Lest We Forget: Back to the Other Buchanan
By Franklin H. Littell
Dr. Franklin H. Littell is President of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights. Last year, he was The Robert Foster Cherry Distinguished Visiting Professor at Baylor University. He has had a brilliant career as a teacher, lecturer, Christian activist, and world citizen. A major life work for him has been Jewish/Christian relations but he writes, "Recently I have found myself drawn to more and more insistent attention to social justice." This article attests to that prophetic calling. A fence-straddling coward he is not.
One thing you will have to grant Newt Gingrich: he is-as he says-a "revolutionary." His political base is populist. His contract on America is radical. He is not, except by the typical slovenliness of the journalists, a "conservative."
A conservative believes in incremental change, to avoid the ripping and tearing that accompanies passion-inspired and sweeping measures. He knows that change is the nature of the universe, but he wants it to be orderly and rational.
Gingrich and his disciplined cadre in the Congress openly declare their intention to undo the social patterns and economic structures set in place by the "New Deal" by which Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "brain trust` pulled America out of the Great Depression. They consider John E Kennedy`s vision for America and LBJ`s "Great Society" mere extensions of FDR`s use of the Federal government to "promote the general welfare."
As is often the case with slogans uttered for popular consumption, the history is all wrong. What is happening is not the reversal of 60 years of social progress, but the reversal of a course set for the Union in the middle of the 19th century.
Until the Civil war, it was uncertain whether the American economy and politics would be dominated by the plantation model. This was a real alternative at the time, and indeed in most of Latin America the new nations followed the plantation model-with fatal results to the present day. As a result of the confrontation between two social structures in the Civil War, the United States of America enacted three measures that fixed America`s course until the Reagan and Bush years.
The three measures, which were intended to advance the open society and break the class model, were the Morrill Land Act (1862), the Homestead Act (1862) and Emancipation (1865). All three of these measures are now being dismantled, and we are being turned back indeed-but not to Herbert Hoover: Gingrich and his fellow hired guns are intent on returning us to James Buchanan. They are but completing a dismantling of the American Dream that was well under way under Reagan and Bush.
To understand the background to the Morrill Land Act: when the Articles of Confederation yielded place to the USA, every square mile of land beyond the Allegheny Mountains belonged to the people and was subject to Congressional control and designation of use. (Those who claim the "right" to graze their cattle or cut the trees in the National Parks and Forests have no such "right" at all: they have been permitted by custom the liberty to poach.) Believing-as was often stated by sundry "Founding Fathers"-that the survival of democracy depended upon educated citizens, the Congress in 1862 made millions of square miles of public land available to boards of directors or trustees of state institutions to provide free public higher education.
This important measure, on which the upward mobility of so many generations of native and immigrant youth has depended, has now been effectively dismantled. The City University of New York and the state colleges of California were the last to abandon this vital aid to the realization of the American Dream. If the present Congressional assault on public education and higher education is successful, a major radical goal will have been achieved: to create a vastly larger pool of cheap and uneducated labor, in the USA as well as in Third World countries.
The second major measure in the middle of the 19th century was the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act, again making use of lands which belonged to the people of the USA, made millions of acres available in quarter sections (lots of 160 acres) to anyone who would go forth, settle, and improve the land. The goal was an independent yeomanry, symbolized by the "family" farm (a point which Pat Robertson, among others of the radical right, seems to have forgotten in his mantra: "the family!").
In the last census the family unit in agriculture had fallen to the point where it was no longer counted. In the last two decades, large numbers of ranches in Montana and farms in Iowa have been lost to agro-industry. Many of the displaced former owners are now agricultural laborers where their grandparents homesteaded.
Being a WASP, this writer has some difficulty to speak with authority about what is being done to turn the clock back on African-American fellow citizens. The late Clarence Mitchell, giant of the civil rights struggle, once responded to a white Senator who was lecturing him on the happiness of southern "nigras," "Senator, I have been a black man a good deal longer than you have."
Let me then defer to any of our black statesmen-perhaps Congressman Bill Grey, who gave up his powerful post in Congress to serve America`s black colleges. Perhaps we might ask Cynthia McKinney, a very bright and articulate member of Congress from Georgia.
The Rehnquist Court, the majority hag-ridlden by an abundance of ideology and a shortage of common sense, voted 5-4 against Congress` action to create districts to protect legislative representation for minorities. Congressman McKinney`s district will be erased. In the minority, Justice Ginsburg pointed out that there have long been districts on ethnic lines: Italian wards in South Philadelphia, Jewish in Los Angeles, Irish in Jersey City, etc. One of the black leaders said it turned the clock back 90 years. Another said, "We`ve had 300 years of slavery and 30 years of justice and that`s being ended."
Lest we forget. the cruel singling out of an ethnic minority for discrimination and repression was a major mark of the ill-fated German Third Reich.
The bitterness of an African-American, again singled out for discriminatory action, can be understood even by a white citizen with imagination. However, both of them need to realize that this attack on the liberty and dignity of black citizens, which is only one of many during and since Reagan and Bush, is part of an overall assault to turn America away from past gains. Those gains are not gains of the Roosevelt era but gains of the age of Abraham Lincoln.
