just as patriotic but doesn't have the P.O.W. experience to highlight), McCain went the economic route. But, as Krauthamer noted,

After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party's vocation. With a Republican White House having partly nationalized the banks and just about everything else, McCain's final anti-Obama maneuver - Joe-the-Plumber, spread-the-wealth accusations of socialism - became almost comical.

It was even more "comical" than the effort of the Republican team to compete with Barack Obama on the issue of "change." Barack Obama not only represented change, was not only the embodiment of change, but was change itself. (Note the breathless headlines and commentary, suggesting the purge of our racist legacy, following his victory.) Krauthammer comments

McCain thought he could steal the "change" issue from Obama by running a Two Mavericks campaign. It was a fool's errand from the very beginning. It defied logic for the incumbent party's candidate to try to take "change" away from the opposition. Election Day exit polls bore that out with a vengeance. Voters for whom change was the most important issue went 89-to-9 for Obama.

No doubt Krauthammer's commentary, generally valid, was motivated in part by an effort to deflect blame from the man he claims "will be- he should be- remembered as the most worthy presidentail nominee ever to be denied the prize" (Hubert Humphrey, Al Gore, others; did I mention Hubert Humphrey?. But now comes more objective evidence of the mistake the campaign made just before the Republican National Convention.

Curtis B. Gans is director of the Committe for the Study of the American Electorate. He has concluded (pdf) that the percentage of eligible citizens turning out to vote in this election was at most 1% higher than in 2004, in part because the heralded jump in registration "was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats." And he found three reasons for the decline in Republican turnout, including

John McCain’s efforts to unite the differing factions in the Republican Party by the nomination of Governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee was a singular failure. By election time many culturally conservative Republicans still did not see him as one of their own and stayed home, while moderate Republicans saw the nomination of Palin reckless and worried about McCain’s steadiness.

As expected, the selection of Sarah Palin galvanized the base- the Democratic base.

The Speech- no. 9


It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.


The children. The elderly. The sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Those were the passions of the individual, Hubert H. Humphrey, who spoke those words. Hillary Clinton is no Hubert Humphrey (thank you, Lloyd Bentsen) but consider that Mrs. Clinton was an intern for the famous childrens' advocate, Marian Wright Edelman, and advised the Childrens Defense Fund. And in her concession speech yesterday, 6/7/08, Mrs. Clinton highlighted the concern for both the elderly and the ill which arguably characterized her pursuit of the presidential nomination. Not a bad epitaph for a speech, and a campaign.

Vice-Presidential Consideration

In an article on salon.com on 6/6/08, Walter Shapiro argues that Barack Obama is unlikely to select as his running mate any of the usual suspects. Shapiro notes that the practice of the nominee choosing the V.P.-designate began only in 1960 and frequently has produced "a national embarassment- or worse." Think Agnew, Eagleton (a little unfair- but it was an embarrassment), Ferraro, Quayle, Lieberman, Cheney.

By contrast, through 1956 the convention iself selected the head guy's running mate. And in 1960, that process led to a fight among four giants: John F. Kennedy, Estes Kefauver, Al Gore Sr., and Hubert H. Humphrey.

Think about that a moment. We all remember John Kennedy. Then there was Albert Arnold Gore, whose son became Vice-President before being elected President in 2000, of whom it was said "never ran a negative campaign." The Tennessee senator who helped create the Interstate Highway System, was dedicated to fighting poverty, opposed the Vietnam War, and was one of only three southern Senators who refused to sign the segregationist Southern Manifesto. He supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after he had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964- but later wrote in his memoirs of his regret over his position.

The other two senators opposing the Southern Manifesto? Lyndon B. Johnson and Estes Kefauver. That was Estes Kefauver, a supporter of antitrust activity and opponent of "the concentration of U.S. economic and political power under the control of a wealthy, exclusive elite." He served as chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses), whose televised hearings in 1950-1951 threw light on the danger of organized crime before American society, a la The Sopranos, began to glorify La Cosa Nostra.

And then there was Minnesota Senator, and Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, who tirelesly fought for justice for the less fortunate in American society. At the Democratic Presidential Convention on July 14, 1948, Humphrey helped spark the walkout of Strom Thurmon's Dixicrats with a speech in which he declared

To those who say -- My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say -- To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

Years later, we have a presumptive nominee whose slogan is "we are the ones we've been waiting for" and little experience by which to judge him; and a vanquished candidate, the spouse of a former president, who during the campaign compared her opponent unfavorably to the presumptive Republican nominee. The decline in the caliber of the national candidates of our party is disturbing. And stunning.

Maybe Too Little; Certainly Too Late


Early in the Democratic presidential race, before there were Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy, before most of the talk of Martin Luther Kind, Jr., bipartisanship, and the politics of hope, there was Iraq. Senator Hillary Clinton had voted in favor of a resolution authorizing President Bush to take military action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq while State Senator Barack Obama, speaking from an anti-war district in Chicago, Illinois, had spoken out against the resolution. With the war the biggest issue among the American people and especially among Democrats, Obama had been on the right side, Clinton on the right side.

As a Presidential candidate, Obama emphasized the differences he had 4-5 years earlier on Iraq with the Senator from New York. Although for many months behind Clinton in national polls of Democrats, Obama early on was a highly credible candidate in part because of the stance he had taken. Later came Oprah, celebrityhood, and a commanding lead in the quest for the nomination.

At the debate on February 26, 2008 in Cleveland, Ohio, Obama highlighted this distinction while defending the approach he has taken toward Gulf War II, once he was actually able to effect the course of the war. He eloquently declared:

And the fact was this was a big strategic blunder. It was not a
matter of, "Well, here is the initial decision, but since then we've
voted the same way. Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out. The question is: Who's making the decision initially to drive the bus into the ditch?

Near the end of the debate, co-host Tim Russert asked the candidates "before you go, each of you have talked about your careers in public service. Looking back through them, is there any words or vote that you'd like to take back?" and Clinton responded:

"Well, obviously, I've said many times that, although my
vote on the 2002 authorization regarding Iraq was a sincere vote, I would not have voted that way again."
Sensing he had something, Russert followed up "But to be clear, you'd like to have your vote back?" and Clinton reiterated "absolutely. I've said that many times."


But of course she hadn't said that many times. Or at all. Sure, Mrs. Clinton had implied it several times, and it was clear that she had learned that her vote was wrong both in terms of policy and politics, but she hadn't so stated.

It reminded me of October, 1968. Hubert H. Humphrey was headed for defeat in the presidential race, in part because of his loyalty in supporting President Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War, when he finally found his voice and advocated a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam. His poll numbers went up (aided by an actual halt ordered by Johnson) and Humphrey barely- by under 1%- lost an election he likely would have won had the campaign lasted one more week.

The analogy isn't perfect. Clinton was not Vice-President and she acquiesced in the policy of a Republican, not Democratic, President. And Hillary Clinton (like Barack Obama) is no Hubert Humphrey. Still, it struck me that had the New York Senator conceded a year ago that she would have liked to have taken her vote back, she might have blunted Obama's argument, and perhaps even his candidacy. Now, of course, it is too late.