Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

Civil Rights and the Mob: George Wallace, Bull Connor, Orval Faubus And Other Democrats
by Ann Coulter

06/07/2011 An excerpt from Ann Coulter's new book, Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

CHAPTER 10: CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE MOB: GEORGE WALLACE, BULL CONNOR, ORVAL FAUBUS AND OTHER DEMOCRATS

It was the Democratic Party that ginned up the racist mob against blacks and it is the Democratic Party ginning every new mob today, ironically, all portraying themselves as the equivalent of the Freedom Riders. With real civil rights secure, try to find a restaurant that won’t serve a black person, modern civil rights laws benefit only the mob, not the victims of the mob, as American blacks had been. Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.

Democrats have gone from demagoguing white (trash) voters with claims that Republicans are the party of blacks, to demagoguing black voters telling them Republicans are the party of racists. Any mob in a storm.

The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything, a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”

This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.

Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond, the only one who later became a Republican, remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”

A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”3

Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example, there were five Democrats from nowhere near the South: Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a favorite target of Senator Joe McCarthy, Democratic senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Democratic senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.4

According to Caro, the Western Democrats traded their votes on civil rights for a dam authorization on the Idaho-Oregon border. That’s how dear black civil rights were to liberals, they traded them away for a dam.

While Democrats are the party of the mob, Republicans are the party of calm order, willing to breach the peace only when it comes to great transgressions against humanity, slavery, abortion, and terrorism.

After the Civil War, it was Republicans who passed the Thirteenth Amendment, granting slaves their freedom; the Fourteenth Amendment, granting them citizenship; and Fifteenth Amendment, giving them the right to vote. It was Republicans who sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the hard-won rights of the freed slaves.

Then, as now, the Democrats favored the hooligans. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a terrorist group to attack Republicans who had come to the Democratic South after the Civil War to help enforce legal equality for freed slaves.

It was again Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, both signed into law by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. Under the “living Constitution,” the Supreme Court upheld fraudulent “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.

Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them, a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti–poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946.

With a lock on the racist mob vote, Democratic politicians won elections and promptly resegregated the entire South with Jim Crow laws. In 1913, Progressive Democrat president Woodrow Wilson even instituted segregation in Washington, D.C., bringing Jim Crow to the federal workforce. Wilson summarily dismissed black officials from their federal jobs in the South and in D.C.

A friend of Wilson said that with him running the country, “Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race.”7 There’s your post-racial Democratic Party.

A crucial part of the Democrats’ victim folklore is that they have been losing the South to Republicans over the past half century because the Democrats stood on principle to oppose race discrimination, while the Republican Party pandered to racists in the South, a region of the country liberals believe is composed primarily of Klan members. (That might be your first clue as to why Southerners don’t like liberals.) The Republican Party’s allegedly racist appeal to Southerners is darkly referred to seventeen times a day in the mainstream media as the “Southern Strategy.”

In fact, it was Eisenhower who broke the Democrats’ hold on the South in 1952, and if anyone was appealing to bigots that year, it wasn’t Eisenhower. Democrat Adlai Stevenson, known to experience “personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes,”12 chose as his running mate John Sparkman of Alabama, a Democrat segregationist.

And yet the Old South, which according to mainstream media accounts voted Republican solely out of racial resentment, suddenly started voting Republican in 1952. Ike carried Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida outright, and nearly stole Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia from Stevenson. (Eisenhower lost Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent and lost West Virginia and South Carolina by fewer than 4 percentage points.)

This was just four years after Democrat-turned-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond won four Southern states. But running with a segregationist didn’t help Stevenson in the South a few years later.

Then, in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools; the Democratic platform did not, and would not, as long as Democrats were winning elections by appealing to the racist mob. This led the black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to break with his party and endorse Eisenhower for president.

Governor Orval Faubus, progressive New Deal Democrat, blocked the schoolhouse door to the Little Rock Central High School with the state’s National Guard rather than allow nine black students to attend. In response, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out of Faubus’s hands. Then he sent the 101st Airborne Division to walk the black children to school and stay with them throughout the day.

Eisenhower implemented the 1948 executive order President Tru- man had issued, but then ignored desegregating the military. Also unlike Truman, Eisenhower hired blacks for prominent positions in his administration.

It was Republicans who overwhelmingly introduced, promoted, and passed every civil rights act from the end of the Civil War right up to and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Eisenhower pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, written by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, guaranteeing black voting rights, to be enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice.

During the endless deliberation on Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats, “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again.” Senator Sam Ervin, another liberal luminary, instrumental in the destruction of anti-communist Republicans Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, told his fellow segregationists, “I’m on your side, not theirs,” and advised them to face up to the fact that “we’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.”14

Until 1964, every civil rights act had presented no possible constitutional problems, those federal laws were fully within Congress’s enumerated powers to enact because they were directed at government officials (Democrats) who were violating the Constitution by denying black citizens the right to vote.

Federal laws aimed at discrimination by government actors are expressly within Congress’s authority under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Democrats opposed these civil rights laws not because of any questions about Congress’s authority to enact them, they couldn’t care less about the Constitution, but because they wanted to keep discriminating.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was again supported overwhelmingly by Republicans and less so by Democrats. As with the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, it was Republicans who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act by huge majorities, with a distinctly smaller majority of Democrats supporting it. In the Senate, for example, 82 percent of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared with only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans supported the ’64 bill, compared with only 63 percent of Democrats.

The only reason Democratic majorities were beginning to support civil rights for blacks was that by 1964, thanks to Republican voting rights acts, more blacks were voting. Democrats couldn’t keep winning elections in some parts of the country by appealing to the racist mob.

As Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia had explained years earlier, “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” saying the Democrats sought to “remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” The Democrats’ position on civil rights depended on where the votes were.

Once the Democrats got involved, civil rights became just another racket with another mob. Unlike previous civil rights laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included provisions aimed at purely private actors, raising the hackles of some constitutional purists, notably Barry Goldwater, the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee. Goldwater, like the rest of his party, had supported every single civil rights bill until the 1964 act. But he broke with the vast majority of his fellow Republicans to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Like many other conservatives opposed to a living, growing, breathing Constitution, Goldwater actually opposed only two of the seven major provisions of the bill, those regulating privately owned housing and public accommodations. But there were other provisions he would have made tougher. For example, Goldwater wanted to make it mandatory that federal funds be withheld from programs practicing discrimination, rather than discretionary, as President Kennedy had requested.

Goldwater was a vehement foe of segregation. He was a founder of the NAACP in Arizona, donating the equivalent of several thousand dollars to the organization’s efforts to integrate the public schools. When he was head of the Arizona National Guard, he had integrated the state Guard before Harry Truman announced he was integrating the U.S. military. As the Washington Post said, Goldwater “ended racial segregation in his family department stores, and he was instrumental in ending it in Phoenix schools and restaurants and in the Arizona National Guard.”

But he was also a believer in limited government. It was, after all, racist Democratic politicians in the South using the force of the government to violate private property rights by enforcing the Jim Crow laws in the first place. As Sowell points out, it wasn’t the private bus companies demanding that blacks sit in the back of the bus, it was the government.

Goldwater not only had personally promoted desegregation, he belonged to a party that had been fighting for civil rights for the previous century against Democratic obstructionism. Lyndon Johnson voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure in the Senate. But by the time he became president, he had flipped 180 degrees. Appealing to regional mobs wouldn’t work with a national electorate.

Unlike mob-appeasing Democrats, Goldwater based his objections to certain parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on purely constitutional principles. Along with other constitutional purists in the Republican Party, Goldwater opposed federal initiatives in a lot of areas, not just those involving race. By contrast, segregationist Democrats routinely criticized the exercise of federal power and expenditure of federal funds when it involved ending discrimination against blacks, but gladly accepted federal pork projects for their states.

It would be as if, after fighting the Democrats for a hundred years over the issue of abortion, Republicans finally got Roe v. Wade overturned, and then, out of pure political calculation, Democrats jumped on the bandwagon and demanded a federal law outlawing abortion. Some pro-life Republicans would probably object that federal law outlawing abortion is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers.

On the basis of Republicans’ constitutional objections, Democrats would then reverse the entire history of the pro-life movement and start claiming the Democratic Party alone fought to end abortion in America. That is exactly what they have done with the history of civil rights.
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