History Book Club
Wednesday,
October 26, 2016
Political Parties in America
Headline
during HUAC “Red Scare” investigation, 1952
Wednesday, October 26,
2016: Political Parties in America. Whigs, Know-Nothings, Federalists,
Copperheads; Communists, Socialists, Republicans, Democrats, more.
Summers, Mark Wahlgren A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia and the Making of Reconstruction,
University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Reading
about Reconstruction, as it appeared in the Fall of 1866, 150 years ago, tells
a story of a terrible monster, the President of the United States, rumored to
be ready for a coup d’état…. Declaring the returning congressmen from the South
unconstitutional, or sending in the army to exclude the Republicans from
Congress, or the Democrats.
It
was a time of unsettling fear. How would
the country get itself together again?
Or would it?
In
the South, rumors were flying about hordes of freed slaves massing to rape and
kill white people. And an organization,
soon to be known as the Ku Klux Klan, was forming to “protect white values”,
and to terrorize blacks, and anyone who appeared to help blacks.
Author
Mark Wahlgren Summers writes of the ever-recurring use of fear in American
politics. The “crack-brained” Anti-Mason
movement in the 1820s, the Know-Nothings’ fear of plotting popes, and the
Birchers’ seeing Reds behind every bush and tree.
One might
add to those examples the threat of millions of undocumented Mexicans, many of
them “murderers and rapists” … and the
hordes of Fanatical Islamic Terrorists, hidden among Syrian refugees, destined
for our towns and cities.
Summers’
book is about Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the “role of
unreasonable, sometimes unreasoning, fear in political discourse.” Political
parties often went far beyond the ideas and policies that give them their
credentials,” he writes. “Big turnouts at elections, and the way voters
identify themselves with one side or the other, may be based on the nightmare
in the closet, the terrible unknown that could happen when the lights go down.”
Today we
see the fear of Trump with his hand on the nuclear button, or his efforts to
encourage racism, chaos in immigrant communities, and to undo the progress
toward equality of women and minorities.
Or, the fear of Hillary Clinton appointing activist Supreme Court
justices to “tear up” the Constitution, particularly the Second Amendment.
The more
we read about the years following the Civil War the more we marvel about how
much things have changed, and how much they keep on being the same.
Reconstruction
was the driving mission of the Republican Party after the Civil War, and it was
the thing that white southerners feared, that stirred talk of another civil
war, and that set the Republicans back so that they relaxed their drive for the
civil rights for newly freed slaves. They talked themselves into thinking
Reconstruction succeeded, but it would take another century before blacks could
begin to win those rights.
Here we
are today, a century and a half later. Segregation has been outlawed, blacks
have equal access to schools, jobs… A black man is just completing his eighth
year as our President, and still, millions of Americans resent blacks, do not
consider them equal, and actively, albeit covertly, act to keep them as
second-class citizens. The Republican
Party, famous for its leadership role as the Party of Lincoln, now pays scant
attention to encouraging blacks to join, and indeed has nominated a man to run
for president who has aligned himself with quiet friends like the former head
of the KKK, and has preached to a base that includes many not afraid to yell
out racist slurs about President Obama and his family.
A Dangerous Stir
Before
George Washington’s second term had ended a party system was coming into
effect, with Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.
By the
1840s, after Andrew Jackson had given new definition to the Democratic Party, America recognized
the permanency of the party system. The election of Jackson gave rise to the Whig Party, whose members didn’t like
to think of themselves as a party. They
favored the supremacy of Congress, and favored a program of modernization,
banking and economic protectionism to stimulate manufacturing. They appealed to
entrepreneurs and planters, but had little appeal for farmers and unskilled
workers. Whigs attracted many active Protestants, who were morally opposed to
Jackson’s Indian removal policies.
Democrats
in those days stood for “the sovereignty of the people” and majority rule as a
general principle of governing. It attracted farmers, urban workers and new
immigrants. When more and more Catholics began to arrive in America, they
migrated toward the Democrats. Democrats were the dominant party in the south
as tension grew before the Civil War. The Copperheads became a vocal faction
among northern Democrats. They opposed the war, urged an immediate peace with
the Confederates, allowing slavery to continue. After the fall of Atlanta in
1864, the Copperhead movement collapsed.
The Whig Party fell apart
because of the expansion of slavery to the territories. Most Whig Party
leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham
Lincoln did temporarily) or
changed parties. The northern voter-base mostly gravitated to the new Republican Party.
In the South, most joined the Know
Nothing Party.
In its two decades of
existence, the Whig Party had two of its candidates, Harrison and Taylor,
elected President. Both died in office. John Tyler succeeded to the Presidency after
Harrison's death in 1841, but was expelled from the party. Millard
Fillmore, who became President after Taylor's death in 1850, was the last
Whig president.
Anti-Catholicism had been around in America even in
colonial times, but when huge numbers of German and Irish Catholics began to
arrive in the 1840s, the American
Republican Party emerged, then became the Native American Party, and finally the American Party in 1855. Its unofficial name was the “Know Nothing”
party, because members were told to resist inquiries into the party’s
organization by saying “I know nothing.”
The Know Nothings became very strong in
Massachusetts, and spread nation-wide. Abraham Lincoln strongly opposed the
Know Nothing movement but did not denounce it publicly, because he needed the
votes of its membership to form a successful anti-slavery coalition in
Illinois. Just like today, with politicians who oppose Trump, but need his
supporters.
In a letter
to a friend, Lincoln wrote: “I am not a Know-Nothing – that is certain. How
could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor
of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me
to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are
created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except
negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created
equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to that I
should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving
liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and
without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
The Know
Nothings opposed other, non-Catholic groups as well, like the Chinese in
California. In Chicago the Know Nothing mayor refused to hire immigrants for
city jobs. They also opposed slavery and alcoholic beverages.
The
anti-slavery Know Nothings in the north blended into the Republican party at
the time Lincoln was elected in 1860. In the south, they joined the Constitutional Party.
The Republican
Party grew anew in the late 1850s from the remnants of the Whig Party, and for
the next several decades elected most presidents, but not senators and
congressmen.
Pres. Andrew Johnson (1865-68)
“A Dangerous Stir” is a marvelous tale of Reconstruction,
of Andrew Johnson, a president of amazingly disastrous proportions, including
bigot, blowhard, drunkard, narcissist. It is the tale of politicians enlarging
upon every suspicion, newspapers enlarging still more, to stir each part of the
nation to a swizzling frenzy. Plots of
roving bands of freed blacks, intent upon murder of any whites in sight usually
turned out to be drunk whites killing other drunk whites. The Ku Klux Klan
stirred up more hatred and distrust, and strung up many innocent blacks.
Cartoon, “Andrew Johnson’s
Reconstruction: How it Works, Harper’s,
1866
The radical Republicans finally took President Johnson,
an old Jacksonian Democrat, to court in impeachment, but it failed. A very popular Republican, Ulysses S. Grant,
was elected President, and Johnson returned to Washington as a
Congressman.
Author Summers ends his story with a Coda. “By 1875 it
was plain to any thinking person, that is anyone who was not a newspaper
editor, that the Union would not be undone, that however much they prided
themselves on their southernness, that white southerners would never go out of
the Union, would never seek a new war.” One irony of Reconstruction was that
fears that were never more than fond fancies were roused so well that when they
had been laid to rest and other terrors rose the will to believe was gone.
By learning about this important period in our nation’s
history, it was fascinating to see how much history repeats itself. If you are
not paying attention, you believe it is happening now for the first time.
-end-
HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2016-2017
Wednesday, November
30, 2016: Colonization in America. Jamestown, Plymouth, Gloucester, St. Augustine, Junipero
Serra, Roger Williams, Quebec, Nieuw Amsterdam, more.
December: No
Meeting
Wednesday,
January 18 (vice 25), 2017: History of Cape Ann. Read
about the history of Gloucester, or Rockport, or about how Gloucester became
famous as a fishing port, or how Rockport gained fame with granite quarrying.
Read about Cape Ann as an art colony. Read about the Revolutionary War and
privateers off Cape Ann, or the Royal Navy attacking in the War of 1812. Read
about how the Sicilian, Portuguese, and Scandinavian immigrants joined the
original English settlers here.
Wednesday,
February 22, 2017: Pick your favorite Chinese dynasty. Whether
it’s Xia dynasty, Shang, Chou (Zhou), Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, or any of the
others, you’ll learn Chinese history. [Suggested by Walt Frederick].
Wednesday,
March 29, 2017: What made America powerful? Was it our
geography, size, natural resources, protection of two oceans, our choice of
immigrants, our leaders? [Suggested by
Janos Posfai]
Wednesday,
April 26, 2017: History of Class in America
We’ve often bragged that Americans started out
resisting the class structure, but our Founding Fathers included men like
Thomas Jefferson, owners of much land and slaves. At the same time, indentured
servants arrived in young America, to fill the bottom rungs of society. [Suggested
by Sam Coulbourn]
Wednesday,
May 31, 2017: Famines in the World [Suggested by Linda
Burkell and Walt Frederick]
Wednesday,
June 28, 2017 History
of English/British Colonialism. It started in the latter part of the 15th Century
with plantations in Ireland. Read how the United Kingdom grew to become the
greatest Empire in the history of the world.
If you wish, home in on British slave trade, and how the U.K. colonized the
New World, bringing slaves to grow sugar and cotton. Then Napoleonic Wars and
Britain’s seizure of French Colonies. America and Canada. Colonization of Asia in Hong Kong, Malaya,
Australia, New Zealand, India, Burma. Africa, and more for you to discover. [Suggested
by Richard Heuser]
Wednesday,
July 26, 2017: Treasure Hunts in History. This
is your opportunity to find a treasure and discover the hunt for it, whether it
is the quest for gold in California, diamonds in Africa, the hunt for the
pharaohs buried in the pyramids, the hunt to discover a cure for polio or
yellow fever, the terracotta army buried with Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor
of China, the search for the source of the Nile, the discovery of Neanderthal
man… This topic is for you to imagine!
[Suggested by Walt Frederick].
