KKK & The Party: A Series on the Democratic Party in America Part 3

Politifact.com asserts that it is not fair to say that the Democratic Party founded the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group found primarily in the Southern United States. What they could confer is that many early Democrats used the Klan as their strong arm. Of course, as with any underground organization, there is no transparency. Even the hooded marchers themselves disguise their racist identities in order to infiltrate mainline organizations, even politics. In 1868, during future Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s impressionable youth, the Klan served as a major part of the Democratic party, speaking at the National Convention and holding elected office. Klan members taunted their white might slogans at every turn, using tactics to legally bind blacks across Dixie. Klansmen even marched on Washington, routinely burning crosses, terrorizing citizens, and dividing the nation. The major theme of the loudest voices in America yelled, “This is a White Man’s Country, Let White Men Rule.”

In 1872, during the next nationwide election cycle, the theme was “New Departure,” a departure from the Republican reforms of Reconstruction and rebuilding the south after the Civil War. When Congress attempted to transform the war torn south, Democrat-led southern states reconciled themselves to political rhetoric since military manpower had lost out. In short, a different kind of fight to keep African-Americans diminished was put into motion. The Klan played an active role in keeping freed blacks from voting, achieving economic advancement, or exercising any rights that our Constitution provided. In those days the Republican platform was called liberal by Dixiecrats who saw the idea of making segregation illegal a progressive notion. Liberalism became synonymous with the Republicans efforts to end segregation in the south. The term liberal during this time in America’s history bears little resemblance to the current definition, because the initial meaning was based on Constitutionality that was systemically deprived from black citizens by deep state racism in our nation.

A splinter group, receiving less that one percent of the vote, called themselves the Straight Out Democrats, a conservative base that supported a Charles O’Connor/John Quincy Adams II ticket in the election cycle shortly after the Civil War. They held a national convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on the basis that any voter turn out would not result in electoral college votes because the Democratic National Committee did not recognize the Straight Out Democrats as an official political party. In other words, the few conservative Democrats that broke away from the racist policies of the party were politically ostracized for their conservative stance, and barely recognized by the people. The Democratic Party during the Klan’s infiltration into politics represents a truly liberal platform more representative of modern definitions.

The Republican party also experienced a split in 1872. The Liberal Republican Party nominee, Horace Greeley, a candidate who failed to secure the bid for the Republican nomination, became the Liberal Republican Party nominee for the presidency and was eventually support by the Democratic Party within months of the election. While the Liberal Republican Party platform valued some of the same principles of their more conservative counterpart, such as matters concerning the equality of all men regardless of color, persuasion (whose broadest terms include matters of sexuality), religion, nativity or race, there was a debate about how maters of reconstruction would be carried out. In just seven years after the Civil War, Democratic support of Horace Greeley to divide the chances of Republicans in the 1872 election ended poorly for the party who lost to Ulysses S. Grant’s Republicans. Their efforts to “remove the vestiges of Confederate nationalism, racism, and slavery” were seen as the best interest of the Union by the people who vastly voted in the war hero.

Greeley, who popularized the slogan, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” eventually served in Congress, representing New York; and continued to promote his ideas of feminism and socialism. Re-constructionist ideals of the first two years of Grant’s administration caused southern Democrats to rise up at the polls. In 1874, the policies of Grant’s administration were called Pro-Black. Democrats exploited the inadequate implementation of reconstruction policies as a failure of the administration and (Democrats) took control of the House of Representatives. Democrats also had a majority in the Senate as a result of the criticisms of Grant’s White House. This set in order the introduction of Jim Crow laws.

Democratic led House and Senate called for the removal of federal troops from southern states, leaving newly freed blacks to fend for themselves in post-Civil War America. State and local laws in Democratic-led state legislatures after Reconstruction brought about radical change in the former Confederate States of America. Jim Crow, modeled partially after a caricature of a man in black face, kept Americans oppressed, economically and socially, in a time when the country was trying to heal from the battles that killed a generation of soldiers. Jim Crow laws led to “separate but equal” racial segregation doctrines. The laws institutionalized economic, social, and educational disadvantages for non-white communities including poll taxes which kept blacks from exercising their rights to vote.