NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5434

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

How Capitalists Rule/ Part 7


                  The Democrats and Republicans:

                  The great betrayal of 1876-77

                        By Vince Copeland


The new political lineup

After the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, some of the party's
leaders became leaders of the Southern Democrats. A larger number
went back to the official Republican Party and became prominent
"reformers" of national government. But generally the Liberal
Democrats sank without leaving much trace.

The Democrats nationally then became a polyglot union of Southern
centrists, Southern reactionaries and some anti-Wall Street
Northern progressives, with the Northern sympathizers of slavery
still hanging around for a while.

After General Ulysses S. Grant won a second term for the
Republicans in 1872, the all-out drive to bourgeoisify the country
continued at still greater speed. Reconstruction began to falter
and several Southern states suppressed Black Freedom, even
including the right to vote.

It should go without saying that as soon as it had been possible to
vote, the freed slaves all voted Republican. They became, in fact,
a very powerful voting machine for a few years. But the Republican
connection was at best a temporary class alliance rather than any
kind of class partnership.

The official Republican Party kept the loyalty of the lower middle
class in the North--particularly of those white farmers who, except
for the most devoted Abolitionists and the slaves themselves, had
been the most vigorous opponents of slavery and given the most
lives to eradicate it.

Several factors contributed to Grant's second victory. First, he
had an even bigger slush fund than in 1868. But also he benefited
from the continued anti-slavery idealism of the Northern voters,
the fact that the Western voters had gotten land, and the swing by
a large number of Southern voters, mostly Black, into what had now
become Wall Street's new camp. Grant won half the old Southern
states in 1872.

Wall Street had finally joined the revolution, so now the ebbing
forces of the revolution were joining Wall Street. They had nowhere
else to go without repudiating the Civil War itself. The Liberal
Republicans were in the process of actually doing that, while the
Democrats had already done so. Of course, many Democrats never
supported the Civil War in the first place.

Thus the same Wall Street bankers who had earlier supported
slavery, and then grew immensely richer out of the struggle against
it, now received the votes to rule the country in the name of
anti-slavery. But by 1872 they were already beginning to
re-establish their economic ties with the white rulers of the
South.

They had quietly allowed reactionary, white-supremacist "home rule"
to be restored in several of the Southern states, despite their
oblique support of Grant's Radicalism and their coolness to the
Liberal Republicans. They kept to a more Radical course in the
remaining Southern states, but probably in order to keep
intimidating the overthrown rulers in both areas.

Reconstruction and Wall Street

Reconstruction (1865-77) was the most revolutionary period this
country has ever experienced. And by that token it was also the
most democratic--with a small d. It was not just the institution of
slavery that was abolished. The notion of human inferiority was
also beginning to be abolished. Black and white shared the
governments of Southern states; Blacks were elected to both houses
of Congress. (Today, over 100 years later, there is not one Black
senator!)

W.E.B. Dubois, who emphasized the legislative abilities and
participation of ex-slaves in the Southern governments, proved
beyond the shadow of a doubt that the freed people were at least
the equal of the former masters in this respect.

Reconstruction took place entirely under the aegis of the
Republican Party. Where the Republicans retreated, the Democrats
advanced and re-established lynch law.

However, Wall Street and the majority of the Republican leaders
were against dividing the great estates, even during Wall Street's
Radical period. This was partly because of Northern finance
capital's pre-war ties to the slave-owning South and partly because
they were frightened at the idea of dividing up property--because
that could lead to communism.

But by keeping their plantations, albeit without slaves, the former
slave masters were able to get somewhat stronger than the
North--and certainly most of the Republicans--wanted them to be.

The election of 1876

By 1876 all the Southern states except for Republican-controlled
Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina had virtually eliminated the
Reconstruction governments and were restricting the rights of
African Americans.

The erosion of the Black vote contributed to a narrow victory for
the Democratic candidate, Samuel S. Tilden, over his Republican
rival, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the election of 1876. The official
vote after the Republican-dominated electoral commission had
finished a recount was 4,300,590 to 4,036,298. However, presidents
are elected not by popular vote but by the Electoral College. After
several months of maneuvering and almost unbearable tensions
throughout the country, the Electoral College announced on March 2,
1877, that the Republican Hayes would be the new president. What
had happened?

The Wall Street bankers, who rigged and then re-rigged the
election, had encountered an obstacle. It was not because they had
destroyed the original Republican Radicalism, but because they
still hadn't quite done so. It was they who gave a dubious victory
to Hayes and the "Radicals" who really had been absorbed and
supplanted in the Republican Party. But by doing so, they inflicted
a final defeat on Radicalism.

If the South had been completely separate from the North during
Reconstruction, the Black people might well have succeeded in a
revolution like that led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in the Haiti of
the 1790s. Or if the white working class of the North had been more
mature and had not exhausted its potential in the Civil War, an
equally powerful revolution could have ensued.

Dubois felt that Black Reconstruction was indeed the "dictatorship
of the proletariat." This may well have been so. But if so, it was
all the more fated to come into conflict with the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie and its hidden cannons up North.

The Great Betrayal of 1876-1877

As part of the election steal by Hayes, a deal was made between the
new rulers of the North and the old rulers of the South. The last
of the Union troops were removed from the South and the old rulers
were put back in charge, with the understanding that they had to
confine themselves to their own section and not interfere with the
capitalist expansion of the North.

This agreement was not written down anywhere. It was an
understanding. Those few bourgeois historians who are the most
perceptive and honest--like C. Vann Woodward--have exposed it for
what it was. It would have come about inevitably, given the nature
of the two ruling classes, but what brought it to life was the
election of 1876.

Before the recount of the votes, it appeared that the Democrats had
won the electoral college vote by 200 to 184, as well as the
popular vote.

But the Republican Party controlled the governments of Louisiana,
Florida and South Carolina, which had 15 electoral college votes
between them. They also found one Democratic elector from Oregon
ineligible. The result was 185 electoral votes for Tilden to 184
for Hayes.

This raised a storm of protest throughout the country. So Congress
appointed a special commission composed of the Supreme Court judges
and a number of U.S. senators and representatives from both
parties.

At first the commission was divided evenly between the two parties.
Later, seemingly by accident, the Republicans got a majority of
one. It was by this majority that the Republican Hayes was decided
the winner.

There was talk of a new revolt of the South, a new Civil War and so
on. But the defeated Tilden, deep in the councils of the New York
financial world, gave the word to his followers to cool it.

Hayes' platform, like Tilden's, was a "return to normalcy"--a
signal for the definitive end of Reconstruction. The Democratic
leadership could have continued to protest the loss of the
presidency but, based as they were in the South, they took a
different course. The prize of "home rule," the retention of the
great estates by the old rulers, and of course a concomitant
dictatorship over the freed Black people were now firmly in their
hands.

His Fraudulency

As a matter of fact, Hayes was far more strongly attacked in his
own party than by the Democrats. Roscoe Conkling, the New York
State Republican leader, coined the term "His Fraudulency" for
Hayes. And it stuck.

Unfortunately, the new unbridled terror in the South against the
Black population also stuck. While the devilish deal between
Republicans and Democrats put the domination of the South in the
hands of one class, the capitalists, it still reflected the
interests of two predatory classes. One of them was the class of
former slave masters, who now had to adapt themselves much more to
the capitalist system and to accept the national leadership of the
biggest capitalists. The other was that of the big industrialists
and bankers, who were already changing their character in the
direction of monopoly capitalism.

Tilden the Democrat, for example, was a lawyer for the big
railroads. He had put together many combinations of roads, as J.P.
Morgan was just beginning to do. Tilden was not nearly so bold as
Morgan and had amassed "only" $5 million-$6 million in commissions
for this work--still a colossal sum in those days, however. He was
privy to the new drive of capital for expansion on a different
front. (Hayes, by the way, who had been a Civil War general and
governor of Ohio, was also a railroad lawyer.)

Tilden had captured many voters because of his cry for "reform" in
government. The Republicans were robbing the Treasury, plundering
government lands and purchasing high offices, setting up syndicates
on Wall Street with government complicity. The people had their
fill of this.

But Tilden's "reformism" was limited to "honest government,"
cleaning up civil service and the like. It had nothing to do with
social reform, with helping the working class, the poor and
unemployed. And as a supporter of McClellan's program for "the
Union as it was" in the election of 1864, Tilden had shown he
certainly was no friend of the African American.

Even if Tilden had won the election and been given the presidential
crown, it would have made little difference. Of course, many more
Radical Republicans would have been steamed up by the more obvious
drive to social reaction. The freed people of the South might have
risen up or at least been harder to govern. But the two parties
were now in the same class camp.

It is safe to say that among the ranks of the white Democrats and
Republicans in the North, the whole reactionary deal was only
vaguely understood. The superficial idea that "Lincoln's party
freed the slaves" crowded out any appreciation of just what this
freedom really consisted of, once Reconstruction was ended.

The Black people of the South continued to vote Republican for
generations after the Civil War--in those areas where they were
able to vote at all.

It was not until 1936 that African Americans in the North began to
vote Democratic after Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats
initiated the New Deal. This was during the great capitalist
Depression, which in turn spurred the greatest upsurge yet by Black
and white labor.

                               -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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