First, there is no doubt that the Republican party, during the civil war period, was the abolitionist party. There is also no doubt that liberal and moderate republicans supported the civil rights movement one hundred years later. It is also a fact that conservative democrats opposed civil rights, along with conservative republicans. And some conservatives supporter earlier, much tamer, civil rights legislation. But conservatives of both parties generally opposed the civil rights act of 1964.
Part of the problem in this discussion is the fact that the parties have changed quite a bit since that period. It used to be that each party had its own faction of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. The primary difference between the two parties used to be the view of the rightful position of government in our lives. Republicans wanted small government while democrats were comfortable with more government intervention. But, outside of that, each party housed people with different views on other issues. That may be the reason why the parties were able to work together in the past, whereas today they seem almost incapable of doing so.
Ever since the civil rights movement, there has been a change in composition of the parties. It did not happen overnight, but over the past decades, with an escalation in the past decade, liberals and moderates have left the republican party, and conservatives have left the democratic party. So the divide between the parties has grown to an unmanageable point, paralyzing our government’s functioning.
Now, as to the civil rights movement. I found an article by a respected conservative who explains
why he and other conservatives opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He is a political scientist as well as a former official in the Reagan administration. He should meet any reasonable person’s definition as a noted conservative, well-qualified to speak on this topic.
http://conservative.org/battleline/cons ... il-rights/ CONSERVATIVE CIVIL RIGHTS
by Donald Devine
Issue 220– January 30, 2013
The Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the Fisher v University of Texas at Austin affirmative action case and out of the blue the conservative activist asked: you were there at the time, how do you explain why conservatives opposed civil rights in the 1960s, a moral failure if there ever was one? Young people ask the toughest questions.
He had been reading a book about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rebuking the fact that Sen. Barry Goldwater and the conservative movement in general had opposed it. I explained that we feared the national government would abuse the great power over individual actions that this bill granted to the president and the courts. History proved we were correct. But we were wrong too.
I hope you notice that he has already verified what I have been telling you. Conservatives did oppose the civil rights act. And I hope you know at least enough to realize that Barry Goldwater was one of the primary leaders of the conservative movement and was a presidential candidate, as well. Notice he also says “the conservative movement in general had opposed it.” I could just stop there with my point proven, but this is just part of the larger picture.
There actually were three major civil rights bills in the period, in 1957, 1960 and 1964. Conservatives and Goldwater in particular mainly supported the first two. The 1957 Act was proposed by GOP President Dwight Eisenhower to provide equal access to voting for President and Congress, to prohibit racial intimidation, coercion or otherwise interfering with a national election. It gave the Attorney General power to issue injunctions and contempt of court orders, with fines and up to six months imprisonment. Federal judges were permitted to hear cases with or without juries if they feared the locals would be prejudiced. Conservatives did not like this abrogation of the right of trial by jury and additional restrictions that were added in the 1960 Act but most of them thought voting for national office and interstate violence were clearly national responsibilities, obvious privileges of citizenship, and mostly supported both of the early laws.
The 1964 Act went well beyond regulating government in the widely accepted areas of voting restrictions and interstate violence against African-Americans. Federal regulation was expanded from protecting only blacks to discrimination based on religion and national origin too. For the first time private discrimination was prohibited in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce (vaguely defined), to include all but private clubs (not defined). Discrimination in employment was extended even further to cover race, color, religion, national origin and sex, covering almost everyone. The Act further allowed non-federal cases to be removed from state to U.S. courts if a federal judge considered state judges or jurors potentially prejudicial.
The ’64 law thus expanded protection from government discrimination against a minority that had been held in slavery and lived generations thereafter under oppressive segregation laws to cover presumed discrimination in vast areas of private economic and social life - of groups representing a great majority of the nation, many with weak or no historical claims to actual harm. This vast expansion of national power shocked the new conservative movement that had been founded on the idea of protecting individual and local freedom from the excessive governmental intervention of an expanding national welfare state. The theme of Goldwater’s 1960 classic book, Conscience of a Conservative, was to resist the encroachment of national government economic and social regulation against personal and state liberties, which, however, he still believed was compatible with supporting the two earlier early civil rights bills.
This was what the earlier article I cited about Buckley said. Some conservatives, particularly the leaders of the party, opposed the civil rights act “on principle”. The principle is that the federal government should not expand its powers and should not encroach on states’ rights or on private business. If I want to discriminate against African-Americans as a private business owner, I should have that right. Rand Paul recently also articulated this philosophy. As I previously quoted from Buckley, some conservatives hoped that African-Americans could attain more equality just by demanding it on their own. The problem is that, at the same time as conservatives were citing these principles, some were also making statements that we now perceive as fairly racist. I already quoted the Buckley article, but here is additional information. William F. Buckley was probably the most influential conservative voice of his time.
This is Buckley’s infamous editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail” which can be found here:
http://adamgomez.files.wordpress.com/20 ... l-1957.pdf The most important event of the past three weeks was the remarkable and unexpected vote by the Senate to guarantee to defendants in a criminal contempt action the privilege of a jury trial . That vote does not necessarily affirm a citizen's intrinsic rights:trial by jury in contempt actions, civil or criminal, is not an American birthright, and it cannot, therefore, be maintained that the Senate's vote upheld, pure and simple, the Common Law. What the Senate did was to leave undisturbed the mechanism that spans the abstractions by which a society is guided and the actual, sublunary requirements of the individual community. In that sense, the vote was a conservative victory. For the effect of it is-and let us speak about it bluntly-to permit a jury to modify or waive the law in such circumstances as, in the judgment of the jury, require so grave an interposition between the law and its violator.
What kind of circumstances do we speak about? Again, let us speak frankly. The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. Political scientists assert that minorities do not vote as a unit. Women do not vote as a bloc, they contend; nor do Jews, or Catholics, or laborers, or nudists-nor do Negroes; nor will the enfranchised Negroes of the South. If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro from voting-why should it, if the Negro vote, like the women's, merely swells the volume, but does not affect the ratio, of the vote? In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail- that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.
What are such issues? Is school integration one? The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as a unit want integrated schools. Others disagree, contending that most Negroes approve the social separation of the races. What if the NAACP is correct, and the matter comes to a vote in a community in which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would, according to democratic processes, win the election; but that is the kind of situation the White community will not permit. The White community will not count the marginal Negro vote. The man who didn't count it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation, might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which would affirm the law and conform with the relevant political abstractions, but whose consequences might be violent and anarchistic.
The central question that emerges-and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage . The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own .
NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds. That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously argued that the difference between 20 and 21-yearolds is the difference between slavery and freedom. The residents of the District of Columbia do not vote: and the population of D .C. increases by geometric proportion. Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could. Overwhelming numbers of White people in the South do not vote. Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom . Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro-and a great many Whites-to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.
The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
This is racism, pure and simple. Others have claimed that Buckley was not racist, but it is not appropriate to simply dismiss the charge out-of-hand with this sort of evidence. I previously quoted a thoughtful article that was as fair as could be hoped towards Buckley, and the conclusion is that while Buckley behaved generously and made other statements that deny racism, he also obviously made other statements that are racist.
To continue with Devine’s article:
His (Goldwater’s) position at that early date was complex: “I am in agreement with the [anti-racial segregation] objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina. . . . I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned . . . [and] should not be affected by engines of national power.” At the time of the 1964 Act, Goldwater vigorously opposed its private employment and accommodations sections, saying he could find “no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority” over such private activity, claiming to have based his constitutional judgment on the advice of future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Appellate Justice Robert Bork. His support for private desegregation was not pure rhetoric as Goldwater was instrumental in integrating the department store in Arizona that bore his family name.
This was the crux of the principle. Even if the individual conservative supported the idea of racial equality, he/she was not willing to mandate that others also do so. They were not willing to use the force of the federal government to force anyone to do so. They thought that things would work themselves out on their own, eventually. This was completely unrealistic, and unfair to the generations of African-Americans who would have had to wait it out.
The Devine has more information for anyone so inclined, but I believe I have provided sufficient quotes to demonstrate my point: conservatives, in general, opposed the civil rights act of 1964, which was the only act with enough teeth to make a difference. And African Americans took note of that.
I’ve already referenced two well-known racist democrats who immediately fled the party for the republican party: Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. But even more significant is the gradual evolution of the republican party to its current status as a party that does not tolerate liberal or moderate republicans in their midst. Due to redistricting, the greatest fear many House republicans have is being primaried by the right. This is why we have seen more fringe candidates being nominated by the republican party who don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting elected in the general election. This has created a divide in the party between the far righters and the establishment republicans, who likely better see the bigger picture.
Here’s the dilemma for the republican party. Even if its conservatives initially opposed civil rights due to the principle of opposition to federal intervention,
the fact is that they became a more comfortable home to racists than the democratic party would become. If you were a good-old-boy racist, which party would you prefer? The party housed the most conservatives who opposed the civil rights act, or the party that housed the most liberals and moderates who supported the civil rights act? So, even if the conservatives who originally opposed the civil rights act did so out of principled objection to federal intervention,
they still opposed it. And the person viewed by many as the father of the modern conservative movement, William Buckley, made the racist statements he did, as well. What more does a semi- or poorly informed racist need?
And, of course, we have the whole wonderful Southern Strategy that deliberately played upon the racist sentiments of some southerners…
I want to be clear. I’m not saying that the republican party is racist, or even that the majority of republicans are racist. I am saying that there is a faction of the republican party that is racist, and the party has pandered to them in the past. And I’m also saying there are good reasons African-Americans tend not to be republican, and those good reasons don’t include the sheer ignorance some of you attribute to them here. As Rand Paul should have learned at Howard, African-Americans know their history. After all, it affected them. There is nothing strange in that. Mormons know their history, because it affected them. To assume gross ignorance on the part of African Americans as some of you have on this forum is just adding insult upon insult. It certainly won’t result in minorities feeling more comfortable with the republican party.
