Last night our car battery died, leaving us stranded in a windchill of 40 below, an experience that triggered sobering thoughts about life in America today.

The evening before, as I drove home rain pattered the windshield. The temperature gauge in the car said 43, the sky looked like the gray of March. Twelve hours later the mercury had fallen a numbing 50 degrees, which combined with winds clocked at close to 40 miles an hour meant that bare flesh could take on the ominous pale color of the early stages of frostbite in matter of minutes. Had our car died on the highway, I might not be writing this now.

As an old wilderness guide and former resident of a town where the local garage mechanic used to cruise the country roads at night in case someone had gone off into the ditch when it was 30 below, I like to be prepared for cold. When we used to drive down to my son’s college basketball games I would stuff the car with expedition-quality sleeping bags, a coal shovel, a complete tool set, survival gear and every Minnesotan’s winter companion–jumper cables. This time I did none of those things and almost paid the price.

The main culprit was an aging battery. I knew the battery would need replacing soon, but like everybody reading these pages, I was calculating what we could afford. Our winters here have been unusually mild lately, so I gambled the battery could hold on for another month or so because since Christmas just about everything we own has needed some kind of repair from the defective refrigerator limit switch that turned ice cream to slush to the hard drive on my computer that ate two long nights worth of work. With the bills piling up, the battery had to wait.

When we were finally back on the highway after I came close to getting frostbite on my fingers trying to get the car to start and I realized my feet were still there, I thought about the millions of Americans who have been making similar trade-offs over the past few years. Our decision to hold off on the battery reflected similar daily dilemmas all of you face as you try to juggle various bills with various needs. That’s why we have a mortgage crisis and people are pessimistic about whether their children will live lives even more economically-challenged than ours.

But we are the lucky ones. As tense as it was at times, the dead battery represented an almost laughable inconvenience compared to what millions were dealing with that night. For them it was not about something as trivial as a battery, it really was about life and death. That night as the winds howled, there were families not far from where our battery died who had to decide how they would survive that night in a simple frame house with little or no insulation and an aging furnace that put out too little heat and ate too much money. I suspect many of them did the only things they could–bundled up as if they were outside, turned on the stove, lit candles and prayed morning would come and the winds would die.

But these decisions all had consequences and trade-offs far beyond needing to buy a battery. The heating bill for that night would have to be paid by deferring something else like a clinic visit or even food. Yes, more families than there should be in America had to choose last night between eating supper and freezing to death.

Why? Because America has frozen them out. In the name of some abstract concept so foreign to some of those freezing people it might as well be quantum mechanics–a balanced budget–our President and Congress had cut back on home heating assistance, food stamps and children’s health insurance. An analysis by the Minnesota Budget Project estimated 22,400 Minnesotans could lose their low income heating assistance in 2008 due to Bush budget cuts. The Michigan League for Human Services put the number in that state who would lose heating assistance at 84,000. But the villainy is even more serious, for as we all know only too well, energy costs are going up, particularly in states that depend on heating oil. Capitol Comments notes:

LIHEAP, however, has not been keeping up with the rise in home energy prices. As a result, the purchasing power of the average grant has been declining.

I’ve presented charts and graphs and data in various essays so many times that this time I will leave them out and ask you to read the following scenario then close your eyes and think about it for a minute in a moment of silence to those who had to face last night with their heating assistance cut.

Maybe you have never experienced forty below windchill, but imagine the coldest cold you have ever felt and then multiply that many times over. Then place yourself in a single floor, wood frame house where the wind shakes the walls with an otherworldly rumble and deposits blotches of frost and ice where it can work its way through the cracks. You have no windows because they now resemble the cracked glass on shower doors found in cheap motels. Your children are crying because their hands and feet hurt, so you put them in bed, throwing everything you can think of on top of them. The smell of gas from the stove pervades the air. Carbon monoxide, even if you think about it, inspires considerably less fear than the thought you will fall asleep and the burners will blow out, turning the house into a time bomb.

In the northern Minnesota of my roots there have been stories in the paper for generations. A house blows up. A family is found dead. Here law enforcement, fire and social service officials estimate the number of these stories each autumn. Under George W. Bush and the wimpy Pelosi Congress, that calculation has ominously crept upward, especially with this latest so-called budget stimulus deal in which Pelosi and her House colleagues decided to ignore the people who faced last night with no reserves. What would $1,200 do for them? Especially after the winter is over?

It reminds me of the apocryphal story of the nineteenth century tycoon whose idea of charity was to periodically throw money from his carriage. But this is the twenty-first century not some Dickensian vision of the past. It also reminded me of stories in the news today about people dying in the cold spell in China. But this is America, not some impoverished Chinese village, but for too many people trying to make it through last night there was little difference.

When you go to vote next Tuesday think about that. Then cast your vote for someone who promises to change it. This morning when I woke up I immediately glanced at the paper to see if anyone had died last night. Thankfully, everyone survived. But that we should even be checking such statistics is a national embarrassment.

I think about how up north where my parents are buried the ground freezes so hard in the winter you cannot bury anyone. So the coffins pile up in a brick building on the edge of the cemetery waiting for spring.

Tagged with: America • america today • American_families • budget_cuts • Bush • car battery • Childrens_health_insurance • coal shovel • college basketball games • Congress • country roads • freezing • frostbite • garage mechanic • GOP_budget_cuts • heating • heating_assistance • jumper cables • media • Michigan • Minnesota • Pelosi • president • temperature • wilderness guide • windchill • winter companion

As we ponder the ascension of yet another Clinton to the White House it is instructive to remember what the first Clinton stood for and nowhere is that better articulated than in the history of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Uncle Judd’s Creek

The narrow, winding creek threads its way tentatively through a swamp dominated by the compact bushes of Labrador tea, so that at times it is lost from view as if it had been swallowed by the land, only to emerge again into the light with an unmistakable glimmer. Since before my boyhood and before the boyhoods of several other generations this nondescript body of water has been known as Uncle Judd’s Creek and therein lies a tale that belies its insignificant size.

Judd Cleveland gave his name to the creek and to generations of rumors, none more apocryphal than the tale he was somehow related to the president who also bore his surname. The wildest of these stories speculated that he was the illegitimate son who had inspired one of the dirtiest bits of campaign doggerel ever, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”

I actually knew an old woman who with her husband homesteaded the area near Judd’s Creek in a tent back when the area was still largely frontier who claimed to have been friends with the reclusive Uncle Judd. Ply her with a few of her favorite Texas Steers–basically bourbon in a giant shot glass–and she could tell Judd Cleveland tales for hours.

That an American president should somehow become associated with a winding stream not far from the Canadian border surely stands as one of the stranger footnotes in American history, yet it is a footnote packed with enough potent symbolism that it resonates over a century, uniting Grover Cleveland with one of our era’s more controversial presidents, one William Jefferson Clinton.

There is, of course, the foul odor of sexual scandal that hangs over both men. Cleveland was a corpulent man known even to his supporters as one with an eye for the ladies. Too much has already been written about Clinton’s dalliances, both real and imagined.

Then there is the fact both men made it to the White House in eras dominated by Republicans, earning both reputations as adroit political manipulators whose paths mirror the meanderings of that wilderness creek as the two seemingly disappeared into the swamps of their times only to emerge again into the sunlight with an almost blinding glitter.

Given these similarities it seems surprising that no one has sought to link the two men, but then those who write about politics these days tend to have short historical memories, as is witnessed by their ignoring the lost voices and lost values of those who made the last century a Democratic Century. Sadly, William Jefferson Clinton is not one of them for he stands not in the tradition of Bryan, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman but rather harkens back to the man who was Bryan’s mortal enemy, Grover Cleveland.

The Bourbons

Grover Cleveland remains one of those presidents who has precipitated wide disagreement among historians, with some going so far as to see him as the father of the modern Presidency and others viewing him as capitulating to the unreconstructed South and the businessmen who gave the Gilded Age its name. On the positive side, Cleveland tried to weed out corruption and graft from his party, which put him at odds with Tammany Hall. On the negative side, Cleveland’s economic philosophy was little different than that of the Republicans.

The supporters of Grover Cleveland were known as Bourbons. Depending on the source, there are various apocryphal explanations for the term. One relates it to Kentucky bourbon, because Cleveland enjoyed strong support from Southerners who supported Cleveland because he agreed to look the other way during Reconstruction. The one that rings truest to me sees the term as relating to the aristocratic Bourbons of France who returned to power after being driven out by the Revolution.

This explanation fits because Cleveland essentially capitulated to the tycoons of the Gilded Age. Among his strongest supporters were Minnesota railroad baron James J. Hill, New York financier and thoroughbred-raiser William Whitney, and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal president Arthur Gorman. In one biography of Cleveland, Horace Merrill’s Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party it is instructive that two chapters are titled “Businessmen’s President,” and “Defender of the Status Quo.”

Merrill points out:

He never served on the board of trustees of a charitable institution or advocated charitable activity as a function of government. (p. 8)

Perhaps one of Cleveland’s most revealing moments came when he vetoed an 1887 bill that would have provided free seed to drought-stricken farmers. In his message Cleveland wrote:

The lesson should constantly be enforced that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. ..Federal aid, in such cases, encourages the expectations of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character. (Quoted in Richard Welch, The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, p. 14)

In short, Grover Cleveland was a closet Social Darwinist. He ascended to the Presidency via a nineteenth century version of “Republican Lite” held by many Democrats who believed the only way to the White House was by adopting the major tenets of the Republicans and encouraging the new corporate growth that dominated the last half of the century.

Exhibit A in this portrait of Cleveland is one of the most contentious events in American history–the 1894 Pullman Strike. To break the strike Cleveland sent in 12,000 federal troops under the general who two years later would accept the surrender of Geronimo, Nelson A. Miles. The final toll was twelve strikers killed and 57 wounded.

The New Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council

With the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984, many Democrats began to wonder if the old truths of the Party had become obsolete. A year later a group dominated by conservative Southern Democrats including Al Gore, Chuck Robb, Sam Nunn, John Breaux, and an Arkansas governor named William Jefferson Clinton organized the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) with the initial mission of securing the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination for a moderate Southerner. The organizers of the DLC and its first staffers were Al From and Will Marshall. From had served as director of the House Democratic Caucus under Louisiana Democrat Gillis Long, a member of the Long family that dominated Louisiana politics. Marshall also worked for Long as his policy director. It was Long who stated in 1984, shortly before his death from a heart attack in January of 1985:

Our program amounts to a clean break with the recent rhetoric — but not the traditional values — of the Democratic Party.

In a speech outlining the founding of the DLC, Al From gave a diagnosis of the illness that the DLC hoped to cure:

As the 1960s passed into the 1970s, the liberal agenda — largely because of its success — ran out of steam, and the intellectual coherence of the New Deal began to dissipate. The Democratic coalition split apart over civil rights, Vietnam, economic change, and culture and values, and the great cause of liberal government that had animated the Democratic Party for three decades degenerated into a collection of special pleaders…Democrats had run out of ideas — and liberalism was in great need of resuscitation.

As From and others have noted, the seminal document of the DLC was the 1990 New Orleans Declaration which outlined 15 principles. The Declaration mixed traditional liberal beliefs such as inclusion, civil rights, and progressive taxation with a more conservative economic philosophy. The principles included:

We believe the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

We believe the Democratic Party’s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government.

We believe that all claims on government are not equal. Our leaders must reject demands that are less worthy, and hold to clear governing priorities.

We believe that economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone. The free market, regulated in the public interest, is the best engine of general prosperity.

Like Grover Cleveland, the Democratic Leadership Council sought a truce with corporate America and thus was born the New Bourbonism.

In a sentence that surely contains more contradictions in the least number of words than just about anything written by an American politician, Bill Clinton, who was elected chair of the DLC at that New Orleans meeting, declared:

We had issued a statement of principles intended to move beyond the tired partisan debate in Washington by creating a dynamic but centrist progressive movement of new ideas rooted in traditional American values. (My Life, pp. 364-365)

Clinton would add:

By embracing ideas and values that were both liberal and conservative, it made voters who had not supported Democratic presidential candidates in years listen to our message. (p. 366)

The Contradictions of the New Bourbonism

Anyone who can explain what is meant by “a dynamic but centrist progressive movement” deserves an endowed chair at Harvard, because reading these words today they make no sense other than as gibberish or an impenetrable tangle of contradictions. They also are revealing of the roots of the DLC and the New Democrats, for note how they try to cement together a series of opposing ideas into some kind of whole, like someone attempting to glue together fire and water.

The New Orleans Declaration is not so much Clinton’s hallowed “new ideas” as a stale intellectual smorgasbord stolen from both parties. You can hear in them the voice of Ronald Reagan as well as the voice of moderate Democrats like Sam Nunn. What you don’t hear are the voices of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman. In a fascinating psychological way, these ideas represent the mindset of an awkward, overweight boy from Arkansas who sought to get along with his schoolmates by telling them what they wanted to hear.

And like a high school geek wanting to be part of the in-crowd, the DLC sucked up to the biggest man on campus in the 1990’s–corporate America. That in 1990 a declaration of principles by a group of Democrats should invoke the “free market” over a half century after the New Deal seems preposterous, but then those were preposterous times. Of course, like everything else in this document that tries to be everything at once and hence amounts to nothing, it egregiously adds the phrase, “regulated in the public interest.” Just how much in the public interest people would find out when Bill Clinton walked through the doors of the White House and began auctioning off nights in the Lincoln bedroom.

Follow the Money (Again)

Given the free market philosophy of the DLC, the logical question arises as to who is funding this effort, for the DLC has grown from that group that met in 1985 to the most powerful force in the Democratic Party–and you don’t grow like that without funding to pay for staff, and, more crucially support candidates. The think tank of the DLC is the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), run by none other than Will Marshall. The Charity Navigator Guide to Intelligent Giving gives the Institute an overall rating of one star. That one star means the PPI:

Fails to meet industry standards and performs well below most charities in its Cause.

Just for those keeping score that compares to a rating of three stars for the Heritage Foundation. The Guide explains its ratings:

Our ratings show givers how efficiently we believe a charity will use their support today, and to what extent the charities are growing their programs and services over time.

The PPI in turn operates under the Third Way Foundation whose contributors include the Bradley Foundation, Ameritech, General Mills, Bank One, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, DuPont, General Electric, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft and Merrill Lynch. The Bradley Foundation is especially interesting because according to Media Transparency the foundation:

Is the country’s largest and most influential right-wing foundation.

Media Transparency goes on to note:

The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation, however, is to return the U.S. - and the world- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off.

That one of the major supporters of the Democratic Leadership Council should be a right wing foundation dedicated to taking this country back to the nineteenth century surely has to rank as one of the more bizarre pairings in recent American history, but Grover Cleveland would understand it perfectly.

Uncle Judd Cleveland would also. Not far from where Judd’s Creek enters the lake near my parents’ old home, it unexpectedly plunges over a spectacular thirty-foot waterfall. The Democrats experienced a similar plunge with Bill Clinton and the New Democrats as the Party dropped backwards almost an century. The irony of this is that it is exactly what happened to the Republican Party, so the end of the twentieth century resembled the end of the nineteenth, as if two specters from the past found themselves locked in combat.

Curious about Judd Cleveland I once searched for his grave in a the local cemetery where my parents are buried. I wasn’t sure what I’d find–a big stone monument or a plain headstone with only a name and some dates. Instead I found nothing. I guess I hadn’t really expected to, for when you chase a legend it often ends up just as an ambiguous mark on the map of history. But it fits, for this was a man who didn’t want to be found, living out his life as a reclusive hermit, as if he were running from his past.

Judd Cleveland could deny his past and somehow find peace alone somewhere along that creek, but a country has nowhere to hide. All members of the Democratic Party are relatives of Bill Clinton whether we like it or not. Unlike Judd we cannot escape our past, but instead need to confront it and find our way out of the swamp the New Democrats lead us into. For eight years the party has meandered like someone trying to follow that Minnesota creek, its moral compass misplaced. It’s time to recover it or our party could end up like Judd Cleveland.

Tagged with: Abraham_Lincoln • Al Gore • American_democracy • Bill_Clinton • Bourbons • Chuck Robb • Citigroup • Democratic_Leadership_Council • Democratic_Party • Democrats • DLC • Franklin_Roosevelt • Geronimo • government • Grover_Cleveland • Harry_Truman • laissez_faire • level_playing_field • media • New_Deal • New_Democrats • New_Orleans_Declaration • Progressive_Policy_Institute • Pullman_Strike • Republicans • Republican_Party • Revolution • Social_Darwinism • Southern Democrats • third_way_foundation • values • Walter_Mondale • William_Jennings_Bryan • Woodrow_Wilson

Ronald Reagan’s paradoxes drove Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edmund Morris to the unorthodox solution of using his own biography to explain Reagan’s. Handpicked to write the “authorized” Reagan biography, Morris found that even unprecedented access to Reagan materials left him scratching his head.

Damned if I can figure him out. Is he a political genius or a bore? [p. 5]

For many Americans, Morris’ comment expresses the challenge Ronald Reagan’s life presents, for like prospectors seeking a mother lode it seems the entire country has an obsession to understand our fortieth President. It will be interesting to see whether a century from now he will continue to attract those seeking some magic formula for leadership. The recent controversy over Barack Obama’s comments about Reagan, again brought home how much this President still remains a cipher.

The paradox of Ronald Reagan inserts itself early into his First Inaugural where he makes the statement most associated with him:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

What is virtually never quoted is the final sentence of this paragraph:

The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

The current Republican Counterrevolution loudly broadcasts that they represent the true heirs of Ronald Reagan, but this sentence runs totally counter to the Counterrevolution’s core belief that inequality is the prime mover of America. Democrats and Liberals, including me, have long seen Ronald Reagan as ushering in the end of the New Deal, yet here is Reagan sounding like FDR or Woodrow Wilson.

These two perspectives capture the paradox of Ronald Reagan: he is the President we associate with anti-big government rhetoric and yet on the other hand in the above quotation he seemingly advocates equitable solutions that could come from the New Deal. In that paradox lies the political differences that have split this country since Reagan delivered those words looking out towards the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and the white stone obelisk of the Washington Monument.

As you might expect, some commentators have resolved the paradox by viewing the speech as an example of Reagan’s desire to please all Americans.

In a paper, “Ronald Reagan and the New Conservative Populism,” historian Terri Bimes writes:

The striking feature of Reagan’s First Inaugural Address is the extent to which he toned down the more antagonistic themes from his earlier rhetoric and instead quickly moved toward consensual, unifying rhetoric.

Others have acknowledged the ambiguity. William Safire wrote a New York Times op-ed piece that sees Reagan’s Inaugural as part FDR and part Barry Goldwater:

An FDR-style warning of economic peril, coupled with an attack on big Government as the source of our problem…[and more consensual themes] evoking memories of patriotic fervor, national will, and individual sacrifice.

The remainder of the speech only heightens the paradox. Reagan immediately follows his remark about equity with a paragraph about special interest groups, which he turns into a tribute to:

Men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick–professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “we the people,” this breed called Americans.

This has been standard political rhetoric since the earliest days of the Republic–only the list of jobs has changed. In the context of the times, however, the “working Americans” line echoes those on the right who used it as a code word for an anti-poor, anti-welfare and sometimes even racist agenda.

On the other hand, Reagan’s next paragraph revives the equity theme, restating it by repeatedly using the phrase “all Americans.”

This administration’s objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this “new beginning,” and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy. With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong and prosperous America, at peace with itself and the world.

For those of you doing word counts, the word “all” appears five times. Contrary to the image of Ronald Reagan as a rabid ideologue in the mode of many Goldwaterites, this is inclusive rhetoric. There is nothing in these words of the divisive, name-calling rants of self-proclaimed Reagan heirs such as Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. This is not the divide-and-conquer language of a Karl Rove or Grover Norquist.

Yet no sooner has he finished exalting equity, than Reagan then returns to his anti-government rhetoric. The next six paragraphs reiterate this theme over and over, with sentences that must have warmed the hearts of conservatives who had longed to put an end to the New Deal. He even manages to work in the old states’ rights doctrine dear to the heart of former Dixiecrats now turned Republican.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.

It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

Then comes the paragraph I not only consider the most remarkable in Reagan’s Inaugural, but the most memorable.

How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?

It is amazing that these words have neither been widely-noted nor widely quoted. There is virtually no mention of them in any of the literature I have reviewed. Perhaps it is because they do not fit any of the conventional portraits that have been drawn of this President, but instead only add to the paradox.

The wording of this paragraph fascinates me. The key word is “we,” which Reagan seems to be using in the collective sense of all Americans. “We” are to “reach out a hand when” our “countrymen” fall and “heal the sick.” In other words, “we” have an obligation to help those in need.

The final words of the paragraph represent as clear and eloquent a statement of the level playing field as any spoken during the last century. Note especially that Reagan goes beyond the usual platitudes to state the equity must be something tangible “in fact, not just in theory.” Curiously the president whose words these phrases most resemble is Woodrow Wilson.

Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice.

But where Wilson specifically mentions government, Reagan does not. So we are left to ponder how will this “we” Reagan evokes provide for the imperatives he cites? Given this speech embraces the level playing field in one paragraph and then reverts to the ideology of the Republican Counterrevolution in the next, the critical question about Ronald Reagan relates to his own youth as a lifeguard. Did the man whose role was to save those who got in over their heads believe in helping them, even if it was their own fault, or did he believe in sink or swim, as William Graham Sumner would have it?

This question lies at the heart of understanding Ronald Reagan and his connection to the Counterrevolution. William Graham Sumner was a turn-of-the-century Yale professor and prominent Social Darwinist who believed in sink or swim. If someone was in over the head financially or other wise, Sumner thought that charity only served to perpetuate these weaker people. In Sumner’s view those who struggled to overcome their near-drowning became stronger. The problem with Sumner lies in the truth we all acknowledge, which is that sometimes people accidentally step into a hole that puts them in over their heads and if no one is there to rescue them, they drown.

Perhaps the best answer to where Reagan stands on this issue comes in a speech Garry Wills alerted me to—Reagan’s 1981 address at Notre Dame, a speech he predictably wove around the story of Knute Rockne’s famous “win one for the Gipper” pep talk and his own movie role as George Gipp. At Notre Dame, Reagan gave his own interpretation of the movie most associated with him. In a large sense he was analyzing his own life:

It was to his team that Rockne told the story and so inspired them that they rose above personal animosities. For someone they had never known they joined together in a common cause and attained the unattainable.

Later in the speech he would say:

Is there anything wrong with young people having an experience, feeling something so deeply, thinking of someone else to the point that they can give completely of themselves? (Quoted in Wills, pp. 146-147).

Now these are not words one would associate with either of the Presidents Bush or even with the Goldwaterites. Something far more interesting is going on here that leads me to offer a radical reinterpretation of the man people nicknamed “the Gipper.” Far from being a rigid break with the New Deal and its idea of the level playing field, Ronald Reagan is an important transitional figure whose life was guided by what I term the teamwork myth.

Ronald Reagan believed in a collective group functioning as one around a clear goal, which is why athletics weaves through so much of his life. But it is also the moral of his famous story about the bomber pilot and the wounded gunner. In Reagan’s telling, the gunner is trapped at his post unable to escape the crippled aircraft so the pilot, who is unable to extricate him, says, “We’ll ride this down together.” As several writers would point out, the story has to be false because if both went down with the plane, neither would have lived to tell the tale. When Reagan told the story to Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton during their visit to the White House, both of them found it ridiculous.

This is no William Graham Sumner story. Sumner would have found it as absurd as Keaton and Beatty. With his cold “survival of the fittest” logic, Sumner would have said, if the gunner managed to get himself trapped that was his problem. He also would have pointed out that the pilot’s act made no sense, since if the pilot had chosen to rescue himself he would have lived to fly more missions.

But Reagan’s twist to the level playing field consisted in believing that everyone on the “team” had a responsibility for everyone else. That is the moral of the doomed gunner story as well his citing the “win one for the Gipper” speech of Knute Rockne. Even in death, George Gipp asked that his dying somehow benefit the team. In the old tradition of the “captain goes down with the ship,” the pilot could not leave the gunner.

Reagan himself remained the consummate team player throughout his life. Wills writes:

He functions best as part of a production team. (p. 371)

Even when General Electric fired him, he took one for the team, refusing to criticize the decision which clearly was made on political grounds. Where government fits into this philosophy, lies in Reagan’s view of America as a team. As a student at Eureka College, Reagan had taken part in a strike against an administration which his memory fashioned into a team-centered morality tale. The college president had proposed a reorganization plan with drastic cuts that in Reagan’s words:

Was equivalent to cutting the heart out of the college. (Wills, p. 54)

The students responded by demanding the president’s resignation and when the trustees refused, they went on strike. In a sense the Eureka strike mirrored his quarrel with the Democrats over what had happened to government. To Reagan, the federal government, like the Eureka administration, had grown too out of touch.

Curiously Reagan’s teamwork philosophy makes him closest to Dwight Eisenhower, his fellow Midwesterner whose military view of reality paralleled Reagan’s athletic mental model. Wills notes Reagan’s governing strategies resembled Eisenhower’s, but he does not mention this other, more crucial philosophical parallel.

However, Reagan never became an Eisenhower. The story of his administration in the numerous biographies or the telling oral histories of those who worked with him is one of turmoil. In an oral history interview conducted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, longtime Reagan aide Lynn Nofziger captured the mood:

There were too many people in that White House, I think, who thought that Reagan should do what they wanted done instead of doing what Reagan wanted done.

There was a saying, most associated with Nancy Reagan, of “let Reagan be Reagan,” but those warring over his soul never really allowed that to happen. Nancy Reagan, often stereotyped as the Lady Macbeth of his administration, fought for her husband with mixed results. Nofziger believes Nancy Reagan made a huge mistake in overruling the choice of long-time Reagan aide Ed Meese for the position of Chief of Staff in favor of James Baker, whose main loyalty has always been to the Bush clan.

The war within the Reagan administration also was complicated by the assassination attempt, which left him incapacitated at a crucial time (Nofziger’s interview reveals how close Reagan came to death) and the still unanswered question about when his Alzheimers first manifested itself. Reagan’s hands-off leadership style and his well-known reluctance to fire people (which stems from his team philosophy) also played a role. The story of the Reagan Administration could be summed up with the observation that the paradox of Ronald Reagan became America’s paradox, splitting the country in two.

The unreconstructed Sumnerites in his administration constantly sought to bend Reagan to their will, but were never completely successful. Reagan, for example, went totally against them by agreeing to a tax increase—for the team. Meanwhile Social Conservatives never won him over either. Their causes—abortion, school prayer—never became make-or-break issues for Reagan. The editors of his collected works point out that in all his speeches and other writings, Reagan only mentioned abortion once.

The heart of Ronald Reagan, as opposed to those who claim to be the keepers of Reaganism, lies in his belief that government, like the Eureka administration had lost touch with the “team.” In fairness to Reagan, any objective observer has to acknowledge that there is some merit in Reagan’s criticism of big government, as anyone who has dealt with a government agency can testify.

Ronald Reagan never read Max Weber, but his critique of government has an eerie parallel with Weber’s. A German who wrote in the early years of the twentieth century before “bureaucracy” had become a dirty word, Weber believed that organizations made up of professional civil servants were essential for modern society. He wrote:

The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff. (Parsons, p. 333)

While historians, sociologists and political scientists have generated a considerable literature modifying, improving upon and discounting Weber, he still is recognized today as one of more important early voices attempting to understand the bureaucratic society that would characterize modern institutions from business to education.

Yet Weber also saw bureaucracy’s dark side. He predicted that bureaucrats themselves might zealously guard their positions and their turf to the detriment of society. He also worried increasing specialization could hamstring bureaucracies. But most of all, he feared bureaucracies could become rigid and inhuman. Weber often uses the metaphor of the machine to describe efficient bureaucracies, but he recognized that people were not machines:

The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed…In the great majority of cases he is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. (Gerth and Mills, p. 228)

Weber believed that bureaucracies could become immovable, impersonal and intractable. This led him to speculate about the relationship between bureaucracies and democracy. In a passage that anticipates Ronald Reagan he wrote:

‘Democracy’ as such is opposed to the ‘rule’ of bureaucracy..Under certain conditions democracy creates obvious ruptures and blockages to bureaucratic organization. (Gerth and Mills, p. 231)

When Weber foresaw that the qualities of individualism and equity that come with democracy will at some point lead people to resist specialization and becoming a “cog in an ever-moving mechanism,” he could have been writing about Ronald Reagan.

In a curious way, our oldest president, a man in whose mind mingled the small town Midwest, Hollywood glitz and Knute Rockne myths, reframed the crucial question Weber raised, a question that has become perhaps the most crucial issue of this new millennium: how do we remake government so it is more responsive to the people?

In the years after the First Inaugural, Reagan himself would lean more and more to the anti-government side, as his administration began the rollback of many New Deal reforms. Interviews with Nofziger and some of the other members of the Reagan inner circle suggest a much more complex image of the man and his presidency, than either liberals of conservatives have been willing to acknowledge. Perhaps the major irony of Ronald Reagan’s life is that the man who worshiped teamwork, never really had a team.

Two decades later neither Republican nor Democratic Presidents have provided a satisfactory answer. The Bushes, father and son, with much prodding from Karl Rove and others tried to take America back to the era of William Graham Sumner. Meanwhile in the uncertain winds that have become the Reagan legacy, Bill Clinton could only triangulate, like a sailboat captain whose only concern is to weather the storm.

So Ronald Reagan’s challenge remains unanswered. It still awaits someone who will get beyond Sumnerism and triangulation. Whether Reagan’s teamwork philosophy with its echoes of Franklin Roosevelt and even Abraham Lincoln fosters a “new birth of freedom,” in Lincoln’s words, or represents a curious anachronism or ends up a footnote that echoes the feelings Beatty and Keaton had about the bomber pilot story remains an open question.

Tagged with: Abraham_Lincoln • Bill_Clinton • bill_o_reilly • Bush_tax_cuts • counterrevolution • Democrats • Edmund_Morris • equity • FDR • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • Garry_Wills • Gipper • Grover_Morquist • Hillary_Clinton • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • Karl_Rove • Knute_Rockne • level_playing_field • liberal • New_Deal • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • Reagan_administration • Reagan_era • Reagan_years • Republican_Counterrevolution • Richard_Nixon • Ronald_Reagan • Rutgers_womens_basketball_team • Social_Darwinism • states_rights • survival_of_the_fittest • teamwork • triangulation • William_Graham_Sumner • Woodrow_Wilson

 

Reading the arguments before the Supreme Court in the Indiana voter ID cases reminds you of the stakes in this election: our democracy and a level playing field.

While the Democrats seem on the verge of going into yet another of their famous self-destruct acts and people argue about the importance of this or that issue, I have yet to see a survey or hear a candidate stress the importance of the Supreme Court. There is a good possibility our next President could nominate two or more new justices. With the Court already leaning strongly toward the right, it means America could face the equivalent of the infamous nine old men who so infuriated Franklin Roosevelt he threatened to enlarge the Court. The problem is many of the right-wing justices are young by Supreme Court standards–and you can be sure if the Republicans win they will not be stupid enough to appoint any older justices–so we are talking about what could be two decades of opinions that attempt to take the country back to the nineteenth century.

The Indiana case provided an excellent illustration of just what is at stake. An inordinate amount of the questioning directed at attorney Paul Smith from Justice Scalia concerned whether the petitioners had standing to file the case Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita. This is not a small issue, but in most cases, it is decided by the Court before the case is argued. The justices meet and make their ruling on whether the petitioners have standing and if they do not, send the case back.

Here is the beginning of the exchange after Smith has made his opening argument:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Before — before we get to that, can we talk about standing a little? Who are the — who are the complainants here?

Things go downhill from there.

JUSTICE SCALIA: But that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to have the Democratic Party represent me for all sorts of purposes. And these people can bring their own individual challenges. I mean, I’m not questioning their ability to do it. But, but why is the Democratic Party their representative?

Several pages follow with Souter, Scalia and Kennedy going back and forth about whether the Democratic Party has standing to bring the case before the Court. Finally Chief Justice Roberts intervenes seeking some end to the debate.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: We can limit your standing argument to — I guess it’s based on the affidavits of Ms. Holland and Ms. Smith, the one who is a clerk for the Democratic Party and the other who is a judge for the Democratic Party. We don’t have to agree with you that anybody who votes, might vote Democratic, is enough to give you standing.

But Scalia will not let the matter drop.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Excuse me. Even in its own right, it has to identify somebody that’s a member or not.

Finally on Page 13, we get into a more substantive discussion. Justice Alito and Justice Kennedy ask:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Although that leads to the next question, is whether or not there are ways in which the — the central purpose of this law can be preserved but it could be less stringent.

Smith answers:

If there’s any degree of burden being imposed on the voter by some additional identification requirement, then I would say it’s unconstitutional.

Justice Ginsberg then wonders if it would be OK if pictures were taken of the voters at the polling place with no charge to the voters, which Smith admits would probably be OK.

Then the questioning takes another bizarre turn that we have come to expect from this Court. Chief Justice Roberts asks one of the more insensitive and dumb questions ever asked by a Chief Justice:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana.

This question seems like something out of the South in the 1950s. Roberts clearly hasn’t a clue to the lives poor people lead–and more tellingly–no desire to know about them. This blind spot in a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is about as appalling a demonstration of ignorance as if I had asked why don’t the poor use their welfare Cadillacs to get there. Smith quickly corrects him, but the damage has already been done.

MR. SMITH: No. If you’re an indigent person, Your Honor, in Lake County, in Gary, Indiana, you’d have to take the bus 17 miles down to Crown Point to vote every time you want to vote. And if you’re indigent that’s a significant burden, and –

Scalia interrupts with an even more appalling bit of class prejudice.

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s not a burden if you’re not indigent?

MR. SMITH: Well, it’s — it’s less of a burden, Your Honor, considerably less of a burden.

JUSTICE SCALIA: 17 miles is 17 miles for the rich and the poor.

So let them walk 17 miles so they can vote, Scalia seems to be saying.

Finally, a quarter of the way into oral argument we get to the heart of the matter: preventing voter fraud. The Chief Justice seems to place great weight on a report that there is a 41.4% figure of bad registrations in Indiana. A bit of an explanation of this is necessary to understand the case. Indiana was under a court order to fix its voter registration system, whose records were so bad that, as the Chief Justice points out, almost half of them were a mess. Indiana’s solution is the voter ID law.

Smith tries to explain the difference between bad records and voter fraud.

The situation has existed for now a number of years, and the salient fact here is that there’s not a single recorded example of voter impersonation fraud.

A bit later after the Chief Justice goes on to say duplicate voting is a problem, Smith again tries to correct the false impression:

It’s not happening and, indeed, every single indication in this record is that the evidence of this kind of fraud occurring, to call it scant is to overstate it.

Justice Scalia then raises the old graveyard voter red herring, tipping his hand as he always does in an effort to bully the other justices and the plaintiff:

MR. SMITH: It’s certainly possible that someone could commit this kind of a crime.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I’d say likely.

Unfortunately Smith must have been so unnerved by now that he had trouble digging himself out of the hole Scalia and company have dug for him. Alito begins press the advantage:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, if you concede that some kind of voter ID requirement is appropriate, the problem that I have is where you draw the line on a record like this where there’s nothing to quantify in any way the extent of the problem or the extent of the burden, how many people will actually be prevented from voting or significantly burdened from voting as a result of the requirement? How do we tell whether this is on one side of the line or the other side of the line?

Now Smith is really in a bind. Justice Souter again tries to help him out asking if he can cite specifics about voters being prevented from voting by not having an ID. Smith could have referenced the Eagleton Institute Study cited in Part One of this series. The 2007 study found:

Data showed that registered voters in states that require photo identification as a maximum requirement were 2.9 percent less likely to say they had voted compared to registered voters in states that required voters to state their names.

But Smith appears to have no knowledge of the study. Souter continues to ask leading questions.

JUSTICE SOUTER: But how do — how are we going to — how is a court going to arrive at some kind of a bottom line judgment on this issue?

MR. SMITH: Well, because you — you basically have to take into account all of those factors: How many people are potentially affected; how difficult it is; how similar it is to, say, a poll tax, for example, and say — and then look at what purpose is being served here. Is there any real incremental benefit to anything by –

Smith does not seem inclined to use the argument that if a law makes it difficult for ANYONE to vote, it is unconstitutional. Some on the Court seem to be arguing that voting rights is a quantifiable matter: if only a few people are prevented from voting it is not important.

Scalia explicitly affirms this line of reasoning later in the oral argument:

But why — what precedent is there for knocking down this entire law on a facial challenge when I think everybody agrees that in the vast majority of cases it doesn’t impose a significant hardship?

Note the words “vast majority of cases.” So this is to be America’s new standard in deciding voting rights: as long as a vast majority do not face a significant hardship we don’t have a problem. Since Scalia loves to nitpick, let’s throw a bit of his own medicine back at him. Just what the heck is a “vast majority?” Is it bigger than a “large majority?” And just what is a “significant hardship?” Having to walk 17 miles apparently is not a hardship?

By this line of imprecise reasoning–I say imprecise because of Scalia’s vague terminology–something so fundamental to the functioning of a free country as voting could come down to–dare I say it–the equivalent of jelly bean counting. For this is what the court is doing–by weighing the number of voters inconvenienced by the law against the red herring of voter fraud they are counting the equivalent of jelly beans to come to a decision. God help this Republic if this is the mindset of our most esteemed judicial officials.

How would Brown v. Board and a host of Civil Rights cases have been decided had the Court used Scalia’s reasoning. What is notable is that no other justice called him on it. Apparently no one on this Court is willing to say that if a law deprives even one person of the right to vote, or some other right, that law is wrong.

Even more troubling about the line of questioning coming from Scalia and the Chief Justice is their total ignorance of what it means to be poor in this country. To these justices having to pay $20 plus bus fare plus perhaps lose time off work in order to be able to vote is no big deal. Let’s say the cost is $50 on the low end and over $100 at the high end. That could amount to the equivalent of a week’s worth of groceries or being able to pay your utility bill to get your voter ID–starve or vote, freeze or vote.

No one, not even the bumbling Smith, asked the most important question of all: why in a democracy should it cost anything to vote? Voting is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Since when has someone decided we suddenly have to pay for our rights? How much is free speech worth? Freedom of religion? Maybe we should issue church IDs just to be sure there is no fraud going on there and the same thing with free speech. This is the ultimate consequence of a Republican Counterrevolution that places a monetary value on everything.

It takes the always level-headed Breyer to come back to reality. In questioning Thomas Fisher, who was defending the Indiana law, Breyer states:

I’m saying your whole system is a system designed to assure that the person at the voting booth is the same as the person who registers. I accept that, absolutely right. And I’m simply saying given that, why didn’t you say Mr. Proto — Mr. Likely, like to register: “Come in. If you don’t have a photo ID, we will give you one.” Now, what’s the objection to that?

Then it’s time for Souter to nail Fisher:

JUSTICE SOUTER: Well, are you making the argument that you can place a heavier burden on voters to identify themselves because your State officials refuse to follow the law?…I mean, surely you’re not going to rest your case on that, are you?

Finally, on page 62 Justice Stevens identifies the elephant in the room, the one Justice Scalia was hinting had no standing:

JUSTICE STEVENS: But don’t you think it’s fair to infer that this law does have an adverse impact on the Democrats that is different from its impact on the Republicans?

The answer by Indiana’s attorney was that the Democrats did well in 2006.

Based on the oral arguments, the obvious question on everyone’s mind is how will the Court rule? The Democratic Party could well find itself in deep trouble due to the standing issue. That Scalia should spend 8 pages of the 81 page summary in a lengthy exchange about standing suggests to me only two possibilities: first, this Court is deeply divided to the point of disfunctionality if it cannot decide standing before a case is argued or Scalia was deliberately trying to throw a wrench into the works by focusing on standing rather than on the merits of the case. But something more subtle may be at work here, for Scalia is suggesting that the Democratic Party may not have standing in any case. Scalia’s questioning suggests a cat playing with a mouse, for Smith does not seem to have anticipated this argument very well.

In fact, Smith’s less-then-stellar performance quite frankly would make it surprising if the Court rules in his favor. Having read a fair number of oral arguments and cases, I would rate Smith’s performance no better than a “C.”Even with Souter, Ginsberg, Breyer and Stevens feeding him leading questions, he seemed unable to provide satisfactory answers, which seemed to irk Souter the most.

The Four Horsmen all seemed to tip their hands in favor of the Indiana law. Kennedy’s questions suggest he may again be maneuvering to write one of his separate opinions that like some of his recent efforts leaves legal experts shaking their heads as he did in the desegregation cases. Five to four in favor of Indiana looks to be probably a best case scenario, with six to three not out of the realm of possibility.

Unless I am presently surprised, the results of the Court’s ruling will reverberate through the next election as Republican states rush to push through their own voter ID laws modeled on Indiana’s–which the Smith called one of the most restrictive in the nation. Millions of the poor, the elderly and people of color will again find the voting booths barred to them as they have been before in our nation’s history. The Court’s opinion will amount to nothing less than the systematic disenfranchisement of these voters.

Unlike some who see the upcoming election as the Democrats’ to lose, I think the contest will be close enough that without these voters the Court’s decision could tip the election in favor of the GOP. The Bush v. Gore of 2008 will occur before the election, for if the Eagleton Institute study is right, the Democrats have already lost 2.9% of their voters.

The even more tragic angle on the Indiana cases is that none of the current Democratic Presidential candidates appears to care about these voters, with all of them bumping into each other in their attempts to court the middle class. John Edwards’ two Americas have become three Americas–the rich, the middle class, and the ignored. The poor, who FDR once characterized as the “Forgotten Man,” have again been forgotten.

The reasoning of the Court’s current Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse strikes me as extremely scary, not so much because it favors the Indiana law, which given Smith’s weak arguments seems a given, but because of what they reveal about the justices underlying mental models. If you remember your history, the Four Horsemen was the name given the four conservative justices who precipitated Franklin Roosevelt’s Court-packing scheme. The most disturbing assertion from these new Four Horsemen is Chief Justice Roberts’ and Justice Scalia’s assertion that seventeen miles is no barrier to registration which should go down in history as our own version of “let them eat cake,” only in this case it is “let them walk.”

Then we have the new Four Horsemen’s reviving the red herring of voter fraud. Much of their discussion had all the intellectual rigor of the rants of talk radio call-ins. Justice Scalia’s crack about graveyard voters suggests these justices feel democracy faces a takeover by ghosts. Better to prevent people from voting than risk an attack of imaginary zombies.

But the zombies won, wearing the robes of the Supreme Court. This isn’t about graveyard votes–as the justices well know–it is about whether our system of voting shall intentionally favor the well-to-do and the Republican Party. Should we have expected less?

That such a question should be raised in the twenty-first century is sad, after two centuries of expanding the franchise, we appear poised to take several steps backward. Will we hold our democracy accountable to its own ideals by putting the Court on center stage during the upcoming election? Wolf Blitzer and company, maybe you need to ask a question about the Court and its desegregation and voting rights decisions.

The performance of the new Four Horsemen brings to mind a famous quote from one of the original Four Horsemen of the 1930s, Justice George Sutherland. In Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board he wrote:

The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was.

Tagged with: American-Constitution • Bush_administration • Bush_v_Gore • court_packing_scheme • Democrats • desgregation • disenfranchisement • four_horsemen • Franklin_Roosevelt • GOP • graveyard_voters • Indiana_voter_id_case • Justice_Alito • Justice_Breyer • Justice_Ginsburg • Justice_Kennedy • Justice_Roberts • Justice_Scalia • Justice_Souter • Justice_Stevens • Justice_Sutherland • Justice_Thomas • level_playing_field • oral_arguments • people-of-color • precincts • Supreme-Court • Supreme_Court_four_horsemen • voter_id • voter_participation • voting_rights

During my research for The Strange Death of Liberal America, I explored the records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, using them as the centerpiece for a chapter on Fannie Lou Hamer. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I returned again to those records to research what they had to say about Dr. King.

In 1956, in response to the Brown Decision, the Mississippi legislature approved the creation of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the federal government or any branch, department or agency thereof.”

Commission records lay under a tombstone of secrecy and protection until a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union opened them for the public. Although the records appeared sanitized, what emerged was shocking enough—ghosts whose wails tell a sordid story. The handwritten records from one county show payments to informers ranging from $25 up to almost $100, with $40 not being uncommon. Check marks march down the page, marking African American informers, sometimes several for the same family. Like Nazi and gulag administrators, the Commission believed nothing was too inconsequential to report. An eerie 1964 memo notes: “Rita Schwerner [the wife of slain Civil Rights worker Michael Schwerner] recently purchased a Singer sewing machine in Meridian and had it delivered to 2505 1/2 5th Street in Meridian.”

To picture Mississippi at that time you have to be prepared to walk into a fevered nightmare which periodically reasserts itself into our consciousness. Fantastical images and shapes flit in the darkness, and curses and screams come from beyond the edge of safety and sanity. We awake with that uncomfortable feeling of sorting out what is real. One memo captures the atmosphere: “It was pointed out to Shiboh by the writer,” it notes, “that he was going a bit beyond the tutoring in Leland and he was advised to be very careful he did not go beyond the provisions of the law and create a problem which could bring about serious trouble.”

The Sovereignty Commission recorded over a thousand entries on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. They range from newspaper clippings to the memos of agents the Commission had infiltrating organizations, churches, and communities. They testify to the almost paranoid fear the racists had for the power of Dr. King as well as the extent the Sovereignty Commission penetrated into every area of life in Mississippi.

America still has yet to properly confront this dark side of its history when a state government ran the equivalent of a secret police force every bit as evil as those on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Only by understanding this atmosphere can we truly appreciate the vision and courage of Dr. King and of millions who resonated with his message and brought this country from darkness to a time when a black man could make a serious run for the Presidency.

All of this is on exhibit in memos written by agents detailing the Sovereignty Commission’s attempts to deal with the Grenada County Freedom Movement (GCFM). The GCFM represented one of those local uprisings that testify to the determination and bravery of hundreds of African Americans who fought against the Sovereignty Commission and its secret police force.

Grenada County was one of the dark hearts of the old Confederacy. During Reconstruction, four African American men were lynched there on one day. By the 1960s, the county had become a symbol of Southern intransigence, a place where both sides knew what was at stake.

Bruce Hartford, an organizer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference described the significance of Grenada in an oral history interview:

Grenada hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity, there was no big law that came out of it, but the Grenada movement was very heavy. The Grenada movement probably lasted longer, in terms of the upswelling of people’s mass activity, than any of the other mass movements. Longer than Birmingham, longer than Selma, Albany, St. Augustine, Natchez. I mean lasting longer in terms of how long people kept mass direct-action going.

Perhaps the most notorious event of the Grenada Movement occurred when a Klan mob with clubs, ax handles and chains ambushed elementary school children who were walking through town to enroll in a school that had been ordered to desegregate. Hartford remembered the atmosphere in Grenada:

Grenada became so intense at times that when SCLC field staff who had led demonstrations in places like St. Augustine — which was also very heavy — came to Grenada, they were taken aback. One guy — I won’t call his name — the first demonstration he was assigned to lead in Grenada he saw the mob and he turned us around.

Hartford described Dr. King’s role in the movement:

Dr. King gave a speech and the people in Grenada had told him, “We’re ready to move. Are you gonna stay and move with us?” And he said, “No, we have to finish this Meredith March, but as soon as it’s over, we will come back.”

And come back they did, precipitating a major crisis for Mississippi. Excerpts from a letter by agent Erle Johnston, jr. detail the strategies the Commission employed.

We have attempted, by direct contact and through infiltration, to determine whether the native negroes are in any mood to disregard Dr. Martin Luther King and any of his aides.

The letter goes on to report how the Commission prepared a radio address for the mayor (remember this is America and here is a secret police force writing speeches for the local mayor, speeches which I am sure he was in no position to refuse). Johnston also notes the Commission purchased 3,000 “think Grenada First!” buttons at a cost of $114.

I advised Allen that he and other Negroes in Grenada County should get busy and put the brakes on Dr. King and his movement.

Imagine for a moment what must have been going through Allen’s mind. A man identifying himself as an agent of the government of Mississippi has asked you to “put the brakes on Dr. King.” The agent did not need to threaten, for in a police state where people like Michael Schwerner disappeared and others were beaten and harassed no threats were needed. Instead, the agent merely let Allen fill in the blanks with his own nightmares. The “put the brakes on” phrase is especially eerie, given that Dr. King only had less than eighteen months left to live.

A memo by agent Tom Scarbrough reports on a speech by Dr. King:

Dr. King spoke to a large group of negroes at the New Hope Negro Church. He complimented them highly in carrying out his demands on the city of Grenada, and in the course of his talk pledged that Grenada would be further invaded until their demands were met.

This paragraph reeks with the prejudices held by many segregationists at the time–and by some Americans still. Note how the memo paints a picture of the Grenada Movement as fed by “outsiders” and King himself as a dictator who told people what to do. Most of all, note the none-too-subtle characterization of local African Americans as passive followers. Contrast this with the picture painted by Bruce Hartford.

This paragraph in an obscure memo written by a Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission member in 1966 testifies to the impact that Dr. King had on not only Grenada but America. It also testifies to an image of Dr. King that unfortunately still persists.

As with many great historical figures, there are many Dr. Kings that coexist uneasily in the American mind, some acknowledged and some hidden, but still powerful. There is, of course, the Dr. King celebrated on the holiday named after him–the inspirational leader of The Speech. There is Dr. King, the political leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other events. There is Dr. King the tactician of nonviolence. There is also the Dr. King of agent Scarbrough’s memo and Johnston’s letter.

To the Scarbroughs and Johnstons of the world, Dr. King was little more than a demagogue who gave orders and expected them to be carried out. Johnston’s memo also speaks of “King and his movement.” Few people today would openly admit to this view, so it has been replaced by another more insidious picture which views the Civil Rights Movement in the traditional image of leaders and followers. Contrary to Scarbrough’s memo, the picture that emerges from the Sovereignty Commission records is of what can only be termed a collaborative movement.

In a moving passage, Harford described the power of the nonviolence and the collective effort that lay at the center of Dr. King’s work:

I saw us do non-violent things in Grenada that to this day are just unbelievable to me. There were times we had this march of two or three hundred people circling the square, and surrounding us were a mob of 500 Klansmen. But some of