NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5396

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Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

How Capitalists Rule.../Part 6

                  The Democrats and Republicans:

              After the Civil War, an uncivil peace

                        By Vince Copeland


Grant and the gold

The super-capitalist orientation of President Ulysses S. Grant,
along with the corruption of his administration, cannot be
overestimated. It was part and parcel of the hey-day of capitalist
expansion over which he presided. By the time of the election of
1872, Grant had disgraced himself with a large number of the white
Radicals who had supported him four years earlier.

He was implicated in the biggest gold swindle of the day, in which
his brother-in-law, together with financiers Jay Gould and Jim
Fiske, brought on the famous Black Friday financial crisis by
trying to buy up all the gold in the United States (outside the
Treasury).

They had put Grant's wife in for $500,000 and her brother for $1.5
million. Another million was to go to the assistant treasurer of
the United States, who was head of the Subtreasury in New York. The
plan only fell through because bigger capitalists than Gould and
Fiske, plus a number of smaller capitalists, brought pressure on
Grant to cool the whole thing and release gold from the Treasury to
depress the price.

The Republican soldier-president became a close buddy of the Astors
and the Vanderbilts, the two richest families in the United States.
They in turn were deeply involved with "Boss Tweed" of New York
City, a Democrat--until they found him too expensive and sent him
to jail.

A.T. Stewart, a $40-million dry goods king and another former
Democrat, convinced a group of capitalists to furnish a mansion for
Grant in Philadelphia and to give him $100,000 to pay off the
mortgage on his Washington home. The banker August Belmont, still
a Democrat, was also in on this deal.

After leaving the presidency, Grant tried his hand as a Wall Street
broker. But after fumbling several golden opportunities, Grant
appeared before William H. Vanderbilt in 1884 for a loan. He
immediately received $150,000. (The Vanderbilts had refused to pay
$2 a day to the railroad workers.)

Of course, all these peccadillos of Grant and his intimates pale
before the wild debauch of the public Treasury and theft of public
lands by the unleashed capitalist class itself.

As for the Democrats, they ran Horatio Seymour, governor of New
York State, for president in 1868. Seymour was not only a vicious
racist, but a thinly disguised advocate of a return to the slave
system. He led a fight to repeal the ratification of the 14th
Amendment in the New York State Legislature. But he was the last
prominent Democrat to openly advocate slavery, at least in the
North.

The Republican split

The election of 1872 found Grant still defending the general policy
of Radical Reconstruction, even while Reconstruction was being
eroded in some of the Southern states because it was not radical
enough.

Right in the middle of Reconstruction, during the Grant
administration, there was a split in the Republican Party. It came
from an unexpected quarter.

The split faction, which called itself the Liberal Republicans, was
led by some of the same Northern whites who had been most radical
in the fight against slavery, like Senator Charles Sumner and
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. However, where they
had been militant and intransigent, they now became tepid and
compromising. All their militancy was directed against the Money
Power instead of the Slave Power.

But this was just at the point when the money power--the biggest
capitalists--were coming over, however temporarily and insincerely,
to the cause of Black Freedom. While earlier these capitalists went
to war out of the need to subjugate the big planters, now they were
impelled by their alliance with the radical middle class of the
North.

This class, which really had led the revolution, at least among the
white masses, was now being superseded politically by the same
class that had compromised most with the white rulers of the South
before the Civil War. (Naturally, there were many individual
holdouts who remained loyal to the Black struggle, but their
political power was now being extinguished.)

Sumner, Greeley and their colleagues were outraged by Grant's
closeness to the money power in New York. The money merchants in
turn were now moving into bigger and bigger fields, including the
drive to control the sugar islands in the Caribbean as well as
railroad land in the West and steel plants in the eastern and
midwestern parts of the United States.

Before the Civil War any incursions into the Caribbean would have
benefited the Slave Power rather than the capitalists. But the
defeat of the slavocracy unleashed a big Northern drive for
expansion in this direction. And by this time the banks were
becoming direct investors in sugar plantations on the islands.
Modern imperialism was embarking on its first adventures in
overseas conquest.

Significantly, Sumner's first break with Grant came when the latter
attempted to take over Santo Domingo. But this early opposition to
modern imperialism was motivated by the interests of small capital
and small farm competition much more than by any proletarian
opposition to the power of the big exploiters.

It could be said that the beginnings of monopoly and U.S.
imperialism were already showing themselves and hurting the upper
middle class of both North and South.

The Liberal Republicans, in order to get support in the South,
began to advocate the end of Reconstruction and the removal of
Union troops from the South--all with the condition that the
Southern bourbons pledge their "honor" not to reimpose oppression
and slavery.

The election of 1872

After an enormous amount of research for his book "Black
Reconstruction," the great African American scholar W.E.B. Dubois
thought that by 1872 the leadership of both the big parties,
Republican and Democrat, was chiefly controlled by Wall Street and
that the Dixie component was now definitely subordinate to the
bankers and industrial bosses.

Wall Street's takeover of the Democrats, and even of the
Republicans, was consummated not by a mere infusion of money but
was the result of a conflict of social forces and involved the
struggles of thousands, even millions, of people, white and Black.

The leaders of the Liberal Republicans, some of them with long and
honorable records in the fight against slavery, much predating that
of Grant and infinitely longer than Wall Street's, were in one
sense being perfectly consistent. Being upper middle class, with no
social roots among the still impoverished Black population, they
felt the depredations of Wall Street (which they had always fought
against before the Civil War) and the oppression of the railroads
over the independent farmers and small business of the North and
South.

And they felt this more keenly than they felt the still smoldering
and rekindling fury of the Ku Klux Klan that was directed against
the African American masses.

The same white middle class in the South had joined the Republican
Party after the war, because they had their own grievances against
the plantation lords. But in a short time this class in the South
was even more directly oppressed by the railroads (Northern owned)
and bankers (New York centered) and that section of Northern carpet
baggers who elbowed them out of business. (And this corresponded
closely to the position of the big plantation lords, too.) The
economic bond with their Northern cousins became clear.

Net result of Liberal split

Thus the Liberal Republican Party could be called the White
Republicans as opposed to the "Black" Republicans (most of whom
were white, as we explained earlier). But the real difference was
this: the Liberals were a middle class party while the official
Republicans were a capitalist party which had suddenly seen the
light and was temporarily allied with the Black poor in its drive
to shave the old Southern rulers down to a size and power
compatible with the big Northern capitalists ruling the country.

The net result of the establishment of the Liberal Republicans in
the South was of course to leave the official Republican Party
nearly all Black in that area and to leave the Black people more
exposed to the cruel vengeance of the Democratic plantation owners.

The Liberal Republicans demanded all kinds of progressive reforms
in the national government, including restraints on the Wall Street
banks and railroad companies, and so on.

But in keeping with their new alliance in the South, they also
demanded amnesty for all Confederate generals, governors and other
leaders of the slave holders' rebellion, since those officials came
directly from the same class that was leading the new party.

This was done in the name of "good government," of ending the rule
of the evil "carpet baggers" and ending corruption in government.
Some of these leaders, no doubt, were taken in by the propaganda
about "Black supremacy" and Black rule of the Southern legislatures
and were frightened away from Reconstruction. In fact, only in
South Carolina had Black representation even approached a majority.

The Democratic maneuver

The real essence of the new alliance was made clear by the fact
that the Democratic Party decided to support the Liberal
Republicans in the presidential election. And this support was
accepted. Thus the formerly left Radicals were uniting with their
most deadly wartime opponents. It was a bloc with the right against
the center.

That is, the anti-Wall Street cries coming out of the South,
however genuine and desperate, were then and for a long time
afterward orchestrated by the extreme right wing in the Democratic
Party.

The Liberal Republican program did ask for equal voting rights for
Black people. And probably very few in the Northern wing of the
party realized that an end to Reconstruction, which they were
really advocating, would be in reality an end to all Black Freedom,
falling short only of an actual return to chattel slavery.

They thought they could simultaneously restore all privileges for
the defeated masters while still protecting the civil rights of the
masters' victims. They consoled themselves with the notion that
juridical freedom for the Blacks was real freedom. But on the other
hand, they wanted to remove the juridical restraints on the former
masters who already had the de facto freedom of landed wealth.

Horace Greeley

The presidential candidate of both the Liberal Republicans and the
Democrats in 1872 was none other than Horace Greeley. He had been
the most prominent organizer of the Republican Party and had been
considered a true Radical.

He had a hundred epithets for the Democrats in his newspaper, the
New York Tribune. And after William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell
Phillips, he was probably the most famous anti-slavery agitator. If
he had shown his face in any Southern town five years earlier, he
would most likely have been lynched.

But now the old Democratic Party, formerly run by the Southern
slave masters, backed the Liberal Republicans and supported Greeley
for president.

The old Northern Radicals in the Republican split-off gave the new
Democratic Party some moral authority. Greeley, unwittingly and
almost unwillingly, made this official. This ex-Radical,
ex-socialist, ex-high protectionist (for tariffs) and almost
"ex-Greeley" was calling for amnesty for the last Confederate
holdouts!

The Democratic Party was still considered in many quarters to be
the party of slavery, treason and counter-revolution. The Liberals
lasted just long enough to wipe off some of this tarnish from the
Democrats in the course of the 1872 alliance, but not long enough
to acquire any lasting credibility for themselves. (Greeley had a
mental breakdown and died a few days after the election, which, of
course, he had lost.)

Next: The Great Betrayal of 1876-77

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St.,
New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)

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