Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party

by Dinesh D'Souza

  During all this time, the main opposition to these horrors on the part of the Democratic Party came from Republicans. This book makes an astonishing claim: of all Americans, Republicans are the ones who have the least reason to feel guilty about slavery or racism. This claim comes as a surprise because Republicans are the ones who are regularly chastised by progressives for their alleged bigotry. Let’s see who the real bigots are.

  From the beginning, Republicans have been the good guys, fighting to stop Democratic schemes of exploitation, murder, and plunder. Republicans fought a great war, and hundreds of thousands of them died, to thwart the nefarious practices of the Democrats. Even after slavery, Republicans fought vigorously though not always successfully to defeat Democratic schemes of segregation and racial terrorism.

  The bad guys—the Democrats—put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.

  As I will show, American history is really the story of Democratic malefactors and Republican heroes. I begin with Andrew Jackson. He—not Thomas Jefferson or FDR—is the true founder of the modern Democratic Party.

  Progressives today are divided about Jackson. Some, like Walter Russell Mead, admire Jackson as a “man of the people” but trace the Jacksonian legacy today not to the Democratic Party but to Donald Trump.9 Most progressives are simply uncomfortable with Jackson. Some now want to remove him from the $20 bill and erase him from our collective memory. He was, in this view, a very bad American.

  I support the debunking of Jackson, but not because he was a bad American—rather, because he was a typical, crooked Democrat. Jackson established the Democratic Party as the party of theft. He mastered the art of stealing land from the Indians and then selling it at giveaway prices to white settlers. Jackson’s expectation was that those people would support him politically, as indeed they did. Jackson was indeed a “man of the people,” but his popularity was that of a gang leader who distributes his spoils in exchange for loyalty on the part of those who benefit from his crimes.

  Jackson also figured out how to benefit personally from his land-stealing. Like Hillary Clinton, he started out broke and then became one of the richest people in the country. How? Jackson and his partners and cronies made early bids on Indian land, sometimes even before the Indians had been evacuated from that land. They acquired the land for little or nothing and later sold it for a handsome profit. Remarkably, the roots of the Clinton Foundation can be found in the land-stealing policies of America’s first Democratic president.

  I show in a subsequent chapter how the Democrats were the party of slavery, and how the slave-owner mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today. The point isn’t that the Democrats invented slavery, which is an ancient institution that far predates America. Rather, Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun invented a new justification for slavery, slavery as a “positive good.” For the first time in history, Democrats insisted that slavery wasn’t just beneficial for masters; they said it was also good for the slaves.

  Today progressive pundits attempt to conceal Democratic complicity in slavery by blaming slavery on the “South.” These people have spun a whole history that portrays the slavery battle as one between the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. This of course benefits Democrats today, because today the Democratic Party’s main strength is in the North and the Republican Party’s main strength is in the South.

  But I blow the Democrats’ cover by showing that the slavery debate was not mainly a North-South issue. It was actually a contest between the pro-slavery Democrats and the anti-slavery Republicans. How can I make such an outrageous statement? Let’s begin by recalling that northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas protected slavery, while most southerners didn’t own slaves. (Three fourths of those who fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side had no slaves and weren’t fighting to protect slavery.)

  Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery. Of course there were a range of views among Republicans, from abolitionists who sought to end slavery immediately to mainstream Republicans like Abraham Lincoln who recognized that this was both constitutionally and politically impossible and focused on arresting slavery’s extension into the new territories. This was the platform on which Lincoln won the 1860 election.

  The real clash was between the Democrats, northern and southern, who supported slavery and the Republicans across the country who opposed it. As Lincoln summarized it in his First Inaugural Address, one side believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, and the other believes it is wrong and ought to be restricted. “This,” Lincoln said, “is the only substantial dispute.”10 And this, ultimately, was what the Civil War was all about.

  In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment. Democrats responded by opposing the amendment and a group of them assassinated the man they held responsible for emancipation, Abraham Lincoln. Over the Democrats’ opposition, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.

  DEFENDING THE CRIMINALS

  Confronted with these facts, progressives act like the lawyer who is presented with the murder weapon belonging to his client. Darn, he says to himself, I better think fast. “Yes,” he now admits, “my client did murder the clerk and rob the store. But he didn’t kill all those other people who were also found dead at the scene.”

  In other words, progressives who are forced to acknowledge the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery history promptly respond, “We admit to being the party of slavery, and we did uphold the institution for more than a century, but slavery ended in 1865, so all of this was such a long time ago. You can’t blame us now for the antebellum crimes of the Democratic Party.”

  Yes, but what about the postbellum crimes of the Democratic Party? My slavery chapter is followed by a chapter on segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats in the 1880s invented segregation and Jim Crow laws that lasted through the 1960s. Democrats also came up with the “separate but equal” rationale that justified segregation and pretended that it was for the benefit of African Americans.

  The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

  The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.”

  The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.

  Progressives also led the campaign to stop poor immigrants from coming to this country. They championed laws in the 1920s that brought the massive flows of immigration to this country
to a virtual halt. The motives of the progressives were openly racist, and in the way the immigration restrictions were framed, progressives succeeded in broadening the Democratic Party’s target list of minority groups.

  While the Democratic Party previously singled out blacks and native Indians, progressives showed Democrats how to suppress all minorities. Included in the new list were Hispanics from Central and South America as well as Eastern and Southern Europeans. Many of these people were clearly white but progressives did not consider them white enough. Like blacks, they were considered “unfit” on the basis of their complexion.

  During the 1920s, progressives developed a fascination with and admiration for Italian and German fascism, and the fascists, for their part, praised American progressives. These were likeminded people who spoke the same language, and progressives and fascists worked together to implement programs to sterilize so-called mental defectives and “unfit” people, resulting subsequently in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in America and hundreds of thousands in Nazi Germany.

  During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent members of his brain trust to Europe to study fascist economic programs, which he considered more advanced than anything his New Deal had implemented to date. FDR was enamored with Mussolini, whom he called the “admirable Italian gentleman.” Some Democrats even had a soft spot for Hitler: young JFK went to Germany before World War II and praised Hitler as a “legend” and blamed hostility to the Nazis as jealousy resulting from how much the Nazis had accomplished.

  Yes, I know. Very little of this is understood by people today because progressives have done such a good job of sweeping it all under the rug. This material is simply left out of the textbooks even though it is right there in the historical record. Some progressive pundits know about it, but they don’t want to talk about it. Such talk, they figure, can only hurt today’s Democrats who, after all, can hardly bear responsibility for what JFK said or what FDR and Woodrow Wilson did.

  But don’t we have some responsibility to the truth? Shouldn’t we lay out the facts of history and let people make up their own minds? The progressive answer to this question is no. Progressives detest the facts not because they are untrue but because they don’t fit in with progressive political interests. Facts constitute, as Al Gore might say, an inconvenient truth.

  So progressives have been working hard to come up with lies that can be passed off as facts. Progressives have a whole cultural contingent—Hollywood, the mainline media, the elite universities, even professional comedians—to peddle their propaganda. From the television show Madame Secretary to the front page of the New York Times to nightly quips by Stephen Colbert, the progressive bilge comes at us continually and relentlessly.

  In this bogus narrative, Republicans are the bad guys because Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. For progressive Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement is the canonical event of American history. It is even more important than the American Revolution. Progressive reasoning is: We did this, so it must be the greatest thing that was ever done in America. Republicans opposed it, which makes them the bad guys.

  The only problem is that Republicans were instrumental—actually indispensable—in getting the Civil Rights laws passed. While Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the backing of some northern Democrats, Republicans voted in far higher percentages for the bill than Democrats did. This was also true of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Neither would have passed with just Democratic votes. Indeed, the main opposition to both bills came from Democrats.

  Most people know the Nineteenth Amendment granting women’s suffrage was passed in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year. What few people know is there was a forty-year struggle over that amendment, with Republicans pushing for it and Democrats opposing it, until the Republicans finally had the votes to get it through.

  Republicans proposed women’s suffrage as early as 1878, but it was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Republicans re-introduced the issue each year, but for many years the Democrats tied it up in committees. It only got to the floor in 1887 when the Democrats again defeated it.

  Frustrated, the suffragettes—who were mostly Republican—took the issue to the states. By 1900 several Republican-dominated states granted women the right to vote. In 1916, Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress.

  Congress, however, only took up the issue again in 1914, when it was again rejected by Senate Democrats. Only when the GOP won landslide majorities in both houses in 1918 did the Nineteenth Amendment finally have the necessary two-thirds majority to pass.

  President Woodrow Wilson, who had led his party’s opposition to women’s suffrage, gave in when he saw its inevitability. The Democrats, however, took their opposition to the states, and eight of the nine “no” votes on the Nineteenth Amendment came from Democrat-controlled state legislatures. So the GOP is responsible for women having the right to vote.11

  The inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was, oddly enough, the work of a group of racist, chauvinist Democrats. Led by Democratic Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, this group was looking to defeat the Civil Rights Act. Smith proposed to amend the legislation and add “sex” to “race” as a category protected against discrimination.

  Smith’s Democratic buddies roared with laughter when he offered his one-word amendment. They thought it would make the whole civil rights thing so ridiculous that no sane person would go along with it. One scholar noted that Smith’s amendment “stimulated several hours of humorous debate” among racist, chauvinist Democrats. But to their amazement, the amended version of the bill passed.12 It bears repeating that Republicans provided the margin of victory that extended civil rights protection both to minorities and to women.

  A LARGER DECEPTION

  The canard about the Civil Rights Movement is embedded within a larger deception that progressives uniformly put forward. This deception is intended to defuse the sordid history of the Democratic Party’s two-century involvement in a parade of evils from slavery to segregation to lynching to forced sterilization to support for fascism to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All these horrors are the work of the Democratic Party.

  Progressive Democrats seek to escape responsibility for all this with their tale of the Big Switch. Initially devised by progressives like Dan Carter and Earl and Merle Black, the Big Switch can be understood as a last-ditch attempt to rescue progressive and Democratic Party history. This progressive defense is akin to the lawyer who says, “Yes, my client shot the clerk and killed all those people, but since then he has completely reformed and now lives a blameless life. Meanwhile, his accusers have all become criminals.”

  Actually, even if that were true, the man should still be held to account for what he did. He should be expected to make a confession of his crimes and make some reparation to his victims and to society. Progressives, of course, have no intention of doing any of this. Neither do Democrats. Whenever these people talk about reparations they want “America” to pay. But “America” didn’t commit these crimes; they did. They’re the ones who should be held accountable.

  Back to the Big Switch: the basic idea is that starting with the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats saw the light and became the good guys, while Republicans became the bad guys. What happened to all the racist southern Democrats? Look, say the progressives, they all became Republicans! That’s why the South today is largely Republican.13 This would seem to support the progressive story line.

  The narrative of the Big Switch has one more thing going for it: blacks, who once voted overwhelmingly Republican, now vote overwhelmingly Democratic. This is a switch, and it would seem to go along with the idea that Republicans used to be friendly to black interests but now Democrats are. Why else would 90 percent of blacks today support the Democratic Party?

  This book takes on the narrative of the Big Switch, and debunks
it as the final—and most ingenious—installment of the progressive lie. In reality there was no switch. For the film that accompanies this book, I made a list of 1,500 racist Democrats—a list that includes members of Congress, governors, appellate and Supreme Court justices, and all the notorious figures who opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Of this group, I count exactly fourteen—less than 1 percent—who switched to the Republican Party. So the idea that racist Democrats became Republicans is a myth.

  Of course many southern whites did switch from voting Democrat to voting Republican, helping the GOP become the majority party in the South, as the Democrats once were. But remember that racism declined sharply in the South during the second half of the twentieth century. There is quite literally a mountain of scholarly data that documents this. And this was the very period of GOP ascendancy. So as the South became less racist, it became more Republican.

  I provide evidence in this book to show that southern whites became Republican not for racist motives but for economic ones. The most racist poor whites never left the Democratic Party; they remained loyal to the party of racism until they died. In this sense, the data show that racism slowed the movement of whites toward the Republicans.

  But many southern whites were not under the racist hold of the Democrats. As they became more prosperous, these whites came to see the GOP reflect their beliefs in economic opportunity and upward mobility. They also found Republicans more in tune with their patriotism as well as their socially conservative views. Quite naturally, they moved over to a party that better reflected their interests and aspirations.

  Remarkably, southern whites made the journey from Democratic to Republican for the same reason that southern blacks switched parties from Republican to Democratic. In both cases, the switch occurred for economic—not racial—reasons. The black switch occurred first, in the 1930s, while the white switch occurred much later, in the 1960s and 1970s. In both cases, the timing is significant.