Cronies for Appalachian Oligarchs Celebrate Heroes of Southern Oligarchy
WV House Bill 2174 Exposes the GOP's Oligarch Heritage
A favorite talking point for Republicans is that the Democratic Party was the Party of Southern Slavery and the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and Civil Rights.
In the 19th century that was true.
For instance, radical Republican Charles Sumner fought most of his legal career for “Equality before the law.”
Arguing in 1848 for school desegregation in Massachusetts, Republican Charles Sumner sounded like a Marxist arguing that the State treat everyone with “equal care”:
Here is the Great Charter of every human being drawing the vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his condition and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble, or black; he may be of Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race; he may be of French, German, English, or Irish extraction, but before the Constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear. He is not poor, weak, humble, or black–nor is he Caucasian, Jew, Indian, or Ethiopian– nor is he French, German, English, or Irish; he is a Man, the equal of all his fellow men. He is one of the children of the State, which, like an impartial parent, regards all its offspring with an equal care. [Emphasis Added]
So how did the party of Charles Sumner and “equality before the law” become the party that protects and celebrates Confederate monuments and idols?
And how is this happening in West Virginia, a state that exists because it seceded from the pro-slavery Confederate States of America?
It all makes sense if one understands how the Republican Party became the party of the once-reliably Democratic Southern bloc.
First, the Civil War really was about slavery. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and in its articles of secession they made it really explicitly clear that the state was seceding because of slavery.
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. [Emphasis Added]
The people who fought for the Confederacy were fighting to preserve slavery, and that’s true even though the vast majority of the soldiers were not themselves slaveholders, and even if most Southerners didn’t particularly like slavery.
As William Skaggs noted in Southern Oligarchy, his 1924 historical review of Democratic Party-controlled Southern Oligarchy:
The great mass of Southern people had no interest in slavery and they were bitterly opposed to it. Less than ten per cent of the people owned slaves […] Less than twenty per cent of the soldiers in the Confederate Army were slaveholders, and yet they fought with heroic valor and suffered with undaunted fortitude for the preservation of an institution and an economic system which was rapidly reducing them to a state of industrial serfdom, and for the success of a privileged class which held them in political subjection." [Emphasis Added]
The war was a revolution waged by the wealthy oligarchs in Southern states protecting:
slavery;
the monetary wealth that large slaveholders had hoarded; and,
the oligarchical power that they used their wealth to exercise.
The generals and leaders that these monuments commemorate are generals and leaders who took up arms against the U.S. government in defense of slavery and the southern slave economy. These generals led thousands of poor Southern farmers to their death in a war against the United States of America.
As journalist Becky Little noted for History.com in 2017, in the period after the Civil War “commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro.”
It wasn’t until the early 20th century (around the time that William Skaggs was exposing the Dixiecrat oligarchy) that monuments to Confederate generals started going up
Little’s reporting continues,
“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” [Mark Elliot] says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s.
In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy like General Robert E. Lee, former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and General “Thomas Stonewall” Jackson.” [Emphasis Added]
Southern Dixiecrats erected many of these monuments to celebrate secessionist generals at the height of Jim Crow, 30-60 years after South Carolina seceded for the explicit reason of maintaining slavery.
These monuments represent dark times in U.S. history, whether we see them as commemorating the Civil War that they’re ostensibly about, or Jim Crow, the time period during which they were erected.
And while “Stonewall” Jackson may have been born on land that is in today’s West Virginia, he also fought to defeat the union that West Virginia eventually joined, and he never lived to see it become its own state.
“Stonewall” Jackson was a traitor to the United States, leading poor Southern farmers against the U.S. so that rich Southern plantation owners could maintain their slave economy.
So why are Republicans in the state claiming its anyone’s heritage in this state?
In 1964, Southern Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and allegedly told an aide that Democrats had “lost the South for a generation” as a result.
He was right.
In 1968, Richard Nixon accomplished an incredible feat by winning the Old Confederacy and wooing Dixiecrats with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” This strategy had Nixon talking all over the country about “law and order” and “states’ rights,” and Nixon made inroads with George Wallace’s segregationist voting bloc (“states’ rights’” being code for “states’ rights to segregate”).
It didn’t start in 1968 though, Republicans had already been chipping away at the Democratic oligarchy in the South for almost 15 years. As longtime Republican consultant Lee Atwater explained in 1981,
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n****r, n****r.”
And as John Ehrlichman told Harpers in 1994, this was also the origins of Nixon’s war on drugs.
“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” [Emphasis Added]
Some say that no one called it the “Southern Strategy” at the time, and that’s patently false. The New York Times reported in 1970 on “Nixon’s Southern Strategy” and quoted GOP consultant Kevin Phillips who spelled out another part of the strategy clear as day,
“All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Jacob K. Javitsj only gets 20 per cent. From now on, the Re publicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and be come Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” [Emphasis Added]
In other words, Phillips’ three step plan was:
don’t bother winning Black voters;
don’t suppress Black voter registration, because
as Black voters registered as Democrats, racist whites would join the Republican party in such numbers that Republicans could break Democratic control over local politics in the South.
It seems like it worked. From 1968 until Georgia’s runoff election in 2020 the Old Confederacy turned redder and redder every election.
Ronald Reagan made clear from day one of his 1980 campaign that he was an ideological heir to Nixon. Peniel E. Joseph wrote in the Washington Post in June of 2020,
As the Republican nominee for president in 1980, Reagan staged an Aug. 3 rally at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, an event that was weighted with racist symbolism. Neshoba County was the site of the brutal murders of the black activist James Chaney and white civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were killed during 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, a historic effort by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to bring democracy and racial justice to the Magnolia State. The interracial trio of activists went missing June 21 outside of tiny Philadelphia, Miss. Their bodies were recovered Aug. 4 in an earthen dam, and they have become enshrined as three of the most visible martyrs of the civil rights era.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won every state in the South except Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia—and West Virginia.
How the Democrats lost power in West Virginia is an entire story unto itself—but it was in no small part due to Reagan’s war on unions.
And the reality now is that the modern GOP has won over the power-brokering descendants of the Southern Oligarchy.
In this historical context, the GOP’s celebration of Confederate monuments in West Virginia makes perfect sense and it all starts seeming like dog-whistle Groundhog Day.
Members of today’s statewide Republican supermajority don’t represent average West Virginians: they represent out-of-state profiteers and the richest people in the state.
And these statues don’t represent the poor Confederate soldiers who died fighting to preserve an institution that hurt them—these statues represent the leaders and the generals who led those soldiers in a failed insurrection against the United States of America.