Skull / Bones

In 1908, as Theodore Roosevelt had alienated black supporters (default Republicans) for his role in the Brownsville Affair, the Democrats were petitioned to include an anti-lynching plank in their platform.  William Jennings Bryan scuttled the thing, Populism rearing its ugly side and the Democracy starting with the fist-tight thirteen state Confederate “Solid South”.  Bryan was associated with the populism of Benjamin Tillman, and regularly the perjorative “Bryanism” placed next to “Tillmanism” — Benjamin Tillman came to fight on behalf of the Rural White Farmers of South Carolina against the n-gers and the Elitists, Jesse Helms’s “University of Ngs and Communists” sentiment was essentially stolen from him, as any number of Southern demogogic political themes over the years.  In the fighting between the politics of Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryan for what the Democratic Party — Bryan served as a king-maker in pushing forward the “Progressivism” that marked the Woodrow Wilson Administration.

WEB Du Bois would roll the dice in supporting Woodrow Wilson for president in 1912.  Wilson segregated the federal government past the previous Taft adminstration, and when Du Bois came for a visit to the White House to express his displeasure, was summarily dismissed and told to, in effect, shove it.

The Democratic Convention of 1924 was a protracted fight between Alfred Smith — Urban New Yorker Catholic “Wet” Tammany Hall Connected — against William Gibbs McAdoo, who considered himself in the sort of populist political lineage of William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson — and tied to the Klan.  While this convention is historically thought to have been fought over the issue of Prohibition, that was one of any number of cultural divisions which marked over deeper issues and concerns.  For one, the two sides fought over whether to condemn the Klan by name in the Party Platform — the even split in this voting showed the doom that pervaded the party no matter who they were to nominate — as so happened the rather forgettable conservative Democrat John Davis.

Franklin Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination by starting with the Democratic coalitions who had backed Bryan and MacAdoo, though cut through the lines in his political realignment and reversed this item with respect to the two party factions.   By 1936 he managed to have Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina flee the convention when a black minister gave the invocation, and when he looked out over the convention and saw that a bi-racial convention, or to quote him directly:

“When I came out on the floor of that great hall, bless God, it looked like a chckerboard: a spot of white here, a spot of black there.  But I kept going down that long aisle, and finally found the great standard of South Carolina.  And, praise God, it was a spot of white!  I had no sooner taken my seat when a newspaperman came down the aisle and squatted by me and said, “Senator, do you know a nigger is going to come up younder in a minute and offer the invocation?”  I told him, I said, “Now don’t be joking me, I’m upset enough the way it is.”  But then, bless God, out of that platform walked a slew-footed, blue-gummed, kinky-headed Senegambian!  And he started praying and I started walking.  And as I pushed through these great doors and walked across the vast rotunda, it seemed to me that old John Calhourn leaned down from his mansion in the sky and whispered in my ear, “You did right, Ed.”

During the Roosevelt administration, when a black leader met with the president to ask him to reform the Segregation of the American South, Roosevelt responded that “you have to make me do it” by way of providing him the space in public opinion and activism.  A difficult slug to be sure, and a rather cynical deal.

In 1948, Hubert Humphrey came out shouting to come to the embracing the light of Civil Rights and shedding the dark of States’ Rights, and Southern Dixiecrats stormed out of the convention.  By 1956, the Democratic Party Platform tepidly walked back away from that “light” of civil rights and stated simply about the Brown versus Board of Education decision was historic indeed.  Such was the mark of Gradual Incrementalism promised by the Stevenson campaign, as against Eisenhower’s promise of Incremental Gradualism.

“America is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty is, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure. … No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions.  I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal.  I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another.  The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under that mob.”

– Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Harper’s Magazine 1922

Nay.

And the Libertarian Party has selected for their presidential candidate… former Republican Congress-critter Bob Barr.

I knew a young college Republican and ultra-conservative whose hero was Bob Barr.  I somehow doubt he is going to vote for Barr.  But, hopefully someone will.  The silly season of the Liberal blogosphere, which has run into the libertarian Reason-oids, have come up with this absurd premonition that Alaska might just go for Obama — which, will happen if, you know, Obama wins 45 states.  (The other two states the silly season is suggesting are Kansas – based on a stray poll — and Mississippi — based on an utter maxing out of the black vote to the tune of 100 percent vote for Obama off of 100 percent of eligible black voters voting — or so it would seem.) Part of the calculus for this absurdity is a chunk of vote for Bob Barr in these odd Libertarian “LEAVE ME ALONE!” out-posts.  We shall see, shan’t we?

I was hoping Stan Jones might barn-storm out as a Favorite son candidate of Montana.  If you scaffow at that, realize that Stan Jones is the most consequential Libertarian of the past decade, or more, for having swung the Senate to the Democrats — more electoral impact than anything Bob Barr has had during his Libertarian Party career.  Jon Tester won his election by a fraction of a percentage point, and Jones won three percent of the vote.  Even if you figure that Tester’s anti-Patriot Act and similar stances makes the margin a little too close for comfort in disrupting the odd calculus which, because I don’t want to think too much, has about half the Libertarian politician vote thrown to the Republican if s/he were absent and the other half just dissipating away as a no-vote, it is still enough to say with fair certaintude that Jones is responsible for Tester’s election.  Stan Jones is a perenial candidate who became known previously because he turned his skin blue because he digested collodial silver in 1999 in preparation for disruptions that the Y2K bug might have in the nation’s supply and transport of various antibiotics.  I suppose you can say that American political history is full of characters such as him.  Take the man who swung gave Alf Landon the position to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 1936 off the basis that he was just about the only Republican to win any election in 1934 — John Romulus Brinkley.  Landon owes his Kansas gubernatorial victories to this man’s votes — which otherwise would have gone to the Democratic candidate.  And for that, Landon could win Maine and Vermont.

In 1918, Dr. Brinkley began to perform operations which he claimed would restore male virility and fertility by implanting the glands of goats in his male patients at a cost of $750 per operation (about $7000 today, adjusted for inflation). He hired a press agent, advertised in newspapers, and used direct mail to promote his procedure to people who wrote asking for information. During his medical career, more than 16,000 people were victims of needless insertion of goat testicles, intended to restore energy and virility levels.

Following one of his crude operations, the body of a patient would typically absorb the goat gonads as foreign matter. The organs were never accepted as part of the body since they were simply placed into the human male testicle sac or the abdomen of women, near the ovaries. Unsurprisingly, in light of his questionable medical training (75% completion at a less-than-reputable medical school), frequency of operating while intoxicated, and less-than sterile operating environments, some patients suffered from infection, and an undetermined number died.

Hm.  Go Bob Barr, regardless.

Dope addiction and the jungle rhythm of Rock ‘n’ Roll combine to complete the demoralization of many a modern teenager and destroy all racial self-respect.

The American Mercury.  ‘Twas a fascinating little right-wing magazine.  It had its points, actually.  HJ Mencken is a celebrated wit, remembered for his harbingers against William Jennings Bryan.   But the 1930s brought with it a heck of a panic, as the nation demanded government intervention and their brand of conservativism faded out of style — entertaining and interesting to stick around.

Post-war, came this dire threat of Communism within and without, and the magazine was something along the lines of Reader’s Digest.

Shortly before a conviction, for employing a minor to transport marijuana, took Gene-Krupa temporarily out of circulation, he was shown by Time magazine of April 28, 1941,taking part in an experiment that the American Museum of Natural History called a lecture and demonstration on “The Origins of Primitive Rhythms.”  Quoting Time:  “Crouching like a witch doctor over a clattery battery of traps, perspiring floppy-haired Gene Krupa beat out African War dances and eight-to-the-bar boogie woogie bumps … Lecturer Krupa’s workout underlined a well-known point:  that jazz stems from Africa, via the Southern Negro.  Drummer Krupa played records of drum work by the Royal Watusi … He banged on signal drums, war drums, dance drums.  He showed how his own famed Blue Rhythm Fantasy (scored for fourteen percussion instruments) is based on Bahusu chants and dances…”  Confidential Magazine of September 1954, carried an article titled “They Pay Off With Death”:

“Many of the hepcats of jazz are demanding dope instead of dough for blowing their blue notes.  Here’s how they’re getting paid — by hypodermic …” 

The hep-cats are paid off with drugs.  Who influence the culture with…

Evidence of the systematic lowering of literary, dramatic, artistic, and musical standards stare you in the face on all sides.  It is obviously a major item in the brain-washing technique necessary to clinching the power of the International Welfare State.

I don’t know why the magazine would use the term “International Welfare State” when it clearly means “International Communism”.  This is November 1958, by the way.

That the sinister program of racial intermixture could advance so far without noticeably arousing the wrath of American parents will forever remain a mystery.  Probably much of the blame rests on the annual “Brotherhood” farce.  Initiated in 1934 as “Brotherhood Day” and becoming a full week’s observance in 1940, “Brotherhood Week” — under the nominal sponsorship of the National Conference of Christians and Jews — has become a nationwide Hollywood show that plays up anything and everything but true brotherhood based upon fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

So the conspiracy of Love and Brotherhood continues to this day.

A bit of a post-script:

I listened to some of your friend and mine, Michael Savage, on the radio trotting out a piece of writing from Booker T Washington — asking us all to move on and attacking those negroes who continue on with their grievances, and the race hustlers who make a career out of negro anger.  (To paraphrase, contemporanious terms used regarding Booker T Washington.)

I sort of view these shots from Booker T Washington as being attacks on WEB Du Bois, but that is as much an over simplification and a personification of various strains of argument we have had for all of our nation’s history.  The problem with Washington’s line of thought, of course, is that at this time attitudes toward blacks from the white populace was actually moving backward, which makes Washington’s demand to acknowledge improvements for black Americans a little queasy.

In this context, WEB Du Bois radicalized, his anger sharpening, and he lost much goodwill he previously had toward Booker T Washington.  Just around the corner, Marcus Garvey would walk into the picture, founding the organization now lead by Louis Farrahkhan, and challenge Du Bois from a completely different perspective.  Surely there are antecedents to Garvey’s Black Nationalism (even within the popular nineteenth century idea that the solution to the “Peculiar Institution” was to ship all the slaves back to Africa), but this is roughly the spiritual grandfather of your Jeremiah Wright.

So the voice of Michael Savage cried out that this was 40 years after the Civil War, and still nothing has changed a century later.  He ends the monolouge by suggesting that Booker T Washington is a man not known in the black community, which is a lie — and how many elementary schools in predominantly and historically black areas are named after Washington? — or at least an untruth.  He is widely dismissed as something of an “Uncle Tom”, and that tends to be how he is slotted in our Universities.  I respect that train of thought, though quite confidentally have a high regard for the man, limitations allowed — inbedded in cringing as the most right wing of prominent right wing talk show hosts find him desirable as an example.  He will pop up in Black politicians’ lists of historical heroes, which can be viewed as either a cynical message that they are the “Right Type of African American” and won’t suddenly demand reparations, but then I give your Condelleza Rices more credit — a conservative black will find a great deal to recommend out of a conservative black leader, and pull yourself up by the boot-straps even as everyone is pushing your face down toward your boot-straps.

So everyone’s talking about Mitt Romney’s “Mormon Speech”, wherein he made that asinine comment “Religion requires freedom.  Freedom requires Religion”, and went on about the Great Secular Threat, for the benefit of all those Republican primary voters who are edging over to Mike Huckabee these days.

So we have had all this great spiel comparing Mitt Romney’s speech with The Catholic Speech of a previous candidate who had been dogged about his Catholicism.  I am, of course, referring to…

Alfred Smith in 1928.

So the question is: how did Mitt Romney’s speech measure up to Alfred Smith’s speech?  I guess you just have to surf through the bloviating pundits to assemble your opinion.

Leafing through the published diary of Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice-president most famous for running a third party presidential bid as a Communist dupe…

… Wallace is an interesting figure in American history.  I get the feeling that the anger and animosity he garnered from conservative (Southern) Democrats in the first half of the 1940s was the overt display of sublimated disapproval they had over FDR and the New Deal, unexpressable directly due to political and personality reasons.  But, as I can figure it, the first vice president of John Garner was in place to assuage conservative Democrats that Roosevelt wasn’t going to dip too far to the left, Wallace ended up assuring liberals Roosevelt wasn’t going to head too far to the right at a time he was moving rightward.  Wallace’s disposal as vice-president can be seen as one in a series of the fracturing of the Democratic Party as the party assuaged the separation of the South as the bulwark of the party, to an extent continuing to this day where the political consensus has been a Democratic presidential candidate needs to somehow steal a state south of the Mason-Dixie line.

Anyways, catching me off-guard was a reference to Wallace keeping Franklin Roosevelt abreast of political events in Texas, as concerning the political fortune of one Coke Stevenson to the governship.  A footnote leads me to the odd explanation that Stevenson was considered from the liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, thus favored by the national party.

Having read Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the second volume with concerns to the 1948 Senate campaign, “liberal” is a description that is hard to conture.  Coke Stevenson appealed to Texas’s mythological conception of itself, an austere frontiersman, the rugged individual who got by on grit and self-determination.  Stevenson was described as uneasy about FDR’s “New Deal” expansions of government, considering them hopefully a begrudging stop-gap measure.  His view on the proper role of governance were as rigidly narrow as one can get, just short of Ron Paul’s.  Perhaps there is a bit of sour grapes working here, a shot toward Lyndon Johnson — who famously stole the Senate election from him — but in 1964 when asked, Coke Stevenson said he was for Goldwater, and had been waiting forever for the country to turn rightward.  Nonetheless, for the purposes of national Democratic Party politics in the first half of the 1940, Stevenson was fit for the label “Liberal”.  Such is the peculiar case of how politics aligns and realigns itself, and how individuals fit into the scheme of these things as political contures and issues shift about — sometimes dramatically.  See also the travels of Lyndon Johnson, who was the national candidate against Stevenson and an assertment of control for Truman against Strom Thurmond in the South, then the Dixie-granted Majority Leader of the Senate, then the Civil Rights politician with his “Great Society”.  Or the travels of Harry Truman.  Or, for that matter, figure out how much Henry Wallace moved versus how much the country moved in putting him out of the pale of the national political discourse.

From <a href=”http://www.davidpietrusza.com/1920.html”>1920: The Year of Six Presidents</a>  (a book I’m having difficulty sticking on the sidebar for some strange reason),  culled from pages 386 - 396:

In July 1917, Rhode Island Governor Livingston Beekman provided Josephus Daniels with a letter from Providence Journal publisher John R Rathom, alleging serious problems.  “The situation inNewport is about as bad as can be,” the rotund, Australian-born Rathom wrote.  “These places have been recognized by the police for years; they have been allowed to operate without any hinderance whatever, and orgies of the most disgraceful character have been carried on for the benefit of sailors, and frequently witnessed by police officers themselves as spectators.”  Not all the prostitutes were women.  And not all the homosexual sex was paid for.  In early 1919, Lieutenant Erastus Mead Hudson of the Medical Corps, a Harvard graduate, was assigned to look into not only homosexual prostitution at Newport but also ordinary consensual homosexual laisons.
[…]
Because civilians were involved, local naval authorities thought the Department of Justice should investigate.  Accordingly, on March 22, 1919, FDR wrote to Attorney General Palmer:

The Navy Department has become convinced that such conditions of vice and depravity exist … as to require a most searching and rigid investigation with a view to finally prosecuting and clearing out those responsible for it… “fostering dens where perverted practices were carried on.” … This department, eager for the protection of its young men from such contaminating influences, desires to have the horrible practices stopped.

While Roosevelt, Palmer, and the court of inquiry dithered, Newport’s naval personnel took action — ill-advised, stupid action, true, but action nonetheless.  In February 1919, forty-four year-old Chief Seaman’s Mate Ervin Arnold arrived from San Francisco.  The rough-hewn, poorly educated former Connecticut detective possessed a keen interest, verging on obsession, in investigating homosexuals, boasting that he could ”Tell them a mile off.”  At Newport, Arnold would investigate both homosexual prostitution and purely consensual sex.

On March 15, 1919, Arnold, with Lieutenant Hudson’s backing, recruited thirteen newly enlisted sailors to entrap homosexuals.  “You people will be on the field of operation,” Arnold instructed them.  “You will have to use your judgement whether or not a full act is completed.  If that being the fact, it might lead into something greater.  You have got to form that judgement at the time you are on that field with that party.”
………
In April 191, the Hudson - Arnold operation arrested eighteen offending sailors.  […]

On May 1, Hudson, Arnold, and FDR conferred.  Hudson and Arnold later claimed that they discussed the situation at length; FDR claimed that they spoke for five minutes, without discussing how to proceed.  Whatever transpired, four days later Roosevelt assigned Hudson and Arnold to Naval Intelligence to investigate “moral perversion and drugs” at Newport.  “It is requested,” FDR wrote to Chief of Naval Intelligence Rear Admiral Albert P Niblack, “That this be the only written communication in regard to this affair, as it is thought wise to keep this matter wholly secret.”

To Hudson, FDR also provided a letter addressed to “Whom it may be Concerned” stating that the lieutenant was “engaged on important work in which I am interested and any assistance you can render him will be appreciated.”

[…]
Hudson and Arnold recruited forty-one sailors — ten of whom were mere boys between sixteen and nineteen — and ordered them to entrap homosexuals by whatever means necessary.  In July 1919, they netted sixteen Newport civilians, including the forty-six year old Episcopal chaplain of the Naval Hospital, Samuel Neal Kent, arrested as “a lewd and wanton person.”

Reverend Kent boasted excellent education and reputation.  His arrest outraged his fellow Episcopal clergy.  At Kent’s August 23 trial — and acquittal — two sailors testified that they had been authorized to go “to the limit” to obtain arrests.  The notion outraged just about everyone who heard of it.

On September 3, […] complained bitterly over the Navy’s treatement of Kent.  Roosevelt defended Kent’s prosecution and further slammed the judge who had dismissed the charges against Kent as a political hack.  But he also vowed, “If anyone has given orders to commit immoral acts, someone will swing for it.”

[…]
On January 10, Bishop Perry and twelve clergy from five different Protestant denominations wrote President Wilson.  “It must be evident to every thoughtful mind,” they protested, “that the use of such vile methods cannot fail to undermine the character and ruin the morals of the unfortunate youths detailed for this duty, render no citizen of the community safe from suspicion and calumny, bring the city into unwarented reproach, and shake the faith of the people in the wisdom and integrity of the naval administration.”  They “solmnly request[ed]” that Wilson “at the earliest moment … eliminate from the navy all officials, however hightly placed, who are responsible for the employment of such execrable methods — contrary alike to the dictates of morality, patriotism, and religion.”
[…]

The Journal, responded to what it termed FDR’s “wild and clumsy attack” professed puzzlement:  Mr Roosevelt’s political loyalty to his  pussy-footing chief has lead him into a bog of falsehood and unfairness, where he does not belong, either by training or inclination.  Why this outburst on the eve of a senatorial investigation?  Would it not have been more politic, and certainly more just, to have waited in an orderly fashion for the evidence, without this preliminary shriek of alarm?  Or is it because Administration officials have come to consider themselves so immune from criticism that they think all they have to do in their own defense is to shout “Liar.”

On January 22, Rathom telegraphed FDR, alluding to FDR’s personal involvement:

Many boys wearing the uniform of the United States Navy have been forced into the position of moral perverts by specific orders of officers in the Navy Department, and these conditions were known to the Secretary of the Navy and yourself months ago.

On January 22, however, FDR caught a break, when the skittish Ball Subcommittee voted to conduct hearings in secret.  The Dunn Inquiry, meanwhile, opened proceedings in late January.  It was a classic case of military cover-up.

An old man (relatively recently deceased) I conversed with somewhat over the Internet once suggested that he has argued with black Americans that they oughta all hang one giant picture of Lyndon Johnson in their houses for all he did for them, in doing the legislative legwork that brought about the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1965. I found it a somewhat patronizing statement, but at the same time it sort of raised for me the question of how one relates to the cynical and duplicitious politicos and the incorrigible system they can’t help but promote by being a part of — indeed, an integral cog in the machinery.

I placed this book on a half revamped sidebar book link. (Have to change those things every so often.) It is an important book, and offers much by way of our nation’s political history. Several months ago I did read a blogger, I believe at the washington monthly blog, rail against it saying he’s tried to read it, and asking who the heck could actually read this — as it runs into the minutiae of the Senate at the mid-point of the last century. Maybe it might be a little dry, but there is no other way. But feel free to skip the first thousand pages or so and go to the final 400 pages, which is the most important — how Johnson manuevered a civil rights act through the Senate in 1957.

Understand, Lyndon Johnson came to the position of Senate Majority Leader by toadying up to the Southern Dixiecrats. Senator Russel, the baron of the Southern Caucus, ended with the goal of making Johnson president, to redeem the Southland. Hence, his allowance for Johnson to pass a civil rights act. So long as it didn’t mean anything.

So Lyndon Johnson thread the needle very finely in pushing a civil rights act with the tacit approval of the 22 Filibuster and delay obstructionist happy Southern Caucus. (The two Senators from Tennessee — Gore and Kefauver — broke the mold.)

But, by way of showing the cynicism and duplicity of Lyndon Johnson, it is important to note that he set up the system that forced the very fine needling, from the review in The Nation of this book:

Johnson’s first maneuver was to help defeat an effort by Republicans and liberal Democrats to rewrite Senate Rule 22 in order to short-circuit the expected Southern filibuster. At the opening of the 1957 session, pro-civil rights senators sought a ruling from Vice President Richard Nixon, acting in his capacity as the Senate’s presiding officer, that the Senate was not a continuing body and therefore was not bound by previous rules. That would mean that a majority of senators could establish a new rule allowing debate to be shut off with only a simple majority, not the usual and nearly unobtainable sixty-four votes. Indeed, Nixon, hoping to swing black votes to the GOP, would have issued such a decision. But before he could do so, Johnson used his prerogative as majority leader to move to table the proposed rules change. Using all the skill and power he had amassed as majority leader, Johnson managed to get a majority for his motion. But it was a 55-38 tally. If only seven votes had gone the other way (the three absentees having announced against Johnson’s motion), the motion would have lost, Nixon would have issued his decision, the filibuster would have been broken and an effective civil rights bill would have been passed in 1957, not 1964.

And with that cynical manuever, the Democrats became party of civil rights. And held onto the South for another handful of years. Interestingly enough, the 1958 midterm elections — where the Democrats triumphed with corruption in the Eisenhower administration and a severe recession — swamped norther Democrats into the two branches of Congress, which is sort of where the Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn quote on not wanting so many Democrats elected because it’s harder to control them comes into play — Johnson (or any future Senate majority leader) could no longer play the facilitator between the Dixiecrat Segregationists and the civil-rights oriented northern Democrats as easily, out of necessity for party.

… all of which is a sort of “I wish I had this down in my online discussions with elderly male” thing to suggest that, no, no, no giant portrait of LBJ is required in the homes of black Americans.

Former President Bill Clinton has sharply criticized the Republican presidential frontrunners for snubbing an African-American voter forum this week.

“This says more about the evolution of the Republican party than anything,” Clinton told Tavis Smiley on his Public Radio International show, which will air this Friday. “Keep in mind that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House. And after Theodore Roosevelt, the parties began to switch places.”

It is interesting to look back and see how black Americans and civil rights figured into the two political parties through the ages, and here we ask the question of how we have come to the post-Civil War point where the vast majority of black Americans, or those who were not disenfranchised via Jim Crowe, voted for the Republican party to the point where the vast majority vote for the Democratic Party.  I am tempted to list the diverging point, on the national level — aka the election of presidents– as the 1924 election.

The problem with Bill Clinton’s statement on “parties began to switch places” is that rolling into the 1912 election, various black leaders (W E B DuBois) getting a little angry at the diminishing level of return in supporting the Republicans — and DuBois generally thinking that Booker T Washington was making himself a patronage king within that party and not advancing anything– gambled by endorsing Woodrow Wilson.  Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was probably the low point in terms of civil rights in the post-Civil War.  Rolling into the 1920 election, the Democratic candidate — desparate– degenerated into a lot of race-baiting.  So, on that score, we can count out a 12 year interugum between Theodore Roosevelt and 1924’s John Davis (and a strange convention debate over the KKK) as the shaking of the two parties in terms of the black vote — where the interests of the black vote collided with the interests of the traditional democratic admittedly machine-controlled urban immigrant (Catholic) vote.  Followed by another intergum of 40 years, up to 1964 and the Voting Rights Act and Barry Goldwater — within which the Democrats slid forward and backward in advancing civil rights.