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The inevitable end result of our last 56 years


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1 minute ago, Robert Wheeler said:

I’m laughing at the mask dangling from his ear. This is clearly a case of elder abuse on the part of the DNC.

Oh, that’s right...I forgot...optics are everything to you guys...

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BTW, related to all this is this guy's Mark Updegrove's comments on JFK and RFK and the ciivl rights movement.  From the LBJ LIbrary he did such a nice job for the MSM that he gets a job at ABC.  Off his performance so far he is even worse than Beschloss.  He tries to say JFK was a latecomer to ciivl rights.  Which is the meme from 2013 from those two awful books by the JFK hack  Steve Levingston and the RFK hack, Larry Tye.

This is how I replied:

This is wrong. JFK endorsed Brown vs Board in 1957 and 58, the second time in Jackson MS. He began his ciivl rights program on the day he was inaugurated and he made it a moral issue during the 1960 campaign in LA. He tried to pass a bill in 1962, but could not. Instead he integrated colleges both private and public and used federal marshals when he had to. That meeting this guy refers to with James Baldwin showed RFK one thing: he had to deal with the more rational and reasonable civil rights leaders, and he did. Baldwin was discarded by other civil rights leaders. RFK then managed the March on Washington after JFK approved it.

 

Let me add, I think and many others also think, that the March was the high point of American liberalism after World War 2.  JFK essentially told RFK, look, this has to come off perfectly, if not our enemies will use it to destroy us.  Truer words were never spoken e.g. that specimen Jim Jordan of the Club for Growth.  Did you see this guy yesterday? IMO, that is what Wall Street is all about--excluding of course, our buddy Wheeler.

Edited by James DiEugenio
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6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Any historian knows how phony that is.

The reason that Reconstruction was such an abject failure is that there were not nearly enough troops sent into the south to occupy the massive territory of the largest and most violently racists states.  The highest figures given are usually about 20,000--total.  When you are talking about areas the size of Texas, Louisiana, Virginia and Alabama/Mississippi, that was not going to do it.  So you had 1700 troops in Galveston?  What did that mean to a group of 2000 redeemers in that huge state, who were all well organized and could bring in Klanners by the trainload.

In reality, and this is why Trump is being so silly, the south lost the war, they won the peace.  Grant, who people like Josh Marshall and Leo DiCaprio think is some kind of a hero, should have had a force of 100,000 troops in the south, and they should have been there for 20 years while all the great plantations were divided up and given to the former slaves. 

DId not happen, and did not even come close.  So what replaced slavery was 1.) JIm Crow and 2.) tenant farming.  This was about 3 points better than before.  But the planter class still got what they wanted, dirt cheap labor with no political rights.

That system more or less stayed in place until JFK.

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1

Jim,

      The two Presidents who did the most damage to meaningful Reconstruction were; 1) Andrew Johnson, and 2) Rutherford Hayes.

      Grant's tenure in the White House, from 1869-77 coincided with the implementation of Radical Reconstruction in the South-- a brief era where former slave states actually elected African American Congressmen and Senators to Congress and state legislatures.

     Grant also deployed the U.S. Army to suppress the KKK (in South Carolina.)

     But, as Eric Foner documents on great detail, the marginal progress of Radical Reconstruction was  completely wiped out after 1877, when Hayes cut a deal with Southern Congressmen (in his election vs. Tilden) to withdraw U.S. troops from the former Confederacy.  Hogeboom's biography documents very clearly that Hayes naively believed, for years, that white Southern aristocrats would protect the Constitutional (14th and 15th Amendment) rights of the Freedmen!

     By 1900, black voters in former Confederate states (including those, like Louisiana and South Carolina with majority black populations) had been completely purged from voter rolls, in counties that had elected black legislators during Radical Reconstruction.

     Obviously, this battle over disenfranchisement of black citizens is still being fought-- long after the passage of the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Shelby v. Holder is an abomination.

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IMO, Grant should have arrested Lee and imprisoned his army.  Let the president pardon him.

 

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11 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

IMO, Grant should have arrested Lee and imprisoned his army.  Let the president pardon him.

 

       My impression, from reading Grant's own, fascinating memoir (and other sources, including Princeton historian James McPherson's outstanding Battle Cry of Freedom) is that, at Appomattox, Grant desperately wanted to end the carnage, enmity, and strife of the bloody war.  It was Grant who solicited the armistice from Lee, and offered generous terms-- even forbidding any celebrations or disrespectful conduct toward the surrendering Army of Northern Virginia.

     Grant also respected Lee, personally, on the basis of their service together during the Mexican War.

     The country was war weary, and greatly traumatized.  And most whites in the Northern and Border states (including, unfortunately, Andrew Johnson) were not idealistic Abolitionists, eager to embrace the Freed Men as co-equal American citizens.  Johnson, himself, was utterly contemptuous of African Americans.

     Radical Reconstruction was further undermined by the serious U.S. economic recession of 1873-77 during Grant's second term.

     The country was broke, and meaningful Reconstruction was expensive.

     That said, the failure of Reconstruction was a colossal American tragedy, and we're, obviously, still living with the fallout 150 years later.

Edited by W. Niederhut
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14 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

IMO, Grant should have arrested Lee and imprisoned his army.  Let the president pardon him.

 

If Grant had arrested Lee and waited for a presidential pardon, the remaining Confederate armies in the field would not have surrendered as quickly and easily.  In turn, Lee's army might have reformed as guerilla bands that could have threatened Washington DC, and Lincoln himself, in the name of the Confederate leaders escaped to Montgomery, AL.

Unknown to Grant, that pardon may never have come, given the quickness with which Lincoln's assassination followed the surrender, and the hatred of the South stirred by the murder.  Jefferson Davis was later arrested and imprisoned through the anger of Northern abolitionists such as Stanton, which likely would not have happened had Lincoln lived.

Accepting Lee's surrender and his release and his army's would have been recommended by Lincoln in the conference with his commanders aboard the River Queen at Hampton Roads, VA, in late March 1865.  Should Grant have made no record of this (though I believe he did), enough anecdotal evidence of Lincoln's intentions was recorded among Washington politicians.

It was the right decision in order to close doors in the present and leave others open for the future.  However relieved the decision left him, Grant could not have made it without knowing Lincoln's intention.  Reconstruction might have gone better had Lincoln been at the helm for four more years, and had he exerted his influence afterward.

Edited by David Andrews
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