#Presidential Election 1864

[deadpresidents]

"I sincerely feel that the country is on the verge of ruin, and unless the policy which governs our national affairs can be changed, we must soon end in national bankruptcy and a military despotism. Perhaps the former cannot be arrested, but the latter may; but in my opinion the policy can only be changed by a change of administration. Hence I am for a change, and I looked upon the election of General [George B.] McClellan as the last hope for the restoration of the Union and honorable peace and the security of personal liberty; and this you may publish to the world as my views on the pending crisis. I shall, with great pleasure, cast my vote for Gen. McClellan and [Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Representative George H.] Pendleton."

-- Former President Millard Fillmore, criticizing the Administration of Abraham Lincoln and endorsing Democratic Presidential nominee George B. McClellan in the 1864 election, in a letter to a Mr. Douglas of Brooklyn, New York, November 1864.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

deAdder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 28, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 29, 2024

Former president Trump appears to have slid further since last night’s news about a new grand jury’s superseding indictment of him on charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Over the course of about four hours this morning, Trump posted 50 times on his social media platform, mostly reposting material that was associated with QAnon, violent, authoritarian, or conspiratorial. 

He suggested he is “100% INNOCENT,” and that the indictment is a “Witch Hunt.” He called for trials and jail for special counsel Jack Smith, former president Barack Obama, and the members of Congress who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And he reposted a sexual insult about the political careers of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has today escalated the fight about Trump’s photo op Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, where campaign staff took photos and videos in Section 60, the burial ground of recent veterans, apparently over the strong objections of cemetery officials. Then the campaign released photos and a video from the visit attacking Harris. 

Arlington National Cemetery was established on the former property of General Robert E. Lee in 1864, after the Lee family did not pay their property taxes. At the time, Lee was leading Confederate forces against the United States government, and those buried in the cemetery in its early years were those killed in the Civil War. The cemetery is one of two in the United States that is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, and it is widely considered hallowed ground.  

A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy. 

VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”

In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.  

When asked his opinion of Vice President Harris, Trump once again called her “a Marxist,” a reference that would normally be used to refer to someone who agrees with the basic principles outlined by nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx in his theory of how society works. In Marx’s era, people in the U.S. and Europe were grappling with what industrialization would mean for the relationship between individual workers, employers, resources, and society. Marx believed that there was a growing conflict between workers and capitalists that would eventually lead to a revolution in which workers would take over the means of production—factories, farms, and so on—and end economic inequality.

Harris has shown no signs of embracing this philosophy, and on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property in front of a table with coffee and breakfast cereal at what was supposed to be a press conference on the economy, he said of his campaign strategy: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.” 

Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”

True socialism has never been popular in America. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. 

What Republicans mean by "socialism" in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity. 

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina" and should be kept from the polls.

This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and wealthy men insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars. They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (the reason you needed to worry about strangers and candy in that era was that candy was often painted with lead paint).

Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists. Their conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, the wealth went dramatically upward, not down.

The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”

Vice President Harris recently said she would continue the work of the Biden administration and crack down on the price-fixing, price gouging, and corporate mergers that drove high grocery prices in the wake of the pandemic. Such plans have been on the table for a while: Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) noted last year that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14% and corporate profits rose by 75%. He backed a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—who came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that would set standards to prevent large corporations from price gouging during an “exceptional market shock” like a power grid failure, a public health emergency, a natural disaster, and so on. Harris’s proposal was met with pushback from opponents saying that such a law would do more harm than good and that post-pandemic high inflation was driven by the market.

Yesterday, during testimony for an antitrust case, an email from the senior director for pricing at the grocery giant Kroger, Andy Groff, to other Kroger executives seemed to prove that those calling out price gouging were at least in part right. In it, Groff wrote: “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mapsontheweb]

1864 US Presidential Election

[mariacallous]

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that the country’s presidential election, that in peacetime would be expected next March, will not be taking place while Ukraine remains under martial law and is in a state of war with Russia.

Western right-wing social media personalities predictably greeted this news as confirmation of their prejudices against Ukrainian democracy. Failed politician and 2020 U.S. election denier Kari Lake was among those who complained, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Zelensky is considering canceling elections in Ukraine. I didn’t realize that Democracy could just be turned off & on like a TV.” Not wanting to be left out, reactionary Michael Tracey dedicated several tweets to misunderstanding Ukraine’s constitution while furiously denouncing his own followers for correcting his mistakes via X’s Community Notes feature, claiming that “it’s totally false that holding elections during Martial Law is ‘banned’ by Ukraine’s constitution.” (The Community Note is, in fact, correct, and Tracey is, of course, wrong.)

So while, I hope, everyone knows not to take such figures seriously, Americans might still have qualms over the failure to hold elections. The United States itself has a habit, rare among democracies, of keeping the vote going even during wartime, as in 1864 and 1944.

Thus, it’s worth going into detail as to why the Ukrainian government has taken this position and how the Ukrainian electorate is responding to that. This news certainly didn’t come as a surprise to anyone in Ukraine, and the pressure surrounding wartime elections has been entirely external, leaving many Ukrainians baffled. The most prominent of these interventions was made by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who on a visit to Kyiv in August said he believed the Ukrainian government should hold elections in 2024. While it should be noted that, in responding to Graham, Zelensky appeared to hold the door open for elections next year, he also stressed that they were legally prohibited under martial law in the same interview.

These opinions are not confined to American conservatives either, with the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Tiny Kox, telling European Pravda in May that Ukraine is expected to “organize free and fair elections,” shortly before walking those comments back in a subsequent interview.

For the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, the idea of holding elections next spring is absurd. A recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 81 percent of respondents thought that elections should not be held until after the end of the war. This view is shared across the country, with those in the eastern and southern regions most impacted by the ongoing conflict also overwhelmingly opposing holding elections during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian civil society has also reached the same conclusion, with more than 200 civil society institutions, NGOs, and human rights networks officially declaring their opposition to holding wartime elections. The prospect of holding elections next year had already been deemed “impossible” by Ukraine’s leading election monitoring NGO Opora in July, long before Graham arrived in Kyiv for his moment in front of the cameras.

For those who are unaware of what martial law is, in most countries it entails the suspension of a civilian government, replacing it with a military administration enacted during times of war, and it normally involves the curtailment of peacetime political freedoms such as freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly. While martial law is never a positive political development for a nation-state, at times of war, such as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, such legal measures become unfortunately necessary to save lives.

Both constitutionally and legally speaking, the Ukrainian government is simply following Ukrainian law. The Ukrainian constitution and martial law legislation clearly prohibit presidential, parliamentary, and local elections from taking place under martial law, and Zelensky’s comments last week were merely a repetition of what other Ukrainian government officials have said on this topic in recent months. Other European countries, such as Germany, have similar provisions for postponing wartime elections.

In response to Kox’s comment in May, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said: “The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should clearly understand that there is a Constitution and laws of our country that we have to live by, and we will figure it out on our own. No elections can be held during martial law.”

Similarly, in June, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, said: “If elections were possible during martial law, it could lead to the rupture of the state, which our enemy is waiting for. That is why I think the most correct and wise decision is to hold elections immediately after the end of martial law.”

Speaking in August, Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said: “It will be very difficult to hold elections in the country under such conditions. Indeed, there is martial law, there is war. When we end the war, then we will talk about elections.”

Some might dismiss the position of Ukrainian officials due to their own self-interest in remaining in power. If Zelensky were trying to cling to power against the wishes of Ukraine’s electorate, martial law would seem to provide the Ukrainian government with the legal and constitutional power to do just that.

However, this theory collapses on contact with Ukraine’s opinion polls. A survey taken this summer on a potential presidential election in Ukraine showed that more than 70 percent of respondents were planning to vote for Zelensky, with more than 50 percent of respondents supporting his ruling Servant of the People party.

The scale of the commanding lead that Zelensky has over his political opponents is nearly unheard of in any democracies, let alone Western ones. Few leaders around the world have the same level of popular support and legitimacy that Zelensky’s government currently holds. This is not a government that is in doubt about its democratic legitimacy, and if there were elections in March, the results would be almost guaranteed to be a landslide victory.

It is also true that Zelensky’s government under martial law banned 11 opposition political parties last March. However, the part that is often left out by those complaining about this is that these parties had explicit links to the Russian government and were in many cases actively assisting the Russian invasion. It’s hard to imagine any country not responding the same way when under invasion. For example, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s government banned Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists at the outbreak of World War II. Again, none of this means that Ukraine is no longer a functioning democracy—it is merely a democracy that is currently fighting off an invading army.

The final point is also the most overlooked by external observers pressuring the Ukrainian government into violating its constitutional obligations: the matter of safety. Holding elections while Russia continues to bombard civilian targets in Ukraine on a daily basis is not just dangerous; it is outright irresponsible. The Russian military has a track record of systematically targeting any large congregations of Ukrainian civilians. In October, Russia bombed a cafe where people had gathered for a wake, leaving 59 people dead.

In any wartime election, polling stations would become high-value targets for a Russian dictatorship that is hellbent on destroying Ukrainian democracy and a Russian military that carries out war crimes against civilians as its modus operandi.

Furthermore, 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory is under Russian occupation, and those citizens have just as much right as those living in Kyiv or Lviv to participate in Ukrainian elections, but trying to organize those under Russian occupation would put participants and organizers under mortal peril. Ukraine does not have the means of ensuring the safety of its electorate during this democratic process, and it’s arguable that no democratic nation could ensure the safety of its citizens under these conditions.

Lastly, while this situation has not arisen in Western democracies since the end of World War II, the United Kingdom also did not hold elections between 1940 and 1945, and at no point during that time were substantial parts of Britain occupied by Nazi Germany. Most of democratic Europe was occupied during World War II, but during World War I, France and other nations suspended elections. I have never heard anyone try to say this meant those countries ceased being democracies. The United States was able to hold elections during wartime because the front line was mercifully distant; Ukraine does not have that luxury.

Given that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian politicians, Ukrainian civil society, and the Ukrainian electorate have categorically rejected the notion of holding elections while the country remains locked in an existential war with Russia, there is little excuse for external observers to be piling additional pressure onto Kyiv to hold a dangerous, illegal vanity contest with an already foregone conclusion.

[misfitwashere]

August 28, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

AUG 29

Former president Trump appears to have slid further since last night’s news about a new grand jury’s superseding indictment of him on charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Over the course of about four hours this morning, Trump posted 50 times on his social media platform, mostly reposting material that was associated with QAnon, violent, authoritarian, or conspiratorial. 

He suggested he is “100% INNOCENT,” and that the indictment is a “Witch Hunt.” He called for trials and jail for special counsel Jack Smith, former president Barack Obama, and the members of Congress who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And he reposted a sexual insult about the political careers of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has today escalated the fight about Trump’s photo op Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, where campaign staff took photos and videos in Section 60, the burial ground of recent veterans, apparently over the strong objections of cemetery officials. Then the campaign released photos and a video from the visit attacking Harris. 

Arlington National Cemetery was established on the former property of General Robert E. Lee in 1864, after the Lee family did not pay their property taxes. At the time, Lee was leading Confederate forces against the United States government, and those buried in the cemetery in its early years were those killed in the Civil War. The cemetery is one of two in the United States that is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, and it is widely considered hallowed ground.  

A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy. 

VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”

In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.  

When asked his opinion of Vice President Harris, Trump once again called her “a Marxist,” a reference that would normally be used to refer to someone who agrees with the basic principles outlined by nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx in his theory of how society works. In Marx’s era, people in the U.S. and Europe were grappling with what industrialization would mean for the relationship between individual workers, employers, resources, and society. Marx believed that there was a growing conflict between workers and capitalists that would eventually lead to a revolution in which workers would take over the means of production—factories, farms, and so on—and end economic inequality.

Harris has shown no signs of embracing this philosophy, and on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property in front of a table with coffee and breakfast cereal at what was supposed to be a press conference on the economy, he said of his campaign strategy: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.” 

Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”

True socialism has never been popular in America. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. 

What Republicans mean by "socialism" in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity. 

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina" and should be kept from the polls.

This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and wealthy men insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars. They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (the reason you needed to worry about strangers and candy in that era was that candy was often painted with lead paint).

Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists. Their conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, the wealth went dramatically upward, not down.

The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”

Vice President Harris recently said she would continue the work of the Biden administration and crack down on the price-fixing, price gouging, and corporate mergers that drove high grocery prices in the wake of the pandemic. Such plans have been on the table for a while: Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) noted last year that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14% and corporate profits rose by 75%. He backed a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—who came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that would set standards to prevent large corporations from price gouging during an “exceptional market shock” like a power grid failure, a public health emergency, a natural disaster, and so on. Harris’s proposal was met with pushback from opponents saying that such a law would do more harm than good and that post-pandemic high inflation was driven by the market.

Yesterday, during testimony for an antitrust case, an email from the senior director for pricing at the grocery giant Kroger, Andy Groff, to other Kroger executives seemed to prove that those calling out price gouging were at least in part right. In it, Groff wrote: “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.” 

—

[tomorrowusa]

The Arizona Supreme Court, entirely appointed by Republicans, has banned almost all abortions in the state.

They made their decision based on a law passed in 1864 – one year after Arizona was organized as a territory and 48 years before it became the 48th state. 1864 was during the Civil War and Confederates had been trying to occupy the southern halves of what are now New Mexico and Arizona.

GOP anti-abortion fanatics are currently using their overturning of Roe v. Wade to resuscitate long dormant legislation like the 1864 Arizona territory law and the federal 1873 Comstock Act to destroy reproductive freedom wherever they can.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the state must adhere to a 160-year-old law barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant person’s life – a significant ruling that will make a Civil War-era abortion law enforceable in the state. The law can be traced to as early as 1864 – before Arizona became a state – and was codified in 1901. It carries a prison sentence of two to five years for abortion providers – and it puts Arizona among the states with the strictest abortion laws in the country, alongside Texas, Alabama and Mississippi, where bans exist with almost no exceptions. [ ... ] The 4-2 ruling stems from a case that was revived after the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022, ruling there was no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion. Arizona’s former attorney general then moved to make the state’s near-total abortion ban enforceable again, but was opposed by Planned Parenthood Arizona, sparking yearslong legal challenges that led to Tuesday’s ruling.

Fortunately Arizona has a relatively new Democratic governor who will fight the ruling.

Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs also blasted the ruling, telling residents in an online video statement “the fight for our reproductive freedoms is far from over.” “I’ve personally experienced the anguish of losing a pregnancy and I know it’s outrageous to have the government tell you that the best decision for your health or future could now be considered a crime,” Hobbs said. “I will not stop fighting until we have fully secured the right to reproductive healthcare in our state.”

President Biden, who has made Restore Roe part of his re-election campaign, has condemned the ruling.

And President Joe Biden said in a statement, "Millions of Arizonans will soon live under an even more extreme and dangerous  abortion ban, which fails to protect women even when their health is at risk or in tragic cases of rape or incest."

Arizona is a swing state. In addition to the presidential race, there is an open seat for US Senate and a couple of House districts which were very narrowly won by Republicans in 2022.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruling is another example of why we MUST pay more attention to state government. Start by learning exactly who represents you in your state legislature.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

BONUS FOOTNOTE:

The 1864 Arizona law was made part of an 1865 codification of territorial laws known as the Howell Code; read it here. It's Chapter X Sec. 45 which concerns abortion – referring to it as procuring miscarriage. The Howell Code, cited in the Arizona Supreme Court decision, is hopelessly out of date. One startling example is the prohibition of interracial marriage in Chapter XXX Sec. 3...

Effectively, Republicans would like to return America to the mid 19th century – both legally and socially.

[darkmaga-retard]

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times,

Starting Monday, Democrats will hold their long-anticipated national convention during which they'll formally nominate their presidential candidate and outline to voters their vision for the future.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) will formally lock in the presidential and vice presidential nominees for both major parties.

Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), were nominated at the Republican National Convention last month.

Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, clinched enough delegates to win her party’s nomination at the beginning of August during a virtual roll vote that left little room for last minute dissenters.

She’s expected to accept the nomination, along with her chosen running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in speeches delivered on the final two nights of the event.

This is set to be a very different convention than voters expected at the beginning of the election cycle, when President Joe Biden led the ticket for Democrats.

However, a pressure campaign forced Biden out of the candidacy after an underwhelming debate performance shock up the political landscape.

Since Harris took over the ticket, Democrats have enjoyed a boost in polling. Still, the stakes are high for Harris and the Democrats, who will need to put on a united front after months of division within the party.

Here’s what to expect during the second major party convention of the year.

When and Where

The DNC will be held from Monday, Aug. 19, to Thursday, Aug. 22, in Chicago.

Democrats have a long history of holding their conventions in the windy city—this will be the 12th time since 1864 that the convention has been hosted there.

The last DNC to be held in Chicago was in 1996, when President Bill Clinton was easily re-nominated by his party.

The main event this year is being held at the United Center, a convention center that doubles as the home stadium for the Chicago Bulls basketball team and the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team.

Around 50,000 attendees are expected, including the party’s approximately 5,000 delegates. Like most major political events, it won’t be open to the public.

However, it will stream on a variety of platforms, according to the party.

In addition to the normal media coverage of the event each night, voters will also be able to watch the convention online, courtesy of C-Span.

The event will also be streamed in its entirety via Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube using the vertical style popularized by those apps.

Additional delegate-only events that are not streamed to the public will be hosted at the nearby McCormick Center.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost:

Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a campaign event in Arizona on Friday following the state Supreme Court’s recent ruling that an 1864 near-total abortion ban can go into effect. “Here in Arizona, they have turned the back the clock to the 1800s to take away a woman’s most fundamental right, the right to make decisions over her own body,” Harris told a crowd in Tucson. “The overturning of Roe was, without any question, a seismic event. And this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet.” The near-total ban won’t go into effect until 45 days after the Arizona Supreme Court issues its formal ruling.

The Arizona high court greenlit the reinstatement of the archaic abortion law — which predates Arizona’s statehood — earlier this week. It bans nearly all abortions except for when the pregnant person’s life is at risk. It also carries a felony punishment of two to five years in prison for abortion providers. Harris emphasized how important the outcome of the 2024 election will be for reproductive rights, adding that former President Donald Trump will sign a national abortion ban if reelected in the fall. “We all must understand who is to blame. Former President Donald Trump did this,” Harris said. “Donald Trump is the architect of this health care crisis. And that is not a fact, by the way, that he hides. In fact, he brags about it.”

Harris warned that if reelected, Trump could choose to enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that states it’s illegal to send “obscene” materials in the mail including items that relate to sexual health and contraception. Anti-choice conservative groups have laid out a plan to enforce the zombie law and create a backdoor national abortion ban. “Just like what he did in Arizona, he basically wants to take America back to the 1800s,” Harris said. “But we are not going to let that happen.” Trump has continually boasted about his role in appointing the three Supreme Court justices who were critical in repealing Roe v. Wade. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said this week that he believes abortion rights should be left to the states, but later said the Arizona ruling went too far. He also claimed he would not sign a national abortion ban if he gets to the White House, though past reporting suggests he has at least considered implementing a 15- or 16-week ban. Trump, who has aligned himself with extreme anti-abortion groups, could still enact the Comstock Act or direct the Food and Drug Administration to roll back access to abortion pills.

VP Kamala Harris is correct: Donald Trump is the root cause for all the abortion bans being enacted.

[princetonarchives]

This clipping from the Princeton Standard dated June 24, 1864 refers to an incident on the evening of June 17, 1864. Clement Vallandigham was leader of the Copperheads, a faction of northern Democrats who opposed the Union's military actions and argued that the federal government should just give the South what it wanted. As the 1864 U.S. presidential elections approached, northern Democrats were split into factions of "War Democrats" and "Peace Democrats." Ultimately, at the 1864 Democratic Convention, pro-war George McClellan secured the party's nomination, but nonethless the party adopted a "peace" platform Vallandigham had written, which McClellan himself opposed.

The controversies at Princeton highlight the pervasive mistrust among many Northerners at the time.

[racefortheironthrone]

How did Lincoln's economic policy set the GOP on their path towards corporate domination?

To be fair, I do approve of much of Lincoln's economic policy - the first income tax, the use of greenbacks, land grant colleges, etc. - so it's more that there are a couple areas of economic policy where I think Lincoln's administration had that effect, and the extent to which I think it's fair to hold Lincoln accountable for the long-term implications varies:

Procurement: to be fair, Lincoln inherited a Federal government that really didn't have a modernized procurement system. However, between that and the pretty thorough corruption of Secretary of War Simon Cameron and others within the Federal government, a lot of businessmen got rich selling substandard goods to the Union army and navy at a markup in exchange for kickbacks - so much so that the term "shoddy" became generalized and popularized as a result. (Previously, "shoddy" had specifically referred to reprocessed wool.)

Bonds: in order to finance the Union war effort, the Lincoln administration sold an enormous amount of bonds - and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase basically turned the Union's bond drive over to Jay Cooke, a politically-connected Philadelphia banker. To give him credit, Cooke was very good at selling bonds both to ordinary bankers and the man on the street, but Cooke's personal commission meant that he (and the men he hired as his sub-agents) became staggeringly wealthy and thus a major donor to the Chase presidential campaign in 1868. Cooke ultimately was bankrupted when his Northern Pacific Railway went bust in the Panic of 1873.

Banking: while the National Banking Act of 1863 had many good elements - nationalizing the currency, and establishing Federal charters that allowed the Federal government to regulate banks on capital and reserve requirements - it also had the effect of further concentrating currency and credit in Northeastern banks (which could more easily meet those requirements due to being better-capitalied to begin with), which was a bit of a problem when you realize that the U.S didn't have a central bank to ensure that all regions of the country had decent access to currency and credit.

Railroads: the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 provided for the Federal subsidization of transcontinental railroads through the granting of Federal land. While this got the railroads built, it didn't come without a healthy side-order of corruption: understanding that they stood to make a fortune if the railroad acts went through, railroad companies gave out a lot of free stock to U.S Congressmen, who in turn made sure the Acts passed and the Federal government was generous with land grants, loans, etc. This wouldn't blow up until the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872, but the roots go back in the 1860s.

As you might expect, a lot of the bankers and railroad executives who had gotten rich off the Civil War became major donors and activists and party leaders and elected officials of the Republican Party. This had a significant impact on the party's political and policy direction: by 1868, the Republican Party's national platform mixed calls for civil rights and equal suffrage with demands that Civil War debt be redeemed in gold rather than paper money (which contributed to post-war deflation and represented a repudiation of the Greenback Acts), and that progressive taxation be done away with.

[msternberg]

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

June 17, 1854

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

October 13, 1858

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

April 16, 1862

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

July 17, 1862

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

April 8, 1864

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

January 31, 1865

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

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

February 5, 1866

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

March 27, 1866

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

May 10, 1866

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

June 8, 1866

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

March 27, 1866

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

July 16, 1866

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

March 30, 1868

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

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

October 7, 1868

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

October 22, 1868

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

December 10, 1869

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

February 3, 1870

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

February 25, 1870

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

May 31, 1870

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

June 22, 1870

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

September 6, 1870

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

February 1, 1871

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

February 28, 1871

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

April 20, 1871

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

October 10, 1871

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

October 18, 1871

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

November 18, 1872

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

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

September 14, 1874

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

March 1, 1875

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

January 10, 1878

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

February 8, 1894

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

January 15, 1901

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

May 29, 1902

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

February 12, 1909

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

May 21, 1919

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

August 18, 1920

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

January 26, 1922

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

June 2, 1924

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

October 3, 1924

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

June 12, 1929

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

August 17, 1937

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

June 24, 1940

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

August 8, 1945

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

May 17, 1954

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

November 25, 1955

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

March 12, 1956

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

June 5, 1956

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

November 6, 1956

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

September 9, 1957

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

September 24, 1957

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

May 6, 1960

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

May 2, 1963

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

September 29, 1963

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

June 9, 1964

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

June 10, 1964

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

August 4, 1965

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

February 19, 1976

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

September 15, 1981

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

June 29, 1982

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

August 10, 1988

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

November 21, 1991

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

August 20, 1996

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

July 2, 2010

Clinton says Byrd joined KKK to help him get elected

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

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

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

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

Oh wait, princess, I am not done yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Nixon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not done there yet, snowflake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment.

Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither does the history of the black vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[deadpresidents]

"He will probably be the man, though I think we could do better."

-- Representative James Garfield of Ohio, reluctantly supporting the re-election campaign of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, letter to Harmon Austin, March 4, 1864.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Hate Speech

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 01, 2024

In addition to his comments about Russia in Ukraine, Trump said something else in Thursday’s CNN presentation that should be called out for its embrace of one of the darkest moments in U.S. history. 

In response to a question about what the presidential candidates would say to a Black voter disappointed with racial progress in the United States, President Joe Biden pointed out that, while there was still far to go, more Black businesses were started under his administration than at any other time in U.S. history, that black unemployment is at a historic low, and that the administration has relieved student debt, invested in historically Black colleges and universities, and is working to provide for childcare costs, all issues that affect Black Americans. 

In contrast, Trump said: “As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They're taking Black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.” 

Trump was obviously falling back on the point he had prepared to rely on in this election: that immigration is destroying our country. He exaggerated the numbers of incoming migrants and warned that there is worse to come.

But what jumped out is his phrase: “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.” 

In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted: “The Chinese Must Go!” 

And those were just the early days.

But while they are related, there is a key difference between these racist appeals and the racism that Trump exhibited on Thursday. Politicians have often tried to get votes by warning that outsiders would draw from a pool of jobs that potential voters wanted themselves. Trump’s comments the other night drew on that racism but reached back much further to the idea that there are certain jobs that are “Black” or “Hispanic.”

This is not a new idea in the United States. 

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told his colleagues in 1858. “That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.” 

Capital produced by the labor of mudsills would concentrate in the hands of the upper class, who would use it efficiently and intelligently to develop society. Their guidance elevated those weak-minded but strong-muscled people in the mudsill class, who were “happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”

Southern leaders were smart enough to have designated a different race as their society’s mudsills, Hammond said, but in the North the “whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.” This created a political problem for northerners, for the majority of the population made up that lower class. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond asked his colleagues who insisted that all people were created equal. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided.” 

The only true way to look at the world was to understand that some people were better than others and had the right and maybe the duty, to rule. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’” Hammond wrote, and it was on this theory that some people are better than others that southern enslavers based their proposed new nation. 

“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, told supporters. 

Not everyone agreed. For his part, rising politician Abraham Lincoln stood on the Declaration of Independence. Months after Hammond’s speech, Lincoln addressed German immigrants in Chicago. Arguments that some races are “inferior,” he said, would “rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form.” The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others, he said, is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” 

According to the mudsill theory, he said the following year, “a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.” He disagreed. “[T]here is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”

He went on to tie the mudsill theory to the larger principles of the United States. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop,” he said. “If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No, no,” he concluded to cheers: “Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it.” 

One hundred and sixty-six years later, Black and Hispanic social media users have answered Trump’s statement about “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” with photos of themselves in highly skilled professional positions. But while they did so with good humor, they were illustrating for the modern world the principle Lincoln articulated: in the United States there should be no such thing as “Black jobs” or “Hispanic jobs.” 

Such a construction directly contradicts the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ignores the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Anyone who sees the world through such a lens is on the wrong side of history. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[brownald]

Howdy can someone familiar with alternate history tell me if this is good?

November 1864: Abraham Lincoln loses the presidential election to George B. McClellan. Seeing the writing on the wall, he prepares as many Union forces as possible to end the war before McClellan can.

December-January 1865: The Union forces assault Virginia in a desperate gambit to end the war. They are unsuccessful, and by the time McClellan takes power the state is a ruined war zone. He immediately orders a full withdrawal and begins peace talks.

November 1865: The Treaty of Richmond is signed, and the war is ended. The Union promises “that no interference upon Confederate material interests shall take place”. The confederacy promises that “under no circumstances shall land belonging to the United States be captured by southern hands.” The treaty is unpopular among northern abolitionists, but most up north and south celebrate the ending of the war.

December 1865: The Sons of Brown, an abolitionist militia, is formed in Illinois by Union veterans.

March 1868: Ulysses S. Grant is chosen as the Republican candidate for president.

September-November 1868: During a debate with George B. McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant is assassinated by a confederate sympathizer. Without a serious opponent, McClellan is elected for a second term. He is unpopular though, thanks in part due to his inability to stabilize the northern economy after the war.

July 1870: The Confederacy announces the Davis Decree, proclaiming its intent to restart the Transatlantic Slave Trade by the end of the decade.

November 1870: Nebraska is inducted as the next American state.

January 1872: The states of California and Oregon, separated by distance from the Federal Government, secede from the Union, forming the Republic of West Libertalia in May of that year.

February 1872: The United States sends thousands of troops to its western territories in response to the secession, and admits Dakota as the newest US state.

July 1872: After months of military occupation, the independent territories begin to grow restless and protest against the government. The protests spread outside the territories, and there are soon riots in Washington DC. McClellan is impeached on charges of illegal occupation, and Vice President Clement Vallandigham becomes the new president. He immediately removes all US troops from the western territories.

August 1872: Continuing to face pressure at home, President Vallandigham decides to cede US control of all as of yet unincorporated US territories. From this point onward, they are considered sovereign land. Manifest Destiny is no more.

September 1872: Seizing the opportunity, the Confederacy annexes the territory of New Mexico and invades the Indian Territory. Sergeant Major Jeremiah Bell of the Georgia 5th Cavalry Regiment commits several atrocities.

October 1872: The Nevada territory is admitted to West Libertalia.

September 1875: The Washington Territory is admitted to West Libertalia.

November 1875: British Canada signs a nonaggression pact with the United States and prepares for war with West Libertalia.

May 1876: The Arizona territory is admitted to the Confederacy.

May 1876: The Eiffel Tower is constructed by France for the 1876 World’s Fair.

July 1876: Moses Martinez is liberated from his New Mexico mine by the Sons of Brown and joins them.

October 1877: Facing a shortage of slave labor after their sudden expansion, the Confederacy passes The Great Truth Act, classifying all residents of Native American and Mexican descent as the same social class as African-Americans.

March 1878: Confederate forces amass at the bottom coast of Florida. Sergeant Major Jeremiah Bell is among them.

September 1878: The Confederacy launched an invasion of Cuba, and kicks the Spanish off the island.

November 1878: The Spanish declare war on the Confederacy. The fighting is waged mostly on Cuba.

September 1879: John Wilkes Booth, a known Confederate sympathizer, organizes a terrorist attack to protest French anger against Confederate slavery. In a truly dastardly plot, the Palais Bourbon and the Eiffel Tower are set upon by Confederates in hot air balloons carrying sticks of dynamite, causing serious structural damage to the Palais and completely destroying the Eiffel Tower. In response, France declares war against the Confederacy and joins Spain’s war against it.

June 1880: Canadian forces invade West Libertalia via Washington.

August 1880: Former President Abraham Lincoln dies of tuberculosis. In his goodbye letter, he asks the nation to advocate for freedom against all forms of tyranny. This leads to months of riots, which are brutally suppressed by President Samuel Tildon, who does it to “maintain the fragile unity of our dear Union”. Many European countries stop buying American goods as a result, and many American citizens immigrate to West Libertalia.

February 1881: The Anderson Coal Mine is set up in Utah by an American businessman using slave labor. West Libertalia is angered by this.

November 1881: The conflict between Canada and West Libertalia reaches an uneasy resolution, but no treaty is signed. The borders remain the same as they were before the war, but hostilities are not concluded.

March 1882: The French forces make landfall at New Orleans while the Spanish land in Florida.

April 1882: The amount of new immigrants is more than West Libertalia can handle and it undergoes a recession as there are too many mouths to feed.

July 1882: The Confederacy surrenders to the Spanish and French. Spain reclaims Cuba and most of Florida as part of the terms, and France is given immense compensation as well as exclusive trading rights in the city of New Orléans. Additionally, John Wilkes Booth is given to French custody and executed.

October 1882: Jeremiah Bell is forced to resign from the Confederate Army and moves to Utah, becoming a bounty hunter.

January 1883: The Berlin Conference is held. European powers divide Africa between them, ending the Confederacy’s hope of reinstating the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

December 1883: Moses Martinez leaves the Sons of Brown, and becomes a privateer for the West Libertalian government.

July 1884: Judah Volkov is dishonorably discharged from the Union Army and moves to Utah in order to use his training on the frontier.

August 1888: The Anderson Coal Mine is attacked by West Libertalian forces, who are then attacked by Jeremiah Bell’s militia. This marks the beginning of renewed hostilities between the three groups.

January 1889: The story begins

[mariacallous]

In March, 2021, Kari Lake, who for twenty-two years had been the co-anchor of the 5 P.M. and 9 P.M. local news at Fox 10 Phoenix, recorded a two-and-a-half-minute goodbye of sorts, and posted it to social media. Lake had been off the set recently, having taken a personal leave, and she said that she wouldn’t be coming back. “Sadly, journalism has changed a lot since I first stepped into a newsroom,” Lake said. “And I’ll be honest—I don’t like the direction it’s going.” She went on, “It is scary walking away from a good job and a successful career, especially in difficult times. I know God has my back and will guide me to work that aligns with my values.”

Lake is now the Republican nominee in the race for governor of Arizona, and a very quickly rising figure within the national Party. The National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote in a column on Thursday that, if Lake wins her race, she “would have to be considered the favorite to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick should he win the Republican nomination again in 2024.” She has done this without much of a traditional campaign operation. She has not commissioned a single poll, and according to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, when a supporter asked Lake whether she had hired certain high-priced consultants, the candidate said, “I don’t know who those people are.” She then called over a young aide and told him to “show off his ‘MAGA’ tattoo,” which he did by pulling back his lower lip. Lake’s rise has been unsettling for reporters in particular, since she is bluntly antagonistic toward many of them. The Washington Post’s Ruby Cramer, interviewing the candidate for a recent profile, found that Lake and her husband, an independent producer named Jeff Halperin, record their press encounters. (If it all “goes great,” Lake told Cramer, it needn’t be cause for concern.) She taunts reporters about their audience size; the clips go viral.

When Lake upended the Republican gubernatorial primary this year, she was seen largely as a MAGA candidate who had outflanked the field by insisting that Donald Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential election. But, in the general election, that political strength on the far-right has been compounded by another: perhaps unsurprisingly, Lake is exceptionally good at TV. She speaks concisely and evocatively, and maintains emotional control even while saying very aggressive things. During a televised primary debate, she denounced Joe Biden’s border policies for yielding control “to a criminal element, to dangerous drugs that are killing our young people, and he’s taken away our ability to protect our own state.” When Mark Phillips, a political reporter at the Phoenix ABC affiliate, played a clip of the retired general and Trump political associate Michael Flynn saying that states have the right to declare war and worriedly asked Lake if that’s what she had in mind when she called for militarizing the border, Lake said, “We’re declaring an invasion and we’re protecting our border. That’s what we’re gonna do. You can call it whatever you want.” After the Dobbs decision, a legal battle in Arizona will either leave the state with its current fifteen-week ban or revert it to an 1864 law that banned all abortions in the state except when a mother’s life is at risk. Lake has expressed support for both laws. “I’m pro-woman,” she told Phillips. “And I want to make sure that women have health care. I want to make sure women have access to birth control. And I want to make sure that women are treated with respect.” She went on, “My stance is that I’m pro-life and I want to save as many babies as possible.”

Journalists and liberals have often been alarmed at the growth of right-wing media, which has been a fertile ground for conspiracy theories alleging that the 2020 election was stolen, or that the media is suppressing the truth about the harms of COVID vaccines, or (in the case of QAnon) that the country’s élites belong to a cabal. As Trump’s Presidency has receded, the attention on far-right media has only sharpened, both because Republican political candidates have increasingly used fringe outlets to reach an audience and because reporters and liberals have learned to pay attention to what might be circulating there.

But that isn’t what this election is about. The Republican momentum—and, as I write, it looks very real—is built on a small group of much simpler and less exotic stories: rising crime, chaos at the border, and pain at the pump, each of which has been a standby of local news for a generation. Lake is a talented politician, but less deft campaigners have leaned effectively on these themes, too. The Long Island congressman Lee Zeldin, a staunch Trump supporter who once nominated Jared Kushner for the Nobel Peace Prize, has in recent weeks mounted a serious challenge to Kathy Hochul in the New York governor’s race—one poll last week had him down just four points—in part by following local crime stories with the assiduousness of a small-market TV reporter making an audition tape. On October 18th, Zeldin tweeted an ABC 7 segment of a small event he held outside of a Queens subway station, writing, “I was in Jackson Heights in Queens earlier today outside another subway station where someone was pushed onto the subway tracks and killed.”

There is a reason that the Republicans have seemed to dominate the news ever since Biden took office. These themes are vivid and naturally suited to television news, and they have evoked in their supporters a visceral reaction that Democrats have managed to achieve only on abortion. Otherwise, the Democrats have often relied on statistical information (of the underlying strength of the economy, of the efficacy of the COVID vaccine) to make their case, while Republicans have turned to televisual information to demonstrate the violence in the streets, the migrants running across the border, the soaring prices at the local gas station. (In the education wars that heated up in 2021, images of outraged conservative parents at school-board meetings were up against quotes from tenured academics thoughtfully explaining what critical race theory was and wasn’t.) One of these information types is more powerful than the other. If it bleeds, it leads, in campaigns such as the 9 P.M. news.

At the beginning of these midterm elections, everyone in politics wanted to know whether Republicans were turning back toward Trump or away from him. This question overshadowed what turned out to be a more interesting development—and, for Democrats, a more ominous one. Certain rising Republican politicians—especially Lake and Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (whose wife, Casey, is herself a former local TV-news anchor)—have managed to fuse a New Right pugnacity with a hyper-attention to the news cycle and their own media presentation. It is a potent political mix, and in the past two years it has meant that Republicans no longer look quite so frumpy, quite so clueless, or quite so chaotic as they usually seemed during the Trump years. They are onto something, and if it sometimes feels like the political news has spent the Biden Administration stuck in one long local television-news cycle, well, it probably will feel that way for a while longer. During Lake’s emergence, she has sometimes been described as “Donald Trump in heels.” But that underrates how much Lake and her generation of Republicans have learned from their predecessors, and how intelligently they are operating right now. ♦

[factinhistory]

What Happened on September 2 in American History?

September 2 has been a notable date in American history, marked by significant events ranging from early bank robberies to landmark legislation and presidential visits. This article delves into key occurrences on this date, highlighting their impact on the United States.

What Happened on September 2 in American History?

First Bank Robbery in the US (1798)

On September 2, 1798, the Bank of Pennsylvania was robbed of $162,821 at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, marking the first bank robbery in the United States. This crime was notable not only for the substantial amount stolen but also for its impact on the burgeoning financial system of the early republic.

The robbery highlighted vulnerabilities in banking security during a time when the financial infrastructure was still developing. The incident prompted changes in banking practices and security measures, influencing how financial institutions managed and protected their assets. The high-profile nature of the crime also drew significant public and media attention, further emphasizing the need for improved security protocols in American banks.

See Also: What Happened on September 2 in History?

Gas Lighting Introduced to Hawaii (1859)

On September 2, 1859, gas lighting was introduced to Hawaii, a significant technological advancement for the islands. This development marked a shift from oil lamps and candles to a more efficient and reliable source of lighting.

The introduction of gas lighting represented a major modernization effort in Hawaii, enhancing public spaces and homes with improved illumination. This technological shift played a role in the island’s economic and social development, facilitating longer working hours and contributing to the overall advancement of infrastructure in the region. The move also reflected broader trends of industrialization and modernization during the 19th century.

Battle of Atlanta (1864)

On September 2, 1864, during the American Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman captured and occupied Atlanta, Georgia, effectively ending the Atlanta Campaign. This decisive victory was a turning point in the Civil War, with significant military and strategic implications.

Sherman’s capture of Atlanta was a crucial moment in the Union’s efforts to defeat the Confederacy. The victory boosted Northern morale and was a significant blow to the Confederate forces. The fall of Atlanta also had political ramifications, influencing public opinion and contributing to President Abraham Lincoln’s re-election. The campaign’s success underscored the importance of strategic military operations in shaping the outcome of the war.

National Duties (1901)

On September 2, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt delivered his famous address at the Minnesota State Fair, titled “National Duties.” In this speech, Roosevelt famously advised, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” encapsulating his approach to international relations and domestic policy.

Roosevelt’s address was influential in shaping U.S. foreign policy and his presidential philosophy. The “big stick” policy advocated for a strong and assertive approach to international diplomacy, emphasizing the need for a powerful military to support diplomatic efforts. The speech also reflected Roosevelt’s broader vision for American leadership and reform during his presidency, contributing to his legacy as a dynamic and progressive leader.

Eisenhower in Paris (1959)

On September 2, 1959, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Paris for a diplomatic visit. This trip was part of a broader effort to strengthen relations between the United States and France during the Cold War.

Eisenhower’s visit to Paris was significant in the context of post-World War II diplomacy and the strengthening of transatlantic alliances. The trip highlighted the importance of personal diplomacy and the role of high-level visits in fostering international cooperation. Eisenhower’s engagement with French leaders underscored the strategic partnership between the two nations and their shared interests in addressing global challenges.

Employee Retirement Income Security Act (1974)

On September 2, 1974, U.S. President Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) into law. This landmark legislation set minimum standards for pension plans, aiming to protect employees’ retirement benefits and ensure the stability of pension systems.

ERISA was a significant development in labor and employment law, addressing issues of pension plan management and employee protection. The act established guidelines for reporting, disclosure, and fiduciary responsibilities, enhancing the security of retirement benefits for American workers. Its enactment marked a major step in improving labor conditions and safeguarding employees’ financial futures.

Smith Sentenced for Belushi Death (1986)

On September 2, 1986, Cathy Evelyn Smith was sentenced to three years in prison for her involvement in the drug-related death of actor John Belushi. This case drew considerable media attention and highlighted issues related to drug abuse and celebrity culture.

Smith’s sentencing was a significant moment in the broader discussion of drug-related crimes and their consequences. The case underscored the challenges of addressing substance abuse and the impact of such issues on individuals and society. It also reflected the ongoing concerns about drug use and its effects on public figures and the entertainment industry.

Human Rights Now! (1988)

On September 2, 1988, Amnesty International’s “Human Rights Now!” tour began at Wembley Stadium in London. This global tour aimed to raise awareness about human rights issues and featured performances by notable artists including Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N’Dour.

The “Human Rights Now!” tour was a significant cultural and advocacy event, using music and celebrity influence to highlight human rights abuses around the world. The tour played a role in mobilizing public support for human rights causes and brought attention to various social and political issues. It also demonstrated the power of artistic expression in promoting social change and raising awareness.

Obama Visits Arctic (2015)

On September 2, 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit the Arctic Circle, specifically Kotzebue, Alaska. This historic visit underscored the importance of addressing climate change and highlighted the challenges facing the Arctic region.

Obama’s visit was part of a broader initiative to draw attention to environmental issues and promote international cooperation on climate action. The trip emphasized the need for proactive measures to protect vulnerable regions and address the impacts of global warming. It also reflected the administration’s commitment to environmental stewardship and climate diplomacy.

Johnson Threatens Snap Election (2019)

On September 2, 2019, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened a snap general election if rebel MPs passed a bill aimed at preventing a no-deal Brexit. This political maneuver was a significant moment in the ongoing Brexit negotiations and reflected the intense political climate in the UK.

Johnson’s threat to call an election was a strategic move in response to parliamentary opposition to his Brexit strategy. The situation highlighted the high-stakes nature of Brexit politics and the complex interplay between domestic and European issues. The threat of a snap election underscored the volatility of the political landscape and the challenges of navigating major legislative and policy changes.

Conclusion

September 2 has witnessed a range of significant events in American history, each contributing to the nation’s development in unique ways. From the first bank robbery in the United States to pivotal legislative actions and diplomatic milestones, this date reflects crucial moments that have shaped the country’s social, political, and economic landscape.The events of September 2 span a broad spectrum, illustrating the diverse challenges and achievements faced by the nation.