How the South Beat Reconstruction
Part 3

1880 cartoon showing the “Solid South” being forced to carry Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction regime at bayonet point.

3,095 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Creating & Expanding the Solid South

The end of Reconstruction did not immediately lead to segregation or the disenfranchisement of sub-Saharans in the South or any other part of the country. In 1878, segregation and sub-Saharan disenfranchisement seemed impossible — especially since the South had just barely thrown off a military occupation government. In parts of the South, in fact, sub-Saharans outnumbered whites. South Carolina even had a white minority.

The South was heterogeneous in many ways, and this division could have proven fatal for the South’s whites. The differences in economic attitudes across the region were vast. Much of the South was involved in cotton production, and the cotton planters supported free trade. The sugar and rice planters, however, supported tariffs. In Spanish–speaking south Texas, the economy was dominated by wool production, so the people there also supported protective measures.

Additionally, the South had not left the Union evenly or entirely in 1860. Four slave states hadn’t joined the Confederacy in 1860, and West Virginia had split off from Virginia during the war. North Carolina’s Quaker Belt had leaned pro-Union during the conflict, and the mountainous areas of eastern Tennessee were filled with loyalists. Sherman’s personal security detachment during the March to the Sea, the 1st (US) Alabama Cavalry, was recruited from loyalists from that state.

Southern politicians focused their legislative activities on upholding white civilization and suppressing the Africanization of society. They were keenly aware of the injuries, new provocations, and the natural distinctions that Thomas Jefferson had described. By focusing on repelling the sub-Sharan threat, the Southern politicians were thus able to politically unite and expand “the South.” The Solid South, as it came to be called, included the states of the former Confederacy, plus Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, and Missouri. Oklahoma was not yet a state during the Civil War, but has a large enough Southern population that it can also be included in the cultural South.

Southern whites pursued their collective interests via the Democratic Party. Whichever candidate in the South who won in that Party’s caucus, primary, or back-room deal was certain to win in the election. And provided such a politician kept free of scandal, he was sure to be reelected. This meant that over time, Southern politicians could become heads of Congressional committees and senior Senators. After a time, Southern officials became the ranking elected officials in Congress, so they were able to write the rules to their favor. Additionally, the South was politically able to take advantage of problems such as differing railroad freight rates and other economic issues to forge alliances with the agricultural states of the Great Plains.

Southern politicians made sacrifices to ensure that the North was not able to push “civil rights” and Africanization upon them. Every Southern elected official in Congress understood racial reality and carefully inspected every bill for any pro-sub-Saharan Trojan Horse. One such potential law was an education bill proposed by Senator Henry Blair, a Republican from New Hampshire. Throughout the 1880s Senator Blair sought to provide federal money to local schools. Blair’s bill wasn’t just about education, though. His proposal would have also reduced Southern frustration over their tax money going into pensions that were being paid to Union Army veterans, since it meant that Northern money would be sent to Southern schools. But the Southerners recognized that accepting federal money might mean a push for desegregation or some sort of dubious sub-Saharan uplift scheme, and the bill finally failed in 1890.

The 1890s likewise saw Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the judiciary ruled that segregation was constitutional. During this time, the Southern delegation to Congress was able to come to terms with various politicians in the North over other issues, such as currency policy, provided that Northerners reciprocated and supported issues that were of their concern. During the first two years of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s second presidency, the Democrats controlled the House and Senate. With Republican support, the last Reconstruction Era election laws were swept away. The South had effectively achieved home rule.

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The Southern states moved to disenfranchise sub-Saharans over the next two decades by changing the local state voting laws. The laws varied, but usually included several voter requirements, such as property ownership and literacy tests, which kept the rolls white. By 1910, sub-Saharan electoral participation had evaporated. Legal challenges to these laws fell flat. The judiciary sided with the Southerners.

There are several possible reasons for the judiciary’s support. Federal judges were interested in interpreting the law so as to give the states the maximum power to manage their internal affairs. The judges of that time were also not converts of the abolitionists’ theology of Negro-worship. A further possibility is that the judges had become aware of the racial differences in crime rates, and were thus “red-pilled.” And obviously, as the Southerners gained seniority in the Senate, they could shape the judiciary through the confirmation process.

The removal of blacks from the electorate also favored the Republicans. With the South free of domination by a large and hostile African community, Southerners were free to vote for their economic interests rather than merely focus on survival. The Republicans thus made gains in the region throughout the 1890s. In 1912, the white sharecroppers of Oklahoma likewise voted for the socialists in significant numbers.

A whites-only voting policy allowed the Democratic Party to enact significant social reforms throughout the early twentieth century. Any sort of “socialist” system falls apart in a diverse society, however. Once “civil rights” became dominant in the mid-1960s, the economic policy enacted by the Negro-worshipers shed worker protections and became one of neo-liberalist deindustrialization, economic stagnation, and outsourcing.

Framing the Debate & Metapolitics

The ultimate power in politics is the ability to frame the limits of debate. A pro-white framing appeared in March 1879, when a symposium was held to discuss two questions: “Ought the Negro to Be Disenfranchised?” and “Ought He Have Been Enfranchised?” On this panel were notables from both the North and the South, including future president James A. Garfield.

The Southern members of the symposium claimed that disenfranchisement was impossible and made the case — with which the modern reader is no doubt familiar — that sub-Saharans would vote on their individual interests and thereby support the whites of the South. However, Montgomery Blair, a US Army veteran and notable from Maryland, argued that sub-Saharan enfranchisement had created the political and economic problems seen in Reconstruction. He further remarked that:

The negro is not a self-governing nature. He is of the tropics, where, as Montesquieu observes, despotism has prevailed in all ages. His nature, of which this form of Government is the outgrowth, is not changed by transplanting, more than that of the orange or the banana. Hence to incorporate him in our system is to subvert it. His nominal enfranchisement is but a mode of disfranchising the white man . . .

The 1879 debate is notable in that it put Negro disenfranchisement into the political conversation at an elite level. Once any idea begins to be discussed at the top levels of society, it is usually only a matter of time before it is adopted.

Southern political activists also invented a pseudo-scandal after President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, a black academic, to dinner at the White House. Sub-Saharans had dined with the other presidents in the past, so such an event had precedent, but the firestorm which resulted further framed the debate over race relations to favor an all-white political community.

Novels likewise appeared which advanced the cause of the South. The novelist Thomas Dixon, Jr. wrote several books about Reconstruction, the most famous of which was The Clansman, which was later turned into the film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Even in non-fiction, every American history department until the 1950s taught the era of Reconstruction from the point of view of the “Dunning School,” which was named for the historian William A. Dunning. It postulated that Reconstruction had been a shameful episode in American history.

The Costs & Benefits of Southern Home Rule

With the election of the Southerner Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912, the South’s star had risen indeed.  Southern politicians likewise dominated the House and the Senate, and Southern attitudes on segregation had been adopted by Northern Republicans such as William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

With home rule secured, the people of the South began supporting American imperial projects. During the Wilson administration, Southern senators backed federal projects that they had previously blocked. This included expanding the Merchant Marine, sponsoring industrial development, and putting the railroads under federal government control for the duration of the First World War. Southern historians who were influenced by William Dunning also wrote articles on why fighting Germany was the “right thing to do” in 1917.

Looking back at the Wilson administration today, it is clear that his regime indeed protected whites from sub-Saharan criminality, but it is also possible that Southern nationalism had gone too far. The Wilson administration fully suppressed dissent during the First World War, including by imprisoning filmmakers for making movies about the American Revolution — because they supposedly made the British look bad. Wilson likewise imprisoned political rivals such as the socialist Eugene V. Debs, harassed and suppressed pacifist Christian sects, and waged cultural war against the German minority in the Midwest.

As the South rose, the Midwest declined. Historian Jon K. Lauck writes:

By the late nineteenth century, Peak Midwest had been achieved and the Midwestern Moment had arrived, but by the era of World War I the Midwest had begun to enter a new phase owning to international developments, industrialization, urbanization, migration, technology, and other factors such as the central administrative state, professionalization, mass culture, and global wars. The Midwestern Moment, the era of regional ascendance from roughly the Civil War to World War 1, was passing and the high standing of the Midwest — once seen as the “warm center of the world, “in the words of the Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald — began to lose its centrality to American life.[1]

During the First World War, the Wilson administration pushed hard against the German Belt. Wilson’s actions were not a rational response to a hostile foreign presence during war, such as the later Japanese internment. They were a subtle continuation of the Civil War. (Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Even as the South was fully ascendant under Wilson, cracks in its unity began to emerge. One problem was the rise of the Second Klan, which arose in 1915, when there was complete white supremacy in the South. It ironically caused a loss of white solidarity. Senator LeRoy Percy explained this to an audience in Brookhaven, Mississippi at the time:

The white man is in control of every department of government, of the courts, judges and juries . . . [and yet the Ku Klux Klan was] “dragged from its grave and revamped for profit.[2]

The Black Nationalist Ayo H. Kimathi has put forward the theory — which I support — that The Birth of a Nation received Jewish support in marketing and distribution because it successfully diverted anger over the rape and murder of a young Southern girl named Mary Phagan by a Jew onto blacks in general. The crime against Mary Phagan was an act which was symbolic of the larger dispossession of old-stock Americans by Jews. This state of affairs was masked by a revival of the anger over Reconstruction — a policy which had ended four decades earlier.

Another sign of this dispossession was the nomination — by the Southerner Woodrow Wilson — of the first Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, to the US Supreme Court. The vehicle for this dispossession was the Democratic Party. All the claims about the Democratic Party being “the real racists” or a “white supremacist party” are true, when we are speaking of the party as it was in the early twentieth century. But the party was also an unstable coalition of wildly different groups. In The Iron Curtain Over America, John Beaty wrote:

Unlike the Republican Party, which still had a fairly homogeneous membership, the Democratic Party was a collection of several groups. “The Democratic Party is not a political party at all; it’s a marriage of convenience among assorted bedfellows, each of whom hates most of the others” (William Bradford Huie in an article, “Truman’s Plan to Make Eisenhower President,” Cosmopolitan, July 1951, p. 31). In the early part of the twentieth century the two largest components of the Democratic Party were the rural Protestant Southerners and the urban Catholic Northerners, who stood as a matter of course for the cardinal principles of Western Christian civilization, but otherwise had little in common politically except an opposition, chiefly because of vanished issues, to the Republican Party. The third group, which had been increasing rapidly after 1880, consisted of Eastern Europeans and other “liberals,” best exemplified perhaps by the distinguished Harvard Jew, of Prague stock, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, whom President Woodrow Wilson, for reasons not yet fully known by the people, named to the United States Supreme Court.[3]

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, the Democratic Party reigned supreme. It was the political expression of the American people, and FDR’s core supporters were Southerners. Roosevelt himself was something of a white advocate, but the power in the base of his party gradually shifted. Ethnonationalist Jews increasingly came to hold key positions and shaped the party in keeping with Zionist and Bolshevik interests. Deluded white liberals were attracted to the party because of the New Deal. Eventually, this liberal-minority coalition moved to purge the Democratic Party of ethnonationalist Southern whites.

The Democrats Attack the South

Just after the end of the Second World War, progressive liberals in the Democratic Party worked against the segregationists. The liberal-minority coalition had been in power since 1933, and they dominated every federal institution. Besides the Jewish animus toward American whites in general and the South in particular, many liberals were genuine anti-Soviet Cold Warriors who sought to discredit Communist criticisms of America by ending segregation and sub-Saharan disenfranchisement.

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Meanwhile, American whites, who had been protected by immigration restrictions, underwent a demographic explosion in the economic boom of the post-war era. Many whites in other parts of the country came to view “The South” as a foreign country. They didn’t see the future danger they faced, which the white Southerners were already confronting.

Slowly, the segregationists and Southerners began to weaken as a result of attacks from the liberal-minority coalition. Democratic Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, who tried to repatriate sub-Saharans to Africa, was blocked from taking his seat in the Senate by Glen H. Taylor, a liberal Democratic Senator from Idaho. Taylor’s ancestors were from colonial Virginia.

Even some Southerners began attacking the South’s social order. Historian C. Vann Woodward called himself a “Southern Dissident” and wrote a series of revisionist books on Reconstruction. He also hailed the “civil rights” movement of the 1950s and ‘60s a Second Reconstruction, while saying in effect that the first Reconstruction had been just.

The “civil rights” movement also happened in part because of the rise of the Chocolate Cities: densely-populated zones where many sub-Saharans live and where they can thus achieve representation in Congress. Their rise caused both Republicans and Democrats to begin courting sub-Saharan voters in the Rust Belt, since they represent a potential swing vote which can aid a candidate in capturing a state’s electoral majority. For their part, sub-Saharans have always been committed Democrats who slowly began to join the party during the Great Depression.

The movement of blacks from the rural South to the ghettos of the Northern cities started in 1877. This migration triggered a panic in the North and led to Congressional hearings and bitter partisan fighting. Many migrating sub-Saharans were in fact turned back at Saint Louis. Nevertheless, this became a trend. For the most part sub-Saharans were not looking for agricultural jobs or farmland, but rather employment in the cities. As agriculture became mechanized, sub-Saharans relocated to the cities of the North, such as Detroit. South Carolina in fact became majority white in 1920 due to this demographic shift — while Detroit was to eventually become a ruin.

There was very little violence involved in this demographic revolution. Black-on-black violence was much greater than lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South. The demographic shift that made the South whiter happened in no small part due to white control over the governments of the Southern states. If we liken the South to the Soviet Union, black migration was akin to the movement of ethnic Russians from the non-Russian Soviet Socialist Republics back to Russia following its collapse.  Estonia, for example, became less Russian and more ethnically Estonian. The South wasn’t independent, however, and the North became saddled with race issues and endless sub-Saharan crime.

Sub-Saharan disenfranchisement and segregation lasted 80 years. President Eisenhower violated the Posse Comitatus Act in 1957 when he sent paratroopers to Arkansas during the Little Rock High School desegregation crisis. The paratroopers who kept schoolgirls at the points of their bayonets laid the foundations for the “civil rights” regime under which all of America suffers today. Although while the social policies of segregation and disenfranchisement were just, albeit unstable, our current social policy under the “civil rights” regime is both unjust and unstable.

Unstable social systems tend to last 80 years. All American white advocates should work every day to bring down this system and build up a white ethnostate.

Bibliography

John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Dallas: Wilkinson Publishing Company, 1951)

David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, & John S. Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2018)

William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political & Economic, 1875-1877, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907)

James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901)

LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Christopher Klein, When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom (New York: Doubleday, 2019)

Jon K. Lauck, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 (Norman, Okla.: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Roy Morris, Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)

C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Notes

[1] Jon K. Lauck, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 (Norman, Okla.: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), p. 18.

[2] Bateman et al., Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 325.

[3] John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Dallas: Wilkinson Publishing Company, 1951), p. 47.