So, while the libertarian movement as a whole is not inherently bigoted, and many believers despise intolerance, the ideology itself does attract many bigots who see the freedom-obsessed culture as a way to protect their “right” of intolerance, and crack down on collective movements that fight for equality. Many of these folks would like to return to the good old days, when robber barons and white men ruled. The free market ideology is particularly well-suited for the robber barons, while the freedom to discriminate comforts the neo-Confederates. Like the larger conservative movement, libertarianism is a sanctuary for nostalgic white males. Fortunately, nothing can prevent the white mans inevitable fall from dominance, and in the future, many white males may very well change their mind on the so-called “right to discriminate.” -Conor Lynch
From reading around I get the impression that maybe Hillary is moving left out in the open but in such a way to make it clear to the country, to those willing to pay attention, how far right the Republican Party has moved. This is something like the path President Obama has traveled only more so. A majority of Americans I believe support Democratic positions on the major issues. The other party can only try to bambooze the electorate while counting on white people in the South. The other thing is that the Democratic Party is not going to win back the former slave states anytime soon. The path to continued victory lies elsewhere.
I picked up too late on Professor McDonald, long-time faculty member at the University of Alabama now retired. He calls himself a conservative historian. We could have argued.
One problem with this book is that nowhere in the pages does he define what he means by "conservative historian."
The book has pictures of McDonald with Presidents Nixon, Bush, and Reagan. Ugh!
"And that is where the Germans went wrong. History is a mode of thinking that wrenches the past out of context and sequence, out of the way it really happened, and reorders it in an artificial way that facilitates understanding and remembering." P. 5
He supported Goldwater in 1964. LBJ's administration was a disaster. Really, Dr. McDonald? Viet Nam yes. You think Goldwater would have done better? What about Medicare, the '64 civil rights act, and the voting rights act. Yes, you are right-winger, sir. P. 110
John Hope Franklin's interpretation of Reconstruction was in line with the Dunning's 1907 version? I. don't. think. so. P. 117
Agrees with Hamilton that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary and pernicious. P.153
Justifying "states rights." P. 156
In his book We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, McDonald argued that Charles A. Beard (in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States) had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution.
Instead of just two interests, landed and mercantile, which conflicted,
there were three dozen identifiable interests that forced the delegates
to bargain.
McDonald and the late Grady McWhiney presented the "Celtic hypothesis" stating that the distinctiveness of Southern
culture derives largely from the majority of the Southern population
being descendants of Celtic herdsmen while the majority of the Northern
population was the descendants of farmers. (From Wikipedia)
McWhiney was once head of the League of the South. OH, my!
This Celtic Thesis business is the scholarly essence of Southern apology.
Now I know my old Winfield Dr. Michael Hill got his racism.
McDonald certainly has a high opinion of his views.
The 1780's leading up to the Constitution were a complicated time. I doubt I can come to a conclusive understanding of those years. P. 12
Criticizes Stampp's interpretation of Reconstruction published in 1965. McDonald is clearly out of the mainstream of contemporary scholarship on the Reconstruction period. He has no mention of Eric Foner. P. 118
Southern slaves were better off than Northern free industrial works. Ha, ha, ha. As soon as you read something like this, you know you're dealing a person who refuses to come to terms with America's history of slavery and segregation. P. 119
If I have a personal Moby Dick to drive me crazy it is that I often
prefer reading a good book to real life. The internet no. Real life is
preferable to the elusive online world always. But a good absorbing
book? Hmmmm. . . . On most days better than washing the dishes or
trying to remember a password under pressure.
Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton stands ready to take up the fight for voting rights as she takes the stage in Texas on Thursday.
The issue -- far from the spotlight when she last ran in 2008 -- has taken on far greater importance in the wake of GOP-passed laws in recent years they say are aimed at reducing voter fraud, but Democrats say depress voter turnout. Democrats argue stringent voting laws -- limit early voting opportunities or require ID to register to vote -- most affect the poor, who may not have a valid ID, and those who can't take off work to head to the polls.
What's more, the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that a key aspect of President Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act of 1965 was no longer constitutional.
The changes have drawn Democrats -- including lawyers close to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee -- into a voting rights fight that some African-Americans, like South Carolina Democrat Bakari Sellers, are calling "the greatest challenge of our generation."
Clinton will push for "swift action" on the issue and knock Republicans for supporting voting laws that she says keep people away from the ballot box.
The comments will come during a speech at Texas Southern University, a historically black college, after Clinton receives an award named after Barbara Jordan, a pioneer African-American lawmaker and civil rights leader.
Clinton, an aide said Wednesday, will call for "a new national standard of no fewer than 20 days of early in-person voting in every state, including weekend and evening voting" during the speech.
Clinton will "draw a sharp contrast with Republicans who have fought to curb early voting," the aide said. In particular, she will target efforts in North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida.
The former first lady has long been a supporter of voting rights: She helped register voters in Texas' Rio Grande Valley during the George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential run. But supporting voting rights now has the added benefit of helping keep together the coalition of voters that elected and re-elected President Barack Obama.
Obama won 93% of African-American voters in 2012 and 95% in 2008, according to exit polls. Some Democrats worry that Clinton needs a similar performance with African-American voters and disenfranchisement is an issue that Democrats hope will activate that base.
The first few months of Clinton's campaign have seen a number of events and trips focused on African-American voters.
In her first speech as a candidate, Clinton called for mandatory police body cameras across the country and end "era of mass incarceration," an issue that connected with African-American activists concerned about black men dying at the hands of law enforcement.
Clinton also focused on a minority-owned business in her first trip to South Carolina, a state with a sizable African-American population that overwhelmingly picked Obama over her in the 2008 primary.
"Secretary Clinton is addressing the right issue in the right place at the right time," Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told CNN on Wednesday.
"It is our hope that she and presidential contenders on both sides of the aisle will not only address the issue but support fixing the badly broken Voting Rights Act," the NAACP president said, arguing that anyone not "well versed and strongly positioned in our nation's voting and criminal justice rights challenges" will likely not be "deemed by a majority of the electorate as deserving to hold the office.
"Clinton's top campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, has also taken on the fight by filing lawsuits challenging voter restriction laws in Ohio and Wisconsin. He told The New York Times on Wednesday that, "We should all want to ensure that all eligible voters can exercise their right to vote and have their vote counted."
Supporting voting rights was one of the first issues the former secretary of state dove head first into shortly after leaving the State Department with a speech at the American Bar Association's annual meeting in San Francisco in August 2013.
Clinton condemned voter ID laws, telling the audience of lawyers that they are bringing back the "old demons of discrimination."
"We do, let's admit it, have a long history of shutting people out: African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities," Clinton said. "And throughout our history, we have found too many ways to divide and exclude people from their ownership of the law and protection from the law."
Rhetoric like that, according to Sellers, was welcome to many in the African-American community.
"This message whether it is her speech on immigration, whether or not it is her speech on police reform, it has to be heard in the barber shops, not just by the pastors, but by their congregations," Sellers said. "It has to reverberate."
This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription. Learn more »
The most
obvious constitutional result of the Civil War was the adoption of three
landmark constitutional amendments. The 13th ended slavery forever in
the United States, while the 14th made all persons born in the United
States (including the former slaves) citizens of the nation and
prohibited the states from denying anyone the privileges and immunities
of American citizenship, due process or law, or equal protection of the
law. Finally, the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited the
states from denying the franchise to anyone based on “race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.”
These amendments,
however, have their roots in the war itself, and in some ways can been
seen as formal acknowledgments of the way the war altered the
Constitution. Other changes came about without any amendments. Thus, the
war altered the Constitution in a variety of ways. A review of some of
them underscores how the Union that President Lincoln preserved was
fundamentally different — and better — than the Union he inherited when
he became president.
Slavery
The first and most obvious change involves slavery. The 13th Amendment
was possible (as were the other two Civil War amendments) only because
the war broke slavery’s stranglehold over politics and constitutional
development. The Constitution of 1787 protected slavery at every turn.
Although framers did not use the word “slavery” in the document,
everyone at the Constitutional Convention understood the ways in which
the new form of government protected slavery. Indeed, the word “slavery”
was not used at the request of the Connecticut delegation and some
other Northerners, who feared that their constituents would not ratify
the Constitution if the word was in the document — not because the
delegates objected to the word itself.
It would take many
pages to review all the proslavery features of the Constitution, but
here are some of the most significant ones. The three-fifths clause gave
the South extra members of the House of Representatives, based on the
number of slaves in each state. Without these representatives, created
entirely by slavery, proslavery legislation like the Missouri Compromise
of 1820 and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 could never have been
passed.
Equally important,
votes in the Electoral College were based on the number of
representatives in the House, and so slavery gave the South a bonus in
electing the president. Without the electors created by slavery, the
slaveholding Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 to
the non-slaveholding John Adams.
The “domestic
insurrections clause” guaranteed that federal troops would be used to
suppress slave rebellions, as they were in the Nat Turner Rebellion in
1831 and John Brown’s attempt to start a slave rebellion in 1859.
Photo
An image from Harper's Weekly showing the House of Representatives during the passage of the 13th Amendment, Jan. 31, 1865.Credit Library of Congress
Finally, it took
two-thirds of Congress to send a constitutional amendment to the states,
and it took three-fourths of the states to ratify any amendment. Had
the 15 slave states all remained in the Union, to this day, in 2015, it
would be impossible to end slavery by constitutional amendment, since in
a 50-state union, it takes just 13 states to block an amendment.
The political power of
the slave states meant that the nation was always forced to protect
slavery. Thus the South in effect controlled politics from 1788 until
1861. Slave owners held the presidency for all but 12 years between 1788
and 1850. All of the two-term presidents were slave owners. Three
Northerners held the office from 1850 to 1860 — Fillmore, Pierce and
Buchanan – but all were proslavery and they bent over backward to
placate the South.
It took the Civil War
to break slavery’s stranglehold on politics and fundamentally alter the
nature of constitutional law and constitutional change.
The demise of slavery
began with slaves running away and the army freeing them. But the key
moment was the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the first important
executive order in American history. In order to destroy slavery — and
save the Union — Lincoln found new power for his office.
Secession and Nullification
Since the beginning of the nation, claims that states could nullify
federal law or even secede had destabilized American politics and
constitutional law. Sometimes Northerners made these claims, such as the
disgruntled New Englanders who organized the Hartford Convention to
oppose the War of 1812. But most claims of nullification came from the
slave South. In 1798 Jefferson secretly wrote the “Kentucky
Resolutions,” while his friend James Madison wrote the “Virginia
Resolutions”; both asserted the right of the states to nullify federal
law.
From the earliest
debates over the Union, in the Second Continental Congress, until the
eve of the Civil War, numerous Southern politicians publicly advocated
secession if they did not get their way on issues involving slavery and
other issues. In 1832-33 South Carolina asserted the right to nullify
the federal tariff, and then officially (although mostly symbolically)
passed an ordinance to nullify the Force Law, which authorized the
president to use appropriate military or civil power to enforce federal
laws. At this time Georgia also brazenly declared it did not have to
abide by a federal treaty with the Cherokees. In 1850 Southerners held
two secession conventions, which went nowhere. In the debates over what
became of the Compromise of 1850, Senator John C. Calhoun of South
Carolina asserted the right of the South to block federal law.
Some Northern
opponents of slavery — most notably William Lloyd Garrison — argued for
Northern secession because they rightly understood that slavery
dominated the American government. But Garrison had few followers, and
even many of them never accepted his slogan of “No Union With
Slaveholders.” In the mid-1850s the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the
Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, but when the Supreme Court upheld
the law the Wisconsin Court backed off.
In short,
nullification and secession were not new ideas in 1861, when 11 states
left the union, but had been part of the warp and weft of constitutional
debate since the founding. But the Civil War ended the discussion. The
question of the constitutionality of nullification or secession was
permanently settled by the “legal case” of Lee v. Grant, decided at
Appomattox Court House in April 1865. Grant had successfully defended
the Constitution and the idea of a perpetual Union. Secession lost, and
the United States won. The Supreme Court would weigh in on this in Texas
v. White (1869), holding that secession had never been legal and that
the state governments in the Confederacy lacked any legal authority.
Money and National Power
From the beginning of the nation there had been debates over whether the
United States government could issue currency. Indeed, before the Civil
War there was no national currency, only “bank notes” issued by private
banks or state banks. For two periods (1791-1811 and 1816-1836) the
federally chartered Bank of the United States circulated bank notes that
functioned as a national currency. But Andrew Jackson vetoed the bank’s
recharter on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, and for the next
25 years the nation’s economy was hampered by the lack of a stable,
national currency.
The war changed this,
too. In order to finance the war, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.
Chase developed a policy that led to the issuing of “greenbacks,” and
suddenly the constitutional issue was settled — not in court, but by the
exigency of the conflict. The Supreme Court was perplexed by this new
policy and after the war the court briefly declared that issuing
greenbacks was unconstitutional, but then quickly changed its mind.
Since then, the dollar has emerged as the most important currency in the
world. Although no longer backed by gold or silver, American currency
remains “the gold standard” for international transactions.
Military Law and Civilians
The war also created a new set of rules — laws that are still with us —
for when and how military tribunals or martial law can apply to
civilians. For example, when the war began there were no federal laws
prohibiting acts of sabotage or for preventing civilians from forming
armies to make war on the United States. Nor was there any national
police force. Thus, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus along the
railroad route from Philadelphia to Washington and used the Army to
arrest pro-Confederate terrorists, like John Merryman, who was tearing
up railroads leading to Washington, D.C., and trying to organize a
Confederate army in Maryland.
Again, this was a
matter of necessity, not ideology: Congress was not in session, and so
Lincoln acted on is own authority. Indeed, if Merryman had been
successful, members of Congress would have been unable to reach
Washington to meet. Congress later approved Lincoln’s actions and
authorized even more-massive suspensions of habeas corpus. Thus, the
Constitutional rule from the Civil War is that in a dire emergency the
government may act to restrain people to preserve public safety.
But what happens when
the immediate and pressing emergency is over? May the military still be
used to arrest and try civilians? The answer from the Civil War is an
emphatic no. During the war military officials in Indiana arrested
Lamdin P. Milligan for trying to organize a Confederate army in that
state. There was no combat in Indiana at the time, civil society was
smoothly functioning, and even Milligan’s allies were not blowing up
bridges or destroying railroads as Merryman had been doing.
Nevertheless, the Army tried Milligan and sentenced him to death. In
1866, in Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court ruled that the trial was
unconstitutional. The military might arrest Milligan because of the
emergency of the war (just as it had arrested Merryman), but the court
ruled that if the civilian courts were open, as they were in Indiana, it
was unconstitutional to try a civilian in a military court.
This has generally
been the law of the land ever since. In the aftermath of 9/11 the
Supreme Court upheld the rule that civilians (even terrorists in the
United States) could not be tried by military tribunals, but could only
be tried by civilian courts. The Justices relied on Milligan.
Racial Change and the Movement Toward Racial Equality
When the war began, federal law denied African-Americans virtually all
constitutional rights. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857, Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that blacks could never be citizens of the
United States, even if they were treated as citizens in the states
where they lived. This led to the oddity that blacks could vote for
members of Congress and presidential electors in six states, and could
hold office in those states and some others, but they were not citizens
of the nation. Federal law nevertheless supported Taney’s rulings. For
example, before the war blacks could not be members of state militias,
serve in the national army, receive passports from the State Department,
or be letter carriers for the post office.
During the war all
this began to change. In 1862 Congress authorized the recruitment of
blacks in the national army and in state militias. While most black
soldiers were enlisted men, some served as noncommissioned officers, and
a few served as officers. Martin Delaney held the rank of major. Just
as striking, Eli Parker, a member of the Seneca nation, served on
Ulysses S. Grant’s personal staff as a lieutenant colonel and was
promoted to brevet brigadier general at the very end of the war.
The war also broke
down racial and ethnic/religious taboos and attitudes. Abraham Lincoln
became the first president to meet with blacks, and in the case of
Frederick Douglass, seek out their advice. In 1864 and 1865 Congress
gave charters to street railway companies that required that there be no
discrimination in seating. Congress also changed the law that limited
military chaplains to ministers of the gospel, thus allowing rabbis and
Roman Catholic priests to become chaplains. During the war Congress
created the office of recorder of the deeds for the city of Washington.
The first officer holder was Simon Wolfe, a Jewish immigrant, but after
that, the office was held by African-Americans for the rest of the
century, including Frederick Douglass, Blanch Bruce, a former senator,
and Henry P. Cheatham, a former congressman. In his last public speech
Lincoln called for enfranchising black veterans and other members of
their race. Five years later the Constitution would reflect that goal in
the 14th and 15th amendments.
Today we rightly look
back at these two amendments, and the 13th, as the most important
lasting constitutional legacies of the Civil War. And that they are. But
it is also important that we look at how America’s understanding of the
Constitution, especially as it related to racial and ethnic equality,
changed during the course of the war, and not simply as a consequence of
it. Put differently: The Civil War amendments changed the Constitution.
But even if, somehow, they had never happened, the war itself would
have altered the way Americans saw one another, and their government.
Paul Finkelman
is a senior fellow in the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and
Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania and a
scholar-in-residence at the National Constitution Center.
One-hundred-and-fifty
years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits
and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary
accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the
Civil War as it unfolded.
Ty Cobb in 1925. Despite his
reputation, “it’s very hard to make a case for Cobb being racist,” the
author of a new biography said.Credit
Associated Press
When he began work on a new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty”
(Simon & Schuster), Charles Leerhsen expected to uncover fresh
depictions of the player as a racist and a spikes-sharpening attacker of
opposing infielders. If Cobb was the meanest man in baseball flannels,
additional animosity would not be difficult to find.
“I
thought I’d find new examples of monstrous monstrosity,” Leerhsen said
in an interview last week. “Instead, I found a very different person
than the myth. I was a little disappointed at first. He’s more normal
than I thought.”
Leerhsen’s
research found neither a saint nor a Rabelaisian character like Babe
Ruth. Sure, Cobb could be unpleasant and overly sensitive. He had a
temper and fought with his share of people, including a fan
who heckled him mercilessly. But Leerhsen did not unearth a bigot
primed to attack black men or a brandisher of carefully filed daggers
beneath his shoes.
“It’s a warts-and-all biography,” Leerhsen said, laughing. “But they’re warts, not tumors.”
Four
years of research found that Cobb’s father, a teacher and state senator
in northeast Georgia, detested the mores of the Jim Crow South and once
stopped a lynch mob. Some of Cobb’s family members turned out to be
abolitionists. And Cobb attended Negro league games after his retirement
and supported integration in baseball.
“If
you stick to the facts, and not the myth or the assumptions about
someone born in Georgia in 1886,” Leerhsen said, “it’s very hard to make
a case for Cobb being racist.”
He
added, “Two or three times he got in fights with black people, but it
was never clear what part, if any, race played in those incidents, and
of course he got in many more fights with white people.”
As for the notion that Cobb turned his cleats into weapons, Leerhsen found no evidence.
“That
was one of the easiest things to prove,” he said. “There are so many
quotes from players that said he didn’t. Even Sam Crawford, who was
hardly Cobb’s biggest fan, said he didn’t purposely spike people.”
The
book is not purely a defense of Cobb, to clear him of alleged sins, but
a full biography of one of the early 20th century’s seminal players.
“He
was actually the most exciting player, maybe ever,” said Leerhsen, who
has held top editing positions at People magazine and Sports
Illustrated. “He was sort of crazy on the basepaths, and he was always
playing so hard. He flew in the face of 19th-century sportsmanship that
you shouldn’t be too tricky; he was about being what he called a mental
hazard on the field.”
Photo
Leerhsen's book. "It's a warts-and-all biography,” he said. “But they’re warts, not tumors.”
Still, as indignant as he is about Cobb’s reputation as baseball’s cur-in-residence, Leerhsen understands its persistence.
“People
love a villain,” he said. “By saying he’s a racist and a monster,
you’re saying, ‘I’m not, so I’m a decent and nice person.’ ”
He
added: “People cherish their sports myths. Their father told them, and
there’s a sacredness to them about what you learned when you first
learned about baseball.”
Leerhsen
disdains drive-by insults, like one from Bill Bryson in the 2013 book
“One Summer: America, 1927,” in which Bryson wrote that Cobb was “only a
degree or two removed from classical psychopathology.”
“Where do you get that from?” Leerhsen said.
He
is also critical of a previous Cobb biographer, Charles Alexander, for
writing that a bellhop and a night watchman who were involved with Cobb
in a hotel fight in 1909 were black. Alexander cited contemporary
accounts for the claim, but Leerhsen said he found none. That fight,
Leerhsen said, was transformed over the years into an account of Cobb’s
stabbing to death a young black waiter.
Leerhsen
is particularly upset by Al Stump, who ghostwrote Cobb’s 1961
autobiography and, soon after Cobb died, created a portrait of the dying
Cobb as a paranoid, pill-popping, boozing, gun-wielding wreck. That
account, in True magazine, led Ron Shelton to make the 1994 movie
“Cobb,” which The New York Times described as a “blustery, fire-snorting film.”
Photo
Charles Leerhsen.Credit
Diana Eliazov/Simon & Schuster
That
same year, Stump published “Cobb: A Biography,” which he said restored
much of what had been omitted from the autobiography.
But Leerhsen said the book had become a standard reference by which to judge Cobb as a miscreant.
“Stump’s
book was almost completely fabricated,” Leerhsen said, adding that he
had found “examples of him making up quotes — Juan Marichal and Don
Drysdale complaining about interviews with him.”
Leerhsen continued, “He didn’t do the hard work of going back to newspapers clips and the letters.”
Stump died in 1995. His son, John, did not return an email request for comment.
As
for “Cobb,” the movie, Leerhsen cites an email exchange in which
Shelton said he created an attempted rape of a casino cigarette girl
“because it felt like the sort of thing that Cobb might do.”
Shelton
explained Friday by email that the scene grew out of a story Stump told
him about how Cobb “strong-armed a woman to his room where he was
unable to conclude his intentions due to impotency.”
Shelton
said that Stump was not the only source for the film — another, the
Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, told him “chilling stories” about Cobb —
and that Cobb’s still-living contemporaries told him “he was much worse
than his reputation.”
He added: “I told my story, and Charlie’s telling his. But I stand by mine.”
