These absurd predictions sound like those of a man insisting that a scorpion that has already shown its sting is not going to sting anyone. Why, then, would an intelligent man like Du Bois say such nonsense? In other words, notwithstanding his personal desire to settle scores with Washington and Roosevelt, why didn’t Du Bois go with the higher cause of stopping Wilson and his party’s known racism? We can answer this question by looking at Du Bois’ subsequent career. In the years following Wilson’s two terms—in which Du Bois’ predictions proved to be the very opposite of the truth—Du Bois moved on from Wilson and proceeded to become enamored with both Stalin and Hitler.
In 1936–37, Du Bois made a trip to Europe that included visits to Russia and Germany. He praised Stalin for making “a brave start at scientific planning” by “investing the ownership of all land and materials in the public and then using natural wealth and resources for the ultimate good of the mass of inhabitants.” Du Bois refused to criticize Stalin’s purge trials and actually defended his forced relocation of small landowning peasants, apparently regarding such repressive measures as necessary to establish a state-run egalitarian paradise.
What attracted Du Bois to Stalin was his socialism, which Du Bois came to understand as the most uncompromising form of progressivism. On Stalin’s death, Du Bois proclaimed him a “great man” who pursued “real socialism.” And this is also what Du Bois appreciated about Hitler. Traveling through Nazi Germany, Du Bois praised Hitler’s dictatorship as “absolutely necessary to put the state in order” and praised Hitler’s social programs such as “national health, living wage, new public housing projects and new public works of all kinds.” Du Bois found the Nazi state to be a “content and prosperous whole.” While Du Bois deplored Hitler’s racism toward blacks, he attributed Hitler’s vilification of Jews to “reasoned prejudice or an economic fear.”10
Du Bois’ blind appreciation for Hitler mirrors his blind appreciation for Stalin, and indeed the two dictators—notwithstanding their subsequent clash on the battlefield—were close ideological cousins. They were, in fact, both national socialists. While Marx and Lenin both viewed communism as international socialism, Stalin had emphasized “socialism in one country,” socialism for Mother Russia—in short, national socialism. Hitler too was a national socialist who headed the German National Socialist Workers’ Party.
Historian Stanley Payne, in A History of Fascism, remarks on the parallel between Stalinist socialism and German national socialism. Much earlier the Russian socialist Trotsky recognized the similarity, contending that Stalinism and fascism were “symmetrical phenomena.”11 Both Hitler and Stalin were champions of the all-powerful state, and they sought a remaking of society and even of human nature in subordination to the centralized state.
Du Bois’ naked admiration for tyrants like Stalin and Hitler proved an embarrassment to his allies at the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose magazine, The Crisis, Du Bois edited for many years. The NAACP fired Du Bois, who eventually left America in disgust and became a citizen of Ghana, where he eventually died a bitter and broken man. This progressive icon came to hate America because in his view America did not take the strong measures that Stalin and Hitler did to bring strongman socialism and centralized state power to their countries.
This, then, is the tragedy of America’s leading African American progressive. He backed Wilson against TR, identified with the Democratic Party at a time when most blacks were Republicans and then later became a devotee of Stalin and Hitler, all because he embraced the progressive vision of the centralized state. In 1912, Du Bois saw Wilson as a more reliable champion of centralized state power than TR. Ultimately that—and Du Bois’ personal grudge—counted more for Du Bois than even Wilson’s blatant, documented commitment to white supremacy.
Du Bois’ betrayal of the black cause was not just about Wilson; it was also about the two political parties. Even though Republicans were the party of emancipation and civil rights, they were also the party of individualism and self-reliance. Du Bois didn’t believe in self-reliance; he believed in reliance upon the centralized state. And he detected a subtle but unmistakable movement in the Democratic Party from the party of state’s rights to the party of centralized state power.
Du Bois realized that the Democrats under Wilson were creating a new plantation, to be run by a new elite progressive class that would replace the old planter class. Du Bois was not entirely against such an arrangement; indeed, he had argued that the black community should be led by a “talented tenth” of its smartest men. One might reasonably suspect that Du Bois envisioned himself at the helm of this group. Yet this was not Wilson’s idea at all—his progressive plantation had no room for blacks at the top—and consequently Du Bois grew disenchanted with Wilson.
Du Bois’ disenchantment with Wilson is today shared by most progressives. Wilson’s racist progressivism is an embarrassment to their current political strategy. But progressives still revere Du Bois. So they ignore Du Bois’ role in putting Wilson in the White House, pretending that it never happened. But in fact Du Bois didn’t just give Wilson his personal endorsement, he also drew other influential blacks, including Boston activist William Monroe Trotter, to the Democratic Party, helping Wilson and the Democrats win a very close election.
This is part of a bigger story that tells us as much about progressives as it does about Du Bois. They continue to lionize Du Bois because they too are aficionados of centralized state power. They too, as Du Bois did, envision a role for black progressives as overseers on their new plantation. They too, as we will see, were complicit in the great schemes of twentieth-century tyranny, not merely Stalinism but also Nazism. Thus for the Democrats and the progressives who led them, the tyranny of the old slave plantation was replaced by the tyranny of the state.
The state, in fact, became the new plantation, run not by an elite class of Democratic planters but by a single Democratic Big Boss—initially Wilson and later Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—operating from a Big House that we know as the White House. Wilson began this reinvention of the Democratic plantation from a rural network specializing in black exploitation to a national network of ethnic exploitation involving multiple minority groups. But Wilson could only take the new progressive plantation so far; it took FDR to actually build it and other Democratic presidents to give it its current shape and form.
In this and the following two chapters, we see how the progressive Democrats creatively reinvented the plantation. They did this by deploying new weapons, white supremacy and ethnic mobilization, that had existed under slavery but were developed by progressives into a comprehensive system of exploitation. At the same time, we should be cognizant that a subsequent generation of progressives has rewritten history to pin the blame for ethnic mobilization and white supremacy onto their adversaries, the very party that fought against Democrats’ vicious and bigoted schemes from the outset.
WHY WILSON ADMIRED LINCOLN
Here we move from the progressive intellectual, Du Bois, to the progressive president, Wilson. Wilson, FDR and LBJ are acknowledged to be the three leading progressives of the twentieth century. Consequently, they are all celebrated in the historiography of the left. In a recent article, “The Do Gooder,” the New Republic ranks Wilson “among America’s greatest presidents.”12 Wilson is praised by progressive biographers for his supposed dedication to global self-determination and for his progressive reforms, including the introduction of the income tax, the Federal Reserve and greater federal regulation of industry.
But Wilson’s blatant record of racism is too much for today’s progressives to ignore. (I find it comical how Democrats today are in the awkward position of having to repudiate the embarrassing bigotry of virtually all their early presidents, from Jackson through Wilson.) In fact, it is crucial for their narrative to distance themselves from the deep r
acism not only in the Democratic Party’s history but also in early progressive history. So progressive activists assail Wilson—always careful to identify him as a Southerner rather than a Democrat—and demand that the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton change its name, while of course keeping its progressive intellectual thrust.
But if Wilson was a progressive racist, shouldn’t Princeton get rid of the progressivism and not just Wilson’s contaminated name? No one on the left is pressing for this, because virtually no one on the left admits that progressivism has anything to do with racism. Wilson’s biographers like Arthur Link and John Milton Cooper insist his racism was a regrettable leftover from his Southern roots. So Wilson did these wonderful progressive things, but occasionally—we hear—his Southern background reasserted itself and he did some bad stuff like show the Ku Klux Klan propaganda movie in the White House and segregate the federal government and so forth.
Yes, even the progressive critique of Wilson is part of the big lie to blame the South for the bigotry of progressivism and of the Democratic Party. Wilson regarded himself as having transcended Southern provincialism. Having absconded for Princeton at a young age, he believed he embodied the most enlightened progressivism of the early twentieth century, a progressivism far more associated with the North than the South.
That Wilson was in no way representative of Democratic thinking in the South can be seen in a single fact: his almost over-the-top admiration for Abraham Lincoln. This is a surprise: America’s first progressive Democratic president modeled himself upon America’s first Republican president! Our initial bafflement and incomprehension, however, gives way to understanding when we see what it was that Wilson admired about Lincoln.
Wilson did not admire Lincoln for his Republican dedication to the principles of the American founding. On the contrary, Wilson was the first American president to denounce the founders. Wilson ridiculed the founding system of separation of powers and checks and balances. Wilson did not share the founders’ belief that an all-powerful centralized state poses a grave threat to the rights and freedom both of individuals and of states. Wilson rejected the founding scheme of distributing power between the federal government and the states, and also among various branches of the federal government, to minimize abuses of power.
What Wilson admired most about Lincoln was his willingness to greatly increase the power of the federal government at the expense of the states. Lincoln had simply refused to let the states secede, a marvelous display of federal control over renegade subdivisions that wanted to go their own way. Wilson also admired Lincoln’s willingness to undercut the constitutional system of checks and balances when the situation warranted: Lincoln, for instance, suspended habeas corpus even though the Constitution clearly gives that power to Congress.
Lincoln also earned Wilson’s praise for his readiness to revoke civil liberties, as when he had Ohio Copperhead Clement Vallandigham arrested for incendiary speeches opposing the war. Yes, Vallandigham was a Democrat and Wilson sympathized with him in that regard. But in the broader sense, Wilson admired how Lincoln handled the Vallandigham case because he saw in Lincoln a man who represented unlimited state power concentrated in the executive branch, a Republican model for Wilson’s own Democratic administration.
How would Lincoln, had he lived to see them, have responded to Wilson’s commendations? I believe he would have been deeply offended by them. Let’s begin with Lincoln’s use of federal power to prevent states from withdrawing from the union. Lincoln’s point was that the sole reason for seceding was the Southern Democrats’ refusal to accept the result of a free election. What was the point of having elections if the losers could then invalidate them by escaping the governance of an electoral majority?
Lincoln viewed the concentration of federal power that occurred during his administration as a military strategy necessary to put down an armed rebellion and win a civil war. He perceived the measures he took—on habeas corpus, on suspending civil liberty, even the Emancipation Proclamation—as acts taken under duress. He considered none of these measures the normal conduct of government, and with the exception of the Emancipation Proclamation, he intended none to outlast the war.
Consider Lincoln’s argument for suspending habeas corpus. Yes, this power was given to Congress by the Constitution, but the very existence of an armed assault on the government prevented Congress from being able to meet and act promptly. Therefore, Lincoln insisted his executive branch had the temporary authority to act on behalf of Congress, and this action was legitimate provided Congress, upon considering it, approved the measure, which it did.
Lincoln did not himself call for the arrest of Vallandigham, although he approved the move when one of his generals, Ambrose Burnside, ordered it. Lincoln’s reasoning was that Vallandigham had gone beyond criticizing war policy to actively encouraging antidraft riots and exhorting soldiers to leave the front, and this posed a danger to war recruitment and military rules.
“Must I shoot a simple soldier boy who deserts,” Lincoln asked, “while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?”13 Yet Lincoln was fully aware of how Democrats used the Vallandigham case to portray him as a tyrant. He did not wish to give fodder to such accusations. So shortly after Vallandigham’s arrest, Lincoln ordered him released and turned over to the Confederacy.
Lincoln’s commitment to the founders’ scheme can probably be seen most vividly in his insistence that the 1864 election go ahead, even though it took place in the desperate and decisive stage of the war. Lincoln could have argued for postponing the election until the war was over, but such a thought seems not even to have entered his mind. Moreover, for several months while the conflict dragged on, Lincoln himself believed it possible, even probable, that he would lose the election. For a time, it was not even clear he would be the Republican nominee.
Ultimately the victories of the Union armies led by Grant and Sherman revived Lincoln’s popular support and ensured his reelection. Even so, his willingness to risk defeat—to risk what in his mind represented the continuation of the plantation, this time in the North as well as in the South—confirms his determination to respect the founding formula of government by popular consent even under conditions of extreme duress.
In sum, Lincoln was an American nationalist while Wilson was a statist. What Lincoln considered to be extraordinary powers, used by government only in the event of a national emergency, Wilson saw as powers to be used in the ordinary course of government. Essentially Wilson turned what was provisional and most problematic about Lincoln—and recognized as such by Lincoln himself—into a new progressive creed alien to the spirit of Lincoln and also to the spirit of the American founding.
Why, we may ask, was Wilson himself and the whole progressive Democratic movement that grew around him so enamored of the power of centralized government? The usual progressive answer is that progressives came to realize that they were the smartest people and that society runs most efficiently with the smartest people at the helm. This is the theme of progressive manifestos like Herbert Croly’s Progressive Democracy and E. A. Ross’ Social Control, in which Croly and Ross argue that societies don’t run themselves; someone has to control them, and it may as well be highly educated and highly specialized social scientists like themselves.
“The state is an organization that puts the wise minority in the saddle,” Ross writes. “The state aims more steadily at a rational safeguarding of the collective welfare than any organ society has yet employed.” While in theory the state is supposed to be democratically chosen by the society, Ross argues that “as a matter of fact, the state, when it becomes paternal and develops on the administrative side, is able in a measure to guide the society it professes to obey.” It becomes, in a sense, “an independent center of social power.”14
Here we see how progressive intellectuals sought, with a certain measure of rat-like cunning, to subvert the demo
cratic process. Their goal was the administrative state that, while being installed by the people, would govern for rather than by people. The true rulers would be the progressives themselves, guided by the mind of the progressive intellectual. And this progressive longing is with us today. It explains why so many in academia and the professional sectors count themselves as progressives. They aspire to join the ruling class that administers the centralized state.
Many conservatives and Republicans don’t seem to get this. The conservative response—influenced by writers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—is to make the case for why centralized societies don’t work. Conservatives argue in the Hayekian mode that societies are organisms that are far too complex for even the most intelligent and dedicated administrators to run from central command. This response, however, misses the thrust of what is so appealing to progressives about the centralized state, and why progressives don’t really care whether the centralized state makes the best or most efficient decisions compared to alternative ways of organizing society.
Look at the problem this way. Imagine going to a plantation owner and giving him the macroeconomic argument that he shouldn’t use a forced-labor system because slavery is a very inefficient way of organizing society. After all, slaves, being unpaid, have little motivation to work, and blah, blah, blah. Some Republicans and abolitionists did at the time make this sort of case to planters. Not surprisingly, they made very few converts.
What would a plantation man say to someone who talked like this? Most likely he would respond with a scornful laugh. If pressed, he would say he doesn’t give a damn about the profit to society; what motivates his enterprise is its profit to him. Sure, the slaves are reluctant to work, but that problem has had a workable solution ever since the invention of the whip. From the planter’s point of view, unpaid labor is obviously the best form of labor because it costs close to nothing and the planter keeps the vast share of the profit.
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