Back to Woodrow Wilson and the early generation of progressive Democrats. What motivated their enthusiasm for the national government—for the centralized state—was their realization that it was the centralized state that had defeated the old plantation. Consequently, they reasoned that the only way to reestablish the plantation and make it invulnerable was to create a new type of plantation run by the centralized state itself. This way they could become the new plantation bosses, with power incomparably greater than that exercised by any slave-owner.
One national plantation with one big boss and lots of overseers, organized on an ethnic basis like the old plantation, just as effective as a system of exploitation but adapted to new circumstances and therefore structured somewhat differently—this became Wilson’s model and indeed the model of the Democratic Party in the twentieth century, right up to the present.
Wilson represented a great shift in the Democratic Party from being the party of state’s rights to the party of the strong centralized state. The reason for the shift is obvious. State’s rights was the most effective way to protect the old slave plantation. But in the early twentieth century Wilson and the progressives had no slave plantation to protect. They needed a way to revive the plantation, to create a new type of plantation that they could run from a central location. Thus the Democratic Party switched its allegiance to a strong centralized state because that was the best way to reinvent the plantation. Notice that for the Democratic Party this represented a change of tactics, but not a change of purpose.
Wilson and his progressive cohorts created the embryo for this new type of plantation. Here we focus on its genesis, constructed on the cornerstone of white supremacy. Although white supremacy is the very charge progressive Democrats today make against Republicans, I will show that in its most virulent form it is an invention of progressivism and the Democratic Party. I will also identify the three distinguishing features of the new Democratic engine of exploitation: racial terrorism, segregation and forced eugenic sterilization. Some of this surrounding apparatus is now gone, but the progressive plantation itself is in full operation today.
INVENTING WHITE SUPREMACY
How do you reconstruct a plantation? How do you go about rebuilding not a single plantation but an entire plantation system that has been wiped out by the Civil War? This was the challenge confronting Wilson and his generation of progressive Democrats. At first, they had to accept what they had lost. They had lost the slaves, who were now free. This represented a financial loss of $4 billion, a number I arrive at by multiplying the number of slaves (four million) by the average cost of a slave ($1,000).
We can convert $4 billion into today’s money and get a much larger number. But let’s think about what the loss of the slaves actually represented to the planter class. Historian David Brion Davis points out that in 1860 the total value of the slaves was around 80 percent of the nation’s gross national product.15 That means that, in today’s terms, the total loss to the slave-owners was not $4 billion but something closer to $13 trillion. No wonder the Democratic planters went to war, as Jefferson Davis himself said, to protect their very valuable property.
The loss of slavery wasn’t merely a financial disaster; it changed the rules of an entire culture that had previously been based on status, leisure and idleness. A Maryland Unionist described the new situation facing former Democratic slave-owner Tench Tilghman and his family: “The younger ladies on Wednesday and Thursday milked the cows, while their father the General held the umbrella over them to keep off the rain . . . The General has to harness his own carriage horses and probably black his own boots.”16
Fanny Andrews, the daughter of a Georgia Democratic planter, complained that “it seems humiliating to be compelled to bargain and haggle with our own servants about wages.”17 One gets the idea that the true source of her outrage wasn’t the bargaining but rather that the slave-owner class, which previously got this labor for free, now had to pay for it. Such was the angst of the postbellum Democratic leisure class. And yet there was nothing they could do to get their old way of life back.
Sure, the Democrats in the South had some consolations. They had replaced slavery with sharecropping. Under the sharecropping system blacks still worked in the rice, tobacco, cane and cotton fields. Now they were wage laborers and in theory entitled to a share of the crop, typically one-third if the planter provided the implements and seed, one-half if the sharcroppers provided their own.18
Moreover, since sharecroppers lived on the plantation, owners found ways to impose charges on them for tools and living expenses that typically left them with little to call their own. Owners also controlled the freedom and, to some extent, the lives of their workers, who were also their tenants. So dependent were sharecroppers on their employers that some scholars have not hesitated to term sharecropping a form of “neo-slavery.”
Still, sharecroppers were contract laborers. They were not actually slaves. However subjugated they were, they could round up their family and leave the plantation. So if sharecropping was to be part of the new Democratic plantation system, Democrats in the South would have to find ways to force sharecroppers to stay, no matter how onerous the conditions they faced. The great instrument for keeping the slaves on the old plantation—namely, the whip—was no longer available to the postbellum planter class.
Increasingly, Wilson and his fellow Democrats noticed the competitive threat posed by free blacks in the South. Partly this threat was economic—slaves who had developed practical skills were now in a position to compete with white laborers for employment. Part of it was cultural—free blacks could in theory intermingle socially with whites and even intermarry with them, while this had been unthinkable for slaves. Moreover, blacks posed a serious political threat to Democratic hegemony because, overjoyed at being freed by the Republicans, they were now overwhelmingly Republican in their loyalties.
The Democrats no longer had slavery to sustain the plantation, but they did have something else—they did have racism. Racism, after all, predated the slave plantation. It continued through the slave period. And it outlasted slavery, becoming in many respects stronger after emancipation than it had been before. Moreover, slavery had been confined to the South, at least in the nineteenth century, while racism seemed to be a potent force in the North no less than in the South.
These statements require clarification. Racism—specifically the belief in inherent black inferiority—dates back to the first European encounters with Africans in the early modern period. I have written about this in my book The End of Racism. Basically, Europeans could not account for the primitivism of black Africa entirely in environmental terms, and therefore blamed a good portion of it on inherent—and ultimately biological—inferiority. This perception of blacks as uncivilized and perhaps incapable of civilization—this original racism—was imported to America when Europeans settled this continent.
Slavery fortified racism and fostered an early version of white supremacy. It did so for the reason given by historian C. R. Boxer: “One race cannot systematically enslave members of another for centuries without acquiring a conscious or unconscious feeling of racial superiority.”19 The point is that unlike slavery in many other parts of the world, where slaves and slave-owners belonged to the same race, American slavery was racial slavery. Not all the slave-owners were white—there were also a few thousand black slave-owners in the South between the 1820s and 1860—but all the slaves on the Democratic plantations of the South were black.
Boxer’s point is that when the slave-owners are white and the slaves are black, the whites will inevitably presume themselves suited to rule and the blacks suited to be ruled. The presumed logic goes like this: “We are on top and they are on the bottom; therefore, we must deserve to be on top and they must deserve to be on the bottom. We are naturally superior to them.”
Here, then, is the original basis of entrenched white supremacy. Bu
t it took time for this self-consciousness to develop. That’s why we see very few virulent denunciations of blacks, even in the South, during the founding period. Those emerged in the early nineteenth century as the plantation expanded and a political party arose in the 1820s that reflected the will and interest of the planter class. That’s why I say that white supremacy is a creation of the Democratic master class.
This psychological rationalization for slavery then became corroborated by the wretched condition of the slaves. Even though this wretchedness was imposed by the Democratic slave-owner, who prevented his slaves from being educated and civilized, the planter would point to the wretchedness of black slaves as proof of their racial inferiority.
Yet racism was also tempered by slavery not only because the plantation system necessitated close and constant interactions between the slaves and the master class but also because slavery as an institution prevented open economic competition between whites and blacks. Both blacks and whites worked for the benefit of the white master class, and this pleased the masters just fine—as long as the slaves went along with the arrangement, there was no reason for the masters to direct racial hostility to the slaves. After slavery, however, the free blacks became a problem not merely in the economic sense but also in the political and cultural sense.
Wilson and the progressive Democrats observed what modern scholars have subsequently corroborated: there was more potent racism in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than any time before or since. “Anti-black racism,” historian George Fredrickson writes, “peaked in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the First World War.”20
And in this sea of racism, Democrats thrived. They didn’t have slavery, but they did have this. Moreover, slavery was an institution that could be abolished. The slaves could become free. But race, thankfully, for the Democrats, was unalterable. Blacks could not stop being black, or as Democratic pro-slavery apologist Thomas Roderick Dew once put it, “The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots.”21
The Democrats realized they could unify the white South by fomenting a shared hatred of blacks. Racism could not offer, as slavery did, the chance to extract free labor from blacks. But it did offer every white person, no matter how poor or ignorant, the chance to belong to an aristocracy of color, placing them above every black person, no matter how successful or educated.
Thus the Democratic formula became one of white supremacy and black suppression. The Democrats would fight to expand the franchise for whites while curtailing it for blacks. They would indulge white hatred by directing it against blacks, especially educated blacks whose very presence embarrassed racist theories of white supremacy. By cultivating racism, by nourishing it and by using it, the Democrats realized they could build an enduring foundation for a new type of plantation to replace the one that had been lost.
Consider the instrument that sustained the old plantation: the whip. The whip was the tool of force employed by the old Democratic planter class to get the slaves to the plantation, to keep them there, and to make them work. Wilson and his progressive Democrats realized that they needed something similar, a new whip if you will, a new instrument of force that would take these disorderly emancipated slaves and beat them back down, then keep them down, and ideally reduce the threat they posed by reducing their actual number in society.
At this point, in early 1915, who should walk through Wilson’s door in the Oval Office but his old college friend Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
THOMAS DIXON’S PROGRESSIVE RACISM
Wilson and Dixon were buddies; they had attended Johns Hopkins University together. Today progressives call Dixon a “right-winger” on the basis of his Southern roots and racism, but by now we can recognize this as part of the big lie. The South was a Democratic stronghold and racism was virtually the official doctrine of the Democratic Party. Dixon had served in the North Carolina General Assembly as a Democrat. Moreover, Dixon was a self-described progressive associated with the social gospel movement. His slogan was, “Politics is religion in action.”
In his early career, he had been an avowed socialist. A champion of the homeless, he was also an animal rights activist known for his opposition to hunting. He railed against capital punishment. Dixon’s book The Root of Evil contains such a passionate denunciation against capitalism that his progressive biographer Anthony Slide remarks it “almost compensates for the worst excesses of racism to be found elsewhere in Dixon’s writings.”22 That’s how Wilson knew him, and their friendship was ideological no less than personal.
Legislator, lawyer, preacher, actor and author, Dixon also claimed be an expert on Reconstruction who had mastered, in his own words, four thousand volumes of American historical records. In 1902 he published the bestseller The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, and followed it up with The Clansman, a lurid account of a Northern Republican who colludes with vicious, lustful blacks to persecute the South and violate its lovely maidens.
The villain of The Clansman is a character named Austin Stoneman, explicitly modeled on the Pennsylvania Republican abolitionist Wendell Phillips. The victims are ordinary, put-upon Southern Democrats who are just trying to get on with their lives when they are set upon by this predatory alliance of Republicans and Negroes. And the heroes of the book are the Night Riders of the Ku Klux Klan, who swoop down gallantly and overthrow the bad Republicans and Negroes, reestablishing a reign of virtue in the South.
Here is a sample passage by Dixon: “At night the hoof-beat of squadrons of pale horsemen and the crack of their revolvers struck terror into the heart of every Negro, carpet-bagger and scalawag.” No wonder Dixon dedicated his book to the memory of “A Scotch-Irish leader of the South, My Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAtee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.”23
The Clansman was another publishing success, and Dixon even wrote a stage play based on it. But now, he told Wilson, the acclaimed Hollywood producer D. W. Griffith had turned the story into a powerful movie, Birth of a Nation. Dixon was right about this. The film is even today acknowledged to be a technical masterpiece, using the latest cinematic techniques to convert Dixon’s literary melodrama into arresting scenes that build inexorably toward an explosive climax. Dixon wanted Wilson to screen the movie in the White House and invite his cabinet and other influential figures.
Progressive historical accounts of this meeting typically depict Wilson as the gullible fellow who went along with Dixon and Griffith’s nefarious scheme. But Wilson was obviously too intelligent not to recognize the publicity that a screening would provide the new movie. It would be the first-ever film shown at the White House. I believe Wilson knew exactly what he was doing. Dixon promised that the film would “transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat,” and this was exactly what Wilson had in mind.24
What Wilson may not have realized—I suspect he did realize it, but he may not have—is that the White House screening of Birth of a Nation would help to inspire a Klan rejuvenation. If Wilson didn’t know it immediately, he surely knew it soon. That’s because when the film opened in theaters, the nearby streets in several cities were filled with whites on horseback wearing full Ku Klux Klan regalia. More than three million people saw it in its first year. Many of them undoubtedly constituted the original membership of a revived Ku Klux Klan.25
Wilson’s comment on seeing the film, according to Griffith, was simply, “It is like writing history with lightning” and that the events portrayed in the film were “all true.” Wilson’s progressive biographers attempt to distance Wilson from this quotation, since it does not appear in official records, yet there is no reason to believe Griffith made it up. Moreover, Birth of a Nation itself is laced with on-screen quotations taken directly from Wilson’s writings and leave little doubt that his views were congruent with those expressed in the film.
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p; The Klan revival that Wilson inspired was a national phenomenon that went far beyond the reach of the original Ku Klux Klan. It is not widely known—in part because progressive textbooks don’t mention it—that the original Ku Klux Klan was a largely regional phenomenon, concentrated in nine Southern states. But Wilson helped inspire a second Ku Klux Klan that stretched from Maine to the Midwest to California. The new Klan had more members outside the South than within it. This was a Klan no less murderously terrorist than its earlier predecessor, but one that now stretched “from sea to shining sea.”26
Once more, the Ku Klux Klan became the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, just as it had been in the nineteenth century. Again, whether Wilson foresaw this or not, this was what actually happened. And the Klan became just what Wilson and his progressive Democrats were searching for, an institutional whip used to beat blacks down and keep them from competing with whites for jobs, socializing with whites or—most important of all—voting Republican.
In her book White Rage, Carol Anderson describes the typical Klan murder. “One of the most macabre formats was a spectacle lynching which advertised the killing of a black person and provided special promotional trains to bring the audience, including women and children, to the slaughter. These gruesome events were standard family entertainment; severed body parts became souvenirs and decorations hung proudly in homes.”27
As Anderson recognizes, the new Klan was different from its predecessor in some respects. The old Klansmen wore stilts under their robes to appear nine feet tall; the new Klan was distinguished by the white sheets and pointed hats. The old Klan didn’t burn crosses; the new Klan got that idea from a climactic scene in Griffith’s movie. The old Klan targeted blacks and white Republicans; the new Klan targeted blacks and also Catholics and Jews.
Death of a Nation Page 18