#24 March 1868 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shinsengumi-archives · 9 months

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I’m back (after writing a 55 pg fic so far). I’m trying to wrap my head around Soji’s timeline and pouring over the timeline you have posted.

In September 1867 Soji becomes seriously ill - does he stay with the Shinsengumi still during that time I’m guessing?

January 1868 - I assume he went to Osaka for the battle of Toba-Fushimi but he doesn’t take part in it? He stays behind with Kondo who was shot in the shoulder?

February 4 - they sail to Edo, and I assume Soji is with them? And this is his first time on a ship?

Feb? ?? - Okita’s sister Mitsu and Okita Rintaro left (which I’m guessing they were in contact and it’s unknown how they parted)

February 28ish - This is when Soji goes to Matsumoto Ryojin’s clinic and is staying at Matsumoto’s house at Imado shrine.

March 24 - so a month later the Shinsengumi goes to Kofu Castle and stays in Hino which is still in Edo where I’m guessing Soji gets bad/feverish and can’t travel so this is actually where they officially leave him at Uekiya Heigoro’s house? In the “site of Okita Souji’s death” post you say it was the end of February when he moved there (which would be a month prior to this when he was going to Matsumoto’s clinic - so I just want to clarify that it was around the end of March that Okita moved to Heigoro’s house.

Sometime in March (before the 28th) - the Shinsengumi visits Soji and he smiles and doesn’t let them know how sick he is so they won’t worry.

March 28-April 25 - the shinsengumi are pretty much all around Edo until Kondo is beheaded in May and Hijikata gets injured at the Battle of Utsunomiya Castle - Where does Hijikata go?

July 19 - *sobs* we lose him. So he’s at the house alone and suffering from end of March to July? 4 months. And in those four months, he did visit Kondo’s wife Tsune and daughter Tama at Joganji Temple in Nakano (when was this?).

Let me know if I missed anything we know about Soji here as well!

Thank you so much and super grateful. I want to learn as much as I can and flesh out the timeline a bit so I can fully understand what he experienced and how he lived up until the end.

Hi @sayitcanonlybeme, sorry for the extremely late reply. I've gone back to grad school and have been busy with classes/projects for the past few months, so I haven't been able to be active on Tumblr until the holidays.

The timeline was posted a long time ago when I first started learning about the Shinsengumi, so there are inaccuracies, especially mixups between Lunar calendar and Western calendar dates.

Here are the events with details and corrections:

September 1867 Soji becomes seriously ill

It's not clear exactly when he became ill, but according to Japanese Wiki Corpus:

according to Kanefumi NISHIMURA's "Mibu Roshi Shimatsuki", he [Okita Souji] was seriously ill around September when the quarters were moved to Fudodo Village; and in a letter to Kondo dated October 13, Kojima wrote that he was worried about Okita's worsening condition. Given the above, when Okita's health condition worsened so critical that he could not bear fighting was from autumn to winter in 1867. It is also thought that his intense exercise might have been an added burden on his lungs and aggravated his illness.

I'm not sure whether the dates are Lunar or Western calendar, but September is October on the Western calendar. Here's a useful calendar converter.

January 1868 - I assume he went to Osaka for the battle of Toba-Fushimi

He was first staying at Kondo Isami’s mistress’s house in Rokujo, Kyoto, not far from Fushimi (according to this article and this article). Abe Juro arrived there on the morning of December 18 (Lunar calendar, Western calendar: January 12, 1868), hoping to assassinate Okita. He later mentioned in the "Shidankai Sokkiroku" (史談會速記錄), "However there was no one there but one woman, who after interrogation admitted that there was an Okita Souji the other night who at 10PM returned to Fushimi. It was really regrettable."

December 18 was also the day Kondo got shot in the right shoulder on his way from Nijo Castle (more info).

They were both sent to Osaka Castle to receive medical care, so neither of them participated in the fighting that started on January 3 (Lunar calendar, Western calendar: January 27).

February 4 - they sail to Edo

According to this article, Kondo, Hijikata, and Okita boarded the Shogunate's ship Fujisanmaru on January 10 (Lunar calendar, Western calendar: February 3).

(image sources: [1] [2])

Nagakura boarded the Jundomaru which left a day earlier. Out of the 150 Shinsengumi members, 116 remained. They went back to Edo on those two ships along with the rest of the Shogunate army.

The Fujisanmaru arrived at Shinagawa, Edo on January 15. Kondo and Okita went to a medical clinic in Kanda Izumibashi (神田和泉橋) to receive treatment from Matsumoto Ryojun. The rest of the Shinsengumi stayed at a garrison in Kajibashi Gate (鍛冶橋門).

This is likely Okita's first time traveling on a ship since the Shinsengumi originally arrived in Kyoto on foot and there are no other records of Okita making long journeys.

Feb? ?? - Okita’s sister Mitsu and Okita Rintaro left

Okita Mitsu and Rintaro evacuated along with the Shinchogumi's sponsor, the Lord of the Shonai domain Sakai Tadazumi, to the Shonai domain in northern Japan (source).

Since Souji wasn't fit for travel, he was left behind in Edo. According to the Okita Family Records, they left him on February 26 (Lunar calendar, Western calendar: March 19, 1868). However, according to this article, Mitsu and Rintaro left in March (lunar calendar), so I'm not sure which date is more accurate.

According to the Shinsengumi's financial records, Okita withdrew money to pay a carpenter on February 26 (lunar) to repair Uekiya's house in Sendagaya where he spent his final days, so he had either just moved in or was about to move there when Mitsu left.

February 28ish - This is when Soji goes to Matsumoto Ryojin’s clinic

I think February 28ish (lunar) is when he left Matsumoto Ryojun's clinic.

According to this article:

In January of Keio 4, Matsumoto Ryojun was summoned by a certain Hiraoka, a young official of the shogunate, and receive news that "The wounded from the Battle of Toba-Fushimi were returning to Edo, and that they should be given temporary hospitalization at the residences of the lords". As if following in the footsteps of the Shogunate's army, news spread that Satsuma-Choshu army had moved eastward and was coming to Edo. Most of the wounded had already been cured, and more than 30 patients were treated at Imado. He built his own dormitory in a corner of the grounds of the shrine in Imado, where he lived, and built a hospital building in Shofukuji Temple, which was used as a field hospital, and moved his own patients there as well. The Shinsengumi, defeated in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi in Keio 4, returned to Edo aboard the Fujisanmaru and were transported from the Kamaya (釜屋, an inn/teahouse) in Shinagawa to a medical clinic in Okachimachi, Kanda Izumibashi, and then to a field hospital in Shofukuji, where Kondo Isami and Okita Souji were treated by Matsumoto Ryojun, but this is only speculation.

So it's not clear when they went to each location, but from that article, it sounds like Okita went to Matsumoto's clinic at Imado Shrine shortly after arriving in Edo.

March 24 - so a month later the Shinsengumi goes to Kofu Castle and stays in Hino

They went to Kofu on March 24 (Western calendar, Lunar calendar: March 1), so it makes sense that after Okita got too sick in Hino, he was left behind and eventually sent to Uekiya's house in Sendagaya.

He was probably either about to move in or already living in Uekiya's house before he left towards Kofu, since he took out money for renovations on February 26 (lunar).

Sometime in March (before the 28th) - the Shinsengumi visits Soji

Since Nagakura assumed Okita died at Imado in his diary, most Shinsengumi members probably didn't know that he was staying at Uekiya's house starting from March. They were probably trying to keep his location secret to keep him safe.

Since Kondo was captured soon after the Battle of Koshu-Katsunuma, it's unlikely that he ever visited Okita again.

Hijikata did go back to Edo for a short time after that battle, so it's possible that he could have visited Okita, but he was busy pleading Kondo's case and preparing for battle.

It's also possible that a few other trusted Shinsengumi members knew Okita's whereabouts and visited him. Since they didn't want to tell Okita about Kondo's death, it could mean that Okita was still in touch with some Shinsengumi members.

March 28-April 25 - the shinsengumi are pretty much all around Edo until Kondo is beheaded in May and Hijikata gets injured at the Battle of Utsunomiya Castle

At the Battle of Utsunomiya, Hijikata was shot in his right foot on April 23, so he was carried from the battlefield on Shimada Kai's back.

On April 29, Hijikata arrived near Aizu-Wakamatsu and stayed at Shimizuya Inn, which had hot springs, to recover from his wound.

He learned about Kondo's death while he was there and built a tombstone for him at the nearby Tenneiji temple.

On July 1, he left to visit his men.

A month later, he went back to the battlefield to fight the Battle of Aizu.

(source)

He died on July 19 (Western calendar). He might have been lonely without his loved ones, but I don't think he was alone since Uekiya’s rice cooker was taking care of him and he probably saw other doctors after Matsumoto left.

He visited Kondo’s wife and daughter at Joganji Temple, but I don't think there would be any records where we could find the date since he was in hiding and trying to keep his movements secret.

According to the quote from this article from "Shinsengumi Imon" (新選組遺聞) by Shimozawa Kan:

Isami's family, his wife Tsune and his mother-in-law Keiko (瓊子), moved out of their house in Ushigome shortly after Isami left for Koshu and moved to the outskirts of Edo. They rented room at a temple called Joganji in Nomurahongo.

In the Shinsengumi's financial records, there's a withdrawal on February 28 (lunar) for the house in Ushigome where Kondo’s wife and child lived, which might be related to the move.

So Okita probably visited them in Joganji some time between March and July.

This article (from the "Joganji Records" (成願寺誌)) describes what his final days were like:

Edo was already crawling with government troops with Imperial Brocades, but Uekiya, where Souji was staying, was a safe haven in Ikejiribashi, a very lonely place at the time, where the sound of watermills over the river echoed and there was hardly anyone to be seen at night. Although safe, it must have been too lonely for the young Souji. Sometimes he would go by palanquin to Joganji temple, about a ri away [a 1 hour walk]. He would stay there for days and days. He had an incurable disease, and he probably knew better than anyone else that his death was approaching. Unable to endure the loneliness and desolation, he would come to the temple and soak in the warmth of the unchanging affection of the mother and child, and how comforted he was by that.

Let me know if there's anything I didn't cover or if you have any more questions.

I would really like to read the fic you wrote, if you don't mind sharing it - nvm, found it :)

#okita #timeline #okita death #kofu #battle of aizu #kondo family #recommended #resources

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astronoglow · 1 year

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The Real Popeye

His real name was Frank "Rocky" Fiegel. He was born in 1868, in Poland and, as a child, immigrated to the United States with his parents, who settled down in a small town in Illinois. As a young man, Rocky went to sea. After a 20-year career as a sailor in the Merchant Marines, Fiegel retired. He died on March 24, 1947, Chester, IL

#popeye

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houseboatisland · 7 months

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“All is Arbitrary,” a popular Wallundic idiom, can be applied handily to that country’s railway system and especially to the gauges of such.

A narrow majority of the Liberal Republic’s railways are indeed built to the worldwide standard gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches. The country’s first public railway was the Eastern Railway, opened in 1846. It was an instant success and is today the busiest and longest network of all. The next few railways inaugurated in its wake laid themselves to the same gauge for ease of access to the ER, and for a while it seemed all future development would follow suit.

It was a short while.

Claude Ortiz was an up and coming civil engineer with a penchant for, by his own account and stated with pride, “overbuilding.” He had recently achieved celebrity status for his design and erecting of what was then the country’s largest aqueduct, the Grand Staircase. Not wanting to stop there, and out to steal the ER’s newfound thunder, he leapt into the railway business. Inspired by Sir Brunel, he rapidly constructed the Grand Shoreside Railway to a gauge of 6 feet, 6 inches. It linked the growing seaside resorts of Port Nevitt and Locketown, and the first trains ran in 1851. Ortiz intended to “march into” the country’s capital of Silverburn with his broad gauge and from there become the New Standard.

The GSR never penetrated Silverburn, and while Ortiz and some of his apprentice disciples went on to open a handful more routes to his preferred gauge, they never overrode the 56.5” norm and mostly ran in isolation from one another. Ortiz was infuriated, for that had been the whole point of his contrarian determination in the first place! (That and a cartoonishly outsized ego.)

So it was by 1867 that the Liberal Republic had two competing rail gauges under its belt. (That was a lie, for a handful ranging from 4 feet and 5 feet had also started work within those sixteen years. Splendid.) In the country’s northeast, the thriving slate quarries at New Independence were having difficulty removing their products. The area’s booming population also needed transportation beyond horses and coaches, but “the land was craggy and spitefully unyielding after the men had so picked at it.” To save on costly earthworks, and with North Welsh inspiration, a gauge of 2 feet, 3 inches was chosen. The New Independence Railway was speedily opened by 1868. It fast became a narrow gauge juggernaut, becoming double-tracked and signaled, achieving mythical “main line in miniature” status. It further extended to serve nearby granite quarries and offered private sidings for any flour mill, dairy, farm, logging camp or other business that wanted one.

Developments carried on in this increasingly disorderly way, and to the outside world’s bafflement, they went seamlessly. Effective 1976, Wallund had 24 locomotive-hauled gauges it considered “standard,” (for what that’s worth.) This also gave way to the Stephenson gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches becoming officially known as “Standard Standard.”

Curiously, meter gauge is nowhere to be found in Wallund.

Why?

“Meters and kilometers are for kings, and we haven’t any use for those.”

All is Arbitrary, indeed.

#houseboat’s writing #wallund #wallund universe #wallund eastern railway #wallund claude ortiz #wallund grand shoreside railway #wallund new independence railway

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themuseumwithoutwalls · 7 months

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MWW Artwork of the Day (2/19/24) George Peter Alexander Healy (American, 1813–1894) Abraham Lincoln (1869) Oil on canvas, 187.3 x 141.2 cm. The White House, Washington DC

This portrait of Abraham Lincoln was created by George Peter Alexander Healy (sometimes known as G. P. A. Healy) in 1869, not long after Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865. Lincoln originally sat for Healy in 1864, and the artist depicted Lincoln in this pose in a painting entitled The Peacemakers, an 1868 work that showed Lincoln conferring with Union military leaders during the final days of the Civil War. After Lincoln's death, Healy realized that the painting made an impressive portrait of Lincoln alone and painted three replicas, one of which became part of the White House collection. Lincoln became president on March 4, 1861 and had served in the House of Representatives earlier in his life.

#american artist #portraiture

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rosewaterandivy · 5 months

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cf & dd timeline

This will not reflect every single aspect of the gilded age (1870s to 1890s) but it will include various points of historical and technological interest in addition to Nell and Steve’s personal histories. As such, spoilers will be included and updated with each chapter; so if you’d rather not deal with that, please avoid this!

Note: Italics denote events of the plot, & updates will occur after chapters are published. This is work in progress so more dates and details will be added as I think of them. Historical dates and information was provided by the National Humanities Center and my own research.

1858 - June: Samuel and Ameila Harrington welcome the birth of their son and heir, Steven.

November: Arthur and Delphine Fairchild welcome the birth of their daughter, Eleanor. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

1865 - Lincoln Inauguration, Civil War Ends, Lincoln Assassination, Ratification of the 13th Amendment

1866 - the National Labor Union was founded on August 20, First successful transatlantic cable is completed (England to the United States).

1868 - June 25: Congress enacts an 8-hour workday for workers employed by the government, July: Ratification of the 14th Amendment.

1869 - January: Grant Inauguration, Commanche Chief Toch-a-way informs Gen. Philip H. Sheridan that he is a "good Indian," Sheridan reportedly replied: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

May: First Transcontinental Railroad completed when Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met in Utah solidified by a golden railroad spike to link the railroads.

September 24: First “Black Friday” stock market panic due to financier’s attempt to corner the market on gold.

1870 - February: Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi becomes the first African American to serve in the US Senate. Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina becomes the first Black Representative, J.D. Rockefeller establishes Standard Oil of Ohio.

March: 15th Amendment is Ratified

1871 - P.T. Barnum opens his three-ring circus, hailing it as the "Greatest Show on Earth,"

March: Indian Appropriations Act - Congress declares that Indian tribes will no longer be treated as independent nations with whom the government must conduct negotiations; Native Americans legally become wards of the nation.

October 8: The Great Chicago Fire claims 250 lives and destroys 17,500 buildings.

1872 - Montgomery Ward & Co., the first mail-order business, opens in Chicago.

Nov. 5: Susan B. Anthony and other women's suffrage advocates are arrested for attempting to vote in Rochester, N.Y.

1873 - Grant’s second inauguration, The first electric streetcar begins operation in New York City; Free mail delivery begins in all cities above 20,000 population; Mark Twain and C. D. Warner publish the novel The Gilded Age.

Mar. 3: The Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of obscene literature.

Sept. 18: The Financial Panic of 1873 begins. 5,183 business fail; Congress makes gold the national standard and eliminates all silver currency.

Period of recurring epidemics beginning in 1865 comes to an end. From Boston to New Orleans, epidemics of smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid, scarlet fever, and yellow fever had killed thousands.

1875 - Steven begins his studies at Harvard; Nell begins hers at Vassar; Christopher, her older brother begins his final year at Harvard. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

1876 - Centennial Exposition opens in Philadelphia, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Feb. 14: 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

May: The nation celebrates its centennial by opening an International Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Christopher graduates from Harvard and goes on his Grand Tour. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

June 25: Battle of the Little Big Horn - George A. Custer and 265 officers and enlisted men are killed by Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at the Little Horn River in Montana.

1877 - Hayes Inauguration, Reconstruction ends with the withdrawal of federal troops in the south, Great Railroad Strike: After West Virginia railroad workers strike to protest wage reductions, sympathy strikes and violence spread across the Midwest. Federal troops break the strikes.

June to Oct.: Nez Percé Indians, led by Chief Joseph, surrender after a 1600-mile trek retreating from U.S. troops through the U.S. northwest. They are sent to a reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).

Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

Christopher Fairchild weds Marian Hudson. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

1878 - German engineer Karl Benz produces the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine; Thomas Edison patents the photograph.

Jan. 10: The Senate defeats a woman's suffrage amendment 34-16.

Steve graduates from Harvard University. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

1879 - The Carlisle School (Pa.) is opened “Americanize” Indian children.

Feb. 15: Congress grants woman attorneys the right to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Oct. 21: Edison invents the first practical light bulb.

Steve travels Europe on his Grand Tour; Nell returns to France upon news of her parent’s ill health. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

1881 - Helen Hunt Jackson's Century of Dishonor recounts the government's unjust treatment of Native Americans.

January: Christopher and Marian Fairchild welcome the birth of their son and heir, August.

May: Steven returns to New York from the Continent; begins working with his father at their various real estate holdings. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted.)

July 2: President James Garfield is shot by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office-seeker. He died on Sept. 19.

July 4: Booker T. Washington opens Tuskegee Institute.

July 19: Sitting Bull and other Sioux Indians return to the United States from Canada.

September: Arthur and Delphine Fairchild pass away after battling tuberculosis; Christopher takes over the family holdings and arranges for his sister to travel back to New York from France; Marian begins paying calls to the Four Hundred and laying the groundwork for Eleanor’s societal debut. (Occurs before the story starts, not depicted but mentioned.)

1882 - Attorney Samuel Dodd devises the trust, under which stockholders turn over control of previously independent companies to a board of trustees; Standard Oil Trust, the first trust, is formed by John D. Rockefeller.

May 6: Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese Chinese immigration for ten years.

December: Eleanor arrives in New York from France entering her half-mourning period and Steven has one-sided meet cute; news the arrival spreads quickly; her debutante ball to be held at the Fairchild manse on 5th Avenue is the talk of the town. (Chapter I. Coup de foudre - story begins here.)

1883 -

January: Mrs. Astor’s annual ball, the most anticipated event of the season, is held; Nell and Steve both receive invitations.

March 26: Mrs. Vanderbilt, feeling snubbed by The Four Hundred, throws her famous masquerade ball, commemorating the completion of her new Fifth Avenue mansion, Petit Château; Nell and Steve are once again invited to the masquerade, but Nell is warned by Marian to keep her distance from Mr. Harrington; each invite has instructions to dress as their assigned characters. (Chapter II. Traîner quelqu'un dans la boue)

#cf & dd timeline

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msternberg · 1 year

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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.

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Saints&Reading: Thursday, February 16, 2023

february 16_february 3

HOLY EQUAL-TO-THE-APOSTLES NIKOLAI, ARCHBISHOP, APOSTLE TO JAPAN (1912)

Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, was born Ivan Dimitrievich Kasatkin on August 1, 1836, in the village of Berezovsk, Belsk district, Smolensk diocese, where his father served as a deacon. At the age of five, he lost his mother. He completed the Belsk religious school, and afterward the Smolensk Theological Seminary. In 1857 Ivan Kasatkin entered the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. On June 24, 1860, in the academy temple of the Twelve Apostles, Bishop Nectarius tonsured him with the name Nicholas.

On June 29, the Feast of the foremost Apostles Peter and Paul, the monk Nicholas was ordained deacon. The next day, on the altar feast of the academy church, he was ordained to the holy priesthood. Later, at his request, Father Nicholas was assigned to Japan as head of the consular church in the city of Hakodate.

At first, preaching the Gospel in Japan seemed completely impossible. In Father Nicholas’s own words: “the Japanese of the time looked upon foreigners as beasts, and on Christianity as a villainous sect, to which only villains and sorcerers could belong.” He spent eight years in studying the country, the language, manners and customs of the people among whom he would preach.

In 1868, the flock of Father Nicholas numbered about twenty Japanese. At the end of 1869, Hieromonk Nicholas reported in person to the Synod in Petersburg about his work. A decision was made, on January 14, 1870, to form a special Russian Spiritual Mission for preaching the Word of God among the pagan Japanese. Father Nicholas was elevated to the rank of archimandrite and appointed as head of this Mission.

Returning to Japan after two years in Russia, he transferred some of the responsibility for the Hakodate flock to Hieromonk Anatolius and began his missionary work in Tokyo. In 1871 there was a persecution of Christians in Hakodate. Many were arrested (among them, the first Japanese Orthodox priest Paul Sawabe). Only in 1873 did the persecution abate somewhat, and the free preaching of Christianity became possible.

In this year Archimandrite Nicholas began the construction of a stone building in Tokyo which housed a church, a school for fifty men, and later a religious school, which became a seminary in 1878.

In 1874, Bishop Paul of Kamchatka arrived in Tokyo to ordain as priests several Japanese candidates recommended by Archimandrite Nicholas. At the Tokyo Mission, there were four schools: catechists, for women, church servers, and seminary. At Hakodate, there were two separate schools for boys and girls.

In the second half of 1877, the Mission began regular publication in the journal “Church Herald.” By the year 1878, there were already 4115 Christians in Japan, and there were a number of Christian communities. Church services and classes in Japanese and the publication of religious and moral books permitted the Mission to attain such results quickly. Archimandrite Nicholas petitioned the Holy Synod in December of 1878 to provide a bishop for Japan.

Archimandrite Nicholas was consecrated bishop on March 30, 1880, in the Trinity Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Returning to Japan, he resumed his apostolic work with increased fervor. He completed construction on the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Tokyo, translated the service books, and compiled a special Orthodox theological dictionary in the Japanese language.

Great hardship befell the saint and his flock during the Russo-Japanese War. For his ascetic labor during these difficult years, he was elevated to the rank of Archbishop.

In 1911, half a century had passed since the young hieromonk Nicholas had first set foot on Japanese soil. At that time there were 33,017 Christians in 266 communities of the Japanese Orthodox Church, including 1 Archbishop, 1 bishop, 35 priests, 6 deacons, 14 singing instructors, and 116 catechists.

On February 3, 1912, Archbishop Nicholas departed peacefully to the Lord at the age of seventy-six. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him on April 10, 1970, since the saint had long been honored in Japan as a righteous man, and a prayerful intercessor before the Lord.

PROPHET AZARIAH (10TH C.B.C.)

He lived and prophesied in the tenth century B.C., during the reign of Asa, King of Judea. He predicted the help of God to this king for his piety and troubles, which must overtake the Judeans because of their sins. (2 Chronicles 15). The Spirit of God is described as coming upon him (verse 1), and he goes to meet King Asa of Judah to exhort him to carry out a work of reform. In response to Azariah's encouragement, Asa carried out a number of reforms including the destruction of idols and repairs to the altar of Yahweh in the Jerusalem Temple complex. The Bible records that a period of peace followed the carrying out of these reforms (verse 19).

Azariah is described as being the "son of Oded" (verse 1), but the Masoretic Text omits Azariah's name in verse 8, suggesting that the prophecy is from Oded himself

Source: Orthodox Churh in America

MARK 15:1-15

1Immediately, in the morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council; and they bound Jesus, led Him away, and delivered Him to Pilate. 2 Then Pilate asked Him, "Are You the King of the Jews?" He answered and said to him, "It is as you say."3 And the chief priests accused Him of many things, but He answered nothing.4 Then Pilate asked Him again, saying, "Do You answer nothing? See how many things they testify against You!" 5 But Jesus still answered nothing, so Pilate marveled. 6 Now at the feast he was accustomed to releasing one prisoner to them, whomever they requested. 7 And there was one named Barabbas, who was chained with his fellow rebels; they had committed murder in the rebellion. 8 Then the multitude, crying aloud, began to ask him to do just as he had always done for them. 9 But Pilate answered them, saying, "Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?" 10 For he knew that the chief priests had handed Him over because of envy. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd so that he should rather release Barabbas to them. 12 Pilate answered and said to them again, "What then do you want me to do with Him whom you call the King of the Jews?" 13 So they cried out again, "Crucify Him!" 14 Then Pilate said to them, "Why, what evil has He done?" But they cried out all the more, "Crucify Him!" 15 So Pilate, wanting to gratify the crowd, released Barabbas to them; and he delivered Jesus after he had scourged Him, to be crucified.

JOHN 4:20-5:21

20 If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.

1 Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves him who is begotten of Him. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome. 4 For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world our faith. 5 Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? 6 This is He who came by water and blood-Jesus Christ; not only by water but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who bears witness because the Spirit is truth. 7 For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one.9 If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater; for this is the witness of God which He has testified of His Son. 10 He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself; he who does not believe God has made Him a liar because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of His Son. 11 And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God. 14 Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 15 And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him. 16 If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask, and He will give him life for those who commit sin not leading to death. There is sin leading to death. I do not say that he should pray about that. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death. 18 We know that whoever is born of God does not sin; but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him. 19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. 20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.21

Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.

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