Where are the comparable accounts for why Truman, Black, and Byrd went from being Klansmen to being champions of civil rights? Where is the Democratic Party’s story of how it went through soul-searching in order to achieve moral conversion? These accounts simply do not exist. There seems to have been no soul-searching, raising the question of whether there was in fact a conversion. This too-easy progressive switch story raised my suspicion. I decided to look into it, and discovered it was largely bogus.
PROGRESSIVE RACISM
In this chapter I’ll show that the Democratic Party never abandoned racism—it figured out a way to integrate it into its new progressive philosophy. Progressivism didn’t replace racism; rather, northern progressivism worked in tandem with southern racism to create a successful Democratic coalition that pushed through the New Deal and the Great Society.
I’m not alone in thinking this; progressive historian Ira Katznelson admits as much in a powerful recent book, Fear Itself. Katznelson focuses his indictment on the central figure of modern progressivism, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I expand the indictment to the other two central figures: Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. And of course we see the same general trend in the entire Democratic Party. Through this investigation, we’ll discover what Byrd learned that enabled him to make the easy transition from being a racist Democrat to being a progressive Democrat.
It may seem heretical to link the three great progressive champions of the twentieth century—Wilson, FDR, and Johnson—with racism. But the indisputable fact is that all three were either racist themselves or made their peace with racism. Progressive historiography has had to work overtime to conceal the actual facts.
There is some debate about whether Wilson was himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Whatever the truth about that, Wilson was unquestionably a Klan sympathizer. By showing Birth of a Nation at the White House, Wilson contributed to the Klan revival of the early twentieth century. FDR didn’t despise blacks in the way Wilson did, but he did serve as Navy Secretary in the Wilson administration, never objecting to the de jure segregation that Wilson had imposed throughout the federal government.
When FDR became president, he made a bargain with racist southern Democrats that required him to block anti-lynching legislation and exclude blacks from New Deal programs. A surge in lynching during the 1930s had no effect in altering FDR’s commitment to the pact. One might expect to see FDR liberalize on race relations over his multiple terms, but he never did. His bargain with the worst racists in the Democratic Party endured throughout his presidency, from 1932 to 1945.
Lyndon Johnson was himself a member of the racist group of southern Democrats that FDR worked with and cut deals with. Johnson vociferously opposed civil rights in the early part of his career. Later Johnson appeared to change, but in this case the appearance was deceiving. Even as president—during the very period he was promoting the Civil Rights Act of 1964—Johnson called blacks “niggers” and spoke of civil rights legislation as tactical measures for keeping blacks on the Democratic plantation.
What about the Republicans? I will show in this chapter that Republicans throughout the 1950s and 1960s supported civil rights, while the main opposition to the Civil Rights laws came from Democrats. Blacks, starting in the 1930s, did switch from voting Republican to voting Democrat, but this was not on account of racism. On the contrary, blacks in joining the Democratic Party found themselves in the same camp with the segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan. Far from escaping racism, blacks threw themselves into the party of racism.
Why did they do it? The best insight into this question comes from Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Civil War journal. Chesnut observed that even though all the able-bodied white men were away fighting the Yankees, the slaves had not left the plantations. Chesnut found this odd because the slaves were alone with the women and children. They could leave if they wanted; there was no one to stop them. “If slavery is as disagreeable to negroes as we think it,” she wrote, “why don’t they all march over the border where they would be received with open arms?”7 Chesnut implies that whatever their antipathy to slavery, the slaves must have liked the security provided by the plantation.
Another person who understood the tempting security of plantation life was the Republican abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass, however, railed against it. In an 1865 speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass addressed the question: What must be done for the former slaves? Douglass replied, “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fail. Let him alone. If you will only untie his hands and give him a chance, I think he will live.”8
Douglass’s speech was titled, “What the Black Man Wants.” For Douglass, what the black man wanted was freedom—the freedom to make his own future. But the Democrats of the 1930s thought differently. Democrats knew that blacks as much as anyone were suffering financial hardships from the Great Depression; and those hardships gave Democrats—the party of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow—a new opportunity.
AN OFFER THEY COULDN’T REFUSE
So the Democrats made the black leaders a tempting offer. In effect, the Democrats said to them: You may now be free, but what does freedom really amount to? Life for the free black means unemployment and insecurity. This is the “freedom” the Republicans are offering you. We know you don’t trust us—our record with you is a bit spotty—but we have figured out a way to correct that. We can offer you something that will make your life better, something very practical, here and now.
Remember life on the plantation? True, the work was excruciating and unending and you didn’t get paid for it. But in other respects, it wasn’t so bad. We gave you food and a place to live. If you got sick, we called the doctor. We looked after you in your old age. We took care of the children, even when they were too young to work. Plantation life wasn’t much, to be sure, but it was better than living in starvation and fear.
So here’s our deal. We’ll give you a living, and you don’t even have to work for it. In fact, we’d prefer you didn’t work. If you worked and earned money, we’d have to stop paying you. We’d rather have you dependent on us. We’ll look after you, and have other people pay for it. We just want one thing in exchange. You must keep voting for us so that we can keep getting you stuff for free. What do you say?
The answer was yes. This is why blacks—many of them deeply reluctant to leave the party of Lincoln and join the party of the Ku Klux Klan—became Democrats. The black leadership made a Faustian bargain—they sold their souls to the progressives for cash benefits. They traded emancipation and freedom—the right to determine one’s own destiny—for secure dependence on the progressive state. Blacks returned to a new type of plantation run by the same people who used to run the old ones.
I understand how people living during hard times might take this deal. Over time, however, the Democratic payout simply became an entitlement. Black leaders eventually treated opposition to the entitlements as itself a form of racism. Today when black leaders accuse Republicans of opposing civil rights, they are simply playing the progressive game. All they mean is that Republicans aren’t willing to provide the same plantation benefits that Democrats do. For the most part, the African American community today is a ward of the progressive Democratic state.
This remarkable story of the emergence of modern Democratic progressivism begins with Margaret Sanger, who is not merely the founder of Planned Parenthood but one of the founding foremothers of the progressive movement. We cannot understand Sanger by projecting onto her modern progressive talking points. Empowerment! Free choice! Spacing out pregnancies! These weren’t Sanger’s goals at all. Rather, she had a novel solution to what may be termed the problem of useless people.
Useless people abound in every society. India, for example, has plenty of them. That fact is somewhat camouflaged in America, where the success of Indian Americans persuades many that Indians are all smart and productive. �
��You Indians are so bright and so enterprising.” I get this all the time. The truth is that only smart, enterprising Indians can figure out how to get to America.
Long-distance immigration is a highly selective process; it’s not simply a matter of climbing a fence or wading across the Rio Grande. It is a sociological truth—I call it D’Souza’s Law of Immigration—that the quality of the immigrant is directly proportional to the distance traveled to get here. So the Indians in America are not typical Indians. Typical Indians—the type I grew up with—include lots of useless, unproductive people.
MY USELESS UNCLE BHARAT
One such useless person I knew well was my uncle Bharat. This fellow—my mother’s youngest brother—was only ten years older than me. A college dropout, he never seemed capable of finding a job. When he did find a job, he couldn’t keep it. When I was around twelve, Uncle Bharat was employed by an advertising agency. Each week he would take me out for ice cream. We’d head to the ice cream place on his bicycle, with me riding on the back seat.
As we had our ice cream, he would tell me what product he was working on and ask me to come up with witty lines and jingles to help sell that product. Initially I was reluctant, since I was only twelve, but he seemed to really like my ideas. “I really feel, Dinesh,” he told me, “that you are my secret weapon, because you know a lot of words.” My off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions, I’m firmly convinced, made up the bulk of his work product for the week. It was a good deal for me, since I got ice cream out of it. But I knew even then that I was in the company of a useless person.
We never knew what to do with Uncle Bharat. He remained a dependent all his life, living with his parents until they died, and then sponging off relatives, until he eventually died of a heart attack. He was a leech, I have to admit, but the tragedy of his life was not merely that he lived off other people. Rather, it was also that he knew he was a useless person and his was a life unlived. He was never an autonomous individual who experienced the earned satisfaction of having made something of himself.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Democratic Party also had a problem with what they considered to be useless people—namely African Americans—and progressivism became its solution for dealing with that problem. The problem for Democrats emerged only at the end of the Civil War. That’s because, from the Democrats’ perspective, before the war all the useless people were usefully employed as slaves.
Incredibly, many Democratic masters even considered the slaves to be useless people. They routinely complained about how lazy, shiftless, and unproductive the slaves were. We learn from Mary Chesnut that a constant refrain on the plantation was, “They don’t do any work.” It never seemed to occur to the people making such complaints that in fact the slaves did all the work. The masters were the ones who did nothing. While the slaves toiled, the Democratic master class employed itself in such pursuits as mint julep sipping, croquet on the lawn, and dueling.
Even so, the slave owners’ allegation that slaves avoided work did have a basis in fact. Frederick Douglass acknowledged this. He made the obvious point that since slaves couldn’t keep what they earned, they had no incentive to work hard. Still, on balance, Democrats knew that slaves were useful—at least to them. Even indolent slaves produced more than it cost to keep them.
Slavery may have been an unprofitable institution for society—discouraging work on the part of both slave and master, and thus contributing to a slothful, unproductive culture in the Democratic South—but it was unquestionably profitable for the masters. From the Democrats’ point of view, the truly useless people were those who opposed slavery, namely abolitionists and Republicans.
After slavery, the Democrats had a new problem: What to do with the blacks who were now free? The same Democrats who complained that slaves were useless people now insisted that black people were useless unless they were slaves! One Democratic columnist from Charleston warned that free blacks were like animals walking around without owners—this was not good for the animals, he insisted, and it was also bad for society.
After considering what to do with free blacks in the South, the Democratic Party came up with three solutions: Jim Crow, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Through such measures, southern Democrats simultaneously kept black people down and rallied the votes of white people. For several decades, from the 1870s to the 1930s, this solution worked, sustaining the Democrats as the majority party in the South.
Even so, the Republican Party dominated the rest of the country, and blacks in the North and the South voted overwhelmingly for Republicans. Immigrants too, though initially drawn to the Democratic Party, tended to move to the GOP as they became more established and more successful. Nationally, the GOP was without question the majority party and won most presidential elections from 1865 through the 1920s. The Democrats realized that they needed something new, something that went beyond Jim Crow, segregation, and the Klan.
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY’RE BORN
Margaret Sanger came up with an original proposal: let’s prevent these useless people from even existing. Let’s stop them even before they are born. This was the whole point of “birth control,” and it became one of the foundation stones of early progressivism. The progressives recognized the value of Sanger’s cause. So did the leadership of the Democratic Party. If useless people aren’t born, we don’t have to segregate them, nor do we have to chase them down and kill them. People who don’t exist can hardly pose a problem. For one thing, they can’t vote Republican.
Sanger’s Klan appearance, together with her Negro project, show she shared the special antipathy to blacks that was a trademark of the Democratic Party in the South. Sanger did regard blacks as the most backward, unintelligent subset of the population. She seemed to regard a large percentage of the black population as borderline retarded. Sanger’s general view was that ignorant, uneducated people should be convinced through propaganda to practice birth control, but if they refuse they should be forced. As for the “retarded” and “feeble-minded,” Sanger advocated compulsory sterilization.
Sanger set up her Negro Project to give special attention to keeping blacks from multiplying. She wanted black clergymen to sell them on birth control because she thought that blacks listened only to their ministers. If the minister said it was okay, then blacks wouldn’t get the paranoid idea that some white person was trying to wipe out their numbers—even though Sanger was in fact a white person who was trying to wipe out their numbers!
“The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members” Sanger said, “is to kill it.”9 Sanger’s implication is that she—not the family itself—knows what is best for them. It is not a matter of the parents choosing for themselves; she insists they must choose prevention. Sanger routinely spoke of the “unwanted and the unfit” but by this she meant unwanted by her, unfit according to her standard.
Sanger also suggests it is merciful—an act of compassion—to kill an unwanted child. Do children see it that way? Is there a significant population alive today who would rather their births had been prevented? What interests me here is Sanger’s appeal to compassion. It reminds me of how Andrew Jackson claimed he was being kind to the Indians in driving them from their homes, and how Democratic slave owners viewed themselves as apostles of compassion in providing food and lodging to their slaves.
Today’s Democrats, too, have created horrible living conditions for American Indians on reservations and for blacks in inner cities. People there wallow in miserable dependency, lacking jobs, lacking prospects, and lacking hope. Pretty much every child born there is illegitimate; in other words, bastardy is the normal condition of life in the city. Sanger would have been horrified; she would regard the very existence of these populations as a failure of birth control.
Yet today’s Democrats aren’t so different from Sanger, even if they have found a different solution to the problem of useless people. Like Sanger, today’s Democrats deprive others of dignity
and opportunity while viewing themselves as apostles of caring and empathy. Like Sanger, today’s Democrats unceasingly praise their own “compassion” and regard anyone who criticizes their policies as “lacking compassion.”
Sanger was a eugenicist, but of a special type. The term itself means “well born” and eugenics refers to the selective breeding of human populations. Just as animal breeders can engineer certain traits in a dog or horse, eugenicists seek to engineer certain traits in human society. Today we think of eugenics as a single thing, but in the early twentieth century, eugenics came in two versions: positive eugenics and negative eugenics.
In 1925, Sanger attended the Sixth International Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York. She writes about this experience in her autobiography. Here Sanger encountered a group of eugenicists who spoke of their philosophy of “race betterment.” Sanger agreed with them; she was enthusiastically on board with the idea of racial progress.
But then she heard these eugenicists—men like C. B. Davenport, director of the Cold Spring Harbor for Experimental Evolution—call for “more children from the rich.” This is positive eugenics. Sanger was unimpressed; she didn’t think it would work. She went around asking these men how many more children they themselves wanted to have. Most of them said, “None.”
These replies confirmed Sanger’s suspicion that wealthy, educated people didn’t want large families and no amount of convincing would change their mind. Sanger became convinced that eugenics, to be successful, should have a different emphasis: negative eugenics rather than positive eugenics. As Sanger puts it, “The eugenicists wanted more children for the rich. We sought to stop the multiplication of the unfit.”10
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