Recurring Themes in American History

I read a great deal of history, Audible has become my go-to driving companion, and as someone who enjoys studying American Political History, that tends to be the topic which I am most well read in. Since graduating college and thus having more control over what I get to read, I have been branching out into more narrative biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson. I've also taken up the study of the civil war and the two world wars which in many ways shaped the modern world. My goal is to one day have a complete picture of the history of our nation, from its founding to today without any of those glaring gaps, such as the often understudied "James Gap" The period of American History between James Monroe and James Buchannan. But as I have read, a few paragraphs have stuck in my mind, and I've made mental notes not to forget them. I recently decided to take a thought that has been nagging me, find those passages, and write out my thoughts. 

This passage, from page 228 of James M. McPherson's The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, stuck out to me. It regards the state of the southern press on the eve of the Civil War.

"Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one's own neighborhood. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckinridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up "false-hoods and sensation tales" to "arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement."

Link to the book:

In 1942, rumors swirled in South Carolina about so-called "Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs" This excerpt, from South Carolina Encyclopedia has the details.

By the spring of 1942, the rumors of Eleanor Clubs had become so widespread and alarming that public officials, including Mrs. Roosevelt, called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to see if they were true. South Carolina officials launched their own inquiry. Governor Richard Jeffries wrote each of the state’s forty-six sheriffs asking them to search for Eleanor Clubs. A Columbia lawman reported that he discovered an “Eleanor Society” in Cheraw, where at one meeting “cooks and nurses” decided that they “would not work for less than $6 per week.” But most people came to the same conclusion as a Dillon police officer, who said that while “there has been talk of the ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Society,’ after investigating, I find all of this to be just false rumors.” The editor of the Carolina Times, an African American newspaper, thought he knew the real source of these misleading and hysterical reports. “The ‘Eleanor Club’ issue,” he stated, “is a . . . dastardly attempt to besmirch the name of the devoted helpmate of our war-burdened president, both of whom are doing all they can to make the Negro feel his responsibility to his country by giving him an opportunity to share in the benefits of democracy and render his best service to the nation in one of its darkest hours.”

I hope to establish that, from the anti-racial-justice faction in America, the use of falsehood, lies, and fabrication, are established historical trends among the enemies of liberty.

So when I see this, I do not see a new wave of "Fake News" from the radical right,  I see the Southern disunionists of the 1860s, and I see the Segregationists of the 1940s. America is a young nation, and we tend to forget that. Men like Donald Trump were 20 when the civil rights act was passed. Steve Bannon was still in elementary school. These people grew up in a world where segregation was not only the norm but a cause worth fighting for. They are still around.

To say the history of racial injustice is under-represented in American Classrooms is a gross mischaracterization. It would be more apt to say that the study of Racial Injustice in America is American History. From the Revolution to now, I cannot read any credible book that covers American history without seeing how the thread of racial injustice snakes it was into the story.

It was the question of enumerating slaves in the founding of the nation. The tensions between The Slave and the Free States leading up to the civil war. It was reconstruction, Jim Crowe, and segregation. It was the fact that the French Army treated Black American Soldiers better than the Americans treated them. It was the gradual desegregation of the armed forces in WWII, the Civil Rights Era, and now.

No other single issue has come up throughout American History and worked to shape our character as a country. And I have one final point to make on this subject. History shows that we can go backward in this progress. Gains made in civil rights after the Civil War would be washed away by Jim Crow and segregation, and would not be seen again in the south for a hundred years. The Voting Rights Act has recently been gutted, allowing for the sort of voter suppression which is allowing a minority faction of radical conservatives to maintain governmental power.

This is an issue that deserves to be studied and is so often overlooked. Some of you reading this already know all of this and could add more to this conversation. I encourage you to do so. But for those who are surprised, or interested in learning more, than hopefully, you'll take this opportunity to do so.