The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. —Thomas Jefferson
SECRETS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds timorous and slothful.1 —John Milton on the devil Belial, Paradise Lost
Fact Checkers Cover for Democratic Party’s Sordid History With the Ku Klux Klan
During a June 7th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on white supremacy and domestic terrorism, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz stated that:
the Ku Klux Klan “was formed by elected Democrats.”
Klan “leadership was almost entirely elected Democrats.”
today’s Democrats “try very hard to erase the history” of their party’s involvement with the Klan.
today’s Democrats “politicize acts of violence.”
Origins & Leadership
The AP and PolitiFact correctly state that the Klan was started by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee as a non-violent, grassroots social club without political motivations.
What the AP and PolitiFact fail to acknowledge is that the Klan’s 1865–66 founding as a social club does not mark the beginning of the Klan as it is known today. Per the 1971 academic book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, the “real beginning” of the “Ku Klux conspiracy” occurred at an 1867 meeting in Nashville that consolidated the Klan.
As explained by an 1884 book written by a founding member of the Klan, this meeting bound the “isolated dens together” with “unity of purpose and concert of action” to supposedly reign in rogue Klansmen that had turned violent toward black people just a year after the group’s founding. However, White Terror points out that if Klan leaders really wanted to eliminate violence, they would have disbanded altogether. Instead, they sought “tighter organization” and recruited leaders “of far greater prestige and authority whose influence extended throughout the state”—primarily ex-Confederate generals and Democratic politicians.
An investigation published by the Illinois General Assembly in 1976 explains that after the Klan “transformed into a political organization,” violence became more widespread under Democrat leadership. The men that guided the Klan’s reorganization and subsequent growth included:
Nathan Bedford Forrest—first Grand Wizard of the Klan and a Democratic Memphis alderman.
John W. Morton—Grand Cyclops of the Nashville Klan and a Democrat who became the Tennessee Secretary of State.
John B. Gordon—head of the Georgia Klan and a Democratic governor and senator.
George G. Dibrell—Deputy Grand Titan of the Klan and a Democratic congressman from Tennessee.
Dudley M. DuBose—Grand Titan of the Klan’s Fifth Congressional District and a Democratic congressman from Georgia.
Fredrick N. Strudwick—Klan leader in North Carolina and a Democratic state representative.
George W. Gordon—Klan leader and a Democratic congressman from Tennessee.
John C. Brown—“probable leader” of the Klan and a Democratic governor of Tennessee.
Edmund Pettus—Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan and a Democratic senator from Alabama.
However, the Illinois investigation also found that “central control over the actions of the various local Klan groups did not really exist,” and some of the figureheads above began “dropping out” to distance themselves from local terrorism. For example, Nathan Bedford Forest ordered the Klan disbanded in 1869 because he claimed a “few disobedient and bad men” had infiltrated the Klan, disgracing its “good name and honorable reputation.”
On the other hand, some prominent Democrats remained loyal to the Klan’s violent activities. For example, Fredrick Strudwick led a Klan attempt to assassinate a Republican state senator and was later elected as a Democrat to the North Carolina state legislature.
Likewise, the Red Shirts—a “paramilitary extension” of the Democratic Party and essentially the “Klan in a different uniform”—attacked a black militia in 1867 for refusing to surrender their guns to the leader of another militia that “had no legal right” to the weaponry. One participating Red Shirt leader named “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman became the Democratic Governor of South Carolina and a U.S. Senator. He recalled what became known as the Hamburg Massacre (in Edgefield county) with pride:
White men in Edgefield planned “to seize upon the first opportunity” to “provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson” because they believed that “nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it” could succeed in “redeeming the state from negro and carpet bag rule.”
The goal “of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror,” and “seven dead negros lying stark and stiff, certainly had its effect.”
The massacred black people were “offered up as a sacrifice to the fanatical teachings and fiendish hate of those who sought to substitute the rule of the African for that of the Caucasian in South Carolina.”
The AP reports that “many” Democrats joined the Klan, and PolitiFact reports “some” did and that Nathan Forest spoke at a Democratic National Convention, but this is the extent of their admissions of Democrats’ membership in the Klan.
Media Whitewashing
Even though some individual Democrats denounced the violence of the Klan, Democratic politicians and their media allies consistently covered up for it.
A 2011 paper in The Journal of Southern History explains that Democratic newspapers published “blanket denials” of the Klan’s existence “during and after its most active period of violence.” This is exemplified by the New York Tribune’s criticism of Democratic papers in 1868 for dismissing the Klan as a “mythical maggot of distempered Republican brains.” Democratic politicians followed suit, including:
Democratic Governor Robert Lindsay, who testified before Congress in 1871 that “reported outrages by Ku-Klux or disguised persons had ceased for the last two years” in Alabama.
former Democratic Governor John Stevenson who claimed in 1871 that there was “no evidence” of “any secret political organization” in Kentucky.
Such denials were pervasive throughout the Democratic Party and media. As documented by White Terror:
“Most Democrats asserted that no regular or continuing Ku Klux organization existed in their counties, or in the state,” and they “denied even more vehemently that the disguised bands were politically motivated.”
“Few Democrats were willing to admit the Klan’s political character and purpose.”
“The Democratic press in Louisiana played its familiar role as Klan apologist.”
“Democratic newspapers continued to ignore violence more than they condemned it.”
The “only native whites who stood out in significant numbers against the Klan” were Republicans.
In 1871, a Congressional committee exposed the Klan’s mass terror and called for federal intervention in the South. Congressional Democrats pushed back, issuing their own report which stated that:
it is “folly and madness” to claim that “any country can prosper where the Anglo-Saxon is made politically subordinate to the African.”
government cannot “long exist ‘half black and half white.’ ”
the disguised men perpetrating violence in the South do not “have any general organization, or any political significance” and their conduct is not “indorsed by any respectable number” of white people.
“Terrorist Arm of the Democratic Party”
In direct contrast to the claims of Democratic politicians and the media that the Klan had no “political significance,” Klansmen used violence and intimidation to serve the interests of the Democratic party.
For example, a black resident of Alabama named Robert Fullerlove testified before Congress (along with other Klan victims) that Klansmen interrogated black people about their political beliefs and promised to leave them alone if they “would come over to the democratic side.”
The Klan also made frequent death threats to Republican speakers and officials. One Republican state official testified that the “sheriff and clerk, to save their lives, have declared themselves democrats.”
One Democrat from South Carolina testified that members of the Democrat Party in Abbeville County:
were organized into clubs which appointed secret “committees.”
ordered these committees to seize and destroy Republican ballots by force prior to the election.
prevented about four hundred blacks from voting Republican at the Greenwood polling precinct.
generally understood that Republican speakers should be shot, killed, or stopped from speaking.
were “nearly all” part of the Ku Klux Klan.
White Terror—which contains over 1,000 footnotes—summarizes the Democratic Party’s involvement with the Klan as follows:
“The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic party, whether the party leaders as a whole liked it or not.”
“Nearly all members” viewed the Klan “as a secret political society in behalf of the Democratic party.”
The “Klan itself was universally regarded as a Democratic political device.”
Some activities were “obviously and almost exclusively political,” and the Klan “systematically” terrorized “Republicans of both races.”
PolitiFact quotes one historian who stated that some Klans were a “strong arm” for local elected Democrats, and the AP’s choice historian reports that the Klan did not “have ideological motives until later.” Once again, these gentle nods to reality downplay the full extent of the Klan’s political activities.
Not the Party of Today
PolitiFact also uses an unsupported claim from a history professor to spread the common canard that racist southerners fled “into the Republican party” after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. This claim is belied by the facts that:
80% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as compared to only 65% of Democrats, giving racist Democrats no reason to switch parties.
20 of the 21 Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remained in the Democratic Party for their entire congressional careers.
the main demographic of southerners who supported segregation, namely whites who lived in poor areas with large black populations, continued to vote for Democrats at about the same rates.
Republicans won 44% of Southern electoral votes in 1956, about the same as the 45% they won in 1968 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
the portion of white Southerners who said they would be willing to vote for a black president increased from 8% in 1958 to 95% in 1999.
The long-term shift of Southern voters to the Republican Party actually correlates with massive declines in racism, growing prosperity, Democratic opposition to gun rights, and Democratic support of abortion up to birth.
PolitiFact emphasizes that “context matters” because the “anti-black Democratic Party” of yesterday is not the party of today. Yet, Senator Cruz is correct that modern Democrats are still sowing racial divisions for political gain, such as:
politicizing the death of Trayvon Martin.
politicizing the death of Michael Brown.
politicizing the death of George Floyd.
falsely claiming that black people suffer disproportionately from police brutality.
Conclusion
PolitiFact concludes its article by stating that “while some Democrats supported the KKK, there’s no evidence the group was founded by their political party,” and the AP briefly acknowledges that the Klan took on a “political tone.” These are gross understatements in light of the wide-ranging facts above, which are accurately summarized by Senator Cruz.
By fixating on the point that the Democratic Party did not create the club that first called itself the “Ku Klux Klan,” these so-called fact checkers distract readers from the facts that:
influential Democrats established and expanded the “real” Klan.
the Klan was “in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic party” and used violence to stop people from voting Republican.
Democrats and newspapers repeatedly downplayed and denied the existence and brutality of the Klan.
modern Democrats continue to exploit interracial violence for political purposes.
Fact Checkers Cover for Democratic Party’s Sordid History With the Ku Klux Klan - Just Facts
https://www.justfactsdaily.com/fact-checkers-cover-democratic-partys-sordid-history-ku-klux-klan
The following column is excerpted from Dinesh D'Souza's new book, "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party" (Regnery Publishing, July 18, 2016).
Contrary to what we learn from progressives in education and the media, the history of the Democratic Party well into the twentieth century is a virtually uninterrupted history of thievery, corruption and bigotry. American history is the story of Democratic malefactors and Republican heroes. Yes, it’s true.
I begin with Andrew Jackson. He—not Thomas Jefferson or FDR—is the true founder of the modern Democratic Party. Progressives today are divided about Jackson. Some, like historian Sean Wilentz, admire him, while others want to remove him from the $20 bill because he was a slaveowner and a vicious Indian fighter. He was, in this view, a very bad American.
I support the debunking of Jackson, but not because he was a bad American—rather, because he was a typical crooked Democrat. Jackson established the Democratic Party as the party of theft. He mastered the art of stealing land from the Indians and then selling it at giveaway prices to white settlers. Jackson’s expectation was that those people would support him politically, as indeed they did. Jackson was indeed a “man of the people,” but his popularity was that of a gang leader who distributes his spoils in exchange for loyalty on the part of those who benefit from his crimes.
Jackson also figured out how to benefit personally from his land-stealing. Like Hillary Clinton, he started out broke and then became one of the richest people in the country. How? Jackson and his partners and cronies made early bids on Indian land, sometimes even before the Indians had been evacuated from that land. They acquired the land for little or nothing and later sold it for a handsome profit. Remarkably, the roots of the Clinton Foundation can be found in the land-stealing policies of America’s first Democratic president.
The Democrats were also the party of slavery, and the slave-owning mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today. The point isn’t that the Democrats invented slavery which is an ancient institution that far predates America. Rather, Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun invented a new justification for slavery, slavery as a “positive good.” For the first time in history, Democrats insisted that slavery wasn’t just beneficial for masters; they said it was also good for the slaves.
Today progressive pundits attempt to conceal Democratic complicity in slavery by blaming slavery on the “South.” These people have spun a whole history that portrays the slavery battle as one between the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. This of course benefits Democrats today, because today the Democratic Party’s main strength is in the north and the Republican Party’s main strength is in the South.
But the slavery battle was not mainly a North-South issue. It was actually a battle between the pro-slavery Democrats and the anti-slavery Republicans. How can I make such an outrageous statement? Let’s begin by recalling that northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas protected slavery, while most southerners didn’t own slaves. (Three fourths of those who fought in the civil war on the confederate side had no slaves and weren’t fighting to protect slavery.)
Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery. Of course there were a range of views among Republicans, from abolitionists who sought immediately to end slavery to Republicans like Abraham Lincoln who recognized that this was both constitutionally and politically impossible and focused on arresting slavery’s extension into the new territories. This was the main platform on which Lincoln won the 1860 election.
The real clash was between the Democrats, north and south, who supported slavery and the Republicans across the country who opposed it. As Lincoln summarized it in his First Inaugural Address, one side believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, and the other believes it is wrong and ought to be restricted. “This,” Lincoln said, “is the only substantial dispute.” And this, ultimately, was what the Civil War was all about.
In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment. Democrats responded by opposing the Amendment and a group of them assassinated the man they held responsible for emancipation, Abraham Lincoln. Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote, over the Democrats’ opposition.
Confronted with these irrefutable facts, progressives act like the lawyer who is presented with the murder weapon belonging to his client. Darn, he says to himself, I better think fast. “Yes,” he now admits, “my client did murder the clerk and rob the store. But he didn’t kill all those other people who were also found dead at the scene.”
In other words, progressives who are forced to acknowledge the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery history promptly respond, “We admit to being the party of slavery, and we did uphold the institution for more than a century, but slavery ended in 1865, so all of this was such a long time ago. You can’t blame us now for the antebellum wrongs of the Democratic Party.”
Yes, but what about the postbellum crimes of the Democratic Party? From Democratic support for slavery, let’s turn to the party’s complicity in segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats in the 1880s invented segregation and Jim Crow laws that lasted through the 1960s. Democrats also came up with the “separate but equal” rationale that justified segregation and pretended that it was for the benefit of African Americans.
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee by a group of former confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable Senators and Congressmen were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton.
The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.
Progressives also led the campaign to stop poor immigrants from coming to this country. They championed laws in the 1920s that brought the massive flows of immigration to this country to a virtual halt. The motives of the progressives were openly racist and and in the way the immigration restrictions were framed, progressives succeeded in broadening the Democratic Party’s target list of minority groups.
While the Democratic Party previously singled out blacks and native Indians, progressives showed Democrats how to suppress all minorities. Included in the new list were Central and South American Hispanics as well as Eastern and Southern Europeans. Many of these people were clearly white but progressives did not consider white enough. Like blacks, they were considered “unfit” on the basis of their complexion.
During the 1920s, progressives developed a fascination with and admiration for Italian and German fascism, and the fascists, for their part, praised American progressives. These were likeminded people who spoke the same language, and progressives and fascists worked together to implement programs to sterilize so-called mental defectives and “unfit” people, resulting subsequently in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in America and hundreds of thousands in Nazi Germany.
During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent members of his brain trust to Europe to study fascist economic programs, which he considered more advanced that anything his New Deal had implemented to date. FDR was enamored with Mussolini, whom he called the “admirable Italian gentleman.” Some Democrats even had a soft spot for Hitler: young JFK went to Germany before World War II and praised Hitler as a “legend” and blamed hostility to the Nazis as jealousy resulting from how much the Nazis had accomplished.
Yes, I know. Very little of this is known by people today because progressives have done such a good job of sweeping it all under the rug. This material is simply left out of the textbooks even though it is right there in the historical record. Some progressive pundits know about it, but they don’t want to talk about it.
Indeed many progressives have been working hard to come up with lies that can be passed off as facts. Progressives have a whole cultural contingent—Hollywood, the mainline media, the elite universities, even professional comedians—to peddle their propaganda. From the television show Madame Secretary to the front page of the New York Times to nightly quips by Stephen Colbert, the progressive bilge comes at us continually and relentlessly.
In this bogus narrative, Republicans are the bad guys because Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. For progressive Democrats, the civil rights movement is the canonical event of American history. It is even more important than the American Revolution. Progressive reasoning is: we did this, so it must be the greatest thing that was ever done in America. Republicans opposed it, which makes them the bad guys.
The only problem is that Republicans were instrumental—actually indispensable—in getting the Civil Rights Laws passed. While Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the backing of some northern Democrats, Republicans voted in far higher percentages for the bill than Democrats did. This was also true of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Neither would have passed with just Democratic votes. Indeed, the main opposition to both bills came from Democrats.
Interestingly enough the GOP is not merely the party of minority rights but also of women’s rights. Republicans included women’s suffrage in the party’s platform as early as 1896. The first woman elected to Congress was Republican Jeanette Rankin in 1916. That year represented a major GOP push for suffrage, and after the GOP regained control of Congress, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women’s suffrage was finally approved in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year.
The inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was, oddly enough, the work of group of racist, chauvinist Democrats. Led by Democratic Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, this group was looking to defeat the Civil Rights Act. Smith proposed to amend the legislation and add “sex” to “race” as a category protected against discrimination.
Smith’s Democratic buddies roared with laughter when he offered his one-word amendment. They thought it would make the whole civil rights thing so ridiculous that no sane person would go along with it. One scholar noted that Smith’s amendment “stimulated several hours of humorous debate” among racist, chauvinist Democrats. But to their amazement, the amended version of the bill passed. It bears repeating that Republicans provided the margin of victory that extended civil rights protection both to minorities and to women.