Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  The Republican Congress held hearings on Klan atrocities and passed laws—collectively called the Force Bill—authorizing the prosecution of these terrorist lawbreakers. As a consequence of Republican pressure, the Klan went defunct and shut its doors, although it would see a revival early in the twentieth century. During this period when the KKK ceased to exist, other terrorist groups like the Knights of the White Camelia took up the Democratic cause. Moreover, the Klan had in its short but extremely violent tenure largely accomplished its purpose: to intimidate black voters and drive Republican reformers out of the South. In a remarkable admission, Eric Foner writes that in the postbellum era, “The Klan was a military force serving the interest of the Democratic Party.”32

  Foner’s admission is remarkable because it is so rare. Foner, for once, actually makes an incriminating generalization about the Democratic Party. And what a damaging admission it is. Foner makes it clear that, as a domestic terrorist group serving at the behest of a political party, the Klan resembles the Nazi Brownshirts of the 1920s and 1930s. They were the domestic terrorist arm of the Nazi Party.

  There is that glimpse of ideological truth in Foner, and then he is back to his old ways. Foner concludes his book with the glum observation that Reconstruction came to a rude halt in the late 1870s, but he never gives the root cause for this. The root cause is that partly through political obstructionism, but mostly through domestic terrorism carried out by organizations like the Klan, the Democrats defeated the Republican attempt to protect blacks, enfranchise them, and give them a chance to make their own American dream. Weary Republicans—reeling from what historian Joel Williamson terms “battle fatigue”—finally retreated from the South, leaving it in the dirty hands of the Democratic Party.33

  The Democrats lost the Civil War, but they denied the Republicans the chance to build a decent peace. This is the whole meaning of what Foner writes and yet it is the conclusion that he peremptorily resists. So do Barbara Fields, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the whole procession of progressive scholars and pundits. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that these intellectual partisans aren’t particularly eager to tell us that their own party destroyed the postbellum hopes of the African American community.

  Still, for all their limitations, we should not lose sight of what the Republicans did accomplish. They saved the country and vanquished the old Democratic plantation, which lay in ruins after the Civil War. Even though progressives keep telling us about the Lost Cause—supposedly the cause of the Confederacy—the death of the Democratic plantation was the real Lost Cause. The Confederacy was merely the means to save the Democratic plantation. It was the plantation that gave rise to the Democratic Party, and it was for the plantation that Democrats fought so viciously and so bitterly.

  Now that it was gone, the Democrats found themselves in a miserable position. They were like the rebel angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” and now confused and dazed in a hell of their own making. For a time, before they gathered their wits, it was dark despair and pure pandemonium. Yet just like Lucifer and his “horrid crew,” as Milton describes them, the Democrats were not about to submit.

  Rather, in the manner of Belial, Beelzebub and the rest, they drew resolution from despair and shook their fists in rage at the Republicans, seeking not merely to undermine Republican projects like Reconstruction but to make a full comeback themselves. They vowed not, as progressives would have us believe, that “the South will rise again,” but, rather, what the progressives like to conceal from us, that “the Democratic Party will rise again.” They were determined to reinvent the plantation.

  6

  Progressive Plantation

  White Supremacy as a Weapon of Reenslavement

  It was a menace to society itself that the Negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint.

  —Woodrow Wilson, History of the American People1

  In the critical election year of 1912, the progressive African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois faced a choice. Should he endorse the former Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, now running on the progressive “Bull Moose” ticket, or the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, also running on a progressive platform? In general ideological terms, both men were similar, and Du Bois, sharing the same outlook, could hardly distinguish them on that basis.

  Even so, on racial grounds alone, the choice for Du Bois should have been an easy one. Du Bois knew that the Democrats, both in the North and the South, had been the party of the old plantation. They had fought to protect the plantation through the Civil War and had largely successfully blocked Republican Reconstruction. Far from repenting of their long legacy of bigotry and enslavement, the Democrats—especially in the South—were scheming for ways to restore and reinvent the plantation in the twentieth century.

  Wilson was part of this scheme—a Virginia Democrat who as a young boy had watched in horror as Union armies occupied the South. This trauma had inevitably shaped his basic worldview. True, Wilson as a young man migrated north to New Jersey, where he became the president of Princeton and governor of the state. This Northern experience changed Wilson, but not in the way we might think. Instead of moving away from his old bigotries, Wilson acquired new fortification for them in the so-called scientific racism of the fin de siècle. In short, he became even more racist than he had been before.

  We see this in Wilson’s scholarly output, which we can assume that Du Bois—himself a historian and sociologist—knew well. In 1889 Wilson published The State, a survey on the origins of government and civilization. Drawing on a new scientific taxonomy devised in Europe but gaining ground in American universities—much of it deriving from an attempt to apply Darwin’s theories to human populations—Wilson argued that the history of civilization is best understood in terms of the accomplishments and failures of various races.

  American democracy, in Wilson’s view, was not an American creation; rather, it was a racial legacy dating back to the ancient German Teutonic tribes, whom Wilson dubbed the “Aryans.” Wilson credited most achievements in the area of government and social development to these Aryan people. Other races, Wilson insisted, lack the capacity for democratic self-government, which was essentially an Anglo-Saxon product.2 Wilson, in short, was an early apostle of the nineteenth-century movement to invoke science on behalf of white supremacy.

  In 1901, Wilson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly in which he made the case for the segregation laws that the Democratic Party was at the time enacting throughout the South. Free blacks, Wilson argued, were “unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence . . . insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure.” Obviously they needed segregation, Wilson concluded because otherwise they would be “a danger to themselves as well as to those whom they had once served.”3

  Wilson’s magnum opus was his five-volume History of the American People, the tone of which can be captured in a telling section. Returning to his theme of the unschooled Negro, Wilson wrote that as a result of his indolence and viciousness, “The tasks of ordinary labor stood untouched; the idler grew insolent, dangerous; nights went anxiously by, for fear of riot and incendiary fire . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an Invisible Empire of the South, bound together in loose organization, to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.”4

  Running against Wilson was the Rough Rider nicknamed TR, who would seem from his record to be the far better candidate for Du Bois to support. Roosevelt was not uncontaminated by the Darwinian racialism that was all the rage in progressive intellectual precincts. He too spoke of the survival of the stronger races and the ultimate extinction of the lesser ones. Yet TR was a New Yorker, a Union man and a Republican. He embraced Lincoln and Reconstruction
. He condemned lynching and the Klan. Unlike Wilson—and at considerable political risk to himself—he sought to build bridges to the black community and integrate blacks into the postbellum South.

  In 1901, Roosevelt, as the newly elected president, invited the most prominent black leader in America, Booker T. Washington, to dinner at the White House. TR’s natural decency can be seen in his description of the offhand way the invitation came about. “It seemed to me natural to ask him to dinner to talk over his work, and the very fact that I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself and made me hasten to send out the invitation.”5

  Born a slave, Washington had risen to prominence as a black educator and statesman, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington, like TR, was a Republican who subscribed to the Republican ideology of free people, free labor and free markets. TR knew Washington’s deep ties to African American farmers, teachers, small businessmen and clergy, and he sought to create a working relationship with them. A few years later, in 1905, Roosevelt visited Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

  The significance of these actions—especially the 1901 dinner at the White House—can hardly be grasped today. America just had a two-term black president, Barack Obama, and it is commonplace now to have blacks at state functions and at the White House. Blacks and other minorities, from Ben Carson to Nikki Haley, are a visible presence in the Trump administration. The atmosphere could not have been more different a century ago, in the early 1900s. Roosevelt’s dinner invitation provoked the tempestuous ire of Democratic racists throughout the South.

  “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger,” fumed Democratic senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place.” Mississippi’s James Vardaman, a former congressman who would be elected to the Senate as a Democrat that year, said following the dinner that the White House was now “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stables.”6

  What, you might ask, was the big deal? The big deal was that once blacks were freed from slavery, the issue became whether they should enjoy equality of rights with whites. The most potent symbol of this was “social equality,” which included the right to socialize on equal terms with whites, to sit down to dinner with them, even to marry their sons and daughters. This was the explosive significance of the Roosevelt-Washington rendezvous at the White House. It was the original, real-life Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

  WILL THE REAL UNCLE TOM PLEASE STAND UP?

  Yet it was precisely that 1901 meeting that fortified Du Bois’ hatred of Roosevelt. Du Bois, you see, was the second-most-famous black leader in America. He was undoubtedly the country’s leading African American intellectual and was the first black to get a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.

  Even so, Du Bois was a prickly and pretentious figure. Since most people pronounced his name Du-Bwah, he insisted that they should say it as Du-Boys. He wore three-piece suits, and adorned his outfits with a hat and a cane. When challenged in academic quarters, he was known to convey a European sophistication and superiority by drawing out his monocle. He sought to inherit from Frederick Douglass the position of the leading representative of the African American community.

  In dismay he watched as this title seemed to pass seamlessly from Douglass to Washington, one Republican to another. To Du Bois’ horror, Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age and the most influential black journalist of the era, explicitly likened Washington to Douglass and even published an article raising the question of whether Washington was the “Negro Moses.” Du Bois found it hard to believe that American elites, in the North no less than the South, kowtowed to the homespun former slave whom Du Bois considered barely an educator, let alone his equal.

  In his best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois launched an intemperate attack on Washington, accusing him of being a sellout and an Uncle Tom. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the Uncle Tom accusation appears in American politics. Du Bois alleged that while he and others were fighting for blacks to have civil rights and full access to American opportunities—including higher education—Washington sought to accommodate Southern segregation and to teach blacks nothing better than vocational skills in preparation for manual occupations.

  This critique of Washington, launched by a leading progressive, has now become standard fare in progressive academia and media. Typical is the left-wing historian Louis Harlan’s unremittingly hostile two-volume biography of Washington. Harlan portrays his subject as a racial and ideological sellout, while he views Du Bois as a heroic resister on behalf of full legal and social equality. Today Republican intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Republican cabinet officials like Ben Carson are scornfully dismissed as Uncle Toms in the Booker T. Washington mode. Progressive intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West like to think of themselves in the Du Bois role of glorious resisters.

  Yet a closer look reveals that Washington was the resister and Du Bois was the sellout. After all, it was Du Bois who, largely on grounds of personal arrogance and resentment, backed Woodrow Wilson over TR. As we will see in this chapter, Wilson was almost single-handedly responsible for the national revival of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that had been defunct since the 1870s. Wilson also segregated the federal government and promoted vicious schemes of forced sterilization of racial minorities. These schemes were eventually taken up by the Nazis in a macabre succession of policies that moved from mass sterilization to mass murder to the Holocaust.

  Thus I agree with Jonah Goldberg’s assessment that Wilson was “the most racist president of the twentieth century.”7 And this is whom Du Bois actually supported. Washington, by contrast, did nothing so egregious to harm and set back his fellow African Americans. Why, then, is Du Bois portrayed as a hero and Washington spurned as an Uncle Tom by progressives?

  To fully appreciate the absurdity, we need to probe more deeply the meaning of the term “Uncle Tom.” In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the slave character Tom is the noble long-suffering protagonist. He is not a sellout or a traitor to blacks. That use of the term came decades later, as blacks and others looked back at slavery and sought to distinguish those who resisted the institution and those who sustained it. Somehow poor Tom’s name became a symbol of shameful collaboration.

  In this context, it’s helpful to consider how Malcolm X in the 1960s used the term “Uncle Tom.” He used it to designate the House Slave as compared with the Field Slave. As Malcolm X saw it, the Field Slave was the true resister of slavery. He was the “bad nigger.” By contrast, the House Slave made his peace with slavery. In the Malcolm X narrative, when the Big House on the plantation was burning, the Field Slave rejoiced while the House Slave rushed to the owner and said, “Massa, our house is burning.” Our house! The House Slave identified with the master, and accommodated himself to the oppression of slavery.

  Now Malcolm X did not suggest the House Slave liked slavery, merely that he accommodated himself to it. On this basis Malcolm X dubbed him an Uncle Tom. But concealed in Malcolm X’s distinction was the fact that the Field Slave also accommodated himself to slavery. He might have tried to run away or organize a slave revolt—in reality, there were hardly any slave revolts and no successful ones—but the Field Slave, no less than the House Slave, was powerless to actually stop slavery. So both in the end accommodated an institution they were in no position to do anything about, and the House Slave was therefore no more of an Uncle Tom than the Field Slave.

  In the same manner, Booker T. Washington accommodated segregation in the South because he had no power to end it. He emphasized black self-help because this was the only practical way for blacks to advance in the entirely inhospitable Democratic environment of the Deep South. Even so, it may be asked whether he adopted avai
lable measures to fight for legal equality. The answer—generally suppressed in progressive accounts of him—is that yes, he did.

  In a recent biography, historian Robert Norrell highlights facts that have been downplayed or omitted in progressive accounts. He shows that Washington spoke out regularly against lynching and lobbied Congress for legislation to outlaw it; condemned railway segregation in speeches and articles and lobbied the rail companies to stop it; funded lawsuits to block Democratic campaigns to deprive blacks of their voting rights; condemned the unfairness of the sharecropping system that robbed black farmers of their earnings; and supported a black defendant, Alonzo Bailey, in a landmark 1911 Supreme Court case, Bailey v. Alabama, striking down the discriminatory and oppressive practice of peonage.8

  Taken as a whole, Washington did more in practical terms than Du Bois to combat segregation in particular, and white supremacy in general. Note that while Du Bois railed against segregation throughout the early part of the twentieth century, he accomplished nothing in terms of curtailing it. Washington’s “accommodation” is reminiscent of how the founders and even Lincoln accommodated slavery. These men did what they could within their power to restrict what was beyond their power to instantly eliminate. No one can be reasonably criticized for that.

  AN APPRECIATION FOR HITLER

  While we can understand Du Bois’ attack on Washington as the bitter recriminations of a lesser man, this still doesn’t fully explain Du Bois’ bizarre endorsement of Wilson. Du Bois insisted in 1912 that Wilson “will treat black men and their interests with far-sighted fairness . . . he will not seek further means of Jim Crow insult, he will not dismiss black men wholesale from office, and he will remember that the Negro in the United States has a right to be heard and considered.”9