When Republicans Were the Good Guys

For some time I have been reading online articles on AOL/HuffPost; and for maybe a couple of months I have been doing quite a bit of commenting--sometimes adding a new comment but more often replying to someone else's comment.

So that has given me an avenue for venting my views in addition to this blog.

One commenter recently was defending the Republican Party by pointing out that the Republican Party gave us Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves by means of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. She also said that Democrats in the U.S. Congress were the source of a lot of opposition to Civil Rights laws.

Of course she is absolutely correct. After the Civil War, many ill-advised actions and policies were part of so-called Reconstruction. Reconstruction attempted to go very quickly--in fact, instantly--to full integration of the recently-freed slaves into the political society. Not to defend white Southerners, but the extremely sudden and radical--and even punitive-- changes that they were expected to countenance under Reconstruction created an enormous backlash and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan formed to try (for example) to halt the new voting power of African-Americans.

One result of all that upheaval was that white Southerners pretty much rebelled against the Republican party and, for about the next 100 years, would only vote Democratic. Thus the U.S. Congress had Southern congressmen and senators who were so-called "Dixiecrats"--Democrats who could be counted on to oppose any civil rights laws such as school desegregation or protection for the voting rights of Blacks.

However, that has changed, and the present reality is that the South elects Republicans to Congress. Just a couple of examples are senators such as Trent Lott of Mississippi (resigned in 2007 but his successor is another Republican) , Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and many others.

So, even though it may once have been the other way around, now it's Republican congressmen who represent anti-civil rights positions and who are likely to vote to keep the entrenched power structures (such as the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, heterosexual male).

Also, I recently learned something interesting: for 14 years--from January 1920 into the 1930s--the United States had something called Prohibition (prohibition of the manufacture and sale of all alcohol for drinking purposes). Republicans nowadays can often be heard to claim that they defend individual liberty and oppose extensions of government power-- but where the enactment of Prohibition was concerned, again it was the very opposite of that, and not only did Republicans help to enact Prohibition but also Republican presidents Coolidge and Hoover supported the continuation of Prohibition--Hoover even once it was clear to everyone that Prohibition was not working.

And anyone with a little knowledge of American history knows that Prohibition, among other bad effects, caused organized crime in the U.S. to indeed become organized and strong and pervasive throughout the country. Also, it created widespread disregard, disrespect, and defiance of the law-- maybe the origin of the disregard of law that I see so often when drivers ignore "minor" traffic/driving ordinances like "no parking," "no left turn," etc.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein