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Tying up a loose end from a week ago. Joseph Ellis is a marvelous historian. His numerous studies of the framers generally offer compelling and insightful analysis buttressed by careful research and tightly wound logic.

Having said that, Professor Ellis advanced a breathtakingly shaky argument in a brief op-ed piece that appeared in the troubled Los Angeles Times last Saturday morning.

His thesis: When it comes to Barack Obama, the candidate's message of hope and togetherness is rooted in our sacred past.

Ellis begins with a summary of the negative:

"Critics of Obama...have described his vision [of unity and bipartisanship] as a naive pipe dream that would be dead on arrival if he were elected president."

"From the beginning of our history, so the argument goes, an Obama-like message has been a rhetorical veneer designed to obscure the less-attractive reality of irreconcilable division and an inherently adversarial party system."

Not so, says Ellis. Obama skeptics fail to consider our early history as a nation. Employing extensive quotes from our first four American presidents, he sets out to prove "all the prominent founders regarded the bipartisan ideal as the essence of political virtue" and "would regard [partisan battles] as a perversion of all that they wished the American republic to become."

True enough. Ellis accurately conveys the words of these "founding brothers," but his argument ignores the obvious discrepancy between their words and deeds. Incredibly, Ellis seems to accept reams of tragically self-deluded and self-serving pieces of self-analysis from the pens of these eighteenth-century luminaries. Even more curious, he ignores his own findings over time, which tell a much richer story of practical reality so often overcoming the ideals and prevailing political theory of the day.

"Adams carried the ideal to such a length that he regarded his defeat in the presidential election of 1800," writes Ellis, "as evidence that he had so eschewed partisanship that he never abandoned the public interest for his own political gain."

Of course, Adams thought himself an innocent victim of partisanship. Rather pathetically, he assured himself that he had lost a national election as a result of his integrity and principles, preserving the above-quoted defense for posterity. But this is the same Adams who saw the Election of 1800 as an historic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. He viewed Jefferson and Madison as traitors to the true republican ideals of the Revolution (and Jefferson himself as a faithless former friend). Moreover, Adams allowed himself to be convinced that the two Republican Party collaborators were, indeed, dangerous Jacobins (radicals who would murder the opposition, burn churches, and cast the nation into the chaos of mob rule).

Ellis also quotes from Washington's foundational "Farewell Address" in which the Father of our Country rails against "the spirit of party." It is quite true that Washington thoroughly hated the evils of partisanship, and the verbiage of the document (mostly written by Alexander Hamilton with some previous aid from James Madison) reflects that vehemence. However, Washington's ire is directed against one party in particular: the aforementioned inchoate party of Jefferson and Madison. Ironically, even as Washington voiced his righteous indignation, he was tacitly protecting and supporting the party of Hamilton and Adams and the Washington administration, the loose political organization we refer to today as the Federalist Party. All the while, of course, Jefferson was busy denying that his organization was a party and maintaining that factional politics was anathema to him and his loyalists. All of it was quite hypocritical (or, perhaps, more charitably, completely lacking in self awareness).

Amazingly, while admitting he "is somewhat tricky on this score," Ellis even tries to shoehorn Thomas Jefferson into his thesis:

"In fact, Jefferson made two of the most eloquent statements against party politics. 'If I must go to heaven in a party,' he claimed, "I prefer not to go at all.' And in his first inaugural address, he stunned his partisan supporters by observing that 'we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.'"

Those ought to be good laugh lines, really. Jefferson and Madison came to the Federal City in 1801 intent on taking no prisoners. Elegant words be damned, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were devastating practitioners of partisan warfare. In fact, they were so expert that they put the other side out of business--which eventually led to the so-called "Era of Good Feelings" (which it was not).

An alternate interpretation of the evidence Ellis presents? The pols of the eighteenth century took great care that their public personae (and perhaps their own self-perceptions) conformed to the demands of the political culture of their time. However, without exception, the reality of governing the evolving early republic drove its leaders to pound one another relentlessly in a fashion modern-day practitioners of hardball politics might find startling.

Politicians promising a kinder, gentler, and more bipartisan approach have been with us from the beginning. Some of these prophets of non-partisanship may have actually believed their own rhetoric (John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush come to mind), but not one has succeeded in "changing the tone in Washington."
In my last post, I asserted that Lyndon Johnson brilliantly seized a fleeting moment in American history and used his unique skills to accomplish what few others could have or would have: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It is not racist to admit this obvious truth. If you love civil rights, three cheers for Lyndon Johnson!

Lyndon Johnson struck many observers as an unlikely champion of civil rights in that he was a Democrat, a Southerner (Texan), and a famously adroit legislative deal maker, known for his ability to count votes and bend opponents to his interests. While he had articulated the southern orthodoxy of racial segregation early in his career, he famously proclaimed that his later actions sprang from a "change of heart."

Johnson's authentic sensitivity toward the plight of African Americans was sincere, organic, and a lifetime in the making. However, a legend has grown up around this historic legislative accomplishment.

According to the tradition, after signing the landmark legislation in 1964, Johnson purportedly turned to a young aide and proclaimed: "We have lost the South for a generation." This jewel of political prescience is a favorite for pundits and academics, illustrating for many LBJ's courage, integrity, and dedication to racial justice in the face of certain electoral disaster.

Did Johnson really say it?

Perhaps. The source for the quote is Bill Moyers, Johnson's youthful press secretary at the time. Is Moyers a credible historical source? His access and proximity to the President certainly makes him worth considering. On the other hand, I sometimes have difficulty determining when Moyers is preaching, reporting, or opining; more troubling, I am not sure that even he is always readily capable of such distinctions.

Even if the quote is accurate, was Johnson really conceding the South to his arch rivals, the Republicans?

Not likely. No matter how convicted the Texan president found himself on civil rights, he was no political martyr. As vice president, pitching a civil rights bill to President Kennedy, Ted Sorenson remembers Johnson arguing that the losses in the South (if they occurred) would come from states that were already in transition. In effect, Johnson made the case that much of the South was lost anyway. In fact, the Republicans had already made giant strides in the region during the Eisenhower administration.

Could Johnson actually have envisioned the inclusion of African American voters as a curative for an emerging realignment?

And this is where the unabashed speculation begins...

Johnson came of age politically on the edge of South Texas where Democratic Party bosses had "voted Mexicans" en masse with regularity and success; that is, truckloads of brown-skinned voters would be carted to polling places on election day and instructed for whom to vote, for a price. For that time and place, using Latino votes as a blunt instrument was merely politics as usual.

Moreover, Johnson came of age in an era in which the Huey Long Machine in Louisiana, his neighboring state to the east, voted African Americans in massive numbers. Long had proved himself a visionary in this regard. While every other southern state took great pains to bar black voting in any significant numbers during the Jim-Crow Era, Long boldly combined the black vote with poor whites to achieve a populist coalition and a personal fiefdom in the Bayou State.

Was Johnson influenced by these examples of successfully manipulating minority votes? Frankly, I am not nearly enough of a Johnson scholar to make that case with any specificity or certainty.

However, this alternative explanation makes at least as much sense as the more popular legend. While sincerely believing in civil rights, Johnson was also inclined to pursue the transformational legislation with a hope of wresting a more secure political future for his party. In many ways, this scenario is a better fit with the LBJ we think we know than a political suicide mission to achieve justice no matter the cost.
Lyndon Johnson was essential to the Civil Rights Moment of 1964 and 1965.

I love King--and I believe he was the indispensable man in the civil rights breakthrough of mid-century--but there is no racism in giving poor old Lyndon Johnson his due.

Some inside-baseball (history shop talk) background information in a nutshell:

Historians have long argued over whether great men make history or exceptional (but not necessarily indispensable) people sit atop gigantic popular waves that break across the cultural landscape. Is history essentially biography? Or, is the graveyard full of "indispensable" men?

In truth, historical events are complicated webs of contingency. The Civil Rights Moment is a giant river full of diverse currents. We have a tendency to simplistically credit King and Rosa Parks for bringing about a social revolution--but things are much more complicated than that. The story goes back at least a century. The platform on which King stood was built by a legion of greats: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, and a whole host of others.

Moreover, the landmark legislation arrived as the product of a collective change of racial sensibilities in the USA, which occurred as a result of a transformed post-war international political reality, a changing economy, a newly activated federal judiciary, the advent of television, the negative example of Nazi Germany, the hard work of civil rights organizations, and much, much more.

Having said that, just as it is hard to imagine a successful American Revolution without the exceptional leadership and personal force of George Washington, the progress of the 1960s would not have transpired as it did without the person of Martin Luther King. We are right to honor King and Washington as national heroes and role models.

Just the same, there are some silly questions out there that we need not answer. Who was responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Lyndon Johnson or Martin Luther King?

Yes.

While it is true that the re-emergence of King in the tumultuous spring of 1963 and the violent images of Birmingham pushed President Kennedy to endorse a sweeping civil rights bill that June, even after the dramatic pep rally in the nation's capital (the March on Washington) that summer, in which MLK shared his dream with a massive American audience, the legislation was a dead letter by fall. What saved the bill? The assassination of JFK in November, which allowed the new president, Lyndon Johnson, the legislative genius and former "master of the Senate," to leverage the "martyrdom" of the slain president to achieve "racial justice" as a "monument" to a fallen American hero.

Did Lyndon Johnson play a vital role in this event? You bet. LBJ seized the moment and used his unique skills to accomplish what few others could have or would have. It is not racist to admit this obvious truth. If you love civil rights, three cheers for Lyndon Johnson!
An interesting meeting is going on today up the road from me at the University of Oklahoma. Story here.

Excerpts:

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) - University of Oklahoma President David Boren says a conference in Norman today is intended to send a message that Democrats and Republicans should lead a bipartisan government of national unity.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is among more than one dozen political centrists expected to attend the conference one day before the New Hampshire primary.

Other attendees include former Republican senator John Danforth of Missouri and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.


One part of me is drawn to this idea: a government by statesmen rather than by party. As I've mentioned, in my political thought, I am a great admirer of Revolutionary-Era Republicanism (the system of ideas underlying a republic): the political thought of the Revolutionary generation. A major idea in that ideology is that citizens should be committed to the Common Good, what's best for all. Also, that politics takes place within a universe governed by laws given by the Creator, in other words, political decisions should conform not only to the natural laws governing politics, but also to the Moral Law. George Washington deplored the idea of political parties. In the 1790s neither the Federalists nor Republicans could or would call themselves political parties. "Parties" were thought to equal "Faction" which meant a group out for themselves, not the Common Good.

But, on the other hand, there is another idea in Revolutionary-Era Republicanism at tension with this: human beings are not to be trusted with power. One major root of republicanism is the Puritan/ Presbyterian/ Separatist Protestant tradition in Britain. Central to the doctrine of these groups is the teaching that mankind has "fallen" into a state of sin. Therefore, in politics vigilance is necessary lest someone, or some group, abuse power because of their fallenness. Madison exemplifies this way of thinking in the establishment of checks-and-balances within our Federal Government, and between the Federal Government and the States. Later, Martin Van Buren (a member of the Kinderhook Dutch Reformed Church, a group very committed to the doctrine of Total Depravity), would justify political parties, in part, because of their ability to maintain vigilance. In a sense, political parties are an extension of Madison's system of dividing power and then limiting the expression of power by having competing groups.

Realistically, we need parties in conflict. Mexico, among other nations, demonstrates that corruption follows the extended rule by one party making itself a monopoly. Even a "bipartisan" group will act like a party.

For some more philosophy, see below.

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