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How Republicans Became a “States’ Rights” Party

GOP States Rights PartyThe GOP of “Lincoln and Liberty” has been gone for about 50 years.

But Sean Spicer just made it official: the Republicans are “a states’ rights party.”

President Donald Trump’s press secretary said so the other day in response to a reporter’s question about why his boss axed President Obama’s policy that freed transgender students to use toilets and locker rooms that that correspond to their gender identity.

Spicer said that transgender rights is “a states’ rights issue” and that the Republicans are “a states’ rights party.” Southern Democrats used to say the same thing in defense of slavery, segregation and denying African Americans the vote.

The Republicans started down the “states’ rights road” in the 1960s with the Nixon-era “Southern Strategy.”

The Republicans started down the “states’ rights road” in the 1960s with the Nixon-era “Southern Strategy.” The GOP went after conservative white Democrats in the old Confederate states who were ready to abandon their ancestral party because it championed sweeping federal civil rights legislation.

Doubtless, Trump and his flack know the history of “states’ rights” and of “America First,” the latter one of the president’s favorite phrases.

“America First” is not as well known as “states’ rights.” An “America First Committee” vehemently opposed U.S. entry into World War II.

Some committee members were genuine pacifists who believed war was morally wrong. But the organization is better known for its reactionary adherents who hated Jews and spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

More than a few right-wing Republicans embraced the America First Committee because they despised President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “communistic” New Deal.

Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, was the group’s most popular speaker.

He was an “enthusiast of fascism,” wrote historian Eric Rauchway. “Lindbergh accepted a medal from Herman Goering ‘in the name of the Fuehrer’ during a visit to Germany in 1938, and ‘proudly wore the decoration.’”

Historian Susan Dunn wrote that “It is extremely unfortunate that … Trump chose to brand his foreign policy with the noxious slogan ‘America First,’ the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.”

“States’ rights” is considerably older. For going on two centuries, it was white code for white supremacy.

Before the Civil War, the South’s powers-that-be cried “states’ rights,” meaning the right of states to sanction slavery.

In 1860-1861, leaders of eleven southern states trumpeted “states’ rights,” seceded from the Union and established the Confederacy because they feared Abraham Lincoln and the “Black “Republicans” would flex Uncle Sam’s muscles to abolish slavery.

From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the 1960s, Southern politicians resurrected the “states’ rights” slogan to justify Jim Crow segregation and stripping the ballot from African Americans.

While Trump’s GOP is for “states’ rights,” the original GOP was steadfastly nationalist. Abraham Lincoln and the first Republicans believed the federal government had the power to keep slavery out of the western territories.

As the Civil War progressed, the GOP got behind the 13th Amendment to the constitution, which ended slavery. After the war, the Republicans backed the 14th Amendment, which made African Americans citizens, and the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the vote.

All three Reconstruction-era amendments represented the party’s founding principle: that the United States is a federal republic in which the central government is supreme over state governments.

The 1864 Republican platform recognized “the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

(The platform also declared “that foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”

Berry CraigAn 1866 gathering of Kentucky Republicans hailed “the supremacy of the national constitution and laws” over state laws. “The States are not absolutely sovereign,” they maintained.

Berry Craig

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By Berry Craig posted on February 26, 2017

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Berry Craig

Berry Craig is an emeritus professor of history at the West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and a freelance writer. He is a member of American Federation of Teachers Local 1360, the recording secretary for the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, and the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo, Hidden History of Kentucky in the Civil War, Hidden History of Kentucky Soldiers and Hidden History of Western Kentucky. He is a native of Mayfield, Ky., where he lives with his wife of going on 38 years and their 23-year-old son.

Comments

  1. -Nate says

    February 27, 2017 at 9:12 pm

    Thanx Berry ;

    Well said .

    Always interesting to see how some try to hide the basic fact that ‘states rights’ means segregation and slavery no matter how much they claim otherwise .

    Shame on you .

    -Nate

    Reply
  2. JoeWeinstein says

    February 27, 2017 at 4:37 pm

    Craig’s account is inadvertently misleading because it omits a look at the GOP during the long post-Reconstruction pre-Civil-Rights period, 1877-1960s. For that period Craig misleadingly apportions ‘states’ rights’ preferences (if not outright doctrine) just to Southern Democrats. My recollection is that ever since (if not already before) FDR’s New Deal promoted federal-level activism, ‘conservatives’ of both parties – which in most of the country meant Republicans more than Democrats – often used ‘states’ rights’ and related slogans, e.g. ‘keep government close to the people’, to try to kick jurisdiction over various environmental, consumer, and health matters away from the feds and to the states – whose legislatures and executives could more readily be controlled by moneyed interests. The mid-1960s GOP assist to federal Civil Rights legislation was a last-hurrah semi-cynical exception, a gesture toward the party’s Lincoln legacy, which by then was perceived as an encumbrance. GOP strategists perceived (as did Lyndon Johnson) that the Civil Rights legislation would ever after free the GOP of its Lincoln encumbrance, and allow a ‘southern strategy’. So (at least as I see it) even before the 1960s most of the GOP was quite happy with ‘states’ rights’, and its ‘southern strategy’ didn’t involve any big attitudinal shift in regards ‘states’ rights’. .

    Reply
  3. RonWF says

    February 27, 2017 at 4:04 pm

    The 10th Amendment is pretty clear: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The Federal government’s powers were meant to be limited to those in the Constitution and were not to be expanded upon by people who think they have both the right and the duty to tell us how to live.

    If that does not sway you, consider this; if it was not for “state’s rights”, you would not have gay marriage. Do you think that the Supreme Court would have ruled the way it did if it had not been for numerous States legalizing it beforehand?

    Reply
  4. Ken Wolf says

    February 27, 2017 at 12:03 pm

    Still teaching History, I see

    Reply

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