Posted by David Kopel:
Conservatives and the civil rights movement:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_06-2009_09_12.shtml#1252645437
Tim Wise is a British writer who is considered by many people to be an
insightful expert on issues regarding race. However, in a recent
essay, he displays a significant gap in his knowledge about the
American civil rights movement. Expressing his dismay about the
criticism of Van Jones, Wise concludes:
Make no mistake, had they been old enough in those days, Beck and
every modern-day movement conservative would have stood with the
segregationists, with the bigots, with the mobs who burned the
buses carrying freedom riders. They would have stood with the
police in Philadelphia, Mississippi, even as they orchestrated the
killing of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. They
would have stood with Bull Connor in Birmingham. How do we know?
Easy. Because not one prominent conservative spokesperson of that
time did the opposite. Not one. That's who they are. And the minute
you forget that, the minute you insist on treating them better than
they would treat you, the minute you insist on playing by rules
that they refuse to as much as acknowledge, all is lost. They do
not believe in democracy. They believe in power. White power.
Yet in fact, actor Charlton Heston, who later became President of
National Rifle Association (and thus a leading "modern-day movement
conservative" according to many people) marched with Martin Luther
King.
Undeniably one of the most prominent conservatives of the sixties with
Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Il.), the Senate minority leader.
He played an indispensible[1], leading role in the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thanks to Dirksen's wily maneuvering, for
the first time in history a filibuster of a civil rights bill was
broken. Republican Senators voted 27-6 for cloture. In the House,
Republicans voted for the bill [2]138 to 34.
I have not been able to locate an on-line roll call of the votes of
all the Congresspersons. Although both parties in 1964 were more
ideologically diverse than they are today, I suspect that in the 80%
of House Republicans who voted yes, there must have been many solid
conservatives.
[3]This document (page 1 of the House roll call) shows an affirmative
vote by Rep. John Ashbrook (R-Ohio) who was so conservative that in
1972 he ran against incumbent President Richard Nixon for Republican
nomination, challenging him from the Right. Ashbrook was a founding
father of the modern conservative movement: "chairman of the Young
Republican National Federation from 1957 to 1959; one of the
[4]founders of the American Conservative Union, serving as chairman
from 1966 to 1971; and on the Steering Committee of the Committee of
One Million against the Admission of Communist China to the United
Nations, whose campaign began in 1953."
I was able to find a [5]complete list of Congresspersons in the 88th
Congress. By eliminating the six Republican Senators who [6]voted
against the bill (Bourke Hickenlooper, Barry Goldwater, Edwin Mechem,
Milward Simpson, Norris Cotton), we see that there were "yes" votes
from 11 conservative Republicans. (American Conservative Union ratings
are on-line starting from 1971; for Senators who were still voting in
1971, [7]the 1971 ACU rating is in parentheses): Gordon Allott (82),
Peter Dominick (87), Hiram Fong (67), Len Jordan (85), Jack Miller
(91), Glen Beall (74), Roman Hruska (100), Carl Curtis (100), Milton
Young (89, most senior Republican), Karl Mundt, and Wallace Bennett
(94).
Mr. Wise's intemperate and inaccurate words serve as a reminder about
the dangers of recklessly imagining the worst of one's political
opponents. This is a particularly serious problem on both sides of
American politics today, as it was during the John Adams
administration, and in 1850s.
References
1.
http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_histmats_civilrights64_cloturespeech.htm
2.
http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_histmats_civilrights64text.htm#Hdebate
3. http://www.carnellknowledge.com/images/72a.jpg
4. http://www.ashbrook.org/about/ashbrook.html
5. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/cdocuments/hd108-222/88th.pdf
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Right_Act_of_1964#Passage_in_the_Senate
7. http://www.acuratings.org/ratingsarchive/1971/senate.html
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
Volokh@lists.powerblogs.com
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
