Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Unschooled on Race and Conservatives

Leonard Pitts, Jr. writes a spin piece in today's Seattle Times (h/t Adam Schmidt on Facebook).  Pitts  argues that African Americans would be insane to support conservatives because conservatives have always been anti-Black. 

Pitts illustrates the historical ignorance that characterizes the American left and its pitiful media. Social conservatives in New England were the leaders of the abolitionist movement.  For example, John Brown's father was associated with Oberlin College, where Charles Finney, leader of the Second Great Awakening, was president. Oberlin, a Calvinist Presbyterian School, was the first college to admit African Americans in 1835.  Wikipedia writes of Charles Finney:

In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with the abolitionist movement and frequently denounced slavery from the pulpit. In 1835, he moved to Ohio where he became a professor and later president of Oberlin College from 1851 to 1866. Oberlin became active early in the movement to end slavery and was among the first American colleges to co-educate blacks and women with white men.^[8]

<sup>Pitts is also wrong because, later in the 19th century, the Mugwumps, who tended to support laissez faire as well as reforms such as the Pendleton Act, tended not to be anti-Black. They were the post-bellum Republican elitists during the period of carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.  During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan's first victims were African American Republicans.  George Wallace, the leader of 1960s racism, was a Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As Pitts points out, the worst racists were Democrats. Although Pitts calls them conservatives, the racist Democrats voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt just as the northerners did. Pitts's argument is circular:  racism is conservative, therefore, conservatives are racists.  But the advocates of limited government were not necessarily more racist than the supporters of big government and big business--the GOP.  On the one hand, it is true that Andrew Jackson, the founder of today's Democratic Party, was a racist and that his Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney was responsible for the Dred Scott decision.  But the New York labor unions were probably more anti-African American than Jackson was.  That The Miami Herald's syndicated columnist Pitts is apparently unfamiliar with the Draft Riots and organized labor's sympathy for the South during the Civil War is an embarrassment to the pathetic legacy of American journalism.</sup> 

Pitts's argument is tautological:  racists are conservative, therefore conservatives never stood up for blacks.  In fact, the first “conservatives” might be said to have been the pro-laissez faire Mugwumps, who favored the gold standard, opposed tariffs, and favored limited government.   The founder of The Nation, EL Godkin, was not overly supportive of African Americans, but he was no racist.  The Republican Party in the late 19^th century was a big government, pro business party, and mostly laissez faire (at least in words).  

At the same time, the Progressives, especially Woodrow Wilson, were frequently overt racists.  Eugenics was a significant facet of Progressivism, and as C. Vann Woodward points out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Jim Crow exploded during the Progressive era, not the Gilded Age, which was characterized by policies and leadership that conservatives support today. 

One source of Pitts's confusion (besides being due to an ideologically extremist university and educational system that indoctrinates in left wing groupthink rather than educates, leaving people like Pitts ignorant) is that popular lingo confuses laissez faire with conservatism and social democracy or socialism with liberalism. Thus, the Wikipedia article calls Charles Finney "progressive," but he would be considered a social conservative today. 

On the one hand, the first big government socialist president in American politics was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not a racist. On the other hand, the first president who was a conservative (defined in opposition to the first "liberal," Roosevelt) was William Howard Taft, and he wasn’t a racist either.  Roosevelt backed Taft before he learned that Taft would not support regulatory solutions to the trust issue—that he would instead support a litigated settlement in the Standard Oil case.  The Taft Supreme Court (Taft was the only president to later become Chief Justice) was  conservative.  Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912, electing racist-cum-Progressive Woodrow Wilson in Taft’s place.  Wilson began the American socialist project by pushing through the income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank the following year, 1913.  He also implemented Jim Crow in Washington, DC.

Princeton, of which Wilson had been president, has been well known as the most anti-Semitic of the Ivy League universities.   Here is what Wikipedia says about Taft:

Taft met with and publicly endorsed Booker T. Washington's program for uplifting the black race, advising them to stay out of politics at the time and emphasize education and entrepreneurship. A supporter of free immigration, Taft vetoed a law passed by Congress and supported by labor unions that would have restricted unskilled laborers by imposing a literacy test.^[63]

Moreover, the Southern Democrats, the racists,  repeatedly supported left-wing Democrats. They voted for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson.  It was not until the 1960s that racism and the Republican Party crossed paths.  By then, both parties had become advocates of Progressivism and supporters of the Roosevelt/Rockefeller agenda. In 1944, the entire Jim Crow South voted for the paragon of American socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Alabama, for example, the state remembered for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the 1950s, voted 81% for FDR.  In 1952 and 1956, the most social democratic candidate between FDR and BHO was Adlai Stevenson.  In 1956, the ONLY states in which Stevenson won were the Jim Crow states:   Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

So Mr. Pitts, you're a doody head.

Fox News Channel: Where Truth Goes to Die

A Society Whose Citizens Refuse to See and Investigate...

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Spend, Spend, Spend

H/t Dennis Blankshine and Amanda Panda on Facebook. Left Click on picture to enlarge.

Under Executive Order of the President

H/t James M. Debrango on Facebook. Left click on image to enlarge.

Why Pro-Freedom Voters Will Reject the GOP in 2012

The question an American voter needs to ask is, "Do I support a centrally planned, government directed economy, or a free market?"  The two major parties are committed to big government and central planning; if you oppose socialism, voting for either major party is a wasted vote.  Although Herman Cain pleads otherwise, three facts suggest that he is lying, just as other Republican candidates, including Ronald Reagan, have lied, about their commitment to freedom.

First, Cain continues to support the $2 trillion TARP  bailout (see video below).  He objects to its execution, but not its intent.  Second, Cain was a president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank.  His intimate involvement with the biggest and most sensitive of government institutions renders his claims of being in favor of anything other than socialism suspect.  The days when Milton Friedman could call himself a libertarian and still support the Fed are passed. You either support freedom and liberty OR support the Fed--there is no middle course; the same choice was evident to Jacksonian Democrats with respect to the Second Bank of the United States.  Third, Cain has not brought to the fore concerns about the $16 trillion Fed asset purchases and up to $30 trillion monetary expansion ($3 trillion in  the past three years, with a potential expansion by banks through fractional reserve banking to $30 trillion).  These steps are more significant than Obamacare; Cain's avoiding their discussion camouflages his socialism.


Since the Civil War the federal government consistently has increased the scope of its central planning and government intervention. The leading party with respect to this trend until the 1930s was the GOP, especially Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.   A segment of the GOP became a force for small government because of the Civil War's forcing former northern Democrats (who were the limited government party at least until 1896) into the GOP.   Other reasons Republicans became associated with advocacy of limited government were the Democratic Party's backing of Populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.

Despite the GOP's small government strand, its establishment strand never relinquished its commitment to big government.  Democrat Woodrow Wilson oversaw enactment of the first income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, but establishment Republican Theodore Roosevelt made Wilson's election possible.  Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate to defeat the relatively conservative incumbent, William Howard Taft.

In the 1950s, the big government GOP establishment put forward Dwight D. Eisenhower to defeat Taft's son, Senator Robert Taft, also a limited government advocate.  This was accomplished in part by New York Times support for Eisenhower.  In other words, big government Republicans have been willing to defeat small government Republican candidates by running against them as third party candidates (Theodore Roosevelt) and by sabotaging legitimately run campaigns (Eisenhower).  Through deception, legacy media support, third party candidacies, and outright lies (claiming that they are for small government, as did Reagan and George H. Bush) the big government strand of the Republican Party has marginalized the small government strand.  

The only way to resolve the intense conflict within the GOP is for those who favor freedom to bolt. The reason is that the GOP has become so extreme in its socialism that it has supported literally handing the entire economy to control of failed banks.  The economy amounts to $14 trillion; the subsidies to banks potentially amount to tens of trillions.

There are other reasons as well. First, Republican support for radical environmentalism, such as the extremist UN Agenda 21 that the George H. Bush administration signed. Second,  Richard M. Nixon's termination of the gold standard. Third, George W. Bush's tax and spend policies such as his prescription drug plan and the bailout.  Fourth, the failure of the GOP to reduce the size of government under Ronald Reagan or the Newt Gingrich Congress. This failure occurred during years when the GOP controlled all three houses of Congress.

Only two candidates now support a pro-freedom platform.  These are Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. The cause of freedom will be better furthered by reconstructing the Republican Party into a pro-freedom party.  This would undo the damage that the Rockefeller Republicans, with the support of The New York Times and talk radio, have done to the small government strand within the GOP.

It is more important for those who support freedom to now aim to reconstruct the GOP.  The choice between socialists like Romney and Cain and a socialist like Obama is no choice--voting for any of the alternatives to Paul or Johnson is a wasted vote. 

How Iceland Defeated Its Bankers

It's not rocket science. Just let them fail.  None of the chief Republican candidates other than Ron Paul and Gary Johnson opposed the largest step toward socialism since another Republican, Richard Nixon, abolished the international convertibility of dollars into gold: the Bush-McCain-Obama bailout of Wall Street.  H/t Peter C. Bisulca on Facebook.

Henry David Thoreau: Forgotten Libertarian

Some Thoreau quotes from Walden and Civil Disobedience that I recently assigned to my senior seminar class:


a. "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.  He will put something behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves within, around, and within him...In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.  If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."(Walden, p. 256.)

b. "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away.  It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?" (Walden, p. 258.)

c. "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.  It is not so bad as you are.  It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault finder will find faults even in  paradise.  Love your life, poor as it is." (Walden, p. 259.)

d. "I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into a mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights.  Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring.  Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and cinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction--a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.  So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work." (Walden, p. 261).

e.  "The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,--one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance, whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the alms-houses are in good reapair; and before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of widows and orphans that may be; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently...It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradiction of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have the other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support..." (Civil Disobedience, p. 7.)

f. "...any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already." (Civil Disobedience, p. 10.)

g. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. (Civil Disobedience, p. 11.)

h. "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight." (Civil Disobedience, p. 12.)

i. "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined."

Blind faith in Bad Leaders Is not Patriotism

H/t Liberty Non-Compliance and Flo Hoffman on Facebook.

Ron Paul or None at All

H/t Andrew Nappi and Daniel Parkman on Facebook.

1984 Was NOT Supposed to be an Instruction Manual

H/t Mackenzie Stout on Facebook