I welcome Melvin P.'s corrective to my own forgetting, which is itself systematic. Indeed, the overthrow of bourgeois democracy in the United States has always been founded on a *southern strategy* of anti-democratic terror that predates European fascism. To call it fascism is anachronistic, but to not call it fascism leaves it without a name.
"Jim Crow" perhaps carries too much of a connotation of mere discrimination and too much of illusion of containment -- as if it is something whose political consequences were confined to the south and whose historical dynamic has somehow been attenuated by civil rights legislation and Brown v. the Board of Education. Maybe if we call it Jim Crow Fascism, we can open up a space to recall that this is not some exotic import or faded relic. In my post, I talked about the anti-labor policies of the National Association of Manufacturers. It's important to add that the "southern strategy" was from the outset a key element of the N.A.M. campaigns. This is very clear in the rationale and symbolism put forward at the N.A.M.'s 1903 convention, held in New Orleans. The below quote, although not from an official N.A.M. document, evokes the sentiment expressed at the N.A.M convention: "Having lived for some years in a Southern State which has made remarkable progress in manufacturing, especially in metal production and in mining, I contemplate with dread the effect there of a possible eight-hour system for labor. A great proportion of Southern labor is negro labor. To turn loose every day the hordes of negroes that would be idle so much of the day as the eight-hour system would give them would visit on the South nothing short of calamity. The negro problem is grave enough at best. It is vexing the calm of our greatest statesmen and baffling already the efforts of our most strenuous intellects. Who is going to provide entertainment, profitable and wholesome entertainment, for our negroes in their hours of ease? Who is going to guarantee that the passions of the blacks-the millions of blacks-will conform themselves to the invocations of the lyceum and the library? It is a matter of record that the towns and urban communities throughout the South show that there is most crime among negroes on days on which they are not at work, their few whole holidays and their once-a-week half-holidays. The eight-hour system would give them some holiday every day and the race would either degrade every community in the South or have to be exterminated. The negro is not the only human creature to whom enforced or optional idleness is a bane. The best gift of our institutions is in the chance of manful, self-reliant independence. The law should foster it and not hamper and degrade it." Melvin P. wrote, > It is remarkable that the second most brutal period in all of American > history has been wiped from the consciousness of the progressives. Talk > about "bad American history." To this very day political reaction is based > in the South and this includes the structure of our political democracy. > Bush - Texas and Bush Florida and throughout the South into the heart of the > old plantation areas is the current basis of the political reaction in > America. How can this not be understood? > > The political South Controls the nation and Wall Street controls the South > was pointed out by Dr. Dubois and others many many decades ago. The > monumental bloodletting and murder that ushered in the counterrevolution and > the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic Reconstruction governments was not > a fascist movement in the mind of many but the result of the inferiority of > the Negro - according to the "right" and the "meanness" of white people - > racial antagonism, according to the "left." Tom Walker 604 255 4812
