The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 04)

In American History, most of the 1800s can be divided into three time spans: the prewar years, the Civil War, and the postwar years. But while these are three separate segments of time, they are shaped by one single conflict: a conflict between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The Democrats, from the founding of their party by Andrew Jackson in 1828, were committed to defending, supporting, and maintaining slavery.

The Republican Party, and its first major candidate, Abraham Lincoln, were unswervingly focused on the goal of ending slavery.

The political debates and negotiations of the prewar years, the half-million lives lost during the Civil War, and the brutality directed toward African-Americans in the postwar years are simply three phases of the same partisan conflict, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

The Civil War was a deliberate attempt by the Democratic Party, both in the North and the South, to kill America by carving her into two. Had secession worked, Lincoln would have been viewed as a failed president. The North and the South would have come to terms over the bifurcation long before 1865. Slavery would have continued, and on a firmer foundation than before. White supremacy would have continued to be its bedrock, and would have reigned unchallenged throughout the United States. Lincoln’s dark warning about all of America becoming a plantation might have proven prophetic in his own lifetime.

The Democrat strategy, then, was that the Democrats in the South would secede from the Union, and the Democrats in the North would try to use their political influence to persuade the North to get the South back by promising the South that it could keep slavery. In the process, the North would be obliged to accept slavery as well.

The goal of the Democrats was, then, that the entire country, not only the South, would become slaveholding territory.

The Republicans, however, would not go along with the Democratic Party’s plans. The Democrats wanted slavery so badly that they were willing to start and endure a war in which more than 500,000 men died.

The war ended when the South faced its inevitable undersupply of men and materiel. But while the Democrats had been militarily defeated, they had not given up their dreams of slavery. The postwar years would be known as the ‘Reconstruction’ era, and the Democrats would use a mixture of political maneuvering and domestic terror strategies to maintain slavery, or at least a slavelike status.

Although the Republicans had achieved their goal of ending slavery, it was clear that they had to defend and solidify that accomplishment to make sure that the Democrats did not succeed in bringing slavery back, and it was clear that the Republicans would push for full citizenship and full civil rights for the newly-freed ex-slaves.

The Republicans in Congress worked to guarantee civil rights for African-Americans, as Dinesh D’Souza writes:

The Republicans in Congress who drove Reconstruction realized that, perhaps for the first time in history, there was an elected government that supported not merely empancipation from slavery but also full equality of rights and full enfranchisement for blacks. Admittedly this majority would not have existed had Southern Democrats also been represented. By their own choice, however, they had resigned their positions in Congress and thus forfeited their right to have their votes counted.

During the Reconstruction era, not only did the Republicans succeed in ensuring that African-Americans could freely exercise their right to vote, but they even succeeded in getting Black candidates elected to the House of Representatives and to the U.S. Senate. This was the apogee of civil rights.

Electrifying America: Power Revolutionizes Daily Life

During a few decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, most homes in the United States were connected to electrical power. This development changed ordinary life in many ways.

The simplest, but perhaps most significant, change was light. Before electrical lighting, people had candles and oil lamps, but they were not very effective. The amount of light they gave off was not sufficient for many tasks, and there was even less outdoor lighting.

Before electrical lighting was common, most people simply went to bed when it got dark. If they had oil lamps, they might stay up for an hour and do some reading or sewing, but the lamps were smelly and dangerous, and the oil cost money.

With the advent of electrical lighting, people could stay up long after the sunset, and there was enough light for all kinds of activities.

Of course, lighting was only one of the many changes which electrification brought to daily life. Dozens of electrical appliances for households quickly became common, once most homes had electricity. But how did this electrification occur? A report from Mercury Radio Arts explains that it all began when

In 1881, a young English clerk named Samuel Insull sailed from England to America and took a low-paying job as a private secretary for a determined inventor named Thomas Edison. Insull worked hard, coming in before his boss in the morning and staying until long after Edison, who wasn’t exactly lazy himself, had gone home at night.

Edison was one of the greatest and most prolific inventors in history. Samuel Insull had a job which would give him a better technical education than most universities. Insull realized that not only could he get paid for working with Edison, but more importantly, he could learn while working with Edison.

Over time, Insull’s hard work and loyalty did not go unnoticed. He was promoted several times, eventually winding up in charge of Edison’s business affairs.

Having a responsible management position in Edison’s company placed Insull in the center of technological development. The products which came from Edison’s workshops changed the world, and Insull got to see from the inside what a world-changing business looked like.

After twelve years absorbing as much knowledge as he could, Insull finally left to pursue his own American dream. He moved to Chicago, took out a personal loan for $250,000, and built the largest power plant in the world.

Samuel Insull took a huge risk. He had knowledge and experience, but he didn’t have much money. He had to borrow the money to start a business.

If the business succeeded, he’d earn enough money to repay the loan. If the business failed, he’d have to repay the loan anyway. He’d have to pay the $250,000 back to the bank, and in the 1890s, that was a lot of money.

At the time, electricity was like private jets are today - grossly expensive and available only to those who don’t spend much time worrying about their bank account. But Insull had a dream that electricity could be produced on a much larger scale and used by the masses. By developing revolutionary ideas, like variable pricing and inexpensive home wiring, he turned electricity from a luxury into a virtual commodity.

Samuel Insull found a way to lower the price of electricity. In one single year, the average family found that their electricity bill was more than 30% lower.

Electricity became affordable and became part of everyday life.

Before long, Insull’s new company was servicing over ten million customers in 32 states and had a market value of over $3 billion (somewhere around $66 billion in today’s dollars, which is about the size of Amazon.com and Kraft Foods, combined). Insull also benefited personally. At one point, his net worth was estimated to be $100 million. Time magazine even celebrated his success by putting him on their cover in 1929. He was a true American success story - a foreigner with virtually nothing to his name who had made it big through hard work and innovation.

Samuel Insull was a symbol for successful immigration. He came to the United States with no money, but he came with the desire to work hard and learn.

Such examples of successful immigration gave rise to the phrase “land of opportunity” when people spoke of immigration into America. Naturally, not all immigrants became as wealthy as Samuel Insull. But they found that they experienced a better standard of living after coming to the United States. They found that they had chances and opportunities.

Entrepreneurs like Insull not only were able to work themselves out of poverty, but they created opportunities for others. They created well-paying jobs in their factories and offices. They created investment opportunities for families.

But, as the Mercury Radio Arts report continues, “then the world changed.”

As the Roaring Twenties morphed into the Great Depression, Insull’s business struggled. The debt and equity he’d financed his company’s growth with had become virtually worthless, leaving over a million middle-class Americans who’d invested in his stock in financial straits. The public outrage was palpable.

What could have been a short-term economic downturn in 1929 became a long-term economic crisis. Samuel Insull lost his wealth, as did millions of his customers and his investors. Losing the wealth was a minor problem. The major problem was that people blamed Insull for the crisis.

It is easy, in hindsight, to understand that there was no way that Insull could have created these problems, and there is no way that he would have wanted to destroy his own wealth. But sometimes, during disasters, people’s desire to find someone to blame - people’s desire to punish a scapegoat - is strong enough to make them act irrationally.

In the matter of a few short years Insull had gone from hero to villain; from the poster boy for everything great about American capitalism to the poster boy for everything wrong with it.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from the Great Depression, and how people joined forces against Insull to blame him and eventually to attack him in court. Economists have developed various competing theories to explain the Great Depression, but none of them would hold Samuel Insull as responsible for the collapse of his own company.

Eventually, the courts failed to validate people’s irrational rage, and declared Insull innocent:

The government, seizing on the public’s fury over their lost wealth, charged him with fraud, and though he was acquitted at trial, it didn’t matter - the damage was done. Insull was the most hated man in America.

It is a basic fact about economies that they have occasional downturns - this is sometimes called the “business cycle.” There will be years when wages and profits increase, and there will be years when they decrease. It is not pleasant to live through these cycles, but if people wait patiently, the economy works its way back toward positive growth.

Such short term downward trends can become long term - the business cycle can get stuck - if the government takes action. Although such government intervention is usually well-intended, it nonetheless stymies the economy’s organic tendencies to return itself to levels which are closer to equilibrium.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was not the fault of Samuel Insull. It was caused by government intervention into the ordinary buying and selling which shape the economy. But Insull was the scapegoat, the target of people’s unjust rage.

All he'd done to deserve it was to build a remarkable company that, like so many others, suffered during the Depression.

Although declared innocent in a court of law, Insull’s reputation and career were permanently damaged. Eventually, he left the United States.

As an immigrant, Samuel Insull arrived in America with no money. He’d worked hard and studied, he took risks and looked for opportunities. He’d gained a lot of wealth, and in the process, he’d created income for millions of other people, lifting them from the lower classes to the middle class. He’d benefitted from the chances which are made available in a free economy.

But when the government took the economy’s freedom away, by regulating and taxing, the income went away, too. Even though the government thought it was doing something to help people, it was actually harming them.

Although Samuel Insull was the most dramatic victim of the government’s terrible mistake, he wasn’t the only victim. Millions of Americans would suffer through the Great Depression. Their suffering could have been avoided if the government had simply done nothing.

Insull became a symbol, both for amazing possibilities offered by America’s free economy, and for the misery and anger caused by governmental regulation.

In 1938, Samuel Insull, who’d fled America for France (oh the irony), died of a heart attack in a Paris subway station. He had eight cents in his pocket. It was a sad and lonely ending for a man who exemplified the American dream by bringing affordable electricity to millions.

He’d done nothing wrong and nothing illegal. He’d been praised by millions of people around the nation, people who’d benefitted materially from his work. When people suddenly felt sharp economic pain, they lashed out blindly, needing someone to blame and to punish. Samuel Insull was an innocent man who was also a convenient target.

Forced to defend himself at trial, he said:

I find myself somewhat in this sort of situation. What I did, when I did it, was honest; now, through changed conditions, what I did may or may not be called honest. Politics demand, therefore, that I be brought to trial; but what is really being brought to trial is the system I represented.

The sad fact is that innocent men are sometimes made into scapegoats simply because people are angry and don’t know who to blame.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 03)

When the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, the victorious Republican Party saw a chance to solidify its gains. The Republicans had created their political party with the goal of ending slavery. Now that the war was over and slavery was ended, the Republicans wanted to make sure that slavery was permanently gone and would never come back. They also wanted to make sure that the newly-freed African-Americans would have the full rights of citizenship.

Meanwhile, the defeated Democrats were angry. They had defended slavery, and sought maintain and support slavery. But now their former slaves were free citizens and able to vote. Even though the Democratic Party had lost the war, it hoped to find ways to prevent African-Americans from having civil rights.

This conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans in the postwar years was actually the same conflict they had in the prewar years. This postwar era is called the ‘Reconstruction’ era.

In the prewar years, the conflict took the form of the Republican Party, its goal of abolishing slavery, and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

In the years leading up to the war, in multiple addresses and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln himself stressed the main issue that separated the two parties. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties,” Lincoln said in a September 11, 1858, speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, “is that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong.”

The Democrats defended slavery so strongly that they were willing to start a four-year-long war about the issue, causing more than 500,000 deaths.

During the war, in the election of 1864, the Democrats nominated George McClellan, a pro-slavery candidate, to be president. McClellan lost, and Abraham Lincoln won reelection.

After the war’s end, the Democratic Party had a strong affection for the “plantation” lifestyle, a lifestyle which ended when Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863. The Democrats wanted their slaves back, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:

Even in the aftermath of the Civil War, so strong was their attachment to the plantation that an overwhelming majority of Northern Democrats refused to vote to permanently end slavery. Again, we are speaking of Northern Democrats; Southern Democrats who may have been expected to vote against the amendment were not permitted to vote at all. And when the Thirteenth Amendment went to the states for ratification, only Republican states carried by Lincoln voted for it; Democratic states that went for McClellan all voted no.

The Republican Party promoted three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment, which protected and made permanent Lincoln’s decree that slavery be permanently abolished; the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that former slaves would have full citizenship and enjoy equal protection under the law; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which specified that all citizens, including former slaves, had right to vote, regardless of race.

These three “Republican Amendments” revealed the core beliefs of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party opposed all three.

Even after the end of the Civil War, the Democrats hoped somehow to recreate a slave-like condition for African-Americans. Their main way of doing this was the ‘sharecropping’ system, which exploited certain legal agreements to keep former slaves, and other Blacks, in poverty.

Sharecropping was one way the Democratic Party fought against the “Republican Amendments” during the ‘Reconstruction’ era. Opposing the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments was another way. After 1877, the end of the Reconstruction era, Democratic legislatures began to write “Jim Crow Laws,” another attempt to reverse the Republican Party’s achievements.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 02)

The U.S. Civil War (1861 to 1865) grew out of political disputes between the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1850s. When the war ended, those disputes continued. In the years after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, Democrats and Republicans continued to argue. Historians call these postwar years the ‘Reconstruction’ era.

In all three eras — before the war, during the war, and after the war — the conflict was about slavery. The Democrats defended the institution of slavery, and wished to support and maintain it. The Republicans had created their political party with the goal of ending slavery. The two parties were absolutely opposed to each other.

“The slavery debate was not a North-South debate but rather a partisan debate,” writes historian Dinesh D’Souza. A leader in the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, wrote the following to a leader in the Democratic Party:

You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Commenting on this letter, written by Lincoln, historian Dinesh D’Souza notes that:

In 1860, at the time Lincoln wrote this letter, no Republican owned a slave. I don’t mean merely that no Republican leader owned a slave. No Republican in the country owned a slave. All the slaves in the United States at the time — all four million of them — were owned by Democrats.

It is clear that this opposition between the parties during the prewar years is the same conflict that continued between them in the postwar years. During the ‘Reconstruction’ era, the Republicans overcame the Democratic Party to ratify three amendments to the Constitution.

The three Reconstruction amendments formed the basis for civil rights, not only for African-Americans, but eventually for all citizens. These amendments grew organically out of the Declaration of Independence, out of the U.S. Constitution, and out of the Bill of Rights.

The magnificient scope of Republican Reconstruction can be seen in three landmark constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment extending equal rights under the law to all citizens; and the Fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote. These amendments went beyond unbinding the slave and making him a freeman; they also made him a U.S. citizen with the right to cast his ballot and to the full and equal protection of the laws.

Yet the Democrats stubbornly opposed these amendments. The Reconstruction era is the time when the Republicans worked to solidify the civil rights of African-Americans, while the Democrats were simply angry that their slaves had been taken away.

The anger and resentment which lingered in the Democrats would last for many years. The bitter feud between the two parties did not go away quickly, and did not go away even after the painful and bloody Civil War.

Before, during, and after the war, the hostile relationship between the two parts was largely the same, and based on the same disagreement about the same issue.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 01)

Historians use the word ‘Reconstruction’ to refer to the years immediately after the U.S. Civil War.

The war ended when General Grant and General Lee signed the terms of surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. Some historians argue that the ‘Reconstruction’ began somewhat earlier, in those regions of the Democrat territory that had already been taken over or occupied by the Republicans.

The Reconstruction is generally thought to have ended around 1877, but again, that date is subject to some interpretation.

The Reconstruction marks a transition: the conflict about slavery was fought with military weapons during the war; after the war, the conflict continued, but not as a military conflict. Before, during, and after the war, the Democratic Party supported slavery.

The Republican Party was created for the purpose of ending slavery. The Democrats felt angry and humiliated that the Republican Party had succeeded in its goal. The Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, had freed the slaves by signing his Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republicans had supported the Union Army to ensure that the slaves were freed.

There were people who voted for the Democratic Party both in the northern states and in the southern states. In the North, the Democrats were in the minority; in the South, they were in the majority. During the Civil War, the Democrats in the northern states were in communication with the Democrats in the southern states. Their continuous goal was to maintain slavery. After the war, their goal was to restore and renew slavery.

Likewise, the Republican voters in the North were the majority, but in the South they were a minority. Because the Republicans had dedicated themselves to ending slavery, the Republican voters in the South — although they were in the minority — carried out sabotage operations to undermine the Democratic Party’s war effort.

After the war, the Republicans worked to solidify the end of slavery, by passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. These amendments to the Constitution guaranteed civil rights for African-Americans. The Democratic Party opposed these amendments furiously.

Historian Dinesh D’Souza explains that, given the nature of political events before, during, and after the Civil War, it is clear that events “blame the conflict mostly on” the Democratic Party, and further blame the Democratic Party “again for the postbellum resistance to” the efforts of Reconstruction. Looking at the leadership of the Confederate States of America, “the Democratic Party affiliation of the Confederates” is clear.

The President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, was a member of the Democratic Party, as was his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. But support for slavery was not limited to the Democratic Party in the southern states.

In the northern states, the words and actions of elected officials, party officials, and ordinary voters show “the role of the Northern Democrats in upholding slavery before and during the Civil War, and then reestablishing a form of neo-slavery in the South after the war.” Not only was the Democratic Party composed of “apologists for slavery,” but Democrats established the system of sharecropping as way to push African-Americans back down into an inferior status.

“The Civil War arose” because of a conflict between two political parties. The basis of the war was “a bitter struggle between a Republican Party that sought to block the spread of slavery and a Democratic Party North and South that sought to continue it.” It was “the role of the Northern Democrats, even during the war, to undermine the Union war effort, to force a peace treaty with the South and to give slavery a permanent place in America’s future.”

The Democratic Party, before, during, and after the Civil War, was united in its desire to preserve and promote slavery. In the first few years of postwar peace,

the Northern Democrats attempted to block the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and worked closely with the Southern Democrats to defeat Reconstruction, which was a Republican project to create multicultural democracy in America. Instead the Democrats deplyed a new weapon, racial terrorism, to disperse white Republicans, subjugate blacks, and reestablish their political hegemony in the South.

After the Civil War, leaders in the Democratic Party asked the rhetorical question, “What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?” The famous Democrats who’d argued heatedly for slavery before and during war continued to be the leaders of their political party after the war. Alexander Stephens, one of the first to use this rhetorical question, was the Vice President of the Confederate States of America during the war, and cheerfully nominated by the Democratic Party to run for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, influenced policy inside the Democratic Party during the postwar years, giving speeches and writing books.

Although the Republican Party had the majority of voters in the northern states, there were still a significant number of Democrats in the North, and they continued to agitate for slavery during and after the war. Before the war began, President Lincoln, as a leader in the Republican Party, wrote to a leader in the Democrat party:

You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

It is no surprise that the Democrats in the South supported slavery. It is shocking to learn that the Democrats in the North supported slavery, and did so long after the Civil War ended. The Republican Party had been created for the purpose of ending slavery, and the Democrats were angry that the Republicans had succeeded. Regarding the words quoted above from Lincoln’s letter, Dinesh D’Souza writes:

Lincoln was not actually distinguishing the positions of the North versus the South. The North certainly did not unanimously share the view that slavery was wrong. Only Republicans in the North held that position. Democrats in the North — Stephen Douglas notably among them — emphatically rejected that view. Northern Democrats led by Douglas contested the 1860 election against Lincoln on the basis of that disagreement.

The Reconstruction Era was a struggle between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Reconstruction Era was simply a continuation of the war, which had been a conflict between the two parties.

Kennan's Prescient Awareness of the Soviet Threat: Should America Ally Itself with the USSR?

Between 1931 and 1963, George F. Kennan worked for the U.S. State Department. During those years, and afterward, he gathered information, analyzed it, and explained it, both to the U.S. federal government, as well as to the public at large. He served under an impressive and diverse array of presidents — Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

In 1941, Kennan was in Berlin, observing the operations of the Nazi government, which had taken over Germany eight years earlier. France and England were already at war with the Nazi government. Russia, i.e. the USSR, had recently switched sides, from being a friend of the Nazis to an enemy of the Nazis.

America was already supporting Britain in its war effort to liberate Germany from the Nazis. It was becoming increasingly clear that the United States would probably soon become directly involved in the war.

When Russia changed its allegiance, and started fighting against both the Germans and the Nazis, the English government under the leadership of Winston Churchill issued statements warmly welcoming the Soviet Socialists to the anti-Nazi cause. It is probable that many English political leaders had private misgivings about an alliance with the Soviets.

The question facing the United States was this: in American efforts to stop the Nazis, should the U.S. embrace the Soviet Socialists as allies? Like many officials in the upper levels of government, George Kennan was aware of the mass murders which the Soviets had carried out in Ukraine and other places. Kennan wrote to Washington from Berlin:

I feel strongly that we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause in the present Russian-German conflict. It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our own position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic States, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Romania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia — including Norway and Sweden — to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany.

Kennan’s report reveals that, even after fighting had begun on the Eastern Front, the nations of central and eastern Europe were more worried about the Soviets than about the Nazis.

Such worries turned out to be correct. Although the war in that part of the world killed many thousands of people between 1939 and 1945, the postwar Soviet occupation of that same part of the world killed millions more. The postwar peace under Soviet Socialist domination turned out to be deadlier than the war itself.