Reconstruction, Religion, and Civil Rights

One of my favorite friends from college is Dave.

Over the last almost 30 years since graduation, we’ve remained in touch. At first, it was a phone call or two every year, but with the invention of email (thank you Al Gore!) we’ve managed to become quasi-regular correspondents. I’m a terrible correspondent, usually. I’m guilty of holding an email intending to respond, forgetting about it, then shooting off one or two sentences to cure my egregious default. I don’t tend to do this with Dave. Oh, there’s the one or two-sentence responses, but they tend to be sent pretty promptly – well, promptly for me, anyhow.

No, Dave’s emails provoke long-winded responses from me. Dave and I have never claimed to be politically compatible, but our discussions usually turn up much more areas of agreement than disagreement. See, Dave’s a self-described conservative. Not a Tea Party conservative, absolutely not. Dave’s got two post-graduate degrees – an engineering degree from Dartmouth and an MBA from UVA, so no one has ever accused him of not being a thoughtful, extremely intelligent guy. Well, maybe someone did when we were undergrads together at Colgate, but that only happened because they were drunk.

Dave’s emails have inspired more than one of my blog posts. Today’s is yet another.

Dave wrote me earlier this week, saying,

Thought provoking:

1.      Are the people opposed to same-gender marriage equally opposed to opposite-gender marriages where there is no sex and hence no chance of procreation?

2.      What will same-gender marriage advocates protest for if full marriage rights are granted?  My guess is clean air and water, safer roads, better schools …  Or maybe they won’t protest at all and instead will just get on with their lives like most “normal” people.

‘Tis a silly question, I thought in my best Monty Python accent. Opposition to same-sex marriage tends to be based on religion, not on procreation. And don’t “normal” people get concerned about inequities of our government and culture? So I responded,

1. Depending on their reason for objecting to same-sex marriage, maybe.
2. The world won’t be fixed when this one unfairness is resolved. We have lots more to protest. Equal rights for women (the ERA in Arkansas can’t seem to make it out of committee). Equal rights for minorities. Freedom from religion-based laws that restrict freedom of conscience. Access to safe, effective sex education and birth control, including safe abortions. Life and health for kids whose parents would restrict their access to proven and effective medical treatment in the name of religion or pseudoscience. Eradication of preventable disease. Vaccination. Food for the hungry. Replacing dictatorships like North Korea’s and North Dakota’s. A stop to corporate abuses of campaign finance laws. A stop to the corporate abuses of the people who buy their products. Clean air. Clean water. Safer roads. Better schools. Alternative fuels. Safer communities. Rehabilitation of criminals. Job training for criminals. Job training for young people who choose not to continue their traditional educations. Preservation of rain forests. Preservation of threatened and engendered species of plants and animals. Funding of scientific research. Funding of medical research. Space exploration. More charitable giving. Rehabilitation of drug abusers. A stop to unnecessary regulation of anything. Complete nuclear disarmament. An unbiased news media. Free healthcare. Free Tibet.

Need I continue?

Dave wasn’t about to let me off so easily.

1.  Some people just object.
2.  I think that was the point. Move on to other issues. And the people opposed to same-gender marriage won’t have to hear about it anymore. Maybe the people opposed to same-gender marriage will find themselves side-by-side with same-gender marriage advocates on issues where they share common ground. It’s up to them to build on it.

Optimistic?

 

Insert eye roll here.

I am not in the least optimistic that the vast majority of those opposing same-sex marriage will look for common ground with anyone who does not share their insular opinions. If it happens by accident, sure, but look for it? Don’t make me laugh. They are terrified of anything that shifts their paradigm, of anything that moves their cheese.  Those who can ally themselves over issue 1 (we are at war with Eurasia) will be mortal enemies over issue 2 (we have always been at war with Eastasia), and will come back together over Issue 3 (because we have always been at war with Eurasia), only to become enemies again on issue 4. And often they will not realize that they have changed alliances. Because the enemy has always been Eastasia.

We have a crisis in this country right now. It’s a communication crisis, and it can be blamed on the sound-bite and an “Us vs. Them” mentality. People have much more in common than not. Only occasionally do the different sides actually have different goals. It’s all in how the media or their leaders – or both – spin it to them.

Conservative America traditionally stands for smaller government, which theoretically brings with it lower taxes and greater personal autonomy: “freedom.” Liberal, or Progressive, America traditionally stands for social safety, which theoretically brings with it more government involvement and necessarily higher taxes. What is their common goal? They want to be safe, healthy, and financially stable, because only if they have these things will they have “freedom.”

Political party platforms associated with conservative ideals and with progressive ones change over time. The economic disasters of Reconstruction and the Great Depression caused profound changed in the political affiliations of many Americans. So did the political panic of the Cold War. The demise of the Dixiecrats and the fall of Jim Crow has a lot to do with current political alignments. I’ve seen a violation of the basic tenets in both of these diametrically opposed sides just during my lifetime. Political alignments often define issues, and since for all practical purposes we have limited ourselves to only two parties in the United States, our political parties appear to be polarized. And at the moment, as the chart shows, our two political parties are more polarized than they have ever been since the end of Reconstruction.

At the time of the Civil War, the Republican Party was conservative, but not as much as it is today. In 1860, Republicans not only did not want to “conserve” the status quo (which is the very definition of conservatism), they wanted to bring massive change to the economy of half of the country. The war certainly accomplished that. Outlawing slavery all at once undermined the agrarian business model of the nation, which had been overwhelmingly dependent on slave labor to get crops planted and harvested. The more industrialized north did not feel the devastating economic crisis brought on by this change as greatly as did the primarily agricultural South. Emancipation was the most drastic change in property rights in US economic history – possibly in world economic history. The only comparable situation I can think of is the 1861 emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire – serfdom in western Europe, on the other hand, disappeared gradually over several centuries.

The two biggest cash crops in the South before the war were cotton and tobacco, followed closely by hemp, rice, and indigo. The primary producers of these crops were the large Southern plantations – farms larger than 200 acres – that used significant slave labor. In 1860, plantations with more than 50 slaves made up 4% of all farms but grew 32% of all the cotton produced in this country. By 1880, farms of that size constituted less than 1% of all farms, and now paid wages instead of supporting slaves at subsistence levels. Increased costs to produce the South’s primary sources of income dramatically compromised the economic health of the South.

The stereotypical image of the pre-war plantation is of a rich, idle white family surrounded by complacent slaves who did everything for their masters – from the farm labor and cooking to dressing the ladies and caring for the white children. This image is flawed. The white “masters” typically labored in the fields, too, and always had hired hands – both white and free blacks – in addition to slaves. Families owning 50 or more slaves were rare. For that matter, families owning any slaves at all were not in the majority of white southerners. Only about a quarter of southern families held slaves,  While wealthier families frequently had a family of slaves in the same house, most southerners were themselves the laborers, the farmhands, and the hired wage earners that they still are today. Most slaves were owned by large planters and worked on larger plantations. Nevertheless, when the legs are cut out from under the highest-earning industry in a geographic region, the entire region suffers. (No area of 21^st century America knows this reality more intimately than Detroit.)

But let’s add other economic costs. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Confederate dollar was worthless due to inflation and people in the South had to resort to bartering services for goods. White planters had lost their enormous investment in slaves. They had virtually no capital to pay free workers to bring in crops. Immediately after the war, onerous property taxes were imposed on southern landholders. These taxes were essentially war reparations and had to be paid in scarce Union dollars. Landowners often could not pay these taxes. The way they had raised money in the past – providing subsistence rather than wages to the families that worked their land to conserve cash income for other purposes – was no longer legal. They had to change their business model entirely, and immediately.

Sharecropping was the answer. Landowners broke up large plantations and rented smaller plots to their former slaves and employees. Almost overnight the South was transformed from a prosperous land-owning populace into a tenant farming agriculture system. The few large landowners who were able to hang on to their property no longer worked the land themselves. Those who were fortunate enough to obtain land at fire-sale prices worked harder than the previous owners to make it produce enough to support their families. Tenant farmers could never hope to wring enough profits out of the land to support themselves in their former lifestyles unless they were freed slaves, in which case their condition in life was definitely improved.

Now, add to that massive change the fact that for four years Southerners had burned cotton and tobacco rather than allow Union forces to confiscate it. Invading Union troops had devastated the physical structures that constituted the framework of the Southern economic engine, and nearly half of the livestock of the South had been killed during the war. And here’s the kicker: over a quarter of all Southern white men of military age died during the war, leaving their families destitute. Per capita income for white southerners declined from $125 in 1857 to a low of $80 in 1879. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, but rather than being reconstructed into something viable and prosperous, the South had been further devastated by it. By the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the former Confederacy was locked into a system of poverty. The financial ruin of the South was complete. One hundred and fifty years later, it still has not recovered except in pockets where petroleum production has made the difference.

The resentment of the defeated South at losing the comfort and prosperity it had once enjoyed lit flames of anger among people who had lost nearly everything. That anger was directed externally: toward the former slaves they had once depended on or who they had once ordered around with impunity, but who now were raised to the same socioeconomic level as free white laborers almost overnight;  toward the educated, industrialized northern states, which were able to resume their former lives after the war; toward the federal government agents who enforced these changes; and toward the speculators who came to the South with carpetbags full of cash to take advantage of Southern economic desperation.

The only real power or freedom that remained to Southerners was in how they treated each other. Free black people were the poster children of Confederate defeat, and because of their lack of education, unfamiliarity with government processes, lack of representation in government, lack of education, and economic disadvantages, they were easy targets. White supremacy ideology frustrated racial equality and ushered in the  Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws had an initial side effect of disenfranchising poor whites along with poor blacks, and almost all black people were poor.

Voter turnout dropped considerably, and the United States Supreme Court eventually declared poll taxes unconstitutional. It was more difficult for the federal government to regulate how people behaved toward one another, though. While many white Southerners who had managed to retain more wealth focused on economic issues, the vast majority of impoverished white Southerners were still indignant that they were caught up in the Southern economic crisis. In the late 1800’s “separate but equal” became the law of the land, cast in iron by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. It was perfectly legal to treat the different races differently, and government policies encouraged it.

Environmental disaster compounded economic disaster when the Great Depression struck. While the stock market crash of 1929 had relatively little to do with the suppressed Southern economy other than to deprive it of what little wealth it had managed to regain, the Dust Bowl had a devastating effect on the still predominantly agricultural South.

The Depression is notorious for high unemployment rates. People who can’t find jobs have no purchasing power. The South was already economically depressed before the 1930s, and the “stimulus” of the New Deal sometimes extracted more money than the poor South had to spare. The New Deal is responsible for the progressive socioeconomic reforms of social security, minimum wage controls, and farm subsidies, the latter of which allowed poor Southern farmers a measure of economic security they had never before experienced. It cost the worker more in actual cash, though, and established institutionalized inflation that is unstoppable.

With the end of World War II, the Southern Democrats who had signed on to the New Deal because of their constituents’ dire economic situation suddenly faced a civil rights crisis: those uppity women and blacks who had earned a comfortable living during the war did not want to turn loose of the gains they had made. The Southern white man had gone away to fight and lost enough of his dominance that something had to be done quickly to preserve his way of life. And despite the gains made by women and black people, white men were still in charge of the government.

Enter the Dixiecrat. After the Civil War, Southern politicians wouldn’t be caught dead identifying with Lincoln’s Republican party. The South turned overwhelmingly to the Democratic party in the 1870’s, and until the 1990’s – that’s right, only twenty years ago – Republicans were rarely elected at the local level anywhere in the former Confederacy. There was no point in voting in a Republican primary in the South because there were so few Republican candidates. Local elections were normally determined in the Democratic primaries until the Reagan administration managed to make diplomatic inroads with Southern sensibilities. Rev. Jerry Falwell had a lot to do with that, which I’ll explain in a moment. (The South voted for Republicans at the national level, though.)

Really, it’s all Harry Truman’s fault. The economic demands of the New Deal had started rabid insanity among Southern politicians. Socially conservative politicians, damned if they would let minorities get the best of them, embraced progressive economic ideas that were sold as a way to lift not just the South but the entire country out of poverty. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the liberal and progressive Truman (from the border state of Missouri) got a bee in his bonnet about – of all things! – civil rights. The original idea was to end discrimination in the military since black and Indian soldiers had made amazing contributions to the war effort. The Dixiecrats and their supporters saw the writing on the wall, though. If those minorities got an inch, and they’d take a mile. Discrimination was entrenched in the Southern way of life, and that was a status quo the whites could not tolerate changing. Those uppity Negroes were trying to take the rightful place of white folks all over again. This was Reconstruction Redux.

The Civil Rights movement put an end to the cooperation between Southern Democrats and their northern counterparts. Once again, those damn Yankees were attempting to force massive change on the Southern way of life, and the South was not happy about it.

When I was born at the tail end of the baby boom, Jim Crow was alive and well. The outraged Dixiecrats were being forced to desegregate schools. (My rural eastern Arkansas elementary school desegregated in 1968, the year I started first grade.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the great-grandchildren of slaves a more effective legal tool to fight the racial discrimination that had been institutionalized all over the country. An amendment to it in 1968 further expanded civil rights.

Since the end of the Civil War, Congress had passed numerous civil rights laws. In 1866 Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto of a bill that said anyone born in the U.S., regardless of race, was a U.S. citizen. In 1871, Congress outlawed ethnic violence against black people. (The KKK ignored this law with impunity.) In 1875 Congress attempted to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations, but the Supreme Court struck down the act as an unconstitutional regulation of individual action. Brown v. Board of Education, which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson to do away with the doctrine of “separate but equal,” was decided in 1954. In 1957, the year the National Guard was called out to desegregate Little Rock schools over the objection of segregationists here, the Civil Rights Commission was formed. And in 1964 the broad Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination was passed – a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. Laws passed in 1968 (the Fair Housing Act) and 1987 (extending nondiscrimination requirements to government contractors) further expanded civil rights.

We are now 150 years and seven generations removed from slavery. Those without a sense of the history of it see the struggle for racial parity as black people being “given” what white people have “earned.” Affirmative action, designed to promote minority interests when all other things are equal, is seen as favoring minorities, and to an extent, it does. Quotas that reflect the actual population are also seen as rewarding those “lazy” people who would otherwise not be qualified. Those who complain are called either racist or realist, depending upon their audience.

We see the same thing in other civil rights struggles. Homosexuals make up more than 10% of our population, but discrimination against them is still legal. (A 2002 Gallup poll found the number to be 9%, but keep in mind that Kinsey’s research found that sexual orientation is more of a question of degree along a spectrum rather than a bright line.) Couched in terms of the civil rights struggle, which same-sex marriage certainly is a part of, the conservative population resists change, preferring to maintain a status quo. By definition, a liberal is progressive in ideas, ideals, and outlook. A liberal sees change as improvement in the current situation. This is the exact opposite of conservative ideals, which harken back to the “good old days” when “things were better” and “people knew their places.”

Change is scary to those whose mindset is conservative. Instead of embracing change with all the promise and anticipation of a liberal, the conservative resists with everything in his power.

What’s another thing that poor people tend not to have that wealthier people tend to acquire? Education. The South and Midwest are less educated, more superstitious, and therefore more fearful of the unknown. A lack of desire to educate themselves is an unfortunate characteristic that brands these types so that they are easily recognizable.

Religion in America is symptomatic of these attitudes. The United States has experienced several episodes of Christian revivalism, or “Awakening.” These terms refer to a specific period of increased spiritual interest bracketed by declines in religious interest. Revival or awakening happens regularly everywhere in the world where religion is practiced. Eras of economic hardship correlate to an increased religious revival.  The Enlightenment of the 18^th century was a period of spiritual decline marked by searching outside religion for matters of morality and understanding about human nature. The Great Awakening was its philosophical rival in colonial America and was such a strong movement that its imprimatur is still evident in our national psyche. It was followed by a Second Great Awakening, during which Christian evangelicals really became the institution they now are. Charismatic and emotional speakers rode a circuit to whip the religious audiences into frenzies, and their converts at these tent revivals were so inspired that they carried the word to others, making religious adherence not only fashionable but necessary for morality. A third Awakening spread especially throughout the Midwest and prompted a new flood of missions to Asia.

Despite the persuasive and educated voices of men like Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Robert G. Ingersoll, John Dewey, Felix Adler, and George Santayana, the sheer charisma of the evangelicals of the Great Awakenings carried much more weight with a partially literate, largely uneducated public.

We are now in the midst of another Awakening. This Awakening has cemented itself in the disillusioned South and in the Midwest, where the economy of the mostly rural population is largely agrarian and relatively fewer people have higher education. Television and radio have sped and maintained the momentum of this religious movement. I’ll never forget hearing Jerry Falwell (I told you I’d get back to him) decrying secular humanism in the heyday of the Moral Majority. I never understood how he could make “humanism” into a curse word until it dawned on me that the people flocking to listen to him had no idea what it meant.

In this Fourth Awakening, new Christian sects have sprung up like weeds in a previously neatly-tended garden, and the detritus they spread is poison to reason and science. They look backward instead of forward and are willing to compromise freedoms of conscience to maintain the status quo they treasure. They are the Todd Akins (“Women’s bodies have a way of shutting that whole [pregnancy from rape] thing down”) and Sarah Palins of American politics, and their followers are the Tea Party, and can always be counted on to vote against their own best interest. They are persuaded by sound bites on television and sermons from their ministers. These people are anti-intellectual, uneducated, and irrational. They parrot the words of their religious and political leaders without examining the ideas critically or, apparently, even with any real interest.

Obviously, I do not hold much respect for these people. The sign that summed them up for me read, “Keep Government OUT of My Medicare.” The Awakening and the Tea Party both have less traction on the more populated coasts of our country, where people tend to have more education and tend to be exposed regularly to people who are not like them. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it allays fear.

Now, a person who styles himself as a “fiscal conservative” is a different animal altogether from these screaming mobs of illogical idiots with their misspelled signs and their complete misunderstanding of the purpose of any government system. These fiscal conservatives usually bemoan the loss of the Republican party to the religious right and to the anti-intellectuals of the Tea Party. They are right to be concerned. Where reasonable minds can disagree and compromise, unreasoning minds consider dialog the precursor to capitulating – compromise is to be avoided at all costs.

This is no way to run a government. It is no way to decide public policy. I sincerely wish that rational conservatives would retake control of the Republican party. It’s not that I agree with them, but that I see them as opponents worthy of outreach. I feel like I could work with them, because they will see that we are committed to the same goals, albeit with different ideas as to how to reach them. However, there’s no working with irrational, willfully ignorant, reactionary mobs who see any change at all as a threat to their precious way of life, and who cannot imagine a better future.

Last Updated on April 20, 2013 by