When the GOP went all wrong: 1928

 

When Harding and Coolidge ran for President in 1920, under the slogan a “Fair deal”, their campaign printed an appeal to women. It makes interesting reading vis a vis the Republican party today.

For instance, H and C pledged that at no time and in no way would American soldiers go to war unless this was deemed necessary by an official act of the legislature. Interesting language, already cutting corners on the old Constitution. And of course regularly violated by all presidents, R and D, since then.

But the beautiful part must be quoted.

“Republican domestic policy is for the strengthening and protecting of all elements which keep life on a high plane. It has been under Republican administration that this country has been an asylum for the less happy people of Europe, the land of promise and a haven.”

The old pro-immigration Republican party! Now, the promise to extend asylum and a haven to the less happy peoples of anywhere – save I suppose Aryan Germans – would cause instant censor by the Repubs.

The twenties saw a crucial reshuffling of a party that was, up until Hoover, still the party that bragged of being the party of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Hoover, that vile man, was the grandfather of Nixon’s Southern strategy, employing the same to Catholic scare the white Dem South and nominating a well known Southern racist for the Supreme Court, one John Parker. I’ve written about this before for Willett’s Magazine.

The roots of the abandonment of Lincoln and Roosevelt were encoded in Hoover’s greatest achievement in the 1920s – his leadership of the Federal response to the great flood of 1927, when the Mississippi river flooded the Delta. As John Barry’s Rising Tide has shown, the flood had a surprisingly large impact on American politics. It was, for one thing, the largest flood ever experience in the U.S. at its greatest extent, had flooded 27,000 square miles. Much of the flooded land was in the state of Mississippi, where cotton plantations depended on a black labor force that they could pay slave wages to. The white elite was very fearful that black laborers would escape the Delta – and where then would they find such a mistreatable labor force? This fear was a powerful driver of the racial atrocities committed during the flood. Hoover was, in fact, informed of these atrocities from numerous sources.

He not only did nothing, he saw the advantage to being seen as the champion of white over black, here.

This is why, in 1928, the party of Lincoln witnessed, for the first time, a considerable desertion by the black Northern voters – the ones that is who made it around the barriers and could vote.

Then came Judge Parker in Hoover’s nadir year, 1930.  He started out as a politician in North Carolina. A republican politician in the South. It was easier to be Republican in the solid South under Hoover, due to that recent history that every black leader knew.

The racial politics of the expansion of the state into the American economy is a complex story, in which, on the one hand, democratic economic policies came about, and, on the other hand, American racism became even more anchored – as if the White working class could only be benefitted if African-Americans were sacrificed.

It is necessary to go into these details in order to understand, for one thing, why the newspaper pundit story of the Republicans being “small government” is wrong, and, for another thing, why this history crucially forgets racist moments in the development of the modern mixed economy

 

So, why Hoover would elevate a North Carolina obscurity to the post of Supreme Court justice? In Hoover’s mind, the South was now in play, and he was on a charm offensive to get Southern votes for 1932. It hadn’t yet penetrated the political mind that the Depression was for real.

Observers saw what Hoover was doing. The New Republic wrote: “it was apparent as soon as President Hoover announced the appointment of John F. Parker of North Carolina that he had chosen an undistinguished candidate for political reasons…”

And, indeed, the fight against Parker was mounted as a political campaign. As the New York World said, sensibly, in an editorial: … the Senate has every right, if it so chooses, to ask the President to maintain on the Supreme Court bench a balance between liberal and conservative opinion. This is of course true – although in the years high decorum of the neo-liberal period, this idea has been systematically mealy-mouthed away as “playing politics” with the Court.

Two forces militated immediately against Parker. One was the NAACP, which noted that Parker, though a Republican, had run a campaign in North Carolina promising to suppress black voting, because “we recognize that he [the negro] has not reached the stage in his development where he can share in the burdens and responsibilities of government.”  The other, stronger force militating against Parker was the AFL. Parker’s record as a judge was unsympathetic to labor in the extreme.

In 1971, in an essay in the NYT, William Rehnquist, who had been nominated for Nixon for a post on the Court, wrote an essay about nominee rejects for the NYT. It is a nicely written essay, centering on Parker’s nomination, which was, Rehnquist writes, “one of the most remarkable battles over a judicial nominee in the upper chamber.” Rehnquist gives a lot of credit for the defeat of Parker to Senator William Borah, a populist Republican senator for whom I myself have a lot of heart. Idaho, before it became famous as neo-Nazi vacationland, was a radical state, and elected senators who thought accordingly, from Borah to Church. I have to give Rehnquist, a standard economic conservative, a lot of credit for giving Borah credit. Most conservative scholars in this area consider Borah a dirty dog, smearing Parker by associating him with his decision on a case involving “yellow dog contracts” – contracts that impressed an obligation on the employee who signed them not to join a union. Borah, and the Union’s, argument against these contracts may seem like an issue from another era, but – in my opinion – these arguments are very relevant to the contract creep we see today, when corporations force employees to sign non-compete and non-disclosure contracts. Borah ended his indictment of Parker’s position with an excellent summation of the duties incumbent on the Senate when deciding on the President’s nominee: : “In passing upon the fitness of the nominee to that court we are bound to take into consideration everything which goes to make up a great judge – his character and standing as a man, his scholarship, his learning in the law, and his statesmanship.”Nobody at that point doubted Parker’s character and standing. It was his learning in the law – his decisions – that doomed him. Parker’s fall presaged Hoover’s own. Hoover lost every state in the South in 1932, including North Caroline, where Roosevelt beat him 497,566 to 208,344. Somehow, I think that loss must have really bit. As for Judge Parker, he went on to a fairly distinguished career. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography chronicles the life of a state bigwig, crowned by his appointment as one of the lawyers in the Nuremberg trials. Of course, the irony of a man who believed the “negro” was not yet in a state of development to vote representing the Allied moral case at the Nuremberg trial is something I can only contemplate – hoping that by 1945 he had learned something. In 1957 he became the chairman of Billy Graham’s General Crusade committee. Then he died, and was buried with honors.

Life goes on after you are rejected by the Senate. It is all creme.