Life of Bryan

[posted by Callimachus]

Bob Moser of The Nation, who often has written perceptively of the new Democrats' problems in the New South, does it again.

The South has long amounted to little more than a swirl of stereotypes in the national mind (see Gone With the Wind; please do not see Forrest Gump). Many non-Southern progressives still see the region as a dank, magnolia-scented Otherworld where the cultural obsessions of race, religion and rifles hold white voters together in an unbreakable sway, making it hopeless terrain for planting any politics to the left of Jefferson Davis or Jerry Falwell.

He homes in on one of the moments when Howard Dean got it exactly right, and the week or so when I thought I wanted him to be the next president:

Stating his intention of competing for the votes of "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks" in November 2003, Dean set off howls of protest among party leaders and his rivals for the presidential nomination, who said he was simultaneously stereotyping white Southerners and offending blacks. But few of the complaints originated in Dixie. As they "stand on their soapboxes to castigate Dr. Dean's remarks," wrote the Rev. Joe Darby, vice president of the Charleston NAACP, "Democratic candidates and party leadership should bear in mind that black voters think for themselves." The previous February at a hamburger stand in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Dean had been applauded by black listeners when he said, "You know all those white guys riding around with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks? Well, their kids don't have health insurance either."

The way Dean's campaign derailed after that may be proof that God is real and he does, in fact, love Republicans. Because Dean had hit on a winning formula before he fell over in the swamp and sank.

Moser even hits on the right historical antecedent, the Southern Farmers' Alliance led by Georgia's Tom Watson in the 1890s, which forged -- for a time -- a common cause between poor whites and blacks.

Though the Populists had their share of two-faced politicians and race-baiters, the movement as a whole made a remarkable call for trans-racial solidarity, based on an equality of want and poverty, a common grievance and a common oppressor. "They are in the ditch just like we are," as a white Texas Populist put it. Watson had the vision of "presenting a platform immensely beneficial to both races and injurious to neither," and "making it in the interest of both races to act together for the success of the platform." The success of the party overall hinged on black cooperation, and Watson promised blacks that, if they succeeded at the ballot box, the Populists would "wipe out the color line and put every man on his citizenship irrespective of color."

In its short life the movement produced scene after scene that is simply not supposed to be possible in the conventional political-liberal narrative of Southern, and American history: In the 1892 campaign, for instance, a black Populist had made 63 speeches for Watson. He was threatened in one town and fled to Watson for protection. Watson called for aid, and some 2,000 white farmers showed up, some of them after riding all night, and remained on armed guard for two nights at his home to prevent violence to this man.

[Always a great introduction to this topic is C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," first edition 1955, which is still in print. Martin Luther King Jr. called it "The historical Bible of the civil rights movement."]

I'm not surprised, though that many of Moser's intended readers would be made uncomfortable by his argument. They have married themselves to a historical view that Southerners are historically incapable of achieving racial harmony without Northern intervention. And it gives the lie in a big way to the notion that Southerners are historically incapable of achieving racial harmony without Northern intervention, that federal pressure on conservative cultural bigotry is the only agent of positive social change in the nation, and that the dinosaurs of the Civil Rights era must never relax their iron vigilance. The received wisdom is that Southern whites (if not American whites overall) are incapable of lifting their benighted selves out of the crudest collective racism without the Better Angels of the elite Democratic judiciary to guide them.

"For beleaguered Southern liberals ...," Moser writes, "the Democrats' misunderstanding of what appeals to the South and to Middle America falls somewhere between a bad joke and a tragedy--and Kerry's win looked like the perfect example." After 2004, however, he writes, things only got worse. He quotes Thomas Schaller's 2005 book, "Whistling Past Dixie": "[T]he Democrats should be able to run outside the South by running against the conservative South." In essence reduplicating Lincoln's 1860 strategy. But this time the numbers are against them.

And more than numbers. To forge a new Southern Democratic progressive majority, Moser advocates an "emphasis on the "value" of economic fairness (along with other Democratic issues popular with moderate evangelicals, including environmental stewardship)." He goes on to quote William Jennings Bryan, the great champion of Watson-style populism on the national scale.

"Today the Democratic Party stands between two great forces. On one side stand the corporate interests of the nation, its moneyed institutions, its aggregations of wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless .... On the other side stands the unnumbered throng which gave a name to the Democratic Party and for which it has presumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls."

Can't you just feel the power in it? "When they heeded Bryan's populist call," Moser writes, "the party began its transformation into the progressive force behind Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal--both more enthusiastically supported in the South than anywhere else."

Ah, well. Until my co-workers stop citing "Inherit the Wind" as their favorite movie and "the only thing that got [them] through the Reagan years" I don't think Bryan is going to be back up on the pedestal. Even The Nation devotes half its mentions to him to painting him as a George W. Bush-style anti-scientific Christian fundamentalist bully.

But his deep-rooted Christianity was one reason his progressivism worked so well in the nation (if not "The Nation"). Can you have one without the other and still turn in a performance on election day? Perhaps. Can you have one while actively despising and disparaging the other? I doubt it.

Memos to Demos

Do better than this.

Sen. Joseph Biden says he can hold his own in a 2008 presidential primary against Democratic contenders from the South, noting that his home state of Delaware was a "slave state."

Biden dismissed the notion that he was a "Northeastern liberal" who would have a poor showing in the South against other likely contenders such as Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

... "You don't know my state," he said. "My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state."

The sad thing is, Biden is the kind of Democrat who, theoretically, ought to appeal to me. He has education, aspirations of statesmanship, historical sensibilities, big-picture visionary capabilities, and theoretically he is possessed of a natural intelligence.

Then something like this. Oh well; the same laundry list could be applied to Newt Gingrich.

Some about slavery in Delaware here. It is an interesting historical sidelight, but not terribly relevant to a national election in 2006.

Missing the Point

Several people, including Instapundit, have linked approvingly to this highly critical review of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History."

Frankly, I'm not impressed. I haven't read Woods' book, but I recognize his historical perspective, which the Weekly Standard reviewer rightly pegs as paleo-con (not neo-con, which is the label the book's publisher's seem to covet).

First, not every argument or observation is wrong, just because someone like Woods brings it up. Second, if you're going to counter-argue with this kind of writing, you need more than a superficial acquaintance with U.S. history.

Soon enough, however, the guide starts to slip from conventional history into a Bizarro world where every state has the right to disregard any piece of federal legislation it doesn't like or even to secede. "There is, obviously, no provision in the Constitution that explicitly authorizes nullification," the author concedes, but Woods nevertheless is convinced that this right exists. His source? Mainly the writings of the Southern pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun.

I can think of few sadder testimonies to our neglect of history than this: the long and honorable career of John C. Calhoun has been distilled to a single adjective: "pro-slavery." But that's exactly what's wrong with this review.

Woods is only getting warmed up. Next he comes to the origins of the "Civil War" which, it seems, was pretty much the fault of Northern abolitionists whose writings "seethed with loathing for the entire South" and "only served to discredit anti-slavery activity in the South."

This is invoked in the review article, but it is never addressed or contered. Whether it was the cause of the war is probably beyond the range of proof or disproof. The rest of the allegations, it seems to me, are true beyond argument.

According to Woods, the war wasn't really about slavery (no mention of the Emancipation Proclamation). It was really about the desire of Northern plutocrats to protect themselves from the threat of commerce being diverted to "the South's low-tariff or free trade regime."

Now, this happens to be one of the places where I seem to agree with Woods (at least based on what I read about his book). In fact, I've made a similar argument myself, and defended it for years in online debates. There are good angles of attack against this position. Believe me, I know. Invoking the Emancipation Proclamation isn't one of them.

To attempt to use it, as here, as a single-phrase smackdown is just plain silly. The war had been underway for a year and a half before Lincoln set pen to paper to write the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had said explicitly, if he could preserve the union without liberating a single slave, he gladly would do so.

The place to make the argument that slavery was the cause of the war is in the South, not the North. The Southern states' declarations of causes for leaving the union are the ammunition you use. There are counter-arguments to that, but it's an uphill slog, compared to fighting against the Emancipation Proclamation. That's a cardboard sword. A juvenile snakehead could refute it. An AOL Civil War message board poster could refute it.

He approvingly quotes H.L. Mencken's comment that Union soldiers "actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." Well, not quite all their people. But the plight of African-Americans does not concern Woods any more than it did Mencken.

Once again, rather than trying to make an argument, he retreats into "you're taking the side of the people who had slaves, therefore you're wrong." Slavery was legal in the North throughout the entire duration of the Civil War. Slaveowners fought in the Northern army and even led it in some cases. As John B. Henderson, the Unionist senator from Missouri, reminded his colleagues, "there are numbers of loyal slaveholders in that state [Missouri], men who have been carrying the flag of their country from the earliest beginning of this rebellion, who have left their homes for the battle-field, leaving their slaves behind them, many of whom are in the service of the country today, and will continue there until the rebellion is over."

When the Civil War ended, 19 of 24 Northern states did not allow blacks to vote. Nowhere did they serve on juries before 1860. They could not give testimony in 10 states, and were prevented from assembling in two. Several western states had prohibited free blacks from entering the state. Blacks who entered Illinois and stayed more than 10 days were guilty of "high misdemeanor." Even those that didn't exclude blacks debated doing so and had discriminatory ordinances on the local level.

But first Woods gives a Gone With the Wind version of Reconstruction, with evil Republican carpetbaggers trying to rape the virtuous South. He is particularly upset about the 14th Amendment (he claims it was never lawfully ratified) because it barred former Confederates from holding political office. "Thus," Woods laments, "the natural leadership class of the South would be disqualified from office and disgraced forever by having been dishonored in a constitutional amendment." It never occurs to Woods that "the natural leadership class" may have disgraced itself already by holding fellow human beings in bondage.

See above. The disqualifying factor, if you want to argue it, was treason, not slave-owning, which was legal.

The word "racism" in all its variants is a 20th century invention. Lincoln never heard it. What we would now call "racism" was so pervasive and universal in 19th century America -- North and South and West -- that no one felt a need to coin a word for it. It was a white man's country, north and south, in the mid-19th century. If you can't accept that fact, you can't argue reasonably about it.

To argue against some position about early 19th century America by slapping it with the "racist" tarbrush is a false attempt to apply modern moral standards to a time and place where they have no meaning. Don't mistake me: I like where we are much better than where we were. But I want to genuinely understand the past -- our past.

To grapple with slavery as a dynamic force between North and South in America, you have to think of it in terms of its meaning to two groups of white people. To do that does not ignore the humanity of the slaves, or the fact that slavery was the central aspect of a slave's life. But it does set it aside for the duration of the argument.

That "setting aside," after the 20th century, is something we feel as horrible. It is a mental process akin to the one that allows genocides. I suspect it is a natural muscle in the human mind, but it is one we're desperately trying not to exercise.