REPASTE.."The Southern Coup" (How We Got Here) Michael Lind

[KoKo]

The South, the GOP and America/ How Goldwater turned the Tide for Repug RW'ers to Take Over America..A HISTORY!


The Southern Coup

* June 19, 1995 | 12:00 am


Theodore Roosevelt opposed both prayer in public schools and public money for religious schools. His successors in the GOP, however, seek to encourage small children to jump up in classrooms to praise Jesus and to replace the public school system with taxpayer-funded private schools. Conservatives have been careful to present the school-choice movement as a national movement, transcending race, region and religion. As part of this strategy, they play up the alleged troubles of Hasidic schools, like the Kiryas Joel School District in New York, and argue that the greatest beneficiaries of school choice would be poor black children in northern cities like Chicago who could receive first-rate educations in parochial schools. One may doubt, however, that the lily-white and disproportionately large Southern base of the GOP favors school choice primarily out of a disinterested desire to promote that centuries-old Southern nightmare--the Catholic-black alliance. The fact is that the chief beneficiaries of school choice would be Southern Protestant evangelical bible schools, which, incidentally, would have almost exclusively white student bodies. It is no accident that the Reagan administration fought the IRS over the revocation of the tax-exempt status not of a black-majority parochial school in the Northeast, nor of a Hasidic school district, but of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist academy that banned the practice and promotion of interracial dating.

The beginnings of the present-day school-choice enthusiasm in the South go back to the civil rights era, when several Southern legislatures decided to abolish public education in their states altogether rather than allow white and black children to mingle in the same classrooms. The federal judiciary thwarted their plans; school choice seeks to achieve the same end by different means. Outside of the South, in parts of the country with strong traditions of public education and different political cultures, school choice has little appeal. In California, suburban Republicans, satisfied with their public schools, recently combined with Democrats to defeat a school-choice ballot initiative.

The great champions of public education in the United States have all been Northerners, like Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the father of the public school system, and Republican Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont, author of the Morrill Land Grant University Act of 1862. The Southern ruling class, though, has had an obsessive fear of the subversive effects of education ever since Virginia Governor William Berkeley in 1671 boasted: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them.... God keep us from both!" Education and free discussion threatened what W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South, described as the uniquely Southern ideal of the homogeneous community, "a place where dissent and variety are completely suppressed ... where men become virtual replicas of one another." It is no coincidence that Southern universities of the first rank, such as Duke, Vanderbilt and Southern Methodist University, have tended to be located on the periphery of the Tidewater South, remote from the power centers of the Bourbon rich.

For generations, Southern conservatives have sought to use state governments to purge "radical" professors from state universities. Consider North Carolina, where New Dealer and anti-segregationist Frank Porter Graham turned the University of North Carolina into the leading Southern university. When Graham, appointed to the Senate by a progressive governor, ran for election on his own, one of the campaign ads that brought him down read: "wake up, white people. Do You Want Negroes Working Beside You, Your Wife and Daughters? Using Your Toilet Facilities? Frank Graham Favors Mingling of the Races." The media consultant behind the successful smear campaign was the young Jesse Helms.

Much, Much more of this read...including the Texas Contingent here at .........

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-southern-coup

[Grand Taurean]

1. Lincoln was too soft to say the least.

Softer than I would have been.

[thucythucy]

3. Lincoln and radical reform

The idea that Lincoln would have been "soft" in reconstructing the South is more myth than history. It's true Lincoln didn't favor mass trials and executions for treason--prefering that the leaders of the Confederacy instead go into exile. He did, however, side with the so-called Radical Republicans (what James McPherson and David Blight call the "Progressive Republicans") on issues such as land reform and the break-up of the Southern oligarchy that caused the war. The much ridiculed slogan "forty acres and a mule" was actually in reference to a proposal which Lincoln favored to seize the massive estates of the Southern oligarchy--all of whom had forfeited their property tights by committing treason--and divide the land among newly emancipated slaves and poor whites. Lincoln, remember, was a big supporter of the Homestead Act, seeing it as a model for how Southern society could be restructured. In this way, it was argued, poor Southern whites would have a vested interest in the success of Reconstruction--and in racial equality. This was to be combined with the creation of a public school system open to all--which until then, as the post notes, had been firmly resisted by the slave-owners as antithetical to their continued dominance.

What happened instead was Lincoln was assassinated, and among the first acts of President Johnson was to remove all confiscated land from the juresdiction of the Freedman's Bureau, thereby paving the way for the Southern oligarchy that had caused the war to keep its land, and eventually regain its economic and political power. Johnson's kowtowing and "moderation" to the Southern powers-that-be was the real cause of his impeachment.

IMHO, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the greatest single political tragedy in US history. Had Lincoln served out his full eight years, much of the racial baggage this culture still carries--not to mention the continued prominance of the Southern conservative faction in national politics--would not be nearly as great a factor as it is today.

[sasquatch]

2. Gee, I'm surprised this hasn't been shut down yet

[Cirque du So-What]

4. nevermind

nevermind