An odd element of the manners of Black History Month which I thought I’d get to after that month ended.  We meet up with some of the great Black Political Activists in American History.  Frederick Douglas, even Booker T Washington, W E B Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.  People who have read books you need to read.
But you know what?  Let’s give up to the Political Hacks!  Vilified in the most hypocritical of matters through the first half of the last century, called “venal” and “corrupt”, and “locusts”, they are responsible for the nomination and presidency of William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover.  They functioned as any political party whose voting base had been systematically kicked off the voting rolls would.

A quick note from a book from Sarah Vowell, to note that I don’t think it’s quite accurate.

McKinley and Mark Hanna, already innovators in corporate campaign contributions, were the first Republicans to actively woo white (male) southern Democrats.  (The two made a point of vacationing in Thomasville, Georgia — where Hanna’s brother Mel had bought a plantation for cheap — in 1895, where they planned the ‘96 campaign and courted local pols.)
Another milestone in the history of how the party of Lincoln became the party of, say, late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond [...] — Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation, page 201

Nay, the disruption away from the “Party of Lincoln” and to the — well, Party of James Blaine, actually — probably best is pointed at the end of the Grant Administration.  1874 mid-term elections.  The Democratic Party in the South forced into place a one party state with the instrument of the Ku Klux Klan, and the North quit caring.

A funny thing about this wikipedia article on “lily-whites“.  There is no “Black and Tans” article, sequestered into the disambiguation page.

Black and Tans, a faction within the Republican Party (U.S. political party) based in the Southern United States and comprised primarily of African-Americans generally dependent upon the national party for patronage appointments from Reconstruction and continuing into the 1950s.[citation needed] The Black and Tans provided the only significant opposition to the white Democratic Party of the so-called Solid South.

The Republican nominees picked up whoever would give them the votes.  The factions veered into the Republican Convention every four years moving into floor debate for who gets to be seated.  Mark Hanna started the trend of selecting whichever delegation selection would give them the votes.

At the 1916 convention, the last one before state delegations were reapportioned on the basis of the number of votes cast in the last election, “Southern delegates occupied 348 of 987 seats, or 36.3 per cent of the total number of delegates.”  This had been generally the case since 1876, the last year that Southern States gaave any electoral votes to a Republican Presidential candidate.  Possessing one-third of the delegates in almost all conventions until 1916, the Lily-white and Black and Tan factions thus became crucial to any Presidential aspirant.
Even after 196, when the national convention moved to reduce southern representation because of its lack of vote-getting power, southern delegations still comprised nearly one-fifth of each successive national convention.

Such is the existence of a political party when organized terrorism disenfranchises its voting electorate.

“Many of the parting scenes,” states John Lynch, a Black politician in Mississippi during Reconstruction, “that took place between the colored men and the whites who decided to return to the fold were both affecting and pathetic in the extreme.”

Describing one such parting, Lynch says that the Black president of a local Republican club, Sam Henry, was urging a white ex-confederate Colonel James Lusk to stay within the party ranks for the benefit of all.:
“Oh!  No, Colonel,” Henry cried.  “I beg of you do not leave us.  If you leave us, hundreds of others in your immediate neighborhood will follow your lead.  We will thus be left without solid and substantial friends.  I admit that with you party affiliation is optional, with me it is different.  I must remain a Republican whether I want to or not.  I plead with you, don’t go.”
“The statement you made, Henry, that party affiliation with me is optional,” the Colonel answered, “is presumed to be true; but in point of act it is not.  No white man can live in the South in the future and act with any other than the Democratic Party unless he is willing to live a life of social isolation and remain in political oblivion. … Besides, I have two grown sons.  There is, no doubt, a bright, brilliant, and successful future before them if they are Democrats; otherwise, not.  If I remain in the Republican Party — which can hereafter exist in the South only in name — I will thereby retard, if not more, and possibly destroy their future.”
[John R Lynch The Facts of Reconstruction]

The wikipedia missive might have been off.

134 – 135  In 1928 Presidential hopeful Hebert Hoover used Black and Tan factions in various southern states to secure his nomination.  After obtaining the nomination, he then “created, under the chairmanship of separate campaign committee “to drum up the white southern vote independently of the regular Black and Tan state organizations.”  After his inauguration, Hoover praised the existing lily-white Republican organizations in the South and announced his full support for them.  He removed such Black and Tan leaders as Ben Davis of Georgia, William (Goose Neck Bill) McDonald in Texas and Walter L. Cohen in Louisiana, turning their top state party positions over to whites.  He also launched an investigation of Perry Howard, the head of the Mississippi Black and Tans, and Howard was subsequently removed from his position and shorn of party power under charges of bribery and sale of federal offices.

[...] White Democrats in Mississippi came to Howard’s aid and testified in his behalf.  The chief justice and associate justice and the clerk of the state Supreme Court, some of the major newspapers in the South wrote editorials and numerous Democratic politicians wrote glowing letters and made speeches in his behalf.  The basic reason for this support was that federal jobs obtained by Howard as patronage (or any other Black and Tan Leader) were often sold to White Democrats.  Blacks could not hold positions like third and fourth class postmasterships in the South, so such positions and other jobs which could only be held by whites were sold to them by Black Republicans.  There were never enough “White Republicans” to go around for all the available federal jobs in the South so they went to the Democrats.  Hence, the gratitude and support for Howard.

WE Du Bois made the point that Perry Howard did just about the same thing, and played the same function, that the Lily White function Herbert Hoover was now favoring had been doing.  Yet, the fight went on after Hoover won several southern states against his Catholic opponent.

Sadly, here is wikipedia’s stubby article on Perry Howard.  The paucity of information isn’t the problem.  The problem is it’s not linked up to the other Patronage Kings that were the Republican Party of the South, such as “Tireless Joe Tolbert” of South Carolina.  Excerpts from Black Republicans: the Politics of the Black and Tans, Hanes Walton, Jr…. 1975.

However, in 1900, a white man, Joseph W Tolbert (nicknamed Tireless Joe or Fighting Joe– because he was a delegate or a contestant for a seat at every Republican national convention from 1900 to 1944) rebuilt the Republican Party in the state, organizing it into a unit which “consisted of himself, a few other whites, and several hand-picked negroes over the state”.  The purpose of the Tolbert organization was to choose delegates to the national convention and to distribute patronage to its members, particularly to Tolbert.  Tolbert added several blacks to ensure his group a seat at the national Republican Convention — racial composition was a major argument at credentials hearings and a mixed delegation usually fared better than a Lily-White one/ [...]

Tolbert’s Black and Tan Republicans didn’t go unchallenged.  Another white South Carolinian, seeing the befits accruing to Tolbert’s Black and Tans and understanding that occasionally the national convention seated lily white delegations, organized such a group for his own enrichment.  This man, Joe Hambright of Rock Hill, in October 1930 organized his Republican group along the lines similar to Tolbert’s with only one exception — Hambright excluded Blacks.  Hambright’s Lily – Whites, like Tolbert’s Black and Tans, made no effort to attract supporters or participate in state politics.  They only challenged the Black and Tans at the national convention.

The efforts of Tireless Joe and Hambright made the South Carolina Republican Party a national joke and in 1938, J Bates Gerald, a wealthy lumberman, formed another Republican group to challenge the old Black and Tan and Lily White Groups.  Gerald, understanding the importance of delegation composition, got three white “approved” blacks, all from the middle class, to dispose of Tolbert’s main argument at the national convention — that of racial composition.  Moreover, while Tolbert’s Blacks were handpicked and considered safe and loyal to him, the Gerald – led Republicans selected their blacks to a convention or executive convention fashion.  This strengthened their case and in 1940 [...]

Beat Tolbert, 12 years later kicked out the blacks.

No incident of this session so well illustrates the partisan bitterness and the venomous nature of the hates engendered by the struggles of the preceding years as the attempt on the life of Jackson at the Capitol on January 30, 1835.  Under normal conditions and in ordinary times the incident would have been dismissed, and, properly, ascribed to the insanity of the assailant.  But it was the first time an attempt had been made upon the life of a President — and it was a President who had been intermperately denounced as a tyrant, despot and wrecker of American institutions and liberties.  Just as John Tyler had instantly thought of “political effect,” the ardent friends of Jackson caught the same idea from the opposite angle.  And two days later, Frank Blair in the “Globe” threw out the suggestion of a conspiracy.  “Whether Lawrence [the assailant] has caught, in his visits to the Capitol, the mania which has prevailed the last two sessions of the Senate,” he wrote, “whether he has become infatuated with the chimeras which have troubled the brains of the disappointed and ambitious orators who have depicted the President as a Caesar who ought to have a Brutus; as a Cromwell, a Nero, a Tiberius, we know not.  If no secret conspiracy has prompted the perpetration of the horrid deed, we think it not improbable that some delusion of intellect has grown out of his visits to the Capitol, and that hearing despotism and every horrible mischief threatened to the Republic, and revolution and all its train of calamities imputed as the necessary consequence of the President’s measures, it may be that the infatuated man fancied that he had reason to become his country’s avenger.  If he had heard and believed Mr. Calhourn’s speech of day before yesterday, he would have found in it ample justification for his attempt on one who was represented as the cause of the most dreadful calamities of the Nation; as one who made perfect rottonness and corruption to pervade the vitals of the Government, insomuch that it was scarcely worth preserving, it it were possible.”

The intimation here thrown out was bitterly resented by the Opposition leaders, and particularly Calhourn, who was mentioned.  The very fact that the intemperate and insincere denunciations of high officials as responsible for the distress of the people, acting upon the diseased brain, can very easily persuade the madman to constitute himself the executioner, served to infuriate the orators who had given themselves full play.  Stung to the quick, Calhourn denounced the “Globe” as “base and prostitute” and described it as “the authentic and established organ” of Jackson, “sustained by his power and pampered by his hands.”  “To what was are we coming?” he exclaimed.  “We are told that to denounce the abuse of the Administration even in general terms, without personal reference, is to instigate the assassination of the Chief Executive. . . . I have made up my mind as to my duty.  I am no candidate for any office — I neither seek nor desire place — nothing shall intimidate — nothing shall prevent me from doing what I believe is due to my conscience and my country.”  Mr. Calhourn sat down — and Mr. Leigh immediately rose to present a report from the Committee on Revolutionary Claims.

But Mr. Calhourn’s attack on the “Globe” was not unnoticed by Blair, who replied by quoting from the most venomous portions of Calhourn’s and Preston’s tirades on the Post-Office report.  A week later the Administration organ was still harping on conspiracy.  “Every hour,” wrote Blair, “brings new proof to show that Lawrence has been operated on to seek the President’s life, precisely as we had supposed from the moment we learned that he had been an attenant on the debates in Congress.”

Very soon the capital was startled with the connection of Senator Poindexter’s name with that of the assailant.  The obsession took possession of Jackson that his Mississippi enemy had instigated the attempt at assassination.  The examination of Lawrence had clearly established his insanity; just as clearly shown that he had taken to heart the charges of Jackson’s enemies that he was responsible for the distress of the people.  Finding himself hard pressed by fate , and ascribing his unhappiness to the tyranny of Jackson, he had determined to kill him.  That explanation was convincing and sufficient.  But the suggestion that Poindexter had planned the deed fell on receptive soil.  Affadivits had been placed in Jackson’s hands to the effect that “a gentleman who boarded in the same house informed him that Mr. Poindexter had interviews with Lawrence but a few days before the attempt on the President’s life.”  Some time before the attack, “a captain in high standing in the navy” had said that Poindexter, on a voyage to New Orleans, had threatened
(etc etc)

The Party Battles of the Jackson Period
Claude Bowers, 1922
pages 376 – 379

In 1937, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader — Joseph Robinson — passed away, opening up a contest to fill that spot between Alben Barkley and Pat Harrison.  Barkley won by a vote of 38 to 37 — Roosevelt favoring the more reliable Barkley, playing a two-faced game of “impartiality” in the manner but offering the key assistance.  Everyone immediately posed for “Party Unity” photographs, shaking hands, praises all around, publicized conferences.

And Pat Harrison used the opportunity to separate himself more fully from the president.  The anti-New Deal Democrat nucleus for the Senate that consisted of Joshiah Bailey, Millard Tydings, Carter Glass, and Harry Byrd expanded as Roosevelt’s Court Fight went under way.  When Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts bowed to political pressures and switched his judicial decisions from conservative to liberal — a bullwark of opposition that some skeptical Conservative (largely Dixiecrat) Democrats had leaned on to serve as a line of Obstructionism they would not have to force themselves – served to move them further afield — during the War period, opposing every Domestic policy of the Roosevelt administration en masse.

 How this plays in terms of modern day politics and the sudden comparisons to needing act like Roosevelt, I can’t say.  Perhaps there is a “Use It or Lose It” lesson for Obama, or rather a ”Watch your back”.  Or perhaps there is a lesson there in getting around devolved and artificial political procedural norms.  But when dis-sembling Roosevelt,…

This is Garfield’s congregation.  Which puts into perspective Garfield’s diary excerpt the week before calling a sermon “a very stupid sermon on a very great subject”.

He who studies the movement of American society cannot fail to see that we are under a reign of selfishness in striking contrast to 40 years ago.  As one newspaper said this morning, office-seeking, office-hunting, and looking after spoils have become the main object of life.  Each man is trying his best to crowd the others out.  We are having disgraceful political fights, and we may expect to see these scenes intensified.  Money, money is the craze all over the land; get money, no matter how, is the popular cry.  Why?  Because pleasure is the chief end of man.  Such is the tone of American society today, and it grieves me to say it.  Its apostles are lionized.  The men who are stabbing American morals and constitutional government to the vitals are held up as emamples to follow and admire.  I say to you that the President’s assassination is directly chargeable to this philosophy of good living that is pervading the minds of the public today, and assassinations will be multiplied unless we call a halt.  I predict that in less than 25 years, if matters go as they are going, we will have the Roman Arena in this country, and I do not think it improbable that gladiatorial combat will be restored.

– Rev. M. Harbison, visiting for Rev Power, Church of Disciples

……………..

Our much boasted universal suffrage, our power and our shield, as in our enthusiasm we are want to term it, is not without its drawbacks, not without its dangers to our Nation.  I believe in popular suffrage to the full; but in the name of intelligence and virtue and common honesty, not say decency, I am against the system that places unrestricted power in the hands of the paupers and criminals whom Europe is pouring upon our shores by tens of thousands.
– Reverend Dr. JP Newman

……………….
Philadelphia Press
We have not yet become so Mexicanized that assassination is employed as a political weapon.  This crime, which plunges a whole Nation into sorrow, is the deed of one maddened fanatic, crzed it may be, by political excitement and wrought into a morbid state by imaginary wrongs, but representing nothing but his own insanity.
…………………
Pastors through, some more news items.
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Washington Star
Laying aside its effects upon the incumbent of that high place and those immediately connected with him, and without attaching much importance to the character or purpose of the murderer, the fat that two Presidents have fallen by the bullet of an assassin, raises the question whether the simple surroundings and quiet modes of life heretofor adopted by our Presidents are consistent with the genious of our institutions and becoming to the head of a Republican form of government are, after all, wise and sufficiently safe.  If the Chief Executive of the Nation is to be a target for the bullet of lunatics, disappointed aspirants for office, or political malcontents, it will be necessary to surround the office and its incumbent by more formal and efficient means of protection than have yet been devised or thought necessary.
…………………………………..

And you got to love the British Tories!

London Standard
It would almost seem as if a wave of revolutionary ruffianism is passing over the world.  We are not alone in suffering from its violence.  It is not England only, nor yet only Russia, only Germany, only Italy, that feels the shock.  The American Republic itself has just experienced its malevolence in a peculiarly painful manner.  It matters not whether the assassin of President Garfield had or had not associates in his hateful enterprise.  His act was revolutionary, was ruffianly, and was stamped with that vicious character of personal vengeance which marks all the attempts of the party of disorder.  They do not even aim at a rough sort of justice.  All they seek to do is to kill somebody or other, to alarm a great number of persons, and to disconnect society.  They seek to establish a reign of terror by spasmodic explosions, by irregularly recurring strokes of the dagger, by all and every of the fitful expedients of vague and general vengeance.  The American people are much too shrewd to be the dupes of the blatant adventurers who seek to raise a skirmishing fund to put an end to the tyranny of Great Britain.  They know thoroughly well that if England is suffering from any disease or any cause whatever, it is not from too little liberty, but from too much; not from the cankor of tyrnny, but from the enfeeblement of that just authority and those legitimate restraints, without the cooperation of which society never yet was held together.  Knowing this, and reflecting upon it, they will hardly refrain from drawing the conclusion that what is our case today may be theirs tomorrow.

Bear with me.  There will be at least two more posts of this type.  Relating to the news coverage and debate surrounding the assassination of James Garfield, from July of 1881… on a couple months.  Why?  It seems to provide provides some tangeantal historical context for current debate surrounding political violence, and the problems of where to place blame and what to fault.  The debate seems to reverberate and rhyme.

Next post for this mini-series, when I get around to it.: a couple of preachers.  Fall of Rome and all that, unless we change our wicked ways.
New York Tribune
A second president lies stricken down by assassination.  President Lincoln was murdered, not by rebellion, but by the spirit which gave the rebellion its force.  President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which a political faction has begotten and used.  But for that spirit, there was hardly a man in this country who seemed at sunrise more safe from murderous assault. [...]
“Was he crazed by political excitement?,” then, as many say?  At what point, if ever, did the madness of faction become the madness of irresponsibility?  Do the leaders of factions ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed, and stimulate week after week?  Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or reckless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? [...]
As a “Stalwart of Stalwarts” his passion was intense enough to do the thing other reckless men had wished were done.  So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels.  His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion.  So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.
…………………….

Richmond Dispatch
Well is it for the man who sped the bullet of the assassination that he did not do it in a Southern city; for hot Southern blood would have terminated his life without waiting to learn whether he was a maniac or not — as he was, we take it for granted.
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Louisville Courier Journal
It is fortunate that the hand which dealt that blow was not that of a Southern man, because if it had been we should have from one end of the land to the other a Stalwart outcry against the South.  The author of this dire crime claims to be a Stalwart, and what is there in the character of the man in whose name and interest the deed was done and whose desperate fortunes it saves from destruction to rescue them from a suspicion which would, by a change in that author’s nativitiy, firmly attach itself to the most innocent people?  Mrs. Surratt was hanged on less circumstantial evidence than occurs to the mind as to Roscoe Conkling and Chester A Arthur.  The vile nature of the contest at Albany, the despicable rancor of the combatants, and the base methods adopted by both parties, render murder as likely a weapon as any other; and while we should be slow to accuse anybody, and prayerful that the man Guiteau is not the instrument of a conspiracy, we should not be eager to assume the innocence of a body of political wretches whose hands are stained by every other crime — not preciptate in wishing to hurry into power a hand of bandits and plunderers who may have planned this assassinatino as their last resort.

………………………………
Atlanta Constitution
The news is unquestionably startling, but no thoughtful man will deny that it is the natural and appropriate outcome of the political insanity which goes by the name of Republicanism.  Frenzy and fanaticism are the streams which have fed this remarkable organization from the first.  The fury with which the Southern people have been pursued, the stupendous fraud of 1876, the acknowledged corruption of 1880, the tremendous struggle between the factions, and the marvelous greed for office, all go to show the life of an individual, even though the individual be the Republican President of the United States, will not be allowed to stand in the way of those who are seeking place and power.  There are thousands of Republicans in the North today as insane as the “Stalwart of the Stalwarts” who shote the President, and as ready to be made tools of.  There are thousands of Republicans who would welcome a period of anarchy that would place in control of affairs the restless and revolutionary spirits who are determined at all hazards to control the Government.

Rifling through Hoover’s papers, one sometimes has the strange feeling that the President looked upon the Depression as a public relations problem — that he believed the nightmare would go away if only the image of American business could be polished up and set in the right light.  Faith was an end in itself, “lack of business confidence” was a cardinal sin.  Hoover’s first reaction to the stump which followed the crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenom.  He himself had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic” or “crisis”.  In December 1929 he declared that “conditions are fundamentally sound.”  Three months later he said the worst would be over in sixty days; at the end of May he predicted the economy would be back to normal in the autumn; in June the market broke sharply, yet he told a delegation which called to plead for a public works project “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late.  The Depression is over.”

Already his forecasts were being flung back at him by his critics, but in his December 2, 1930 message to Congress — a lame duck Republican Congress; the Democrats had just swept the off-year elections — he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”  At about the same time the International Apple Shippers Association, faced with a surplus of apples, decided to sell them on credit to jobless men for resale at a nickel each.  Overnight there were shivering apple sellers everywhere.  Asked about them, Hoover replied, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”  Reporters were caustic, and the President was stung.  By now he was beginning to show signs of the more ominous traits of embattled Presidents; as his secretary Thodore Joslin was to note in his memoirs, Hoover was beginning to regard some criticism “as unpatriotic.”  Nevertheless he persevered, pondering new ways of waging psychological warfare.  “What this country needs,” he told Chistopher Morley, “is a great poem.”  To Rudy Vallee he said in the spring of 1932, “If you can sing a song that would make people forget the Depression, I’ll give you a medal.”  Vallee didn’t get the medal.  Instead he sang [here].

[...] One source of embarassment to the Administration was the stretch of Pennsylvania Railroad track between Washington and New York.  It was lined with thousands of billboards.  Half were blank, which raised awkward questions in the minds of passengers until admirers of the President began renting them to spread the slogan “WASN’T THE DEPRESSION TERRIBLE?”  Agreeing that it had been, but that it was past, the International Association of Lions Clubs celebrated Business Confidence Week.

– William Manchester, Glory and the Dream Volume 1

Father Coughlin newsreel

Father Coughlin speaks, and is a tad scary..

News events of February 20, 1964

Ronald Reagan stumps for Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey.

Grover Cleveland: Exactly!

Charles Lindbergh and his America First speech

It has since been calculated, quite believably, that of twenty-one staff members and frequent contributors to the magazine when I was there, eleven have become “enemies of the people,” or the equivalent in party invective; one was killed in Spain, a gentle and dedicated youth named Arnold Ried; and seven couldn’t be tracked down.  Only two were still faithful, or hooked, in the postwar era.  I started to turn “enemy of the people” in my second or third month of the New Masses, for reasons I will come to in a moment, achieved the distinction of being attacked by name in the Daily Worker while still on the magazine, and was out in the bourgeois cold ten months later, in the spring of 1937. [...]

In the second or third month of my tenure the Moscow Trials Trials took their initial toll, leaving me, among millions of others, aghast and bewildered.  Unable to understand how men like Zinoviec and Kamenev, who I had just gotten around to learn were heroes of the Russian Revolution, were really “cannibals” and “mad dog assassins” in ideological disguise, I went to Joe Freeman, the editor who had hired me and a warm, sympathetic, and eloquent man if ever there was one.  I could understand, I said, how a few of the dozens of accused heroes might be “cannibals” of sorts, but I couldn’t begin to see why at least one or two of them didn’t stand up and say, “It’s a lie, I didn’t do it” even if they had, or “Yes, I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”  Why did they all grovel and damn themselves and beg to be shot as a service to the Socialist Fatherland and a boon beyond their poor deserts?”  “You have to read Dostoevsky,” Joe advised me, “to understand the Russian soul.”  So when word came from Moscow a month or so later of a second  batch of trials, at which Piatakov, Redek, and others were to be charged with operating an “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Terrorist Centre,” I impiously captioned our editorial comment “Dostevsky Rides Again,” knowing I could change it when the proof came back from the printer.

A special editorial meeting followed, at which it was made plain to me that such frivolity was roughly equivalent to tripping up a bishop at High Mass.  Nor was my status improved when I pinned up over my desk a cartoon from the Daily Worker which depicted Trotsky as the usual mad dog, with bulging eyes and dripping fangs, crounched and ready to spring at his innocent victim.  The caption over this horror merely said, “Thoroughly Discredited,” an understatement that stuck me as so droll  that I had to be warned again about the consequences of misplaced levity.
[...]

Schachtman and his supporters broke away on the Finnish question, but by this time the Trotsky followers had already suffered the numerous divisions that come inevitably to amoebas and minority political parties alike.  First a faction headed by Comrades Ohler and Stamm went its way, soon to separate again into Ohlerites and Stammites.  Somewhere along the way the immediate family of one George Marln left to become Marlenites, and a Mr. and Ms. Wisbord had a League for the Class Struggle all to themselves until divorce separated their rank from their file.  The Fieldites, another group of limited range, were said to have come a cropper when picket signs were borne past their headquarters proclaiming: “Mr. and Mrs. Field are No Longer Fieldites.”  The deadly seriousness with which all this fantasy could be taken by its dreamers was illustrated at the stormy climax of the evening, so the story goes, Cannon stepped to the rostrum, leveled a finger at his rival, and issued the memorable warning: “Very well, Comrade Schachtman, we will seize power without you!”

–  Robert Bendiner, Just Around the Corner, 97-100, published 1967

Among the perspectives that no longer belong to the establishment Right but that could once be found regularly in the American Mercury, Human Events, National Review, and other conservative publications are the following:  Woodrow Wilson and his outspokenly Anglophile Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, maneuvered us into World War I by treating the two belligerent sides unequally and excusing the British blockade, which was illegal under international law and starved German civilians.  FDR behaved recklessly in dealing with imperial Japan in 1941, and whether he willed it or not, his actions were bound to lead to a Japanese attack.  After Pearl Harbor, the US, led by such liberals as FDR and California governor Earl Warren, stripped American citizens of Japanese ancestry of their property and freedom as part of an attempt to frighten Americans into submission to the central government.  (Significantly, Robert Taft was the sole Senate vote against Internment.)  The Nuremberg trials were an example of victor’s justice that had no legal basis outside of the will of the antifascist winners, including Stalin.  Moreover, World War II could have ended without insisting on “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers; dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese was unnecessary for bringing about a just peace.

– “Victor’s History:  Neocons Have Air-Brushed the Old Right Out of Our Past”, by author I’ll dig up in a minute, in the previous American, the one with the cover-story concerning Chas Freedom.

Notable is that the left-wing explanation for the imprisonment of Japanese – Americans was that it was a property grab.  Beyond that, there’s a lot there that a “Conservative Movement” (whatever that is) should be glad to have thrown overboard.

The article goes on to flow sand at Martin Luther King, Jr. and praise Jesse Helms.

When the co-chair of a White House conference, “To Fulfill These Rights,” scheduled for June 1966, asked him what kind of session he wanted, the president replied:  “In the hill country in the spring, the sun comes up earlier, and the ground gets warmer, and you can see the steam rising and the sap dripping.  And in his pen, you can see my prize bull.  He’s the biggest, best-hung bull in the hill country.  In the spring he gets a hankering for those cows, and he starts pawing the ground and getting restless.  So I open the pen and he goes down the hill, looking for a cow, with his pecker hanging hard and swinging.  Those cows get so Goddamn excited, they get more and more moist to receive him, and their asses just start quivering and they start quivering all over, every one of them is quivering, as that bull struts into their pasture.”  As his distinguished visitors gaped at him in stunned silence, Johnson smacked his hands together noisily, then continued.  “Well, I want a quivering conference.  That’s the kind of conference I want.  I want every damn delegate quivering with excitement and anticipation about the future of civil rights.”

– The White House Looks South, William E Leuchtenburg 2005, page 336