As I noted in a column last year, you would never mistake central Pennsylvania for any part of South Carolina. Here, in pictures, are some more ways that they’re different, starting with the State House in Harrisburg:
Never mind that we don’t hold with public sector unionism in the Palmetto State. I don’t anyway, and I think my attitude is pretty common (much to Mark Whittington’s consternation). But can you imagine, even if we did, being proud enough of it to put a historical plaque smack in front of our State House?
A different place, indeed.
They also have a lot of nekkid people right there where you walk in to the seat of their government. Well, I never saw the like…
Then, when you quit looking at the naked ladies and notice the actual walls of their statehouse up close, you notice how deprived they are up here. You see it, don’t you? No cannonball holes. I mean, they’ve got nothing to resent. How do they get up in the morning with any sense of purpose?
Anyway, I was going to offer to make some for them (after all, they probably helped make ours in one way or another), but I couldn’t find anybody in charge to officially accept my offer.
Related Posts
Ummmm. . .
Pennsylvania has lower infant mortality, higher per capita income, higher graduation rates, higher literacy, lower obesity, alcoholism, divorce, out of wedlock births, than South Carolina?
In short, Pennsylvania surpasses South Carolina in every measure associated with human welfare and productivity?
Well, am I close?
Another little-known fact:
During the Three Mile Island accident, the levels of radiation at the fence were still only 1/3 as high as the day-to-day background radiation inside the homes in Harrisburg.
You were safer to go to work on the property at Three Mile Island during the accident than to stay home and read the newspaper.
They don’t have cannonball damage in PA, but they do have a cracked bell in Philly.
I wonder where the lt. gov. candidates stand on more nekkid statues in Columbia?
I think both SC and Penn. have the same state animal—the White Tail Deer. But that’s where the similarities stop.
Every state has its pros and cons, but comparing Pennsylvania to South Carolina is like comparing the Pittsburgh Steelers to the Gamecocks. They are in different leagues.
Perhaps we need a giant monument on the Statehouse grounds dedicated to the six murdered textile workers in Honea Path, South Carolina during the General Textile Strike in 1934. The S.C. government sanctioned murder of these people was unconscionable. Just as it is today, the governor and the legislature were puppets of the business community. Take a look at the photos and captions on the following web page(s):
The Uprising of ’34
This history has been deliberately suppressed-I suppose that’s the biggest difference between SC and Pennsylvania-here you are murdered or blacklisted if you try to organize against a criminal business oligarchy. I have to give Frank Beacham (the grandson of Dan Beacham, the mill superintendent of Honea Path) credit though, because he offered the following admission of his grandfather’s culpability in the murder of the striking workers:
“My grandfather apparently gave the order to a handful of his favored workers to open fire on a group of their striking co-workers who wanted to organize a union at the mill.”
Yet another unhappy chapter in South Carolina’s anti-democratic, pro-business, anti-worker history.
Having lived in both states I would have to say that South Carolina lacks the kind of brotherhood that is common throughout PA. A striking example, In PA I was friends with 4 asian kids and 2 from Europe and we sat together as lunch. In SC kids sat across from a center aisle in which the black-asian-mexican kids sat and the white kids sat opposite. ANy questions? Sadly this was in 1993. And to think I thought the civil war had ended over a century ago? Oh well I’m not for giant federalized government but racism blows. And naked statues are art, you don’t think sexual thoughts when looking at them unless you are John Ashcroft.
Comments at large:
1. PA was home of the Whiskey Rebellion which was one of the first armed challenges to the new US government.
2. In the last election, they had what was called an Earthquake style reaction as some 15 or so usually untouchable incumbents were ousted, including their Sen. Majority Leader, for giving themselves a pay raise while squeezing the citizens to death with fees and taxes.
3. PA for the most part is fully segregated, with blacks congregated in a handful of poor sections in Philly, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg. For the most part, their public schools are either 90% white or 90% black.
4. If anyone in SC thinks we have fees, check PA out. Trailer licenses and fees annually, State income tax and a local income tax separately administered, developer impact fees, fees for landing in the state in a plane, car inspections required annually, also emissions inspections (ripoff city), the state’s main highway is a toll road and costs about $18 (guess here) to cross the state. I could add more.. I have relatives who live in Taxsylvania.
5. Due to the above, PA has been conducting PR programs to encourage young people to live there. Good jobs are scarce as it is an anti-business climate.
6. The state has some very pretty areas in the mountains and near the Amish farms. But no beach to speak of unless you count cold water Lake Erie (Dreary Erie).
7. Economically, PA is nearly bankrupt with massive long term pension funding issues due to all the teachers and public service workers. Something will give there.
One other comment, Gov. Rendell of PA (Dem) has turned to the casino and slots industry to attempt to bail out the state from it’s severe financial stress. Shades of Gov. Hodges??????
What are you talking about Mark, we have a Cracked Bell here too.
Least we forget, they have Gettysburg.
On the issue of segregation, isn’t that really a matter of personal choice whom you want to eat with rather than something that needs to be mandated by government or pressure?
Pursuit of happiness. It wouldn’t make me happy to be required to socialize with a seedy looking Arab or illegal immigrant.
Sorry, just thinking out loud.
SC is growing much faster while PA is barely holding on? PA lost 4 US House seats between 1980 and 2000, a clear indicator of relative decline.
PA population in 1990 = 11,881,643
PA population in 2005 = 12,429,616
SC population in 1990 = 3,486,703
SC population in 2005 = 4,255,083
Don’t worry, VietVet, I won’t forget about Gettysburg. Around here, there are reminders everywhere. The town we we’ve been staying in was full of re-enactors over the weekend; four Confederate cavalrymen had left their horses out behind our hotel night before last while they went into a tavern to wet their whistles.
I visited Gettyburg last year, and I think it may have been the most impressive visit to a historical site in my life. Read about it here.
Lexwolf – PA has a lot of nice stuff to offer if you can get past the overtaxing and state bureaucracy. What is funny is that people are moving out of NJ into PA because NJ is by far horrible compared to PA. It’s all relative I guess.
Smack in front of the state house…
PA. has a plaque to a movement founded to eliminate the exploitation of workers by management.
SC has the banner of a failed rebellion fought to keep fellow humans in bondage.
Not a bad symbolic comparison of the two states in a nutshell.
A lot of South Carolinians thought Secession was to escape the bondage of Yankee tariffs on Southern trade.
A lot of South Carolinians think you can go to hell for dancing.
DECLARATION OF THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES WHICH INDUCE AND JUSTIFY THE SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA FROM THE FEDERAL UNION.
[p2]
The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
[…]
[p17]
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
[p18]
“No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
[p19]
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.
[p20]
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
[p21]
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
[p22]
The ends for which this Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
[p23]
These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
[p24]
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Declarations of Causes of Seceding States
Georgia
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation.
[…]
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.
I’ve lived in both Pennsylvania (Bethlehem) and South Carolina (Columbia).
An interesting fact about Pennsylvania is that it has the highest %age of native (in-state) population in the nation. It’s also a very old state in its demographics. Look it up.
People just don’t move there.
I’ve never gotten such a sense of dull complacency about a place as when I lived in Pennsylvania.
For all the objective problems of South Carolina and all my problems with it (and I had my share) I have to say that South Carolina, unlike Pennsy, did not seem to be dying before my very eyes.
C – as much as I like so many things about PA, you are so right with that comment. PA, once home to Mellon Bank, Gulf Oil, Beth. Steel, Pullman-Standard, Dresser Ind., Rockwell International and many many other huge corporations, has managed to drive most of them out of the state. Too bad, but as a whole it is way better than the garbage dump of America, New Jersey.
Dave,
I’ve been to PA a number of times. We actually went on vacation there from Europe 3 or 4 times, usually 3 or 4 weeks. The eastern half of PA and southern NJ used to be our base and we would take trips up to maybe 500 miles away.
Like so many places, it’s great to visit but probably wouldn’t be much fun to live in. People visiting any place for a few days generally don’t realize how difficult the place might be to live in. After all, the hotel is doing everything it can to make their stay pleasant but actual residents don’t get that red carpet treatment.
One of the things that always struck me about PA and most of the adjacent states is just how downcast and dispirited the people appear. There just doesn’t seem to be much joie de vivre or confidence about the future.
Dave, if New Jersey is a garbage dump, and yet vastly surpasses South Carolina in every measure associated with human welfare and productivity, what does that make South Carolina?
Dave says:
I used to live in New Jersey. I know a lot about the place. You are so wrong.
According to the most recent Census Data, New Jersey has the 2nd highest median household income in the United States, about 50% more than South Carolina.
New Jersey is also #1 in high school graduation rates, while South Carolina is dead last.
We could go on like this, but what’s the point?
The proof is in the pudding: New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the union because people want to live there.
(And don’t even give me the it’s-all-factories line. It’s-all-suburbs would be closer to the truth!)
New Jersey is also in relative decline, falling from 17 to 15 electoral votes since 1980. That decline would have been much worse if so many people from NY (10 ECs lost since 1980) hadn’t moved to NJ, the lesser evil.
The same is true almost across the board for all the blue states in the Northeast and Midwest. Makes you wonder why, if living in a blue state is so great, the people are all voting with their feet for greener pastures in the red states.
Lex, it’s interesting that you don’t really seem to do direct comparisons, you instead draw conclusions about the relative quality of life in SC versus NJ based on other criteria. I notice that most conservatives do a lot of complaining about illegal immigrants; I wonder how much of the “decline” of the more productive, wealthier states is due to a greater influx of illegal immigrants into the ignorant, shiftless, freeloader, conservative states.
Anyway, why don’t we do a few direct comparisons and see if we can get a flavor of the two states:
Is infant mortality good or bad?
Which state has infant mortality higher?
Is drunkenness good or bad?
Which state has a higher rate of alcoholism?
Is education good or bad?
Which state has a more ignorant population?
Is spouse abuse good or bad?
Which state has a higher rate of domestic violence?
Is productivity good or bad?
Which state has a more productive work force?
NJ and SC have nearly the same number of low income and poor families in their states, about 400,000. PA has 800,000 families in the poor or low income categories. So in about the same geographic size area, PA has twice the number of suffering families. And NJ, which does have a high number of high income families, still has the same number of poor families as SC. If NJ is so enlightened, how do you explain these numbers?
I’ve lived in all three states, although the amount of time (1 year each in NJ & PA, 17 years in SC) is much skewed in SC’s favor. Although NJ & PA are both declining in population, both are way ahead of where SC will ever be in population. The migration to the Sunbelt has benefited mostly Florida, Texas and Arizona, not states like SC. Also, PA has 50% greater land area than SC and more than double the population. NJ has far less land area, but still more than double the population of SC, so the yardsticks are different.
“So in about the same geographic size area, PA has twice the number of suffering families. And NJ, which does have a high number of high income families, still has the same number of poor families as SC.”
It’s remarks like this, Dave, that make me think you’re not even a real conservative, but simply adopting a persona in order to parody conservative thought.
“Makes you wonder why, if living in a blue state is so great, the people are all voting with their feet for greener pastures in the red states.” – lex
More broad brushed simplistic characterizations.
Mary, don’t avoid the question. You are claiming that NJ is such a better quality of life state, yet it has the same number of poor and low income as SC. What is your explanation? These are real families here. How would you explain that face to face with a poor black family in NJ as you spout off how much better educated, compensated, medicated, housed, and fed people in NJ are. Would you tell them, you don’t matter, because some percentage of poor is higher in SC. If you would, you are the typical liberal.. I will wait for an answer.
Dave, avoid the question?!? Avoid the question!?! The last thing I would want to do would be to avoid a softball like that.
It just makes me think that your “conservatism” is just a satirical pose.
New Jersey has a population nearly TWICE AS GREAT as that of South Carolina. If New Jersey has the SAME number of poor households as does South Carolina, its rate of poor households as a proportion of population is a little over HALF that of South Carolina.
Now, as to your question as to what I would say to a poor household in New Jersey, that is a reasonable question, and I would say that New Jersey is doing a lot, but should, of course, do more.
It would be a lot easier, of course, if New Jersey taxpayers didn’t have to subsidize handouts for shiftless freeloaders in failed states like South Carolina.
Actually NJ’s population is MORE THAN TWICE that of SC.
The poverty rate is not comparable at all because the cost of living is so different. A family of four making $15K a year in SC could scrape by, not comfortably but they wouldn’t starve. In NJ that family would be living under a bridge.
Lexwolf – I think you have hit on the lies of statistics that can be made by people like Mary. The feds set a certain income rate nationwide for poverty levels and as you said even if the poor are suffering worse in NJ on higher income, they are not classified as poor. So it is conceivable that the stats for the poor in NJ are actually much higher at real dollar spending and value rates. That explains it.
Mary, so you would tell the poor family that more needs to be done. I bet that would comfort them as you walked away and got into your Lexus and drove off. What a sight? Or, even worse, if you tell them they are poor because the people in SC are getting more help. That would be you.
Yeah, Lex, always some excuse. That’s one of the main reasons that South Carolina continues to cling to the conservative policies that have led to its failure as a state. When policies fail in liberal states, they try something different. When policies fail in conservative states, they cook up some excuse to explain away the failure. The excuse doesn’t make the policies any more successful, though.
What excuse are you goin to make to explain South Carolina’s much higher infant mortality?
Not an excuse at all but simply reality. You know, the stuff that the socalled “reality-based community” is supposed to believe in! You’ll always be able to find one or more statistics to buttress your claim that one state is better than another. That doesn’t mean anything by itself.
IMO the relative growth or decline of a state, easily measured by its electoral vote count, is much more significant. That represents the people’s collective judgement of whether the state meets their needs, after having considered all the pros and cons of staying in the state. It also measures whether people not currently in the state consider it attractive enough to move there. By that overarching standard both PA and NJ are no match at all for SC.
South has risen again, leads nation
Published: Jun 14, 2006
Remember that Civil War refrain, “the South will rise again”?
Guess what? It happened. By common measures of population, production and political clout, the South leads the nation, and has for some time.
The Census Bureau divides the United States into four cultural/geographic regions: the Northeast (9 states), the Midwest (12 states), the West (13 states) and the South (17 states). This division puts Delaware and Washington, D.C., in the South, which may be a bit of a stretch, but the added impact of these two small regions is statistically insignificant.
Conventional wisdom says that the Northeast is the center of culture, economics, education and leadership; the Midwest is home to fertile farmlands and great industrial cities; the West is a place of natural beauty and many high-tech industries; and the South is pocked by racial strife, corrupt politics and rural poverty.
If you accept this picture, you may be surprised at the following facts:
* In 2004, the South claimed 36 percent of the U.S. population; the West 23 percent; the Midwest 22 percent; and the Northeast almost 19 percent.
* In 2004, each region’s share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (our nation’s output) was: the South, 33.6 percent; the West, 23.7 percent; the Midwest, 21.5 percent; and the Northeast, 20.9 percent.
* Over the past 13 electoral cycles (1952-2004), five U.S. presidents came from the South; two from the West; one from the Midwest; and one from the Northeast.
What happened? Southern economic planners realized that in order for the South to catch up to the rest of the nation it had to energize its economic base. Initial progress was slow, but long-range planning paid off. South Carolina attracted BMW; Tennessee brought in Nissan; Alabama lured Mercedes, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai.
Critics said auto manufacturers went South to find cheap labor, but the wages paid at the new factories are pretty good (and looking better in the wake of plant closings by Ford and General Motors).
Of course, there is more to the South’s rise than automobiles. Mississippi welcomed the gaming industry. Louisiana and Florida boosted tourism. Texas expanded its energy base, and so on.
Today the South has more business start-ups than any other region, and a larger share of them succeed.
Six of the top 10 large cities ranked by Entrepreneur.com as “hot” spots in 2005 were in the South, as were eight of the top 10 midsize cities and five of the top 10 small cities.
In other words, 63 percent of the nation’s top entrepreneurial cities are in Dixie. People who cling to the stereotype of a rural, backward, prejudiced, unproductive and divided South are missing one of the biggest stories of our time.
Robert Hebert
retired college professor
Lafayette
Story originally published in The Advocate
Lee, great post. Mary may choke on her corn flakes when she reads that information. And it’s from a professor from a PA college.
Yes, that PA college professor sealed it for me. LOL!!!
Rosh probably out digging or fabricating some dirt to throw at him.
Dave,
surely you meant Muesli. No member of the “reality-based community” would eat ordinary corn flakes.
Yes, the endless explanations and excuses continue.
What’s your excuse for the fact that South Carolina’s infant mortality is so much higher than New Jersey’s?
Mary, according to the Guttmacher.org institute statistics,
NJ
Abortion Rank – 1st
Pregancy Rank 16th
SC
Abortion Rank 17th
Pregnancy 24th
Infant mortality stats do not include abortions and with abortions being so popular in NJ (especially when foisted on the young black teens by liberal democrat doctors) no wonder the NJ infant death rate is lower. As I have said before, NJ is the perfect place for you and your liberal deathmongers. Are you still choking on your Muesli up there?????????
That’s way over her head.
Dave and Lee. You finally found a few peripheral statistics (some of which are subjective) that support your point. The bottom line on this is crystal clear: South Carolina ranks poorly on all major categories of quality of life. If I were to choose just one statistic it would be average life expectancy. SC ranks very low on that one and well below NJ.
Besides, given the strong pro-life inclination of South Carolinians is a ranking of 17th in abortions anything to get excited about? Who’s number 50?
Bud,
if NJ is so much better why are people moving out of there? In many cases straight to SC?
How do you account for that?
Lex, your impressionistic analysis is all well and good, but which of the following factors indicates to you that South Carolina is better than New Jersey:
South Carolina’s higher infant mortality?
South Carolinan’s shorter life expectancy?
South Carolinan’s higher level of illiteracy?
South Carolina’s higher divorce rate?
South Carolina’s higher rate of out of wedlock births?
South Carolina’s higher rate of alcoholism?
South Carolina’s higher rate of domestic violence?
South Carolina’s lower level of education?
South Carolina’s lower per capita income?
How about South Carolina lower cost of living?
Or South Carolina’s much lower taxation?
Or South Carolina’ much better weather?
Or South Carolina’s much better business climate?
Or South Carolina’s much nicer people?
On and on and on…..
As I said earlier, you can come up with all sorts of indices “proving” that one state is better than the other. Big whoop! I tend to go with the collective choices of the people who live in a state, are considering to move there or used to live there. Surely those people have fully considered all the pros and cons. If the state is nevertheless still losing ground compared to other states, then maybe it isn’t exactly the greatest thing since sliced bread. Even if it has a slightly lower infant mortality rate yadda yadda yadda.
BTW, if you really believe that NJ is so much better why are you still living here? Obviously you have also looked at all your little stats and decided that other factors are more important to you. No?
Lexwolf, Mary resides in NJ but for some reason got attracted to this blog because of some poisonous hatred of Brad Warthen, why, no one knows. So she (although another blogger claims it’s a man under a pseudonym) attacks Warthen on nearly every post and then gets into exchanges with others like this time. The funniest thing is, the idiot Mary probably vacations here to get away from all those great things in NJ like rude people, high taxes, lousy weather, and people who think like her(it).
Bud, all right, I am encouraged. You, unlike others like Mary, can actually react to factual evidence and agree there is some truth, instead of mindlessly repeating the same goofy statements over and over like her. Pretty sure Utah is 50th in abortions, Mormons and all, and very limited welfare system in place to attract the low socio-economic types, not surprising at all.
On the average life expectancy, my take on that is that if you could factor in all the elderly lifelong NJ residents who retire to Florida and even in SC, the NJ rate would soar. Retirees, if they can afford it, get the H out of that dump, but they have to die somewhere. Think about that…
Well, that explains it. I was really starting to wonder why anyone would prefer NJ. I guess she has to justify her poor judgement somehow.
Dave, LexWolf, Lee, et al are busily congratulating themselves in the processing of dumping on PA and NJ: Keep it up, guys. That kind of reflexive self-approval is what has kept SC behind not only most of the nation, but behind our nearest neighbors (NC, GA, FL) for a long time.
Southern Gentlemen do not allow callow insults to go unanswered.
When the hateful and jealous defamation stops coming in from Yankees who have no interest in our state, we will have no need to respond.
Lex, I know it may be parodoxical but I prefer SC over NJ in spite of the generally more attractive quality of life indices. The weather is better, traffic is less congested. It’s a short drive to the beach or the mountains. (Sadly, the congestion gap seems to be narrowing. Have you been on Harbison Blvd. lately?)
Of course life expectancy is largely determined by life style, so I can largely (but not entirely) determine my own destiny in that important area. But Mary does have a point. For a variety of reasons people in NJ as a group simply seem to have more common sense when it comes to living a healthy and prosperous life style. Blue states in general perform better than Red states.
My particular specialty is traffic crashes. South Carolinians are much more likely to become traffic victims than motorists in New Jersey. It’s just a fact. Rather than fight it, why don’t we study what they do well and adopt some of what they do rather than stubbornly denying the difference exists?
One factor seems to be that NJ spends far more money on highway maintenance than we do. It’s probably not the main factor, but I do think it helps. So why not raise the gas tax and use the money to improve our roads? Perhaps 100 or more people per year could be saved. And what’s wrong with that?
As for the business climate issue, so what. SC has a very high unemployment rate right now. So a great business climate does not automatically translate into great and plentiful jobs.
Lex, the lower cost of living I’ll give you. This is the result of South Carolina’s lower wages, which (in combination with the much greater desirability of living in New Jersey) causes people to be less willing and able to pay for property in South Carolina, as compared to New Jersey. Now, what must be considered in addition to cost of living is affordability, the ability for someone receiving the median income to sustain a lifestyle at a particular level. How does South Carolina stack up there?
South Carolina does not have “much lower taxation”. South Carolina’s state income tax hits the top bracket at a very low income level. New Jersey has a higher top income tax rate, but hits it at a much higher income level.
All the rest of your comparisons are impressionistic or misleading. By “better business climate” you mean, a work force that is willing to work for lower wages. But in exchange for those lower wages, an employer gets a less educated, less capable worker, who achieves less productivity. That’s why even though wages in New Jersey are a lot higher than in South Carolina, the unemployment rate is a lot lower.
“Even if it has a slightly lower infant mortality rate yadda yadda yadda.”
Within your “yadda yadda yadda,” you are hiding some very serious stuff. Alcoholism, spouse abuse, child abuse, poverty, infant mortality, illitracy, and numerous other factors that give an indication of whether a society is a deent one, made up of decent people.
Infant mortality isn’t “a bit” higher in South Carolina than in New Jersey. It was bud who did the research and put up some numbers. I forget what the numbers were for infant mortality, but it was quite substantially more for South Carolina. I was shocked.
What the hell, Mary, most of the dead infants are black and poor so they count much to Lex.
If they were smart they’d be born to rich Republicans like Dubya was. Brilliant guy, Dubya. Born on third base and Lex thinks that he hit a home run.
Mary, you can try to turn dross into gold as much as you like but the bottom line is that people in New Jersey are voting with their feet. They don’t seem to care about your minor stats either.
As dumb as you think W is, it’s interesting that he delivered a can of genuine Whoop-A$$ to the seemingly brilliant intellectuals Gore and Kerry. He outdebated them and outpolled them on election day. Don’t be a poor sore loser RTH, accept your status as a loser gracefully. And get used to it, unless you move to another country, you will be supporting losers for your entire life.
Moving to another country woould make it worse for RTH. They are far ahead of us in the loser department.
Point of fact, Gore polled MORE votes nationally than Bush in 2000. No one disputes that.
Lex, you can try to explain South Carolina’s deficiencies and failings as much as you want, but consider this. For most of those comparisons, I didn’t do any actual checking to see if South Carolina was worse than New Jersey. I just listed some negative categories, and put them down, just assuming that South Carolina would be ahead of New Jersey in just about every negative category you can think of. When you saw the list, it didn’t even occur to you to imagine the possibility that South Carolina might be better off than New Jersey in any of the categories I listed, or, really, any other category that anyone might list.
Bascially, it is a very safe bet that in every negative category you can think of, South Carolina will be ahead of New Jersey, and in every positive category you can think of, South Carolina will be behind New Jersey.
I know it.
You know it.
That’s why you didn’t even raise any dispute about my assumption of South Carolina’s supremacy in any of the negative categories I listed.
“That’s why you didn’t even raise any dispute about my assumption of South Carolina’s supremacy in any of the negative categories I listed.”
Nope. I didn’t even look at them, especially since you didn’t bother providing the actual stats and I didn’t feel like wasting my time looking them up myself. I simply looked at New Jerseyans moving away from NJ so obviously all your little gotcha statistics can’t be very important. If New Jerseyans don’t consider your stats important enough to make them stay in NJ, why should I?
Bud, either Al or his campaign manager forgot that our elections work by state by state polling, not a nationwide popularity contest. I bet Al hates when they do that.
Mary’s entire modis operandi is trying make herself feel better by bashing other states, other people, etc. It isn’t working for her, either.
But Lex, the population of New Jersey is growing; how does that translate into people from New Jersey moving away?
Now, I grant you that the population of South Carolina is growing at a faster rate, but I also notice that there are a lot of complaints about illegal immigrants.
Maybe the difference in growth results from a greater influx of illegal immigrants into South Carolina?
Maybe there are more low-skilled jobs available in South Carolina, with employers willing to accept a lower quality of work in exchange for paying lower wages?
Anyway, all your claims that South Carolina is better depend not merely on particular comparisons, but on your interpretation of what the comparisons mean. Basically, what you do is, you cast around for some factor that can be interepted in a way favorable to South Carolina, and force such an interpretation on it.
My comparisons on the other hand, depend on questions like:
Is it good or bad for babies to die before they’re 1 year old?
Oh, one of my categories I picked at random was the divorce rate; I just checked it out, and in 2004, the divorce rate per 1000 population was 3.0 in New Jersey, 3.2 in South Carolina.
Like I said, any negative category you can come up with, South Carolina is going to be ahead of New Jersey.
I know it.
You know it.
Infant mortality (which I already knew about, thanks to bud) was 5.0 per 1000 births for New Jersey, 8.4 per 1000 births for South Carolina.
You can try to reinterpret and trivialize that statistic all you want, but it represents a grave failure and moral failing for South Carolina.
South Carolinians are good about talking morality; not so great about practicing it.
Hey, Lee, isn’t it odd that when Mary compares quality of life indicators between SC and NJ you interpret it as an “attack” on SC.
Take off your blinders and rejoin the reality-based community. The stats simply reflect the reality that conditions in SC are closer to Guatemala than Canada.
And, Dear Leader’s policies are driving all of us towards bannana republic-status with a shrinking middle class, a growing underclass of poor and a tiny sliver of super rich.
I interpret it as hate, because Mary isn’t ineterested in the causes or relevance of the data items she chooses, or in improving anyone’s life. She ignores the analysis of experts, like the professor I posted, and just repeats the same smears.
Snap out of you hallucination, Hurl.
The tiny Bush tax cuts cured the malaise of Clinton and pulled us out of his last recession, and into over 4% GDP growth.
If you really want to help the middle class, let them keep enough of their own money by reducing all government, abolishing swindles like Social InSecurity, and abolishing the income tax and property taxes.
Actually, Lee, your proposed solution was bruited about 300 years ago by a man named Thomas Hobbes. He wrote a book called “Leviathan” commenting on what happened when you abolished all government. It was not a favorite of our Founding Fathers.
The “Clinton malaise!” LOL
That has to be your best inadvertent joke yet.
I could quote all kinds of economic stats but obviously you’re on GOPworld and don’t care about reality here on Earth.
Unfortunately, our children will have pay Bush’s credit card bill– just like we did for Reagan. Voodoo economics does work as long as you can keep paying your minimum payments… to the Red Chinese.
OK Mary, let’s see how you spin this one. Guess which state is rated environmentally the WORST in the USA. Yes, you guessed it, NJ made it to number 1 in something, finally. Most Superfund site, most polluted, most dangerous place to live if you want clean air and clean water. SC on the other hand is 15th. I have been saying NJ is a garbage dump all along, here’s the proof.
Visit NJ the Dirtiest State in America!!!!
I poked around a little, and found something called the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute. So far I just looked at the part on air pollution, because that was what came up first on the search. It says that the air quality has improved a lot over the past 20 years, and they hope to have NO unhealthy air days by 2007. Now, a day without “unhealthy” air doesn’t mean that the air is good, or that it’s the best that can be done. But they have been working on the issue, and the federal government, through various liberal initiatives, has also been working on the issue for the past 30-35 years.
And this is a key difference between New Jersey and South Carolina, and helps explain why New Jersey is a successful (although not a perfect) state, while South Carolina is a failure. When New Jersey has a problem, they act to solve it. When South Carolina has a problem, they respond by ignoring the problem, focusing their attention elsewhere, or blaming the problem on untermenschen.
Mary, Slick Willie poked around in fun a little and it cost him an impeachment. So watch out on that poking. But as expected you ignored my facts and spun it. But hey, you have to rationalize about where you live or you could not stand it. Did you see the hazardous sites map? NJ has 116 dirty dots on it. PA is third by the way in pollution. Keep on spinning. “Round and round we go, where it stops nobody knows”.
“But Lex, the population of New Jersey is growing; how does that translate into people from New Jersey moving away?”
Mary, you don’t seem very good at thinking for yourself. Otherwise you would have figured out the answer for yourself already. NY is even worse at retaining its population (lost 10 electoral votes from 1980-2004) and some of those New Yorkers just got stuck in NJ before they could continue on their way down South!
During my sojourn in Gettysburg and the surrounding areas, I was impressed by the similarities between rural Pennsylvania and the Upstate of South Carolina. Before the 1780s, a significant number of Scotch-Irish folks emigrated from Pennsylvania to the Palmetto State.
After I returned from Gettysburg, I wrote the following to a familiar acquaintance:
“Earlier today, in solitude, I stood where I believe Lincoln gave his famous address-and admittedly, I was moved, despite the frigid wind blowing over the knoll. Last week we toured the battlefield and we visited the monuments. Not surprisingly, South Carolina’s monument is fairly large and true to its (our) “states rights” heritage. I often ponder the meaning of The War Between the States, and after seeing the plane on which Pickett’s Charge took place, one can only contemplate the carnage and consequential sorrow of all involved following this seemingly suicidal attack. I do not suppose such a thing would have happened if it were not at least in part due to popular support for the war. There may have been a slave-holding elite who planned and initiated the war, but the ordinary people of the time were in part responsible as well.
Perhaps we can do better.”
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The Gettysburg address is, in my opinion, the greatest speech in American History. But at the time those in attendance were a bit taken aback by it’s breivity. Lincoln’s speech was an afterthought with the “American Idol” star speaker giving the primary speech that day. Does anyone know his name or know anything he said? Although long, that gentleman’s speech did not resonate. Sometimes less is more.
But Lex, that scenario is just something you made up. Do you have any evidence to support it, other than your own conjecture? If not, given your abundantly proven stupidity, why should I trust your analysis?
What evidence do you have that my speculation – that larger numbers of illegal immigrants move to South Carolina because they can get the kind of low-skill, low-education, low-wage jobs that South Carolina has in abundance – aren’t responsible for the discrepancy?
Instead of spending all your time explaining why New Jersey’s much lower infant mortality rate isn’t important, why don’t you think about what South Carolina might be able to do to reduce its own infant mortality?
You can content yourself all you want with the idea that people are fleeing New Jersey in order to escape its higher income, lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy, higher literacy, lower divorce rate, lower alcoholism, lower child abuse, lower spouse abuse, and lower rate of out of wedlock births, but that isn’t going to make South Carolinians any less poor, less subject to babies dying in infancy, less prone to die early, less ignorant, less unstable in their marital experiences, less drunk, less abusive to their children, less abusive to their spouses, or less prone to have children outside of marriage.
Dave, I didn’t say the situation in New Jersey was perfect, or even good. I said that they were working to correct the situation. Quite a few of those Superfund sites have been cleaned up already, if I’m reading the numbers right, and quite a few others have begun cleanup.
The difference between New Jersey and South Carolina isn’t that New Jersey is perfect. It’s that New Jersey works to solve problems.
South Carolina, on the other hand, ignores problems, focuses in other directions, or blames untermenschen. That’s why New Jersey is a successful (though not perfect) state, and South Carolina is a failed state.
Mary, spin it any way you want. The bottom line is that your peeps are moving down South, stats or no stats.
Mary, wrong again. SC leaders were smart enough to NOT LET our state get filthy. Leadership acts, not reacts. And Lex is right, NJ residents are leaving. By the way, I did boot camp at Ft. Dix, NJ. I think Wrightstown is probably one of your nicest areas, and it was a hole. Fond memories. Also, are you aware that at Ft. Dix the black soldiers were all on one side of the base in crappy wooden barracks and the white soldiers were in brick and block barracks with modern “heads”? When I was there, the wooden ones were abandoned, but under a liberal hero, FDR, the troops had been racially segregated. See, racism does not exist ONLY in the south, people in NJ are very adept at racism.
Mark, here’s an interesting explanation as to how the government can whip the people into war fever– in 1861 or 2003.
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always
a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
— Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall
Sounds eerily familiar to the Karl Rove’s playbook, eh?
Spin, spin, spin, Dave.
SC leaders would have done anything they could to get polluting industry here– except allowing unions to get a foothold. Recently, state leaders were disappointed when plans for expanding an industry here with the most deadly of pollutants, radioactive waste, was quashed.
The people of NJ have no say on any policies or regulations on a U.S. Army base. Nice try at dissembling, though.
All “liberal hero” FDR did was bring the country out of near total economic collapse; insititute safe-guards against having it happen again; bring electricity to rural areas left behind by Adam Smith and Republican Hoover; and, lead the nation to victory in a two front world war.
I agree that it’s a shame that he didn’t have the spare time to ensure that every citizen was guaranteed their Civil Rights. That had to wait for another Democratic President.
….and the Republicans who defeated the racist Democrats in the Senate.
Say, Lexie, what ever happened to those bad ole racist southern Dems in the Senate?
Hmmmm, they switched party affiliations and ran the moderate Republicans out of the party.
Nice try, though.
Say, Lexie, what ever happened to those bad ole racist southern Dems in the Senate?
Hmmmm, they switched party affiliations and ran the moderate Republicans out of the party.
Nope, they died or retired as Democrats. Look it up for yourself. It’ll be a major revelation for guys like you. The only exceptions were Thurmond who switched to the GOP, and former KKK Grand Kleagle Robert “Sheets’ Byrd, who is still in the US Senate – still a DEMOCRAT!!
BTW, not only did Sheets vote against the CRA64 but he also “distinguished” himself by staging a “14-hour, 13-minute filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
YOUR GUY!!
“Mary, spin it any way you want. The bottom line is that your peeps are moving down South, stats or no stats.”
But Lex, the statistics you mention don’t lead to that conclusion. Again, New Jersey is growing, so how does that equate to people leaving?
Can you establish that the difference in growth between New Jersey and South Carolina isn’t attributable to a greater influx of illegal immigrants into South Carolina?
And anyway, the reason you raised the idea that people in New Jersey are moving to South Carolinan was to support the proposition that South Carolina is better than New Jersey. You chose that statistic because it was the only one available to you to support your contention, and so you are forced to stick with it.
But is that the ONLY way to evaluate whether a place is better or worse than another?
For example, what does the market tell us about the value of living in South Carolina versus the value of living in New Jersey? How much do homes cost in New Jersey, and how much do they cost in South Carolina?
And what are the people who are supposedly fleeing New Jersey seeking to escape from?
Higher incomes?
Lower infant mortality?
Safer drivers?
Longer lifespans?
And anyway, I put it to you again, never mind the comparison between South Carolina and New Jersey. Which is better, an infant mortality rate of 5.0 per 1000 births, or an infant mortality rate of 8.4 per 1000 births?
The way I see it, you have two alternatives.
(1) You can so what you can to lower the rate of infant mortality in South Carolina.
(2) You can sit doing nothing about South Carolina’s myriad and serious problems, arguing about how those problems don’t matter, because South Carolina is better than New Jersey.
I urge you to choose (1). That’s how you can make a difference in your community. Sitting around explaining how South Carolina is better than New Jersey isn’t really going to matter to most South Carolinians, because so few South Carolinians are able to earn enough to be able to afford to live in New Jersey.
Lexie, Byrd renounced the KKK and his racist past. Republican Thurmond didn’t.
Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lewis, in which Lee Atwater discusses politics in the South:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
“Lexie, Byrd renounced the KKK and his racist past. Republican Thurmond didn’t.”
Of course Thurmond didn’t. He was never in the KKK so how was he supposed to renounce it? Besides you are clearly in denial about Sheets’ sordid past. Just 5 years ago he used the N-word on national TV, over 30 years after this word started to backfire, according to you. Guess he never learned your “coding” – apparently an old racist doesn’t learn your new tricks. I have no idea how you can live in this fantasy world of yours. Again, Sheets Byrd is YOUR GUY!!
Lex, which is better, an infant mortality rate of 5.0 per 1000 births, or an infant mortality rate of 8.4 per 1000 births?
Whichever one gets people in NJ to lose 2 electoral votes in 20 years, clearly representing a relative decline of NJ compared to the rest of the country. If New Jerseyians don’t care about the infant mortality rate enough to stay there, why should we?
BTW, how do you like the current trials and tribulations your government is inflicting on its people? Whom do you blame for the government shutdown, the Dem governor or the Dem legislature?
Mary chooses to ignore the fact that the highest abortion rate in the USA in NJ lowers the infant mortality rate considering that many of the abortions in NJ are performed on drug addicted welfare queens. If these babies had been born, their odds of survival is much lower than a baby from a healthy mother.
Lex, never mind New Jersey. Forget about New Jersey. Think about South Carolina. Think about making South Carolina better. Which is better, an infant mortality rate of 5.0, or an infant mortality rate of 8.4?
Is an infant mortality rate of 8.4 the best that can be achieved? Is it the best that South Carolina can achieve?
Lowering the infant mortality rate requires stigmatizing teen sex, which would be a complete reversal of the message of liberalism and its commercial sponsors in Hollywood. It would require an end to welfare which supports and encourages minority girls to drop out of school and become sex slaves to the Welfare State.
Sure it could be better and in due time it will be better, just as NJ’s rate could be better. Both states have come a long way on this already if you remember that 100 years ago these numbers were measured in the 100s, not single digits the way they are now.
However, there are obviously enough other negative stats for many New Jerseyans to leave the state and make it lose population relative to the rest of the country. Fixating on one little stat doesn’t change the fact that SC is more attractive overall than NJ.
Lex, I really don’t think the fact that more illegal immigrants can afford to live in South Carolina is a big selling point for South Carolina.
Anyway, your attitude sums up the reason that South Carolina is a failed state. Your infant mortality rate is 8.4 per 1000 births. You say that “in due time” it will be better, and then go off and disparage New Jersey. But you don’t NEED to disparge New Jersey in order to keep South Carolinians from moving there. Most South Carolinians can’t afford to live in New Jersey, so living there is not a choice for them.
The question you should be asking yourself is, is South Carolina’s infant mortality rate the best that can be achieved RIGHT NOW? And of course, the answer is no, because numerous states achieve much better rates than South Carolina RIGHT NOW. They didn’t wait for “due time” to come; they did what needed to be done.
That is why South Carolinan is a failed state, and South Carolinians are failures. They don’t actually do anything to solve problems, they just wait for “due time” to come, while contenting themselves with dispraging other states (that they can’t afford to live in) for their imagined problems.
So Lee, are you saying that the conditions to which you attribute infant mortality are more are more prevalent in South Carolina than in more liberal states that have lower rates of infant mortality?
More liberal states than South Carolina have much lower infant mortality rates. So might South Carolina’s higher infant mortality be attributable not to the conditions you mention, but instead to a combination of South Carolina’s failed conservative policies and a population of uneducated, shiftless, conservative freeloaders who are more interested in collecting handouts than in solving problems?
The overwhelming pollution in NJ has gotten to Mary’s brain cells. She is fixated on infant mortality. She is like the deckhand rearranging the chairs on the Titanic while the ship is sinking. Mary, why is NJ leeching federal funds to clean up their mess made by residents of NJ? That means those of us in SC are paying for the past mistakes of your state. How about paying to clean it up yourself and not be so greedy and lazy.
Exactly right, Dave. I can just see people scouring the infant mortality stats when deciding where they should relocate. Mary would have us believe that nothing else matters in their decisions but that mortality rate has got to be just right.
Then she’s getting on that illegal immigrant kick. Never mind that New Jersey has far more of them, even when adjusted for state population. Here are 2 sets of numbers:
NJ: over 300,000
SC: 20,000 – 35,000
SOURCE: BusinessWeek>
NJ: 221,000
SC: 36,000
SOURCE: Statemaster
Lexie, it was Lee Atwater, Republican strategist and mentor to Karl Rove, who said that “nigger” started to backfire. What Atwater was describing was the evolution of the Republican Southern Strategy message.
IOW, when overt racism became unacceptable in political discussion then the Repbulicans adopted code words.
I never said that Thurmond was a member of the KKK. He never publically renounced the racism that characterized his political career for decades– before racism had to be disguised (with codewords as Lee Atwater described).
—
From the Washington Post:
Still, says Ken Hechler, 90, a liberal Democratic former U.S. House member from West Virginia who served with Byrd in Congress, “It’s impossible for anyone to try to whitewash the KKK and its overall symbolism.”
“But at the same time,” he added, “we honor those people who publicly admit the error of their ways.”
Last week, Byrd said: “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times . . . and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.”
—
I’m not going to insist that Byrd is some kind of plaster saint. Many of his policy positions– especially his hawkishness on Vietnam and his obsession with pork appropriations– are anathema to me.
You’re the one in denial. You deny that the Republican Party deliberately chose to embrace the racist power structure of the Dixecrats. Many established Democrats, as you correctly pointed out, opted to retire as Dems while voting mostly with the Republicans against liberal attempts to further civil rights for all Americans.
The bottom line is that the Democratic Party finally rejected de jeur racism and racist southerners sought a new home in the welcoming arms of Republicans.
In short, the Dems quit paying political blackmail for the electoral votes of the “Solid South.” The Republicans promptly picked up the payments. Now, we have the Republican “Solid South.” Republicans diguise the basis for dominance in the South but the deal still holds.
RTH,
great spin, against all evidence! The Dems were founded on racism, they have always been the party of racism and even now they are the true party of racism. The only difference now is that they changed the targets of their racism.
Your characterization of the Democratic Party ignores the internal struggle between Dixiecrats and and liberal Democrats breaking into the open with Truman’s excecutive order.
====From Wikipedia:===
The States’ Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The States’ Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party slogan was “Segregation Forever!” Members of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, were often known as Dixiecrats.
The party was formed after thirty-five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank in the platform, which it did. Even before the convention started, the Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman’s executive order to racially integrate the armed forces.
After President Truman’s endorsement of the civil rights plank, Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states’ rights. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president.
======
Isn’t it a fantastic coincidence that the man who bolted his party and ran for president as a segregationist also led the way for southerners to join the Republican Party?
Lex, it is fascinating how Trent Lott can make a minor remark about Strom and have his career ruined, when Byrd, a liberal democrat, did this:
Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter — which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith — that he would never fight in the armed forces “with a Negro by my side.” Byrd added that, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”
And he filibustered the Senate for 14 hours in 64 to fight the Civil Rights Acts. And alsovoted against the first black USSC nominee, Thurgood Marshall, and the second, Clarence Thomas.
Quite a guy we see but RTH fits right in with him. Hypocrite and race baiter.
But he didn’t lead the way! Can’t you get that into your head? Even you admitted that Dems stayed Dems. Wishful thinking is all good and well but try to stick with reality for a change, willya!
The Dems have always been based on racism. The only thing that changed for them since 1964 is that they switched sides. They are still as divisive as ever, picking one race over another.
“…the pivotal element in John Mitchell’s grand strategy of combining the 1968 Nixon and Wallace votes for a Republican majority in 1972 was the South. Mitchell’s absolutely correct view, largely shared by the President, was that an enormous debt was owed to the Republican South for both nomination and election. […]”
Even before his inauguration, Nixon began to feel the political heat from his Southern friends. The pressure […] came from Republican Chairman Clarke Reed of Mississippi, and from Republican officeholders, led by Senator Strom Thurmond […]
Their objective was nothing less than total suspension of the hated guidelines established in 1966 by HEW as a yardstick to enforce school desegregation under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
[…]
What Thurmond wanted, in short, was nothing less than a sudden halt to federally imposed school desegegation begun when the Supreme Court had launched it in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.
========from “Nixon in the White House” by Evans and Novak.
Talk about sticking to reality!
The Democratic Party nationally isn’t dominated by African Americans and doesn’t practice racist discrimination against whites.
Trent Lott nostalgically wishes that an ardent segregationist had won the Presidency in 1948 because, why? Because Thurmond’s Presidency would have at least forestalled the civil rights movement.
Wikipedia
Like most white Mississippians at the time, Lott was raised as a Democrat. He served as administrative assistant to House Rules Committee chairman William M. Colmer, also of Pascagoula, from 1968 to 1972. When Colmer, one of the leading segregationists in the Democratic Party, retired after 40 years in Congress, he endorsed Lott as his successor in Mississippi’s 5th District, located in the state’s southwestern tip, even though Lott ran as a Republican. He won handily.
Lott’s switch was part of a growing trend in the South. During the 1960s, cracks had begun to appear in the Democrats’ “Solid South”, as most white southerners became more willing to vote Republican after the national Democratic Party strongly endorsed racial integration. For example, Barry Goldwater*** carried Mississippi by winning an unheard-of 87 percent of the popular vote even as he was routed nationally.
My note: Goldwater voted against the 1964 CRA, also.
And, so the torch of racism was passed from the old Dixiecrat Democrat power structure to the current racist Republican power structure.
Lott’s career is the perfect illustration.
RTH, it’s obvious that you just can’t get out of your fantasy world. But now let me really set your head spinning.
You say that the Dems who were against the CRA64 switched to the GOP, despite having produced no evidence whatsoever. But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you’re right. Wouldn’t you then have to agree that the Dems of 1964 were mostly the same Dems as in 1954, 1944, and 1934? Now if they all switched to the GOP, wouldn’t that also mean that all of the socalled Dem accomplishments of FDR and Truman were really GOP accomplishments? You know, those closet Republicans who were just masquerading as Dems!
You see, you just can’t have things both ways no matter how much you would like to wash your hands of your party’s sordid racist past (and present). If you want to blame all that racism on the GOP even though the Dems are the real racist party, then the accomplishments have to also switch to the GOP.
RTH – George Wallace was a Democrat, never a Republican. Al Gore’s dad also worked against and voted against the CRA of 64. Also, by the way, Sen. Robert Byrd’s dad was a KKK member. Funny how it runs in the gene pool, racism that is.. ML King dreamed of everyone being color blind, but the Dems want to balkanize the US into color, wealth, religion, you name it. But they are the minority party so this kind of strategy will guarantee that they stay that way for a long time. Joe Lieberman, one of their best, is also being driven out of their party. Not leftist enough. Keep it up, we love it.
Lexie, as I noted in an earlier post, the national Democratic Party’s interest in civil rights legislation was held hostage by the Southern Dems.
You can play silly games and deny history all you want. You can’t deny this fact: when the national Democratic Party chose to adopt civil rights, the Southern Dems effectively left the party in national elections, particularly. That was the end of the Solid Democratic South and the beginning of the Solid Republican South.
In 1968 the states of the old Confederacy voted for either openly racist Wallace or covertly racist Nixon. In every succeeding election, the Republicans carried the Confederacy except when regional favorite son Carter took most in 1976.
After the CRA 1964, LBJ said “We’ve lost the South for a generation.” It was a choice that party leaders like Hubert Humphrey and LBJ conciously made.
The Dixiecrat Dems represented their constituents. Those constituents were (and, largely, are) racist. Southerners didn’t have a wholesale conversion to color blindness in 1968 when Nixon carried SC, NC, VA, and TN. (Wallace, an overt racist, carried GA, AL, MS, LA, and AK.) They just voted for a Republican and Independent who promised that, if elected, Southern states could continue to enforce segregation and voting rights abuses.
Dave, good riddance to Joe, Bush’s favorite Democrat. Joe thinks that he owns the CT. senate seat. He thinks that he doesn’t have to answer to the primary voters of CT. There are a few others who will share his fate before the blood-letting is done.
It’s not that Joe isn’t “left enough.” It’s that he enables Bush to enact (or try to enact) so many bad, regressive and downright unconstitutional policies and appointments. Joe displays little loyalty to the party or to the causes favored by even centrist Dems.
Dave, do you need a reading comprehension course or did you just not read my last few posts? George Wallace was a Dixiecrat Democrat. He owed his allegiance and his career to racism, just like Strom Thurmond. You can tell because when the Democratic Party chose to endorse civil rights for Americans of all races, both Wallace and Thurmond chose to leave the party. Gore’s father was a Dixiecrat, too.
(BTW, I’m using “Dixiecrat” to refer to Democratic pols who supported Jim Crow racism. Don’t try playing “gotcha” because some individual pol didn’t support Strom in 1948.)
You and Lexie seem to have a problem comprehending that a Southern pol had to openly espouse Jim Crow racism to be successful from the Civl War until, actually, quite recently.
Byrd’s father was KKK and Byrd chose the KKK as an ambitious 24-year-old in 1941. The KKK represented a way for a working class man to advance in politics. While Byrd filibustered the 1964 CRA, he voted in favor of the 1968 CRA which was actually more controversial because it outlawed discrimination in housing.
I must say that I find it amusing that so many of you defenders of St. Strom the Republican are so interested in Byrd. Yes, Byrd used the “N-word” in an interview. He said: “There are white niggers. I’ve seen many white niggers in my life.” Byrd voted against Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown for the best of reasons: because they weren’t qualified no matter what their skin pigmentation. He voted to confirm Colin Powell and Rod Paige.
Meanwhile, Strom would never admit to raping a black girl and having an illegitimate daughter by her.
YOUR GUY!
RTH,
Man, that is some serious brainwashing they gave ya!! So far, you have produced absolutely no evidence for your assertion that all the racist Democrats switched to the GOP after 1964 or so. Surely you will agree that some statement by LBJ hardly qualifies as evidence. Perhaps you would also like to explain why in the world those racist Dems would ever even want to switch to the GOP after the GOP had just voted against them on the CRA64 while the racist Dem senators stuck with them. I mean, that’s quite a leap of faith that defies all logic and common sense.
A much better explanation for the South turning GOP is that most Southerners were and are conservative and were strongly opposed to all the liberal Great Society programs.
FYI some facts:
1. The Democrat Party was founded on racism.
2. The Democrat Party was the Confederacy and defended slavery for 4 long years.
3. The Democrat Party was again on the side of oppression and segregation after Reconstruction, doing everything in its power to come as close to reestablishing slavery as possible. It was the Democrat Party that passed Jim Crow, and it was also the prime mover behind the KKK.
4. It was Democrat governors who stood in the door of schoolhouses all over the South in the 1950s and 1960s, to bar black children from entering.
5. If it had been up to the Democrats there would be no Civil Rights Act of 1964.
6. After the passage of civil rights legislation, the Democrat Party smoothly switched gears and is now in the business of racism against whites.
7. That Dixiecrat Democrat stuff is a bunch of baloney. Note that the ‘-crat’ part is in both words. If these guys had been closet-GOP types surely they would have called themselves Dixiepublicans, wouldn’t they? Instead they chose Dixiecrat because they still firmly considered themselves Democrats.
7. Spin it all you want, but the Democrats are the epitome of the old saying “once a racist, always a racist”!! There would be no Democrat Party if it didn’t have the racism crutch to prop itself up.
YOUR GUYS!!
As for Byrd, you must know that besides doing a 14-hour filibuster against the CRA64, and besides being a Kleagle of the KKK, and besides using the N-word on national TV just 5 years ago, and besides voting against numerous black nominees from both parties, he also has the dubious distinction of being the only US senator to have voted against both black Supreme Court Justices. You can claim that Thomas was unqualified but was Thurgood Marshall also unqualified?? Face it, the guy is an unreconstructed racist. He may have (mostly) learned the new Dem vocabulary but deep down inside he is still the racist he’s always been.
YOUR GUY!!
RTH – Lex is right, Bull Connor was a democrat. Richard Russell, GA Senator, was a dem and the mentor of Sen. Byrd. The list goes on and on. 99% of these guys never left the Dem party. Even today, the Dems will NOT permit a black to be the head of DNC. Maynard Jackson, Mfume, and others have been rejected by Dem leadership in favor of the white good ole boys club. McCauliffe and other nameless white guys. So hold the lecturing of the GOP when the Dems are openly racist even today.
Concerning Strom, the guy has a consensual relationship with a family friend and you turn that into rape. That is really stretching it.
Let’s see, Dave. Strom Thurmond has sex with a teenage girl who works for his father and it’s a consensual relationship. Bill Clinton has sex with an adult woman who works in the White House and it’s rape. This thread has outlived its usefulness when loony bin assertions like the above are taken seriously.
Heh. We’d be in really serious trouble if your assertion above were taken seriously!
On one hand, there is no evidence whatsoever that Thurmond raped anyone. The woman in question never made such a claim.
In addition, nobody ever accused Clinton of raping Lewinsky. Why did you make that up?
On the other hand, there is credible evidence that Clinton did rape Juanita Broaddrick.
“The woman in question never made such a claim.” If she had done that in SC in 1925, there’s a pretty fair chance she would have been on trial, not Strom.
“Nobody ever accused Clinton of raping Lewinsky.” Maybe not on this thread, but I’ve seen it before on other blogs. The Alice in Wonderland assertions that the Democrats are still the party of racism, while the Republicans were (and still are) immaculately conceived to be free of racism are no more incredible.
Nobody ever said that Republicans are “immaculately conceived to be free of racism”. However, you simply can’t deny that the Democrats are the true party of racism even to this very day. They are, and always have been, the party that specifically and explicitly advocates differential treatment for individuals simply because of the color of their skin.
What is really incredible is the laughable attempt by you and KC to slough off 182 years of ongoing racism onto the GOP, despite having no evidence to back up your claims. It just isn’t that simple to shake off your sordid history, you know!
VOA – What does it take for someone like you to recognize that there are black racists, white racists, and racists from all races? The problem with the leftists is that they are obsessed with it. Everything is seen through the racial view and the race card is played often, especially when they are losing an argument of facts.
And then you see things on other blogs and project that onto people on this blog, wow, you are really an objective person.
And about Strom, neither you nor I can mindread what people thought or may or may not have happened in 1925, so we have to rely on the facts available.
Interesting, the NJ state government is in total shutdown. Reports are that the residents say the state is now improved with the government closed down. I found another category that NJ leads in the US. Pedestrians hit by vehicles. So let’s add unsafe to polluted, corrupt, and overtaxed. What a place???? No wonder the folks are abandoning it in droves.
VOA and KC,
I feel your pain and I can certainly understand why you’re posting this crazy stuff. I also wouldn’t want to be associated with a party that has an unbroken history of racism ever since its founding 182 years ago. That, however, doesn’t give you license to rewrite history with no regard to actual facts.
From “The Southern Stratgegy Revisited” by Joseph A. Aistrup.
(emphasis is mine)
After Nixon’s 1960 loss, Operation Dixie changed both its ideological tone and recruitment focus. […] Goldwater pointed to Nixon’s pro-civil rights stance as a significant impediment to Republicans winning in the South. Goldwater’s sentiments triumphed in the RNC, because the RNC’s apportionment formula tended to under-represent the more moderate, internationalist wing of the party, based in large states in the Northeast and Midwest, while over-representing the smaller, more conservative states of the West and South.
[…] a distinctive strategy was born that conceded the support of blacks in the Northeast and South to the Democrats and contained a “distinctly conservative and segregationist call.” […] the focus of the strategy was to connect Southern Democrats with unpopular acts of the Kennedy administration.
The 1962 U.S. Senate campaigns in Alabama and South Carolina became the battlegrounds to test the effectiveness of the strategy. […] In South Carolina, Republican William Workman, an ardent segregationist, made strong attempts to brand Democratic Senator Olin Johnson a “liberal” and “the man that the Kennedys want in the Senate.” […]
It is important to note that Southern Republicans such as Martin and Workman were attempting to take advantage of the Northern Democrats’ movement toward the pro-civil rights side of the debate. By calling their segregationist Southern Democratic opposition “Kennedy-crats,” these GOP candidates were trying to “out-nigger” (in the words of George Wallace) their Democratic opposition. […]
Nonetheless, the insertion of numerous segregationists into the Southern Democratic candidate pool in 1962 represents a significant precedent for the “party of Lincoln.” […]
Significantly, pursuing the Goldwater strategy conflicted with the earlier efforts by Potter to create a non-racist party. This change in issue emphasis sowed the seeds of discontent and intra-party rivalry between economic conservatives and racially oriented social conservatives, which to this very day tears at the heart of GOP unity in some Southern states.
[…]Republican heavy-weights such as former RNC chair Meade Alcorn and New York Senator Jacob Javits felt that the party should not abandon its historic commitment to civil rights to win the votes of Southern segregationists. Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper agreed… emphasizing the amoral dimension of this strategy: “But in the long run, such a position will destroy the Repiblican party, and worse, it will do great wrong because it will be supporting the denial of constitutional and human rights of our citizens.”
In the end, the Republicans were so desperate to regain power that they sold off their party’s heritage.
Helllllloooooo, Strom!
The Myth of the Racist Republicans
A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today’s Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself……
The Southern Strategy
This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.
But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that “racial and economic conservatism” married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism’s economic populism.
Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.
Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to “offer,” so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth’s own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren’t plausible codes for real racism is that they aren’t the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.
Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP’s appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.
Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists’ collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not “have to bid much ideologically” to get Wallace’s electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While “the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South”—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—”the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP,” regardless…..
The Decline of Racism
Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures. So if the GOP’s strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.
What’s more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: “Before the Supreme Court’s [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants.” With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that “people—even historians—are surprised to hear this.” Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.
The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth’s shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers’.
CLICK HERE for the whole thing.
Yeah, I guess that your Republican apologist must be right.
Decades later, an associate prof (who probably wasn’t even born in 1960) writing for a rightwing propaganda organ can confidently contradict the conclusions of Meade, Alcorn and Cooper, highly placed placed Republicans who actually participated in the events.
—-
Republican heavy-weights such as former RNC chair Meade Alcorn and New York Senator Jacob Javits felt that the party should not abandon its historic commitment to civil rights to win the votes of Southern segregationists. Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper agreed… emphasizing the amoral dimension of this strategy: “But in the long run, such a position will destroy the Repiblican party, and worse, it will do great wrong because it will be supporting the denial of constitutional and human rights of our citizens.”
—-
Keep on pretending that the Southern Strategy didn’t happen. Your own party leaders from Lee Atwater to Jacob Javits give lie to your pathetic feel-good revisionist history.
Keep on deluding yourself that it’s all a liberal plot to make Republicans “look bad.”
It’s self-evident. “The party of Lincoln” sold it’s soul when Strom Thurmond, segregationist and rapist was welcomed to the leadership.
Months after Strom Thurmond’s African-American daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, stepped into history, commentators continue to step around the most explosive aspect of this controversy with the same stealth that ushered Thurmond into interracial fatherhood at 22. Thurmond, icon of the Bible-toting, family-values-promoting right, not only contradicted his segregationist credo by impregnating young Carrie Butler in 1925, he most likely violated the law against statutory rape. Yet the very real possibility that Butler was a victim of an illegal sexual assault has been virtually ignored by a media eager to commend Thurmond’s families for playing nice. The celebration of their gentility and patience implies that it would be indecorous to raise the question of whether this all-American story began in sexual abuse.
Any serious inquiry into the likelihood that Butler was the victim of statutory rape was precluded by the Washington Post’s inaccurate report that the age of consent in South Carolina was 14 in 1925, which was widely repeated in print and electronic media. In fact, a South Carolina statute enacted in 1922 criminalized the carnal knowledge of any woman under 16. Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine whether Thurmond violated that law without Butler’s birth date, for which there are no records. But we do know that when she delivered her child on October 12, 1925, she was at most 16–according to Washington-Williams, Butler was born in 1909 or 1910. The only way the conclusion of statutory rape could be avoided is if Butler was born no later than early January 1909, and conception occurred just after her sixteenth birthday. Of course, the odds are against this meticulous alignment.
No doubt apologists will remind us that the possibility of statutory rape does not alone suggest that Butler did not consent to the act. But in a climate characterized by fear and abject racial intimidation, the question of whether Carrie Butler, an impoverished maid in the Thurmond family household, freely consented is virtually meaningless. The more telling question is whether there was any way she could freely say no. Even as a teenager, Butler had to understand that her chances of protecting her sexual autonomy against the desires of the determined son of Edgefield’s most prominent family were virtually nonexistent. The protection law promised was empty; after all, statutory rape laws were not written to protect girls like Butler.
For most critics of sexual racism, this is simply a textbook case of a white man getting away with sexual behavior that would have sent an African-American man to his death. Needless to say, had either of Thurmond’s underaged twin sisters given birth to a mocha-colored baby, somebody would have had to pay, most likely with his life. In fact, Thurmond was not only a privileged recipient of this double standard, he was one of its perpetrators. In 1942, Judge Thrmond sent George Thomas, a black man, to the electric chair based on an alleged rape victi’s cross-race identification, testimony now known to be extremely unreliable. Thurmond refused defense pleas to move the trial to a safer venue, even though the community’s lust for Thomas’s lynching grew so feverish the National Guard had to be called in. A jury took little more than an hour to convict the defendant, notwithstanding the exculpatory testimony of at least nine people who placed the defendant elsewhere at the time of the alleged rape. The defendant’s only chance of survival was destroyed when Thurmond misled the appellate court about the lynch-mob atmosphere that pervaded the trial.
While the repression of black male sexuality dominates most discussions of sexual racism, the silence surrounding the sexual abuse of black women remains relatively unexplored. The contemporary media’s refusal to acknowledge Carrie Butler as a likely victim of such abuse reflects the sexual racism that black women continue to face today.
Indeed, the possibility that Thurmond’s transgression might have gone beyond statutory rape to include the use of force has not even been raised. Yet consider what is known about Thurmond. In 1924 he had already developed a reputation in college for his sexually aggressive conduct–and this was with white women. Thurmond’s sexually inappropriate behavior didn’t end there; stories abound about his groping women in the Capitol, including a senator and a government agent. If Thurmond was not above the un-welcome fondling of some of America’s most powerful women long after the women’s movement established that such boorish behavior was unacceptable, is it such a stretch to imagine him ignoring the protests of a powerless black teenager in 1925?
This is precisely the kind of horror black women workers confronted for generations. One of the first lessons black girls were taught was to beware sexually predatory white men. No doubt that’s why African-American women were among the first plaintiffs to challenge sexual harassment on the job as employment discrimination. After decades of workplace sexual abuse deformed the lives of black women like Butler, they were especially attuned to the connection between harassment and discrimination.
The sexual abuse of black women has long been the crime with no name; even today black women’s claims are the least likely to be believed, and their abusers are the least likely to be punished. The defaming of black women as promiscuous is so deeply rooted in our culture that the victim’s race is still more significant than all other factors in determining whether the alleged assailants will be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated.
The failure to acknowledge the elephant in the middle of the Thurmond revelation speaks volumes about the brutish life black women faced in 1925. If we cannot muster the courage nearly eighty years later to call it out, then the Thurmond bombshell, far from revealing how far we’ve come, tells us much more about how far we haven’t.
From the Nation
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia law schools and is a regular commentator on NPR’s The Tavis Smiley Show.
Washington Times (February 18, 1900):
Negro Lynched to Avenge Assault on White Woman
Columbia, S.C., Feb. 17 — Will Burts, a negro, nineteen years old, was lynched this morning in Aiken county. Three days ago he attempted to outrage Mrs. C. L. Weeks and failed.
A crowd of 250 tracked the negro fifty miles across Aiken, Edgefield, and Greenwood counties. He was caught last evening by a farmer, who received $100 form the posse. The party returned to Greenwood, and at daylight this morning the lynching occurred. Some wished to hold the man till tonight to make a public demonstration of it, but this was outvoted.
A clothesline was obtained, one end swung over an oak limb, and the other fastened to Burts’ neck. He was then ordered to climb the tree and get out on the limb. This the negro did without hesitation. He was then shot from the limb. The rope broke, and, as Burts was not dead, he was again hoisted up and then shot to pieces.
Strom in 1948:
“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
Was he forced to rape his family’s maid?
Strom was communicating the official policy of the official Democrat party in 1948 when he said that. He did think like that back then as did nearly all Dems. When he switched to the GOP, he realized the error of his ways and was forgiven. So whatever he did prior to joining the GOP is on the Democrat’s watch, not the GOP. But why are liberals so eager to forgive and forget about the racist past of the Democrats? So even Sen. Byrd gets a free pass when he was a leader in the KKK. Strom never joined the KKK. Jefferson even took his slave girlfriend, Sally Hemings, to France with him while serving as ambassador. So the history of slave ownership and the legacy of slavery is on the Democrat’s back. Lincoln, a Republican of course, freed the slaves. So RTH, get over it and accept the fact that the Democrats were the slavery party and in many respects still are.
Dave, the quote was from Thurmond’s speech to the Dixiecrat Convention in 1948.
I’m going to walk you through this really slowly because you’re obviously not as dense as your posts indicate. You just want to believe a fairy tale. I understand that you don’t want to admit that “the Party of Lincoln” sold its soul for power.
Thurmond was speaking at a rival political party’s convention in 1948 because he was outraged that the national Democratic Party was attempting to leave behind de jeur segregation, lynching and “states rights” civil rights violations.
Thurmond ran against the Democratic presidential candidate and carried many states in the old Confederacy. His racism-based candidacy failed and he rejoined the Democratic Party primarily because there was no viable alternative. The Republicans weren’t unprincipled and desperate enough, yet, to accept him.
When he switched to the GOP, he realized the error of his ways and was forgiven.
This is important: Thurmond never admitted the “error of his ways.” He never repented publically (nor privately, as far as anyone can tell). Authentic repentance requires public confession.
He just started muting his racism, using code words and “cover issues.” He strove to serve the wishes of his racist constituents. He worked behind the scenes to torpedo integration– especially school integration.
I am not willing to exculpate either the Democratic or Republican parties of being free from the influence of racism. However, minds have slammed shut and thoughtful debate is not possible under those circumstances.
Dave, I’m glad you brought up Jefferson. The United States has been a racist nation from the beginning. Our history has been a struggle to extend human rights to everyone, all races, all genders and, recently, to all sexual persuasions.
The “party of Lincoln” played a key role in that effort with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Ammendment, and, even, Dirksen assisting in passing the CRA 1964.
Republicans spent most of the post-war, post-depression decades as a minority party with a conservative and liberal wing. The take-over by Goldwater paved the way for the subversion-from-within by Southern conservative racists.
So much for “party of Lincoln.”
BTW, citing the brilliant but flawed Jefferson as an antecedent of the modern Democratic Party is a stretch. I’ll gladly take the shortcomings of Jefferson and the repentant Byrd over the modern segregationists of Lott and Thurmond.
Well, we’ve kinda skipped around the historical context. Maybe we should take a look at the current Republican Party.
First, let’s ask the Republican African-American caucus in Congress about the party’s modern record on inclusiveness.
Oops. There isn’t one. Well, maybe that’s because Republicans believe in egalitarianism, not “balkanization.”
So, let’s ask the individual elected African-American Republicans in the U.S. Congress. Whoa! Are you going to tell me that even J.C. Watts gave up trying to integrate “the party of Lincoln?”
Closer to home, in SC, we should find some elected African-American Republicans– since Strom saw the light and joined “the party of Lincoln.”
Hmmm, I wonder how “the Party of Lincoln” in SC, a state with a substantial African-American population, can’t boast of a single representative of that group in the legislature.
Dave, keep on denying reality and it’s likely to slap you in the face.
Gotta love ya, RTH, for your diehard stand in defense of the indefensible. On one hand, you produce no evidence for your myth. On the other hand an article that conclusively collapses your entire argument is just by an “apologist”. Only a head-in-the-sand diehard zealot would have your enormous capacity to stick to an argument unsupported by facts while totally ignoring the obvious truth.
That long Thurmond piece is hilarious in its desperate zeal to “prove” that Strom might have engaged in statutory rape without producing even a shred of real evidence. Huge amounts of innuenedo but ultimately lots of fizzle because we don’t even know Mrs. Washington-Williams’ age at the time. In any case, Strom certainly did the honorable thing and took care of her and the child throughout his life. Certainly beats saying “you better put some ice on that” to Mrs. Broaddrick and walking out as Clinton is alleged to have done after forcing himself on her. (BTW, his major defense back then was because the rape was 20 years ago or so. Yet you guys see nothing wrong with dragging out stuff that happened almost 80 years ago.)
Next you again trot out Strom and the Dixiecrats. This is somehow supposed to be the fault of the GOP. Never mind that after they lost in 1948, the entire gang stayed in the Democrat for at least another 17 years. You can spin it any way you want but this was undeniably deep in the Democrat phase of Strom’s long political life. There is no way you can blame this on anyone but the racist Democrats.
Then you finally produce a piece of evidence: a lynching that took place in 1900 while Dems were in complete control of SC. Well yes, that’s exactly what we’ve been saying all along. Thank you for doing my job for me.
Then you come up with a particularly hilarious comment:
“His racism-based candidacy failed and he rejoined the Democratic Party primarily because there was no viable alternative. The Republicans weren’t unprincipled and desperate enough, yet, to accept him.”
Here you have just explicitly admitted that Strom returned to the Democrats because they were by far the more racist party. Yet you insinuate that Strom later switched to the GOP for racist reasons, despite producing absolutely zilch in the way of evidence for your ridiculous claim. The real reason for Strom’s switch is in the long piece by the “apologist” I quoted earlier. The Democrats were simply lurching too far to the Left for conservative Southerners’ tastes.
It’s self-evident. “The Party of Racism” kept its racist soul when Robert ‘Sheets’ Byrd, segregationist and former KKK Kleagle, continued to be welcomed to the leadership.
Lexwolf, that is a great post completely dismantling the spurious nonsense of RTH. The Strom bashers like to speculate about the worst case scenario, for which they have no proof. Yet if one were to speculate that the young black maid seduced Strom there would be howls of protest about how outrageous that could be. But is it, did not Anita Hill virtually attach herself to Clarence Thomas as she followed him to several job changes so she could reap the benefits of his career advancement? This happens all the time. But the left can only imagine that the Strom relationship was all about abuse of power. The fact is none of us will ever know. But we DO know that Byrd was and is celebrated as a former KKK leader by the Democrats, that is a known fact.
Another area where SC differs from Pennsylvania was given in today’s State Paper (7-9-06). SC has a much higher high school dropout rate. Yet another “success” story of conservative government.
That’s exactly why we need school choice.
Bud, correction, liberal INez Tannenbaum has been running state schools. That is another reason why the governor should be allowed to appoint the ed. secty he or she wants. But Karen Floyd will come in and reverse the lack of progress. Bet on it.
Here’s a long, but very interesting article on New Jersey’s very serious problems. After reading it, most thinking people would gladly live with South Carolina’s comparatively minor problems.
Philadelphia lowered their school dropout rate by private schools taking in so many poor students back in the 1980s. The cost per pupil is a fraction of the public school cost.
I see where some cities in Pennsylvania are revoking business licenses of those caught employing illegal aliens. Right on!