| SNATCHING TARA FR0M SCARLETT O'HARA |
|
|
Last week in this space I described an attempted coup d’etat mounted in my town by the Republicans on the town board who passed motions to reorganize the government so as to transfer the power to appoint officials from the Supervisor, a Democrat, to themselves. They were feeling chesty because they had regained their majority on the board in last year’s election, causing them to become drunk with power.
So overheated in fact, that they decided to institute a new form of government not seen before in the United States. Most of us know that it is the job of the chief executive of any government from Washington on down to appoint people to jobs. Congress, or a local legislature, may have the right to confirm the appointees, but they don’t choose them.
Our local powertrippers apparently decided that this was an outmoded way to do things and hiring should be done by the collective, not by its head. The fact that collectivism is an idea promoted, though not often practiced, by Communists, didn’t seem to bother them. Does that make these Republicans Communists? No, just a bunch of guys out to grab all the good jobs in sight for their friends in any way they can. (Not so different from commies after all).
So they proceeded with their reorganization of town government, confident that they had a done deal and it was all over but the shouting. They only began to suspect that something might be wrong when they found that the town meeting where all the new arrangements were to be enacted into law was suspiciously well-attended. Instead of the usual handful of spectators, they found the hall was jammed with 300 noisy characters representing civic organizations which had never been notified of the proposed reorganization. No sooner had the meeting been called to order than they were on their feet demanding to know why the Republican plans had never been mentioned in the election six weeks before.
From there things went downhill for the new majority. They had no explanation for their failure to confide their intentions to the voters. In Washington they could have pleaded national security but that wouldn’t work in a local election. It didn’t take them long to recognize that they had been caught with their pants down and the best thing they could do was to beat a retreat and abandon their plots. So the resolutions they’d prepared with care for automatic enactment by their bloc were “withdrawn” for “further consideration” and no more has been heard of them since.
In case any reader is now wondering whether this conservative writer has now switched his loyalty from the Republican party to the other side, the answer is no, nothing’s changed. When Republicans start playing games and pulling tricks as if they were Demos, it’s time to change partners for a while and dance with someone else. When the time comes for reconciliation, we’ll be lovers again.
It’s not the first time the Republicans have gone off the track. They did so in monumental style back in the days of the Tenure of Office Act, which I wrote about in my last entry here. The Republicans went on a rampage in those days. The eleven states of the Confederacy lay flat on the canvas after the Civil War and the GYP (Grand Young Party as it was then, although the other meaning of the initials also applied -- see the carpetbagger story below) prepared to jump up and down on the remains.
That was the idea of the Radical Republicans as they were called, the extreme anti-South party controlling both houses of Congress, unhappy with Lincoln when they re-nominated him in 1864 and even more unhappy in 1865 when the war ended and he proposed peace “with malice towards none, with charity for all” which didn’t suit them a bit. His successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson, turned out to have the same ideas, which led to his attempted impeachment in 1867.
Johnson beat the impeachment, but he couldn’t overcome the impeachers. They persisted in their plans to establish the “perpetual ascendancy” of the Republican Party as the rulers of the United States. This was to be done in two ways: by disenfranchising all former Confederate soldiers and officials in the seceding states and at the same time enfranchising all the freed slaves therein. Between the former slaves and the “loyal” whites there would be a permanent Republican majority established throughout the South, based on confiscation and redistribution of rebels' property
These ambitious plans looked like being realized when finally the outcast states were permitted to re-enter the Union by adopting constitutions embodying these ideas, with the U.S. Army standing by to make sure everybody voted right. This meant that there now would be state governments again with power to levy taxes and to expend funds. But because of the new enfranchisement system the new legislatures were packed with “carpetbaggers”, new arrivals from the North who were known by their still unpacked luggage. Between them and the inexperienced and uneducated blacks elected with them a carnival was staged featuring blue-sky accounting and the mysterious disappearance of millions of dollars in state funds into the pockets of the legislators.
This is the accepted account of the Reconstruction era as found in most history books, including the one I’ve consulted, “The Tragic Era” by Claude G. Bowers, published in 1929. Today it’s being challenged by New Left historians who care only about the fact that Reconstruction equalized blacks and whites in the South and everything else is irrelevant.
The two viewpoints can’t be reconciled. Reconstruction got such a bad reputation from the activities of the new legislatures that there was a backlash against it even in the North, so that in 1876 the Republicans only got the Democrats to concede the questionable election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency by promising the removal of federal troops from the South, which was done the next year. After that the backlash continued in the South for eighty years of segregation and discrimination against the blacks. Maybe if Congress, like the local legislature which inspired this essay, hadn’t been so anxious to tear up the Constitution and supplant the executive in the performance of its functions, all this would never have happened. Shoemaker, stick to your last. | |
|
| | |