Thurmond, Lott, and Lincoln
December 17, 2002
I want to apologize to all those who have been hurt
by my insensitive remarks about the Beatles, Canadians, and the Tenth
Amendment. They were mistakes of the head, not of the heart. To make
amends, I pledge on my knees to vote only for liberal and socialist
candidates in the future.
Which reminds me:
Trent Lott has been taking quite a beating for his offhand compliment to
Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday celebration. No need to quote it; by
now you can probably find it in Bartletts. Far be it
from me to defend Lott, who has hurt more people with his groveling
apologies than with his offense, but we could use a bit of perspective.
We are witnessing a
mass display, so typical of Washington and the media, of moral
equestrianism, or high horsemanship an orgy of phony moral
indignation.
Lotts remarks
have been squeezed to death in an effort to make them yield sinister
meanings, specifically nostalgia for racial segregation. And Lott is
vulnerable to this charge because, like Thurmond and many other Southern
politicians, he was for some time a segregationist. But we could with
equal ingenuity parse his salute as expressing a yearning for a past he
remembers as peaceful and untroubled, even if others remember it
otherwise. After all, a Thurmond presidency might have spared this
country the Korean War, the appointment of liberals to the U.S. Supreme
Court, and the rapid decline of constitutional government.
I think Lott is a
pseudo-conservative, but in this case he has been the victim of a willfully
malicious and ignorant interpretation of an innocuous comment and a
consequent media storm, led not by liberals but by other
pseudo-conservatives. The same treatment could be arbitrarily inflicted
on anyone. By the same token, the media can, and do, spare their pet
politicians similar treatment.
One of the themes of
Lotts tormentors is that he has disgraced the party of
Lincoln, making it the party of Thurmond. In the
words of the columnist Cal Thomas, The party of Abraham Lincoln
does not need the language of segregation.
Not that we should expect any Republican to know this, but
Lincoln was a segregationist. In this respect he went far beyond any
position Thurmond or Lott ever took. He espoused, and worked for, an
all-white America.
Lincoln opposed
slavery, but he favored emancipation only if free blacks could be colonized
outside the United States. Within the United States, he stoutly and
eloquently opposed political and social equality for the
Negro. He said it again and again, unequivocally. There is no need to twist
his words, for they are supported by a long and undeniable record.
Lincolns
defenders try to explain away his embarrassing words as mere
concessions to the anti-Negro prejudice of his time. That
is, Honest Abe was lying and pandering. He didnt really mean it.
But this wont
do. It ignores his long advocacy of Negro removal. He spoke of the Negro as
the African, and of Africa as his native land.
Calling the Negro African-American would have seemed to
Lincoln a contradiction in terms.
Many of
Lincolns pro-colonization speeches have been lost, but his 1852
eulogy of Henry Clay ended with a passionate plea for colonization, which
Clay had also espoused. Lincoln praised Clays leadership of the
American Colonization Society as one of his greatest services to this
country.
Nor was this a fleeting
enthusiasm. As president, even in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln
worked to establish two colonies in the Caribbean for former slaves. In
his 1862 state of the Union message, he pleaded with Congress to adopt a
constitutional amendment to promote colonization. I cannot make
it better known than it already is, he said, that I strongly
favor colonization.
Yet his defenders do
their best to ignore these facts. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book
Lincoln at Gettysburg, glorifying Lincoln as a champion of
racial equality, Garry Wills makes not a single mention of colonization!
Lincoln had a dream: a
united, all-white America. Had he prevailed, there would have been no need
for Thurmonds Dixiecrat Party in 1948, for the simple reason that
there would have been no Negroes to segregate.
If the party of
Lincoln is serious about repudiating racists, one wag has said,
it should repudiate Lincoln.
Joseph Sobran
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