ZNet Articles
ZMag Articles
ZCommentaries
Blog PostsJohn Ed Pearce, October 18, 1948
By David Peterson at Sep 20, 2008 |
|
Saturday's release of the Knowledge Networks - Associated Press - Yahoo News poll, the net result of which is that deep-seated anti-black racism in the United States could cost the Black Candidate the White House "if the election is close" (see "Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama"), calls to mind a classic commentary from an old Louisville Courier-Journal reporter and commentator, John Ed Pearce.
I've been wanting to post Pearce's remarkable assessment of what it was like for him to sit through States Rights Party (i.e., "Dixiecrat") campaign rallies in the waning weeks of the 1948 presidential election between the Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman, and his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey, ever since I got my hands on a copy of it via the archivists at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, back in July. Today's AP - Yahoo poll finally gives me cause.
The "Dixiecrats" were not just a third-party formation, but a "reactionary protest organization comprised of economically conservative, segregationist southern Democrats who sought to reclaim their former prestige and ideological prominence in a party that had moved away from them," historian Kari Frederickson writes in her invaluable The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (
Zeroing-in-on the triggering events of the year 1948, Frederickson explains that as the Progressive Party presidential candidate "[Henry] Wallace threatened to lop off the [Democratic] party's left wing" during the upcoming election, Truman's advisors concluded that "Truman would have to appeal to labor and minority voters," and that black voters "might hold the balance of power in key northern cities and that there were enough black voters in fifteen northern states to swing [the then-necessary] 277 electoral votes. In order to win those states, Truman would need to make a renewed and stronger commitment to civil rights." As a consequence, Truman proposed a modest 10-point civil rights program that included monitoring and enforcement by the federal Government, an idea dreaded across the South, as well as "federal protection for voting [rights] and against lynching," and the establishment of the Fair Employment Practice Commission "to prevent unfair discrimination." By the spring of 1948, "The white South responded shrilly and...in unison." The formation of the States Rights or Dixiecrat Party was the outcome.
What follows is the first and only page that the archivists at the Truman Presidential Library could locate of John Ed Pearce's priceless commentary for the Louisville Courier-Journal (October 18, 1948). There is no telling how much of Pearce's original from the carry-over-page is missing here. But the original copy is located in the Dixiecrat file of the newspaper clippings section of the Democratic National Committee Records held by the Library.
SECTION 1 THE COURIER-JOURNAL,
Dixiecrats Cloak Their Ambition
With a Show of Southern Piety
Behind the Thurmond demand
for State Rights, two real
issues lie hidden
By John Ed Pearce
Courier-Journal Staff Writer
There were no fiery crosses burned here when J. Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat Presidential nominee, came to town. No white-robed Klansmen rode to the public meeting here, nor to the one in
A Dixiecrat meeting is the strangest type of political gathering of our time, if indeed it can be called a political gathering. The present is a time for the most momentous political decisions of our history. The issues of labor, conservation, flood control, public power, public lands, tidelands, oil, tariffs, wages, inflation, housing, and the frightening question of foreign policy must be studied and decided by the political candidate.
But not by Mr. Thurmond. For him, these issues simply do not exist. Judging from his addresses in
The Dixiecrats and Mr. Thurmond could be largely forgiven the silliness of their movement if one could believe that their incessant prating of States Rights was based on nothing more evil than a desire to cling to a dream of the Old South. For the problems of the South are more complex and difficult, especially for those who must continue to live in the South, than is imagined by those who see its evils from the outside. And even among the most earnest liberals of the South is a sincere doubt of the wisdom of Federal imposition of a Fair Employment Practices Commission on a people whose hatred of the Negro has been enlarged, ingrained and exploited for generations by politicians and industrialists who see in the system of segregation a vast cheap labor pool, and a source of endless political profit.
But this constant stream of States Rights and the horrors of F.E.P.C. is the shallowest sort of sham. There is too much evidence that the Dixiecrats -- organizers, backers, listeners and principals -- have no honest concern for the entire field of States Rights. For 16 years the South has eagerly abetted such "invasions of States Rights" as R.E.A., T.V.A., Federal road projects, public works, aid to farmers, flood control, school lunch programs and the dozens of measures by which the States have fed at the Federal trough. Southern legislators in
States Rights is the issue only insofar as it concerns the rights of States to solve -- or refuse to solve -- their race problems. The real issue is one word, and that word is never spoken. It is one thought, and that thought is never expressed.
The issue is Nigger.
Not Negro; not the 14,000,000 citizens of our democracy who are trying to raise themselves to a higher standard of life and living through the equal rights and opportunities guaranteed them by our Constitution. Not the people who are striving against disheartening odds to take a decent, respectable place in society, despite the efforts of those who object to their differences in skin coloration.
The issue is not the Negro, the human being who exists and struggles. It is Nigger, that non-existent creature which lives only in the hate-filled minds that conceived it. The word is never spoken, yet it hangs in the air, sweaty, rancid, brutish, hulking and menacing, bespeaking the fear and ignorance of the minds that bore it. On the platform Mr. Thurmond and his fellow traveler shout of Americanism, our way of life, the right to choose one's associates, Communism, Reds. But they mean Nigger.
Mr. Thurmond, of course, never says the word; he's not the type. And it is comical to listen as he tiptoes around the issue, like an old-fashioned father trying to explain sex to his son without saying the words. He creeps up close to the issue, sidles in with an innuendo, and then eases past the danger point with a side-step and a show of studious piety.
It is as obvious and awkward an effort as that of a man trying to get his shoes off and get into bed without waking his wife. Not that he's fooling the audience. They know what he's talking about. They know and they love it. They came to hear him preach segregation, the right of the white man to "keep the Negro in his place," the right of the South to "handle its own problems."
They string along with his platitudes, just as they string along with the advice of underlings who caution against intolerance, but they don't take it seriously. No sooner had Orval Baylor warned the Louisville audience to beware of race friction and intolerance than a committeeman waddled down from the speakers' platform and ordered from the floor two Negro reporters who were sitting in the same room with the white people (though apart from them).
J. Strom Thurmond never utters the coarse words they would like to hear, but they know what he means. It is as though he were whistling the tune of a dirty song, to which the audience knows the dirty words. Mr. Thurmond never says the dirty words, but his listeners laugh and slap their thighs when he reaches the part where the dirty words are supposed to be. "Catering to minority groups," he says, but . . . [*]
[*] The original Louisville Courier-Journal clipping cuts-off here. The carry-over page is missing.
"Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama," Ron Fournier and Trevor Tompson, Associated Press, September 20, 2008
Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party (i.e., Dixiecrats), adopted in
"Jeremiah Wright in the Propaganda System," Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Monthly Review, September, 2008
Reply to J.D. Casten
By Peterson, David at Sep 23, 2008 07:51 AM
J.D. Casten:
Thanks for digging-up the material.
The Wall Street or FIRE - collective\'s regnant assessment of the relevant contributory factors places far too much emphasis upon the irresponsibility of the masses who, in trying to own real estate they didn\'t deserve to own or that was "beyond their means" and out of their class (i.e., these individuals as a class are "subprime," meaning on one level they weren\'t sufficiently creditworthy to take out mortgages, but also on another level less kempt, grubbier than the managers of the FIRE - collective), inflated the housing "bubble" that has been deflating for the past couple of years, with grave consequences for the Super Prime Captains of Wall Street, and even the Bank of China. (I wonder whether the Dalai Lama is short the Whole?)
Several responses are in order. No. One is that markets at all times are endogenously speculative, and the only value that markets confer upon objects real and imaginary is "market value," i.e., not intrinsic but speculative "value."
Rich people no longer bought the flowers to keep them in their gardens, but to sell them again at cent per cent profit. It was seen that somebody must lose in the end. As this conviction spread, prices fell, and never rose again. Confidence was destroyed, and a universal panic seized upon the dealers. A had agreed to purchase ten Semper Augustines from B, at four thousand florins each, at six weeks after the signing of the contract. B was ready with the flowers at the appointed time; but the price had fallen to three or four hundred florins, and A refused either to pay the difference or receive the tulips. Defaulters were announced day after day in all the towns ofHolland
The more complex and technologically sophisticated these engines and amplifiers of human alienation become, the more their endogenously speculative character takes over from the errant social actors who participate in them, typically accompanied by the false belief that they, the buyers and sellers, are in charge, when the truth invariably is quite the opposite. On the other hand, because the term \'bubble\' suggests that there is a true market value for everything, even for X (where X can stand for anything -- let\'s say all varieties of "derivatives" and even our souls, in a very loose sense of the term), and that under "bubble" - conditions, market values temporarily become inflated and inaccurate, the term is misleading. Where this "market" baby is concerned, the whole truly is false. Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for optimism that, collectively speaking, we\'re honest enough to reverse course and walk back out the same disastrous path that we\'ve taken on the way in. -- No permutation on Pascal\'s wager is going to save us. Citing one is a tactic undertaken merely to sound good.
"Ecology -- The Moment of Truth," Monthly Review, July/August, 2008
Reply this comment
Simple Minds
By Casten, J.D. at Sep 22, 2008 14:48 PM
My simple minded understanding is that Derivatives have exacerbated the financial problems, but that the sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting was the underlying cause.
This can be both complicated:
The Lehman Bros. Guide to Exotic Credit Derivatives
Or (over) simplified:
Mike Gasior - YouTube Credit Default Swaps Video
It seems to me that derivatives are a mirror (shadow) not only of the current financial world, but also its future: hence the notational value of derivatives being higher than actual world assets (they can be an insurance appraisal of the future monetary values—sort of like saying what the next 20 years of investments is worth). A run on all derivatives is of course impossible—there isn’t that much money in the world “now”—but since so many are involved with derivatives throughout the financial world, figuring out who is liable for what defaulted debt becomes a huge mess. When the government buys all those “troubled assets”—will the tax payers benefit from the credit-default-swap payoffs?:
Proposed Bill
Reply this comment
\"It\'s the Derivatives, Stupid!\"
By Peterson, David at Sep 22, 2008 11:31 AM
Friends:
Here\'s one that it was a serious oversight on my part not to have mentioned previously: "It\'s the Derivatives, Stupid!" Ellen Hodgson Brown, The Web of Debt, September 18, 2008.
Reply this comment
...Leveraged to The Hilt?
By Casten, J.D. at Sep 22, 2008 11:02 AM
David (& Paul)—
Here’s a relevant book I read awhile back:
Confidence Games – Money and Markets in a World without Redemption – by Mark C. Taylor
Reply this comment
Reply to Paul Street
By Peterson, David at Sep 22, 2008 09:35 AM
Paul:
About standard operating procedures among theU.S.
Elsewhere (September 18) you show that you like Robert Pollin\'s Contours of Descent (Verso, 2003). I also know that you like David Harvey (e.g., here and here too). Other enlightening works include (though by no means are limited to) Samuel Bowels et al.\'s Understanding Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 3rd. Ed., 2005). We should add-in something current by Edward Wolff, "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in theUnited State
But we find ourselves in the middle of some grand pickles, mostly of our own making -- though their genesis spans many generations, of course, and no doubt reaches at least as far back as that period when some local breeding populations in what we now call the Horn of Africa made momentous -- though clearly not well-thought-out -- choices about whether it to keep it small or to multiply and spread.
Think about it. The humans haven\'t even figured out this one yet. And now we\'ve got to cope with military-industrial-congressional complexes and systems of power and ideology, nuclear weapons, anthropogenic and perhaps globally decisive environmental changes, speculative FIRE collectives, speculative genetic manipulations, Blackberries?
You know the old line (uttered in many similar versions over the ages) about how "Only a god can save us now"? True, the speaker in this most famous recent case (1966) happened to be clueless philosopher with a nasty track record. But the line does have a ring of authenticity to it. Yet, as I understand the concept of the world and the concept of god, the only permissible human god -- the only god worthy of the human world -- would be an absolutely devious rake, whose sole reason for being is so that there is somebody out there with sufficient omniscience to stand apart from the spectacle of the squirming human species as it collectively renders its planet uninhabitable, and to laugh scornfully and mockingly at it.
So, verily: Only a god could laugh at us now.
Reply this comment
Follow up
By Street, Paul at Sep 21, 2008 20:23 PM
David, I only meant to suggest that running a black guy is consistent with the notion that they don\'t want to win given what is well-known about (a) how close the last elections have been (how closely divided the electorate is, such as it is) and (b) the fact that many people simply are too racist to vote for a black guy. The other thing I meant to say (along with my Great Plains correspondent) is that (largely independent of being black) Obama loses a certain margin of support for being so bourgeois and imperial and neoliberal and conciliatory and so forth (all the stuff you know about as well if not better than I).
I think the Dems want to win but have a lot of horrible issues when it comes to how and when it comes to what they are about, which isn;t much from a left or true progressive standpoint.
And there\'s the broader party and propaganda systems and political culture that tend to favor the most viciously plutocratic and raw miltiarist of the two corporate-imperial parties.
Still, the recent dramatic escalations in the U.S. FIRE storm (the financia-real-estate-insurance meltowm) --- forcing an historic government iintervention before the election (it was supposed to come after) --- may do the trick for Obama is my sense. Two weeks ago think a McCain victory was indicated; now you maybe could pick Obama, even with the race problem. . McCain has just been ridiculous in his comments and his pretend about -face on regulation; he looks like a dottering old buffoon.
I agree that the GOP is as ridiculous and dangerous a party as one could imagine (see A. . Cockburn\'s comments on McCain and the ludicrous arch-plutocrat Phil Gramm in the September 20/21 issue of CounterPunch).
If a majority of voters and/or Electors select McCain-Palin it will be a new low in U.S. poltiical culture and yes racism will be the main reason!
I am a total waffler on whether to vote tactically (block McCain with Obama) in Iowa or to vote third party (and even there I can\'t decide between Nader and McKinney) here, but it doesn\'t bother me all that much since my deeper and consistent point is stated by Adolph Reed Jr. on the back of my Obama book: "progressive agendas will not be advanced through vesting hopes and dreams in candidate-centered politics....there is no quick fix for the task of building a serious, institutionally grounded working-class based political movement - from the bottom up and the top down."
Building that movement is an area where we have greater sphere of influence than in their ballot boxes, once described by the Marxist historian Alan Dawley as "coffins of class consciousness.\'" The quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting on how to best respond to the masters\' limited candidate choices is somewhat besides the point.
The more a possible president Obama would choose to listen to a Stiiglitz over a Rubin or a Summers or a Bill Daley the better off most Americans will be in the near term it would seem....The best thing of all would for a BO White House to hear some serious thunder on the left and at the the grassroots level, from the bottom up....
Reply this comment
Reply to Paul Street
By Peterson, David at Sep 21, 2008 09:14 AM
Paul:
Presumably you caught the image from Barack Obama\'s Friday news conference in Florida (September 19) about the recurring crises (i.e., SOP, by this point) in the U.S. financial, insurance, and real estate sectors, all instantaneously transmitted around the world. I can\'t name the people who appeared on stage along with Obama from left-to-right. But the participants were drawn fro among the following highly publicized list (some of whom only participated via a teleconference call -- I may be missing one or more names): Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Laura Tyson, Gene Sperling, Paul O\'Neil, Paul Volcker, William Daley, and Warren Buffet. Several of these individuals know exactly what\'s going down within the FIRE collective. One of them even famously stole usage of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" to describe the speculation on "derivatives" (quote-unquote) the inscrutability of which lies at the proximate heart of the FIRE-collective\'s crises -- though since we are dealing with phenomena of the human world, there is always something prior even to this, namely, the human knack for alienation, for falsehood, and for blindly feeding their individual lives to the status-quo institutions that accompany their brief moment on the planet. Yet, I do not believe that a single one of these otherwise unquestionably competent people advising Obama is willing to call for all of us to cash-out. Until candidates and advisers begin speaking in these terms, "little changes, while much gets worse."
But all of this notwithstanding:
1. I don\'t accept the "notion that the Democrats don\'t actually want to win." There very well may be Democrats deep within theClintons
2. Like you, I believe that the more reasonable critiques of the "Obama phenomenon" produced this year are to found in works such as "Where Obamaism Seems to be Going" (Black Agenda Report, July 16) as well as Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm Publishers, 2008). So this is where we\'re both coming form.
3. The U.S. Republican Party is both a disgrace and a joke internationally. Everybody should at least take a glance at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies\' recent report, Blacks & the 2008 Republican National Convention (August, 2008), as well as the accompanying August 29 Press Release. -- Notice how Inter Press Service described the Republican Convention in Minnesota: "As the cameras panned over the party faithful interrupting McCain\'s speech with booming chants of \'U.S.A.\', few faces of colour could be seen in the crowd. Of 2,380 delegates to this week\'s convention inSt. Paul , Minnesota Joint Center
The disgrace- and laugh-meters only run higher, when we look at theUnited States
My own personal view is that (and for the moment, sticking to the catastrophically rigid parameters laid down by Institutional USA) I prefer to see Barack Obama rather than John McCain elected president of theUnited States
Reply this comment
Three points
By Street, Paul at Sep 20, 2008 15:19 PM
The AP-Yahoo-Knowledge Networks poll found Obama would receive an estimated 6 percentage points more support if there were no racial prejudice. Six percent actually seems low to me; it\'s probably worse.
But of course 6 percent is more than enough to swing the election since the last two elections have been a statistical tie --- a coin flip. The electorate has been split down the middle for some time.
There\'s more to this than "boy the U.S. is racist," which of course it is to no small extent.
I would add three things:
1. Knowing that the electorate is evenly divided and that racism still exists in America, the Democrats\' decision to put a black guy up for the presidency fits the notion that the Democrats don\'t actually want to win.
2. BO is not just any black guy. As a progressive Demcoratic activist from the Great Plains wrote me yesterday in regard to this poll and its predictability, he\'s "a black corporate, militarist Democrat.... I wish someone would poll how his disregard for workers, unions, the poor, and foreigners hurts him too".
3. From a black civil rights perspective, the worst -case scenario in terms of immediate policy outcomes is a GOP victory, By increasing the likelihood of a GOP victory, the Democrats\' decision to run a black guy could be seen as objectively anti-black over the next four years.
Which is not to say Obama couldn\'t still slip in; I think he could.
According to the left Democrat I quoted above, "It is a toss up, or worse. Sans the [Rielle Hunter] affair, had they picked Edwards, he\'d be up, I think, by double digits."
An Obama staffer I know relates that the Obama campaign was behind the press interest in the idiotic Edwards-Hunter affair. I can\'t substantiate that , but it fits the Axelrod profile and Axelrod once worked for Edwards and knew his private character and how to investigate his private life and so on. Perhaps more will emerge on this some day.
Obama recently gave a big financial pronouncement with former Goldman Sachs CEO and US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (a key Obama advisor) at his side. Rubin was a leader of the degulatory fiasco that helped (along with deeper systemic issues) bring us to the current historic crisis with the financial markets, of course. Obama is if anything closer to Wall Street than McCain.
Reply this comment
Reply to John Krumm
By Peterson, David at Sep 20, 2008 11:58 AM
John:
I certainly can\'t put a hard number on it. But I have no doubt that your general point is correct. Aside from the roughly one-third (slightly less, actually) of the contemporary American population that is rabidly Republican Party-oriented, no matter what this party\'s members do while occupying the executive branch, the fact that the presidential candidate for the major national party that hasn\'t occupied the executive branch since early 2001 is not out-in-front by a percentage that could fairly be described as a landslide can only have one primary explanation, summed-up nicely 60 years ago by John Ed Pearce: "The issue is [ _____ ]."
Nor is the explanation because the overwhelming majority of the people who will cast ballots on November 4 are in reality dying to vote for a bona fide third-party, non-H. Ross Perot-type candidate, and they find Barack Obama\'s establishment brand far too reactionary for their ultra-progressive tastes.
What a creepy country the United States of America is.
Reply this comment
By Krumm, John at Sep 20, 2008 10:27 AM
I think the press is ignoring the racism factor for the most part, except for occasional tittilation purposes, much like when my racist, right wing father-in-law gleefully telling me he talked to a long-time Democrat woman who told him "I\'m not going to vote for that nigger."
I suspect Obama would be at least 5-10 points higher in the polls right now if he were white.
Reply this comment