Party Switch?

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It has become a staple teaching of America’s politicized educational system that in the 1960s, the two major parties switched positions on civil rights, with the Democrats embracing the principle of equality of rights for all and the Republicans taking up the Democrats’ old racist position. This was never true, but it has come to be taken for granted among leftists and far too many miseducated young Americans. In reality, however, the Republican Party was not only founded on the principle of the injustice of slavery and the necessity that it be abolished, but consistently stood for civil rights after that.

As Rating America’s Presidents shows, Ulysses S. Grant, who was president from 1869 to 1877, showed a consistent commitment to the equality of rights of all people. In his first inaugural address, he called for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which stated: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Two weeks later, President Grant approved an act stipulating that the word “white” be struck from all requirements to hold office or serve as a juror in the District of Columbia. When Southern states resisted Reconstruction measures, denied blacks the right to vote, and allowed the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black populations, Grant sent federal troops to restore order and enforce the law. And in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was approved.

In 1868, Grant (pictured above) had defeated the Democrat candidate, former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who ran on a platform calling for amnesty for all former Confederates, and “the regulation of the elective franchise in the States by their citizens.” That last point meant the right of white Southerners, chiefly former slaveholders and all Democrats, to restrict the freed slaves’ right to vote. For good measure, the Democratic platform called the Reconstruction Acts “unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” A Seymour campaign badge proclaimed, “Our Motto: This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.”

It wasn’t just Grant. In his inaugural address in 1881, another Republican president, James A. Garfield declared: “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787….There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.” He pledged that “so far as my authority can lawfully extend they shall enjoy the full and equal protection of the Constitution and the laws,” deplored the denial of voting rights to blacks, and called for a universal educational system that would be open to black as well as white children.

In his first annual message to Congress on December 3, 1889, Harrison said: “The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found by a cruel slave code. Happily for both races, they are now free. They have from a standpoint of ignorance and poverty—which was our shame, not theirs—made remarkable advances in education and in the acquisition of property.” However, “In many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights. The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.”

Warren G. Harding, yet another Republican, supported a law that made lynching a federal crime; it passed in the House in 1922, but Senate Democrats blocked it from becoming law. Harding’s successor Calvin Coolidge wanted it revived, telling Congress in December 1923: “Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.” However, Senate Democrats blocked it again in 1924.

These are just a few examples of what was a consistent record of Republican support for civil rights. So what happened in the 1960s? The growing Republican support in the South in the 1960s and thereafter is frequently attributed to the supposed racism of the party, but in reality, segregation and Jim Crow ended at the same time that Republican support was growing, and no Republicans campaigned on bringing them back. The “Southern strategy” was not a Republican embrace of racism, but of social conservatism and greater economic freedom than the Democrats offered, both of which had great appeal in the South.

Reality, however, seldom, if ever, intrudes among doctrinaire leftists.