#impeachment of andrew johnson

[deadpresidents]

"Johnson is an insolent, drunken brute in comparison with which Caligula's horse was respectable."

-- Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts) on President Andrew Johnson

[lightdancer1]

Radical/Congressional Reconstruction marked the apex of the first bid by the US government to take active efforts to secure civil rights:

Radical Reconstruction, also called Congressional Reconstruction, marked the start of a phenomenon that the 19th Century Presidency dealt with in a way the modern one post-Theodore Roosevelt doesn't nearly so much. Because Andrew Johnson bent over backwards to accommodate the night-riders, Congress balked at this, securing against his will the 14th Amendment, and securing as well the Tenure of Office Act. At a strict constitutional level this was a usurpation of the power of the Presidency, at a moral level it was a blow against Johnson's enabling lawlessness in a position meant to enforce laws.

The result was the passage of the 14th and ultimately the 15th Amendments, the most radical phases of Reconstruction in an effort to build a political and social space for Black people in the post-War of the Rebellion South, the two terms of Ulysses S. Grant, and the establishment of just enough of a presence that the terror of the mid to late 1870s was forced to settle for 'separate but equal' and not for the outright reconstruction of slavery in all but name.

All because the last Southern President until Woodrow Wilson elected to push events down a malevolent path.

[ruindunburnit]

Working on Knitwear Club is fun, but not when you spend nearly a week trying to straighten out a character's dumbest fucking decisions and most convoluted fucking schemes.

Still, learning about the history of presidential impeachments was fun!

[grison-in-space]

Oh my. Oh my fucking—

Okay, it cannot have escaped y'all that I am a giant Internet-native nerd of a certain age with a strong penchant for folk and a long entrenched fondness for earnest singing about history, and so of course I listened to a lot of Jonathan Coulton when I was in high school.

I seized with particular glee on "The Presidents" when he released it in 2006 because I take took AP American History extremely seriously, and it offers some very handy little mnemonics that help you remember who goes where. If you haven't heard it before, here's a link. Each president gets a little line with a cheeky reference to the most memorable thing from their presidency, ranging from "James Monroe told Europe they could suck it" to "Washington came first and he was perfect" to "Andrew Johnson just survived impeachment," and it's set to a jaunty and extremely memorable tune.

And of course I looked up the specific references. I get curious a lot, and like a lot of folk music fans, I've learned a lot about historical incidents by tracing lyrics back. But there was one line that always eluded me, and it haunted me a bit because it hinted that there might be a better candidate for "America's First Gay President" than that feckless wastrel Buchanan. I never found any other reference to it, but the President is a fairly recent one and eventually I wrote it off as a reference to some kind of contemporary scandal that was just a bit out of focus; I remembered the Monica Lewinsky thing ("Clinton gave an intern a cigar") and presumably it had been something like that. Occasionally I would look into it, but never very hard before I drifted on to other eras of history.

Friends, I figured it out tonight. I have —nearly twenty years into knowing and frequently whistling this song—I suddenly reached understanding.

The line is "Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart for peanuts."

All has become clear!

[tomorrowusa]

Donald Trump has a gag order placed on him by the judge in his Stormy Daniels hush money trial. So to get around the gag order various Trump lickspittles make pilgrimages to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse to say stuff to the media which Trump himself is not allowed to say. Past Trump mouthpieces have included pseudo-hillbilly fascist Sen. J.D. Vance and House Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson.

Monday's Trump mouthpieces were a quintet of MAGA C-listers: Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA-09), ex-NYC police commissioner Bernie Kerik, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, Trump campaign aide Jason Miller (not related to Stephen Miller), and Kash Patel - a onetime deputy director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

While Trump has been beseeching his followers to show up outside the courthouse to demonstrate support for their Dear Leader, on Monday it was pro-democracy Trump opponents who were there in greater numbers.

A cadre of MAGA loyalists who had gathered to show their support for Donald Trump during his hush-money trial was shouted down by a bevy of cowbell-clanging anti-Trump protesters on Monday when they tried to speak outside of a lower Manhattan courthouse. [ ... ] The group that flanked the twice-impeached ex-president this time around included South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, former New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik, ex-Trump administration official Kash Patel, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller, and Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA). All but Patel, meanwhile, were customarily decked out in Trump’s standard red tie and navy suit combo.

Yep, four of the five designated Trump lickspittles were dressed in Trump uniforms. Did he dress them himself over at Trump Tower?

Alan Wilson got an earful when he tried to spew the Trump line.

With boos raining down on Wilson, one demonstrator could be heard shouting “go home you carpetbagging fools.” Another protester who camped out behind the pro-Trump speakers with a large “Bootlickers” sign relentlessly blew a whistle while ringing a cowbell. According to independent reporter Jacqueline Sweet, the man was given a citation by law enforcement for “too much cowbell.” Patel, who is expected to take a senior White House role if Trump returns to power, portrayed the ex-president as a victim of an “unconstitutional weaponization of justice.” It was difficult to hear what he had to say as the crowd chanted: “Kash Patel, Go To Hell!” Kerik was also subjected to targeted insults when he spoke, with protesters calling him a “bald-headed bigot” throughout his comments. According to New York Magazine correspondent Oliva Nuzzi, the Trump-hating crowd also took aim at the speakers for dressing just like the former president, prompting them to call the MAGA group “red tie terrorists.” She added that the demonstrators even got a laugh from Miller, who chuckled when one protester wondered if they had bought their suits at “Dictators R Us.”

To use a favorite Trump word, Monday's Trump mouthpieces were real losers.

Rep. Andrew Clyde's rise to fame in Georgia was as a prominent gun store owner. One wonders how many of his guns make it up to NYC to be used illegally.

Bernie Kerik is a convicted felon for tax fraud who was later pardoned by Trump. He served several years behind bars for his crimes.

Alan Wilson has made false election fraud claims even before the Trump presidency and is a serial litigator for far right causes.

Kash Patel once served as an aide to Devin Nunes – the former House member who unsuccessfully sued a cartoon cow.

Jason Miller admitted to hiring prostitutes and having extramarital affairs with two campaign staffers. Republican family values – just like Trump.

Meidas Touch has a video report on Monday's scene outside the courthouse. (never mind the plant commercial in the middle).

If you're anywhere near NYC, visit the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse area on a day that the hush money trial is in session. There's a lunch break starting roughly at 11:30 AM and court is recessed for the day in the afternoon before the building closes at 5:00 PM. Bring your own cow bell and sign.

Court is in session this week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Next Monday court is closed for Memorial Day but should be in session on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The case may go to the jury sometime late next week.

The Manhattan courthouse is at 100 Centre Street; take the 4, 5, or 6 subway trains to the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station and walk about four blocks north. The crowds and the Trump bootlickers seem to be directly across the street from the courthouse at Collect Pond Park.

EDIT: If Trump toadies had a bad day outside the courtroom, the one and only defense witness for Trump seems to have had an even worse one in court.

[taraross-1787]

This Day in History: Andrew Johnson Impeachment

On this day in 1868, votes are taken in President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial. Thirty-five Senators voted to convict, one vote shy of the 36 votes then needed to remove him from office.

That trial has since been labeled a “political circus” and “a contest for power.” Regardless, Johnson would survive the attempt against him.

Americans were then recovering from a brutal Civil War that had left hundreds of thousands dead or wounded. Johnson wasn’t supposed to be the President that got them through this trying period. He was President only because Abraham Lincoln had been killed just one month into his second term.

Needless to say, Johnson struggled.

The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-johnson-impeached

[mariacallous]

On Aug. 8, 1974, Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon shocked the nation. Following more than a year of multiple investigations into his administration over the Watergate scandal, Nixon went on television and announced that he would be resigning from office the following day.

“To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home,” Nixon said as the nation watched. “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”

Less than two years earlier, Nixon had defeated South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic Party’s candidate, in a landslide victory that pundits had compared to former President Franklin Roosevelt’s historic reelection in 1936. But now, Nixon became the first president in the nation’s history to step down before finishing his term. Americans were stunned and relieved. But even as Nixon’s administration has come to represent the ultimate rupture of a presidency, his was in fact the third consecutive administration to end in disruption in the mid-20th century. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963. Lyndon Johnson had unexpectedly withdrawn from his reelection campaign in 1968. And then, six years later, Nixon would resign.

Nor was the outcome inevitable, as it may seem today. Nixon had fought when Congress, a grand jury, special prosecutors, judges, and reporters tried to find out what his role had been in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972, and whether he had obstructed subsequent investigations. Just a few days before Nixon’s announcement, a mere 31 percent of Republicans polled by Gallup felt that he should no longer hold the office.

The pressure had mounted. On July 24, in United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court ruled that the president must turn over secret White House tape recordings—one of which contained a “smoking gun” in which legislators could hear him in a conversation with advisor H.R. Haldeman, agreeing that they should persuade the CIA to stop the FBI from looking into the matter. On Aug. 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes—all Republicans—met with Nixon and said that if the House voted to send them articles of impeachment, which seemed likely, many in the GOP would join the Democrats in voting to remove him from office. Nixon’s job approval, according to Gallup, fell to 24 percent, with more than a majority of the country thinking he should leave. That’s what he did.

On Aug. 9, at 9:31 a.m., the president entered into the East Room with the first lady, Pat Nixon, and addressed a small group of cabinet officials, friends, and supporters. As he held back tears during different moments of his talk, Nixon advised everyone who was surrounding him: “Aways give your best. Never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

He then went down to the Diplomatic Reception Room, where he wished the new president, Gerald Ford, good luck. Nixon walked up the staircase to the helicopter that was waiting for him outside, turned to look at the White House one last time as president, waved with his fingers shaped as a “V” for victory, and then flew off to Andrews Air Force Base, where Air Force One brought him back to California.

“With his departure,” wrote Jules Witcover in the Washington Post on Aug. 9, “he leaves behind a political legacy of negativism that far transcends the damage to his own party.”

Nixon’s presidency came to an abrupt end, but the resignation was just the final stage of a tumultuous era. The nation had been embroiled in fierce internal battles over issues such civil rights and the war in Vietnam. College campuses had been rocked by ongoing protest. Even the clothing that a person chose to wear sent strong signals about what they stood for. The Democratic Convention in August 1968 in Chicago had been a fiasco. The whole world watched as anti-war activists clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s police force; inside the convention, anti-war delegates fought with supporters of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had become the nominee when Johnson withdrew from the race

And all of this took place after there had been a series of assassinations that started with Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, unrest swept through major cities. When an assassin killed one of the late president’s brothers, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in June, many young people lost all hope.

It is not a surprise that in 1974, Knopf published Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, a masterful work that would come to be considered one of the greatest nonfiction books of the century. Caro traced the career of the legendary unelected civil servant Robert Moses, who started his career as an idealistic reformer but ended as someone who did whatever was necessary, and to whomever, in his quest for total power. “The real lesson of Moses’ career,” wrote a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times, “and it is not nearly so difficult to understand in light of recent events such as Watergate—is the way the techniques of opinion manipulation and power use can operate within democracy.”

But another perspective suggested that perhaps Nixon’s resignation demonstrated that “the system worked,” with the optimists wanting to believe that a scandalous president being forced to give up power would restore the trust in government and elected officials that Vietnam and Watergate had stolen from them.

“No one can rejoice in the events which culminated in the resignation of the President,” noted American Bar Association President Chesterfield Smith in a newspaper interview. “We can, however, find comfort in the fact that … when our system for the administration of justice was tested—by perhaps its greatest challenge of all time—that system proved equal to the task.”

Such feelings did not last long. History took a different turn, and public distrust of government worsened. In 2024, Americans have trouble believing that their leaders will serve the public interest. According to Pew, a mere 22 percent trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always.” Though there have been some moments of improvement, such as at times during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and in the years immediately after 9/11, the public trust percentages upward of 70 percent that were normative in the early 1960s currently feel impossible to recreate. Even in recent years, when trust has grown slightly higher, positive numbers remain far lower than before.

So why didn’t Nixon’s resignation make things better? How did an act of such massive historical weight fail to cure the ills that were afflicting the body politic?

To begin with, Richard Nixon was never held accountable. Just one month after he told Americans that he was stepping down, his successor, Ford—who Nixon had appointed to be his vice president in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned in scandal—pardoned Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed. Seeking to heal the nation, Ford did the opposite. Nixon, who in 1977 told television interviewer David Frost that if a president did something, then it was legal, went on to have a career writing books and giving advice to future leaders. Rather than a criminal, he was treated as a statesman.

Public distrust also never went away because Vietnam and Watergate created a more vigilant outlook, with institutional support, as more people on both the left and right were constantly on the lookout for wrongdoing. Investigative journalists, nonprofit organizations, and good government groups such as a Common Cause were determined to keep holding elected officials accountable. So Americans naturally learned more about the bad things that politicians could do, such as when Sen. Frank Church’s committee revealed the illicit activities of the CIA during the Cold War, as the forces of reform struggled to clean the government so that it work be better. The quest for improvement tapped into a distrust of government that had always been part of the United States since its founding, when the country was created in a rebellion against a corrupt and oppressive British government.

Had this healthy skepticism been balanced with messages about the virtues of what Washington could do, such as when elderly Americans received health care through Medicare or poor young kids received nutrition through school lunch programs, public opinion might have improved. But instead, a conservative movement swept through the nation. Conservatism targeted the ills of government. As Reagan declared in his inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

These feelings only intensified as more conservatism became more entrenched in politics and as the United States moved further away from Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Even some Democratic leaders such as President Bill Clinton, though still liberal, embraced Reagan’s logic as well. During his State of the Union address in 1996, Clinton proclaimed that “the era of big government” was “over.”

As if all of this was not enough, the intensification of hyperpolarization over the past two decades has caused red and blue Americans to distrust officials from the other side. To be sure, strong partisanship is a good thing. Robust parties offer Americans real mechanisms within the mainstream political system to express differences and to struggle over policy. Parties have helped to provide coherence to the country’s incredibly fragmented government.

But when “affective polarization” became normative, as political scientist such as Liliana Mason have argued, intense emotionalism left members of each party disliking the other and disgusted by their opponents to the point that there could be no reconciliation. Fundamental differences have been supplanted by fundamental distrust. And social media has created multiple opportunities to spread all kind of information regardless of its veracity, which further fuels these feelings.

Besides the sorts of tensions that this culture of distrust has created, the sentiment also makes it more difficult for the government that we all need to survive, thrive, and do good work.

Rather than hoping that somehow conditions will miraculously change, the time has come for a new reform agenda, where the country’s elected officials take the concerns that were at the root of the good-faith skepticism that took hold when Nixon stepped down. Instead of just railing against those in charge, Americans need more dialogue about improving processes, procedures, and rules—while demanding better leadership—in order to produce a government that is always looking out for the national interest.

[rabbitcruiser]

Transfer Day

A century ago, the United States made its final territorial acquisition with the purchase of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Located at the southernmost stretch of the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands are a group of three main islands — Saint Croix, Saint John, and Saint Thomas, and a cluster of 50 minor cays and islands. The day is celebrated throughout the Virgin Islands with great vigor. Parades are held at the state halls, and the American Flag is hoisted during the evening ceremony.

History of Transfer Day

The American military leadership began eyeing the Virgin Islands in the mid-1860s. The idea of the acquisition was put forward by the Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867. For a negotiated price of $7.5 million, the Danish government ratified the sale. But the islands bore witness to intense catastrophe in the following year. Back home, the impending impeachment of President Andrew Johnson upset the proceedings even further, and the plan was finally dropped. Decades passed but the notion of a Caribbean naval base persisted with the top diplomats of the United States.

In 1900, the Secretary of State John Hay initiated the second round of negotiations, and a sale was agreed upon for $5 million. However, this time, the Danish waged their revenge and blew the deal out of the Panama Canals.

The relations between the two holdings remained sour for the majority of the early 20th century. However, the fear of European expansion in the Caribbean pushed the American diplomats to enter into a fresh round of negotiations. In March 1916, the United States offered $25 million in gold coins in exchange for the immediate cessation of the Virgin Islands. The deal was finalized in the same year, and the treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate on September 7, 1916.

Although the sale was ratified to establish a U.S. military stronghold in the Caribbean, the island proved to be a lucrative investment because of the booming tourism industry. Today, Virgin Islanders are American citizens with a seat in Congress and many constitutional protections. March 31 is celebrated to honor the peaceful cessation of the islands and the strategic expansion of the American empire.

Transfer Day timeline

1666

The Danish Occupation

Denmark occupies St. Thomas and begins consolidating the adjacent islands of St. John and St. Croix through siege and/or purchase.

1807

The European Tussle

The British acquire the islands after the fall of the Danes and hold on to them until the Danish win them back in 1815.

1917

The American Purchase

The United States of America purchases the three islands for $25 million.

1927

The Constitutional Grant

The American constitution grants citizenship to the inhabitants of the Virgin Islands.

Transfer Day FAQs

Is Transfer Day a federal holiday?

Transfer Day is a public holiday and the majority of businesses and schools stay closed. 

Which nationality do the Virgin Islanders have?

The Virgin Islanders are U.S. citizens. Because they derive their citizenship from a constitutional statute, the Islanders can not participate in federal elections but since 1970, they have been able to elect a delegate to represent them in the United States Congress. 

Do U.S citizens need a passport to visit the Virgin Islands?

U.S. citizens arriving from the mainland and Puerto Rico do not need to present a passport or visa to enter the Virgin Islands. 

How To Observe Transfer Day

Reenact the ceremony: It is fair to say that the Transfer Day ceremony had a bit of a dramatic flair. From the lowering of the Dannebrog (the Danish flag) to the swelling number of generals as the Star-Spangled Banner filled the air. On March 31, stage a skit of your own.

Read about the history: The U.S. Virgin Islands have been home to humans since 1000 B.C. From the native inhabitants to the Danish occupation, the islands have a rich and diverse history. The islands have also borne witness to mass ethnic cleansing, displacement, slavery, and other atrocities. On Transfer Day, take a quick crash course on America’s Caribbean territory.

Eat Red Grout: Red Grout is a traditional Danish pudding, made from guavas and tapioca. It’s a delicacy on the U.S. Virgin Islands and is served to locals every year on Transfer Day. The dish is easy to make and is enjoyed best with a scoop of vanilla cream.

5 Lesser Known Facts About The U.S Virgin Islands

A fight for freedom: A century before the United States outlawed slavery, the islanders led an unsuccessful slave rebellion in 1733.

The bioluminescent nightlife: Pockets of the Virgin Islands light up at night due to the clusters of tiny plankton, called dinoflagellates, spread all across the space.

The party of the pirates: The Virgin Islands remain a safe haven for the pirates, a practice that started in the 17th century when Governor Adolph Esmit allowed them to enter the area for lucrative trade opportunities.

Christopher Columbus coined the name: Columbus stopped by the islands in 1493 and named the cluster of lands ‘The Virgins’ in honor of Saint Ursula and her 10,000 virgins.

Home to Alexander Hamilton: One of the Founding Fathers of the U.S., Hamilton spent a sizable chunk of his youth on the streets of St. Croix, working as a clerk and experimenting with his writing.

Why Transfer Day is Important

It celebrates diversity: The islands stretch across the Caribbean and are home to a diverse community of Native, Black, and Latino Americans. Transfer Day illuminates the rich contribution of these societies to the fabric of America.

It uplifts the tourism industry: Tourism is the backbone of the Virgin Islands’ economy. Over 50% of the Virgin Islanders are employed in the hospitality and travel-related industries. Transfer Day educates us about the hidden beauty of the islands.

It honors the strategic triumph: The bloodless, strifeless transfer was made possible after years of strategic negotiations and good-faith politics. At the dawn of World War I, the acquisition prevented the establishment of a German stronghold across the Caribbean coast as well.

Source

[youzicha]

Khrushchev repeatedly boasted that he could place a nuclear bomb in orbit ("We placed Gagarin and Titov in space, and we can replace them with other loads that can be directed to any place on Earth"), and the Kennedy administration worried that he would score a peacetime propaganda victory ("If the Soviets place a bomb in orbit and threaten us and if this adminstration has refused to develop a capability to destroy it in orbit, you will see the first impeachment proceeding of an American President since Andrew Johnson").

The worries of a Soviet bomb in orbit led to the first nuclear-armed anti-satellite systems, Project 505 (based on the Nike Zeus anti-ballistic missile) and Program 437 (based on the Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile). Based at Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, the Thor missiles stood ready to shoot down a single Soviet satellite within 24 hours until they were retired in 1974.

[manorpunk]

Presidents in the 2020s include (incomplete list):

Joe Biden / Donald Trump / Elizabeth Warren / Ron DeSantis / Bernie Sanders / Kamala Harris after the death of Joe Biden / Joe McCarthy after the removal of Kamala Harris from office (resignation, impeachment, etc) / Amy Klobuchar / the ritually embalmed corpse of Hillary Clinton / Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson / Marianne Williamson / Andrew Cuomo / Jeb!

Elon Musk does not appear in this list due to dying in a hilariously gruesome sexbot-related ‘accident’ in 202X.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the first generation of mass-produced sexbots were rolled out in 202X. It took any radicalizing of the Professional Managerial Class off the table for a couple years, which, considering the way that can go, may have been been a good thing.

[deadpresidents]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN •Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Trilogy by Sidney Blumenthal: -A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 1809-1849 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856 (BOOK | KINDLE) -All the Powers of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, 1856-1860 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

ANDREW JOHNSON •Andrew Johnson: A Biography by Hans L. Trefousse (BOOK) •Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •High Crimes & Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Gene Smith (BOOK)

ULYSSES S. GRANT •Grant by Ron Chernow (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year by Charles Bracelen Flood (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition by Ulysses S. Grant, Edited by John F. Marszalek (BOOK | KINDLE)

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES •Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President by Ari Hoogenboom (BOOK) •Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr. (BOOK | KINDLE)

JAMES GARFIELD •President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman (BOOK | KINDLE) •Garfield by Allan Peskin (BOOK | KINDLE)

CHESTER A. ARTHUR •The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves (BOOK | KINDLE) •Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President by John M. Pafford (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[msternberg]

Someone wrote this as a factual historically backed response to the claim that somehow Democrats and Republicans changed sides.

June 17, 1854

The Republican Party is officially founded as an abolitionist party to slavery in the United States.

October 13, 1858

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.

April 16, 1862

President Lincoln signed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. In Congress, almost every Republican voted for yes and most Democrats voted no.

July 17, 1862

Over unanimous Democrat opposition, the Republican Congress passed The Confiscation Act stating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”.

April 8, 1864

The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition.

January 31, 1865

The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. House with unanimous Republican support and intense Democrat opposition.November 22, 1865

Republicans denounced the Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting the “black codes” which institutionalized racial discrimination.

February 5, 1866

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) introduced legislation (successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson) to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks.

May 10, 1866

The U.S. House passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 100% of Democrats vote no.

June 8, 1866

The U.S. Senate passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens. 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia.

July 16, 1866

The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto of legislation protecting the voting rights of blacks.

March 30, 1868

Republicans begin the impeachment trial of Democrat President Andrew Johnson who declared, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government of white men.”September 12, 1868

Civil rights activist Tunis Campbell and 24 other blacks in the Georgia Senate (all Republicans) were expelled by the Democrat majority and would later be reinstated by the Republican Congress.

October 7, 1868

Republicans denounced Democrat Party’s national campaign theme: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.”

October 22, 1868

While campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. Rep. James Hinds (R-AR) was assassinated by Democrat terrorists who organized as the Ku Klux Klan. Hinds was the first sitting congressman to be murdered while in office.

December 10, 1869

Republican Gov. John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the FIRST-in-nation law granting women the right to vote and hold public office.

February 3, 1870

After passing the House with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition, Republicans’ 15th Amendment was ratified, granting the vote to ALL Americans regardless of race.

February 25, 1870

Hiram Rhodes Revels (R-MS) becomes the first black to be seated in the United States Senate.

May 31, 1870

President U.S. Grant signed the Republicans’ Enforcement Act providing stiff penalties for depriving any American’s civil rights.

June 22, 1870

Ohio Rep. Williams Lawrence created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard the civil rights of blacks against Democrats in the South.

September 6, 1870

Women voted in Wyoming in first election after women’s suffrage signed into law by Republican Gov. John Campbell.

February 1, 1871

Rep. Jefferson Franklin Long (R-GA) became the first black to speak on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

February 28, 1871

The Republican Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871 providing federal protection for black voters.

April 20, 1871

The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawing Democrat Party-affiliated terrorist groups which oppressed blacks and all those who supported them.

October 10, 1871

Following warnings by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting, Republican civil rights activist Octavius Catto was murdered by a Democrat Party operative. His military funeral was attended by thousands.

October 18, 1871

After violence against Republicans in South Carolina, President Ulysses Grant deployed U.S. troops to combat Democrat Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

November 18, 1872

Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting after boasting to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she voted for “Well, I have gone and done it — positively voted the straight Republican ticket.”January 17, 1874

Armed Democrats seized the Texas state government, ending Republican efforts to racially integrate.

September 14, 1874

Democrat white supremacists seized the Louisiana statehouse in attempt to overthrow the racially-integrated administration of Republican Governor William Kellogg. Twenty-seven were killed.

March 1, 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing access to public accommodations without regard to race, was signed by Republican President U.S. Grant and passed with 92% Republican support over 100% Democrat opposition.

January 10, 1878

U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment for women’s suffrage. The Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it four times before the election of a Republican House and Senate that guaranteed its approval in 1919.

February 8, 1894

The Democrat Congress and Democrat President Grover Cleveland joined to repeal the Republicans’ Enforcement Act which had enabled blacks to vote.

January 15, 1901

Republican Booker T. Washington protested the Alabama Democrat Party’s refusal to permit voting by blacks.

May 29, 1902

Virginia Democrats implemented a new state constitution condemned by Republicans as illegal, reducing black voter registration by almost 90%.

February 12, 1909

On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, black Republicans and women’s suffragists Ida Wells and Mary Terrell co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

May 21, 1919

The Republican House passed a constitutional amendment granting women the vote with 85% of Republicans and only 54% of Democrats in favor. In the Senate 80% of Republicans voted yes and almost half of Democrats voted no.

August 18, 1920

The Republican-authored 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became part of the Constitution. Twenty-six of the 36 states needed to ratify had Republican-controlled legislatures.

January 26, 1922

The House passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-MO) making lynching a federal crime. Senate Democrats blocked it by filibuster.

June 2, 1924

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill passed by the Republican Congress granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

October 3, 1924

Republicans denounced three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan for defending the Ku Klux Klan at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.

June 12, 1929

First Lady Lou Hoover invited the wife of black Rep. Oscar De Priest (R-IL) to tea at the White House, sparking protests by Democrats across the country.

August 17, 1937

Republicans organized opposition to former Ku Klux Klansman and Democrat U.S. Senator Hugo Black who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by FDR. Black’s Klan background was hidden until after confirmation.

June 24, 1940

The Republican Party platform called for the integration of the Armed Forces. For the balance of his terms in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D) refused to order it.

August 8, 1945

Republicans condemned Harry Truman’s surprise use of the atomic bomb in Japan. It began two days after the Hiroshima bombing when former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote that “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

May 17, 1954

Earl Warren, California’s three-term Republican Governor and 1948 Republican vice presidential nominee, was nominated to be Chief Justice delivered the landmark decision “Brown v. Board of Education”.

November 25, 1955

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration banned racial segregation of interstate bus travel.

March 12, 1956

Ninety-seven Democrats in Congress condemned the Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision and pledged (Southern Manifesto) to continue segregation.

June 5, 1956

Republican federal judge Frank Johnson ruled in favor of the Rosa Parks decision striking down the “blacks in the back of the bus” law.

November 6, 1956

African-American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy voted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President.

September 9, 1957

President Eisenhower signed the Republican Party’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

September 24, 1957

Sparking criticism from Democrats such as Senators John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, President Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock, AR to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubus to integrate their public schools.

May 6, 1960

President Eisenhower signed the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1960, overcoming a 125-hour, ’round-the-clock filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

May 2, 1963

Republicans condemned Bull Connor, the Democrat “Commissioner of Public Safety” in Birmingham, AL for arresting over 2,000 black schoolchildren marching for their civil rights.

September 29, 1963

Gov. George Wallace (D-AL) defied an order by U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson (appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower) to integrate Tuskegee High School.

June 9, 1964

Republicans condemned the 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who served in the Senate until his death in 2010.

June 10, 1964

Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticized the Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act and called on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists — one of them being Al Gore Sr. (D). President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.

August 4, 1965

Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) overcame Democrat attempts to block 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ninety-four percent of Republicans voted for the landmark civil rights legislation while 27% of Democrats opposed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and other measures devised by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting, was signed into law. A higher percentage of Republicans voted in favor.

February 19, 1976

President Gerald Ford formally rescinded President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII.

September 15, 1981

President Ronald Reagan established the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities to increase black participation in federal education programs.

June 29, 1982

President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

August 10, 1988

President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, compensating Japanese-Americans for the deprivation of their civil rights and property during the World War II internment ordered by FDR.

November 21, 1991

President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to strengthen federal civil rights legislation.

August 20, 1996

A bill authored by U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-NY) to prohibit racial discrimination in adoptions, part of Republicans’ “Contract With America”, became law.

July 2, 2010

Clinton says Byrd joined KKK to help him get elected

Just a “fleeting association”. Nothing to see here.

Only a willing fool (and there quite a lot out there) would accept and recite the nonsensical that one bright, sunny day Democrats and Republicans just up and decided to “switch” political positions and cite the “Southern Strategy” as the uniform knee-jerk retort. Even today, it never takes long for a Democrat to play the race card purely for political advantage.Thanks to the Democrat Party, blacks have the distinction of being the only group in the United States whose history is a work-in-progress.

The idea that “the Dixiecrats joined the Republicans” is not quite true, as you note. But because of Strom Thurmond it is accepted as a fact. What happened is that the **next** generation (post 1965) of white southern politicians — Newt, Trent Lott, Ashcroft, Cochran, Alexander, etc — joined the GOP.So it was really a passing of the torch as the old segregationists retired and were replaced by new young GOP guys. One particularly galling aspect to generalizations about “segregationists became GOP” is that the new GOP South was INTEGRATED for crying out loud, they accepted the Civil Rights revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter led a group of what would become “New” Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore.

There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but that doesn’t mean the birth of the southern GOP was tied to “white racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The confusion arises from GOP Barry Goldwater’s vote against the ’64 act. He had voted in favor or all earlier bills and had led the integration of the Arizona Air National Guard, but he didn’t like the “private property” aspects of the ’64 law. In other words, Goldwater believed people’s private businesses and private clubs were subject only to market forces, not government mandates (“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”) His vote against the Civil Rights Act was because of that one provision was, to my mind, a principled mistake.This stance is what won Goldwater the South in 1964, and no doubt many racists voted for Goldwater in the mistaken belief that he opposed Negro Civil Rights. But Goldwater was not a racist; he was a libertarian who favored both civil rights and property rights.Switch to 1968.Richard Nixon was also a proponent of Civil Rights; it was a CA colleague who urged Ike to appoint Warren to the Supreme Court; he was a supporter of  Brown v. Board, and favored sending troops to integrate Little Rock High). Nixon saw he could develop a “Southern strategy” based on Goldwater’s inroads. He did, but Independent Democrat George Wallace carried most of the deep south in 68. By 1972, however, Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and Nixon began to tilt the south to the GOP. The old guard Democrats began to fade away while a new generation of Southern politicians became Republicans. True, Strom Thurmond switched to GOP, but most of the old timers (Fulbright, Gore, Wallace, Byrd etc etc) retired as Dems.Why did a new generation white Southerners join the GOP? Not because they thought Republicans were racists who would return the South to segregation, but because the GOP was a “local government, small government” party in the old Jeffersonian tradition. Southerners wanted less government and the GOP was their natural home.Jimmy Carter, a Civil Rights Democrat, briefly returned some states to the Democrat fold, but in 1980, Goldwater’s heir, Ronald Reagan, sealed this deal for the GOP. The new “Solid South” was solid GOP.BUT, and we must stress this: the new southern Republicans were *integrationist* Republicans who accepted the Civil Rights revolution and full integration while retaining their love of Jeffersonian limited government principles.

Oh wait, princess, I am not done yet.

Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S. government and had the pro-Klan film “Birth of a Nation” screened in his White House.

Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of the Old Confederacy all six times they ran, when Southern blacks had no vote. Disfranchised black folks did not seem to bother these greatest of liberal icons.

As vice president, FDR chose “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who played a major role in imposing a poll tax to keep blacks from voting.

Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.

Black’s great achievement as a lawyer was in winning acquittal of a man who shot to death the Catholic priest who had presided over his daughter’s marriage to a Puerto Rican.

In 1941, FDR named South Carolina Sen. “Jimmy” Byrnes to the Supreme Court. Byrnes had led filibusters in 1935 and 1938 that killed anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was necessary “to hold in check the Negro in the South.”

FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law.

“This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s country,” said Jimmy. Harry Truman, who paid $10 to join the Klan, then quit, named Byrnes Secretary of State, putting him first in line of succession to the presidency, as Harry then had no V.P.

During the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep black students out of Little Rock High. Gov. Ross Barnett refused to let James Meredith into Ole Miss. Gov. George Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, to block two black students from entering.

All three governors were Democrats. All acted in accord with the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, which was signed by 19 senators, all Democrats, and 80 Democratic congressmen.

Among the signers of the manifesto, which called for massive resistance to the Brown decision desegregating public schools, was the vice presidential nominee on Adlai’s Stevenson’s ticket in 1952, Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama.

Though crushed by Eisenhower, Adlai swept the Deep South, winning both Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Do you suppose those Southerners thought Adlai would be tougher than Ike on Stalin? Or did they think Adlai would maintain the unholy alliance of Southern segregationists and Northern liberals that enabled Democrats to rule from 1932 to 1952?

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and the KKK. “Bull” Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.

And Nixon?

In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, “America can’t afford the cost of segregation.” The following year, Nixon got a personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.

In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”

Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ‘66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.” And so were they all – good Democrats.

While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.

In Nixon’s presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800 percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.

Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights – he never did – but because he shared the patriotic values of the South and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.

When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated.

When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent. Richard Nixon desegregated the Southern schools, something you won’t learn in today’s public schools.

Not done there yet, snowflake.

1964:George Romney, Republican civil rights activist. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.

Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.

That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.

In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views.

Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching.

As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.

Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill.

The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.

In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation.

Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment.

Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Dwight Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Woodrow Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)

Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks.

The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican Party.

Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).

The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.

Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican.

Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress.

Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South.

As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.

And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.

Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.

This fact was recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.

As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.

This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.

This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise. There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace.

That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign.

But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect.

The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power.

Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork.

But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s.

The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.”

Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.”

And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.

Of course there were racists in the Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic Party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”).

But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.

Neither does the history of the black vote.

While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.

By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic Party.

Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics.

Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent.

Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth.

Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs.

In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.

Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties.

Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats.

It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.

Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans.

One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy.

Dowdy was a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms.

He declared the reforms “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people.

Dowdy went on: “I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)

Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.

It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics.

Eisenhower warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.

The Republican Party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.

By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic Party was not his alone.

The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states.

Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried.

Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas.

Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.”

Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman.

Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with several factors: The rise of the southern middle class, The increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, The Vietnam controversy, The rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and The incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party.

Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism. However, this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing. Johnson informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

[moragarsia]

Biden's impeachment and support for Ukraine

The other day, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy said that the House of Representatives of the US Congress would launch an investigation that could launch the impeachment process of President Biden. According to him, the investigation will focus on President Biden's accusations of corruption, abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

Biden's impeachment proceedings date back to 2021. Then the Republican congressmen presented documents accusing Biden of abusing power as vice president. Over the next two years, nothing was done to remove the American leader, except for loud statements in the press. And so, in April 2023, the initiator of the first submission, a member of the US House of Representatives and ardent Trumpist Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would submit new articles on impeachment. This time it was about non-compliance with migration laws and the protection of the border with Mexico. The topic of Biden's impeachment, according to experts, is a kind of manifestation of the political struggle in the United States. And the closer to the elections, they will return to it more and more often.

The likelihood that Biden will be removed from office ahead of schedule because of this is minimal. To begin with, you need to vote by a simple majority in the House of Representatives. In it, the Republicans have only a few votes of advantage, but there is fierce competition within the party against the background of the primaries, so surprises are possible even at this stage. Some conservative congressmen believe that the evidence is too weak. Other Republicans are frankly frightened by the return of the authoritarian populist Trump and the growing influence of ultra-Trumpists. But something else is important. The procedure and impeachmentis only the first step. Then there should be a trial in the Senate, during which it is necessary to gain a two-thirds majority of votes to implement the decision, but the president's party members have a majority in the upper house. In the entire history of the United States, 46 presidents have been elected in the country and only three of them have been prosecuted for impeachment - Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and, in fact, Trump, who was impeached twice, in 2019 and 2020. None of them were suspended from office because of this procedure.

In this regard, no fundamental changes in Washington's policy are expected. The idea of impeachment by the Republicans cannot somehow affect either US domestic politics or assistance for Ukraine. As for the calls of some representatives of the American political elite to reduce or stop aid, these calls are marginal. Republican Senator Mitt Romney responded to critics within his party who argued that America could not afford to continue funding the Ukrainian army: "We spend about $850 billion a year on defense. We use about five percent of this amount to help Ukraine. Oh my God, to defend freedom and destroy the Russian army - a country with 1500 nuclear warheads aimed at us. Being able to do this with five percent of our military budget seems to me to be an extremely smart investment, not something we can't afford".

Against the backdrop of the story associated with the first impeachment of US President Donald Trump in 2019, there was an attempt to draw Ukraine into the internal political processes in the United States. Representatives of the Democratic Party accused him of putting pressure on his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. President Zelensky, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and almost all representatives of the Ukrainian authorities have chosen a very balanced and thoughtful policy in this Question. The United States is the world's foremost democratic power. Ukraine does not interfere in domestic American politics and does not give recommendations to American democracy. At the same time, the Ukrainian side properly responds to all suspicions regarding allegations of corruption, especially when receiving international assistance, and thoroughly investigates them.

[weatherman667]

Ulysses S. Grant: Victor of the American Civil War

Runtime:  30:15

Called Useless Grant as a kid.

Completely failed at everything he did.

Ulysses S. Grant, the name, is a product of a clerical error he never corrected.  His name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant.

Got an easy post in the army, drank his way out of it.  Failed at farming.

But!?, you might asked, He beat Robert E. Lee?  No, he didn’t.  In pretty much every battle, he took FAR more casualties than the South.  His reputation in the North was that of a butcher.  He only won because the North could afford a LOT more casualties.

When first promoted to General, he earned the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” because of surrendering, unconditionally, twice.

Nearly quit being a general, and remained because of General Warcrimes Sherman.

Tried the Zapp Brannigan strategy a few times before he learned to conduct a basic siege.

When given command of all theatres, once again readopted the Zapp Brannigan strategy again.

Only reason they succeeded at all was Sherman’s Warcrimes to the Sea.

It should be noted that the North had a much higher population, stronger economy, and the North was blockading the South.  The fact that North could not win this was ridiculous.

Nearly lost the war as a product of time, as the POTUS election was coming up.  Lincoln was INCREDIBLY unpopular, and his likely replacement promised to negotiate a peace treaty with the South.

Was in charge of Reconstruction, which is nothing like described.  The Reconstruction comes from the fact Sherman burned down everything on his March to the Sea.  These weren’t battle wounds, but warcrimes.  Now, the point of Reconstruction was NOT to reconstruct the South, but to tear apart it’s political strength and subordinate it to the North.  Anyone phrasing Reconstruction as the North helping the South was lying.  Now, the South was quite intent on oppressing the Blacks after they were freed, and you could argue it was justified to stamp down on the South, but saying Reconstruction was about reconstruction is lying.

The only good thing he did was apparently tax evasion.

This video does a good job of neutrally describing Reconstruction.

Runtime:  15:20

This lead into an incredibly interesting read into the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.  All 9 articles were about him ignoring unconstitutional laws, 8 or which were about a single incident.  At the time, 10 of the Confederate States had not been readmitted to the Union, but it still failed to reach a Senate Supermajority needed for impeachment.

The South was also broken up into Reconstruction Military Districts that put the entire South under military occupation by whom they believed to be a hostile foreign military power.

[neververy4]

andrew jackson was responsible for the trail of tears

context

Correct! At least, that’s what I remember from school. Don’t quote us. But alas, my tags were about Andrew Johnson, not Jackson. You got the first name correct tho anon :)

Like my tags said, He’s from Greeneville, Tennessee, USA. And they’re proud of that! There’s even an impersonator who walks around important events pretending to be him. Statues, Banks, a whole highway, tourist route, many things named after him. But I can’t remember what all he did (and I’m not that bothered to look it up; never really fancied him). I THINK he was the one almost impeached once, and I’m pretty sure he was Lincoln’s vice president?