But how? This is a difficult topic to talk about, and I am about to go into controversial territory. (You’re thinking, “Controversial territory? Where else have we been throughout this book?” What I mean is that I’m now entering territory that is controversial even by my standard.) I have to tread carefully. I don’t know a better way, however, than to illustrate the state of mind of a sizable segment of African Americans in the aftermath of slavery—a state of mind that became critical to LBJ as he attempted to solve his political conundrum.
I turn to Eugene Genovese’s study of slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll, widely considered to be the best work on the subject. Genovese relays the testimonies of several slaves who were interviewed after they became free. We might expect them to vividly describe the travails of enslavement, and they did. But they also confessed to something else. I quote verbatim from these accounts.
Here’s Andrew Goodman, interviewed at the age of ninety-seven: “I was born in slavery and I think them days was better for the niggers than the days we see now. One thing was, I never was cold and hungry when my old master lived, and I has been plenty hungry and cold a lot of times since he is gone. But sometimes I think Marse Goodman was the bestest man God made in a long time. The slaves cried when told we were free ’cause they don’t know where to go, and they’s always ’pend on old Marse to look after them.”
Here’s Henri Necaise of Mississippi: “To tell de truth, de fact of de business is, my marster took care of me better’n I can take care of myself now. When us was slaves Marster tell us what to do. He say, ‘Henri, do dis, do dat.’ And us done it. Den us didn’t have to think where de next meal comin’ from, or de next pair of shoes or pants. De grub and clothes give us was better’n I ever gets now.”
Here’s Ezra Adams: “De slaves on our plantation didn’t stop workin’ for old marster even when dey was told dat dey was free. Us didn’t want no more freedom than us was gittin’ on our planation already. Us knowed too well dat us was well took care of, wid plenty of vittles to eat and tight log and board houses to live in. De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat something called freedom, what they could not eat, wear and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’ ’less you got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work.”28
As an immigrant who came to America with $500 in my pocket and no family here, no connections, nothing to fall back on, I know at least a little what it’s like to be flung into freedom. I am hardly comparing my experience to that of former slaves, but in India I did see the people known as Dalits, or “untouchables.” Those people have historically been treated worse than slaves; they are so reviled that traditional Hindus would not allow their shadow to cross over them. The untouchables too fell into a kind of collective stupor in which they could hardly imagine a route of escape from their degraded lot.
Based on that experience, I have nothing but sympathy for these poor slaves who had been turned into complete dependents during slavery and were then hurled into freedom in a society where, to put it mildly, they were not welcome. Thus I am not criticizing their longing for the security of the old plantation; I am merely recognizing it as a natural and powerful response to their dire situation.
LBJ would have recognized it just as I do. The difference is that I get it from books, reinforced by my own, admittedly quite different, experience. But LBJ grew up in the Texas hill country. He was a redneck from the rural backwoods. He knew people like Andrew Goodman, Henri Necaise and Ezra Adams. He understood their insecurity; he understood their fear, in part because he was helping to create it. And now, years and even decades later, LBJ saw a way to exploit that insecurity and fear to offer blacks a new arrangement. This arrangement became the essence of LBJ’s Great Society.
“I’m gonna put $500 million in this budget for poverty,” LBJ told black leader Roy Wilkins, “and a good deal of it ought to go to your people.”29 Both LBJ and Wilkins understood that these types of “handouts” weren’t free. They were offered as part of a bargain between LBJ and the Democrats on the one side, and the black community on the other.
Here’s the bargain that LBJ offered African Americans: We Democrats are going to create a new plantation for you, this time in the towns and cities. On these new plantations, unlike on the old ones, you don’t have to work. In fact, we would prefer if you didn’t work. We are going to support you through an array of so-called poverty programs and race-based programs. Essentially we will provide you with lifetime support, just as in the days of slavery. Your job is simply to keep voting us in power so that we can continue to be your caretakers and providers.
Here’s the part LBJ did not say: We are offering you a living, but it’s going to be a pretty meager living. Basically you get public housing, food stamps, retirement checks every month and medical care for the poor. If you have children we will subsidize them, provided they are illegitimate. More than this we cannot offer you, because we have to make sure that you stay on the plantation. This means that we need you to remain dependent on us so that you keep voting for us. Your dependency is our insurance policy to make sure that this is an exchange, not a giveaway.
In sum, LBJ modified the progressive plantation so that blacks, for the first time, would be treated as constituents, much as the Irish were in the Tammany days. No longer would Democrats directly rip off the blacks by stealing their labor. Now blacks would become partners with Democrats in a scheme to extract resources from other Americans. Through a variety of taxes, regulations and mandates, those other Americans would be the ones paying for the Democratic plantation.
What made the scheme irresistible, from the Democrats’ point of view, was that through the state the Democrats could force even Republicans to pay for their new urban plantation. In fact, the very sufferings that Democrats had historically imposed on blacks would now supply the moral capital for demanding that “America” make blacks whole. Future arguments for reparations and affirmative action would emphasize not what the Democrats did but what “America” did. Now the American taxpayer would be on the hook for correcting the wrongs perpetrated by the Democrats.
LBJ knew, of course, that not all blacks lived in inner cities. Less than half of African Americans today do, and that was also the case in the mid-sixties. It was never LBJ’s intention for all blacks to actually inhabit the urban plantation. Rather, he wanted about half to live there, dependent on the government, and the other half to work for the government, serving the urban plantation. These blacks could now be considered overseers of the Democratic plantation.
LBJ knew that if the government employed blacks on a large scale, it would draw blacks out of fields like teaching, preaching and small business. Teachers, pastors and entrepreneurs would become administrators, service providers and social workers. In sum, they would lose their skills for succeeding in the private sector and learn only how to administer the agencies of government. They too would become captives of a sort, fatally dependent on the Democratic plantation. They too would have no way to leave.
From the perspective of LBJ’s deal, African Americans could now look to the federal government as a new type of Big House. LBJ himself would be Massa, although he could be considered a good master as long as blacks lived up to their end of the deal. And LBJ probably genuinely believed it was a good deal for blacks. After all, who else gets a living from cradle to grave without having to work! Even so, shrewd artificer that he was, LBJ must have known that he was making blacks complicit in their own captivity, a captivity no less real for being voluntary. Few would actually have a chance to escape from the Democrats’ urban plantation. Some would even learn to love the plantation.
Blacks took the deal for the following reasons. First, having come out of the haunting experience of slavery and sharecropping, many of them were terrified of wh
at African American writer Shelby Steele terms the “shock of freedom.” To them a meager security seemed preferable to the risk of not being able to survive. Second, some blacks had come to believe—as some do now—that because of past oppression, America owed them a living.
Republicans of course know there is some truth to this, which is why during Reconstruction Republicans attempted to give blacks a fair start but were thwarted in these efforts by racist Democrats. Today’s Democrats, however, are all too eager to affirm that blacks require the lifetime support of the U.S. government, because this then provides the pathway to political dependency on the Democratic Party.
One consequence of LBJ’s deal was that race, which black leaders from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. had been trying to eradicate from public life, took on a new significance. Blacks wanted to be known as black, and black even became “beautiful.” No one was surprised when progressive pundit Cornel West published a book called Race Matters. As Shelby Steele wryly noted, race never mattered to such people when there was no profit in it for them.30
Also as a consequence of LBJ’s deal, Democrats became the new champions of blacks voting. From LBJ on, Democrats wouldn’t merely advocate that blacks vote; they would in many cases supply the buses to take them to the polls. In her book on the great migration, Isabel Wilkerson writes, without irony, “Suddenly the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls.”31 If LBJ were around to read this, I’m sure he would have found it hilarious.
That’s why LBJ “converted” from a racist Democrat who sought to keep blacks down on the old sharecropping plantation to a racist Democrat who sought to create a new type of plantation where blacks would willingly vote for their Democratic providers. That’s why LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society. That’s why progressives lionize LBJ even though they know what a vile scumbag he was. He’s their guy; he was the creator of their urban plantation in its most modern and most recognizable form. And that’s why blacks have become, as a group, the lifetime servile dependents of the Democratic Party.
PARTY OF CIVIL RIGHTS
Despite the ingenuity of LBJ’s plantation deal, the Democrats still had a major problem, and LBJ himself had no idea how to solve it. That problem was that blacks have long memories. Even blacks living in the 1960s had parents who endured the slights and humiliations of segregation, grandparents who were sharecroppers, great-grandparents who were slaves on the Democratic plantation. Progressive Democrats realized there was no way to con blacks into forgetting about all this stuff.
What they needed was a way to convince blacks that while Democrats may have been their enemies in the past, Democrats were their friends now. Hence progressives needed to sanitize LBJ sufficiently to give him full credit for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. And this project of persuasion would work even better if somehow they could persuade blacks that Republicans, who were blacks’ liberators in the past, were their enemies now. In this way black fear—including the nightmarish memories of the past—could be channeled into political hatred directed at the Republicans.
This is the significance of the Southern Strategy and big switch arguments. The left needed to make the case to African Americans that the parties switched platforms and switched sides: somehow the cops became robbers and the robbers became cops. Consequently, we must never lose sight of how these arguments are weapons to cover up the tracks of the bad guys and to project the blame onto the good guys, making it seem like they are the bad guys. It’s naïve to consider these arguments apart from their political utility.
Still, in the two sections that follow I am going to do exactly this. I am going to examine propositions apart from their manipulative use and merely ask of each one: is this true? Let’s start by asking: which party actually passed the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing bill? Progressives give full credit to LBJ, as if he single-handedly got the legislation through Congress.
Yet LBJ knew that the main opposition to these laws didn’t come from the Republican Party; it came from the Democratic Party, from the group of racist segregationists loosely called the Dixiecrats. These Dixiecrats, led by former Klansman Robert Byrd and LBJ’s own mentor Richard Russell, mounted filibusters to block the legislation. The filibuster against the Civil Rights Act continued for eighty-three days. Byrd himself spoke for over fourteen hours.
LBJ’s only way to get the laws passed was to turn to Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen. Dirksen knew that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was merely a restatement of the Fourteenth Amendment that Republicans had passed—and Democrats had turned into a practical nullity—a century earlier. Even the whole color-blind doctrine articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. was hardly original; Frederick Douglass said the same—and said it better—many decades earlier.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Douglass insisted there was no self-esteem to be found in skin color: “Let the sun be proud of its achievement.” He added, “It is evident that white and black ‘must fall or flourish together.’ In the light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion ought to be repealed . . . and every right, privilege, and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.”32
Dirksen got behind the legislation. And proportionately more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing bill. In the House, the Democratic vote for the Civil Rights Act was close: 152 for and 96 against. The Republican vote was 138 for and 34 against. In the Senate, the Democrats voted 46 for and 21 against; the GOP voted 27 for and 6 against. So 80 percent of Republicans in the House and 82 percent in the Senate voted yes; only 61 percent of House Democrats and 69 percent of Senate Democrats did. Had Congress been made up entirely of Democrats, none of these laws would have secured the votes to defeat the filibuster and thus none of them would have passed.
If one expects progressive pundits to give Republicans credit where credit is due, one would be sorely mistaken. In various ways, progressives have been misleading the public on this topic for decades. While running for president in 2000, Al Gore said his father Al Gore Sr. lost his Senate seat because he championed equal opportunity, even though Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, losing his seat in 1970 because of his positions on the Vietnam War and school prayer. More recently in 2013, MSNBC host Chris Hayes identified segregationist George Wallace—who in 1963 coined the phrase “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—as a Republican. MSNBC was forced to issue a correction.33
A subtler attempt at progressive revisionism comes from Harry Enten, writing in The Guardian. Conceding greater Republican than Democratic support for civil rights, Enten writes that nevertheless “geography was far more predictive of voting coalitions on the Civil Rights [Act] than party affiliation.” Enten proceeds to control for regional affiliation, and based on this revised mathematics, he concludes that Democrats are no less the party of civil rights than Republicans.34 Here we see the familiar progressive tactic of saving the Democrats by blaming the South.
The question that Enten avoids, however, is: which is the party that cultivated and nourished racism in the South in order to establish a one-party monopoly in that region? As we have seen, the answer is: the Democrats. Moreover, northern Democrats allied with southern Democrats in making the party the official vehicle of white supremacy from the 1860s through the 1960s. Enten insists “it just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus,” but this is a flat-out lie; it didn’t “just so happen”; it was the result of calculated, long-standing Democratic strategy beginning when Republicans shut down the old sla
ve plantation.
DID THE PARTIES SWITCH PLATFORMS?
Now let’s turn to a second question: did the two parties switch platforms? We can test this claim by examining the core philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and then seeing whether it is still the core philosophy of the Republican Party today.
On multiple occasions, Lincoln defined slavery in this way: “You work; I’ll eat.” In his Chicago speech of July 10, 1858, Lincoln put it slightly differently: “You toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” In its essence, Lincoln said, slavery gave men the right to “wring their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” As historian Allen Guelzo pointed out in a recent interview I did with him, for Lincoln the most appalling feature of slavery was that it was a form of theft, theft of a man’s labor.
Lincoln went on to argue that for centuries monarchs and aristocrats had stolen the labor of working people through a variety of mechanisms, from confiscatory taxation to outright confiscation. Lincoln insisted that notwithstanding its lofty rationalizations, the Democratic slave plantation was based on this ancient principle of thievery. “No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king . . . or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Lincoln contrasted slavery with the Republican principle, which is that the man that makes the corn has the right to put the corn into his own mouth. In Lincoln’s words, “As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth.” The social philosophy underlying this is that “every man can make himself” and “the man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.”
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