Ernie Dumas elaborates this week on a point I touched on a few days ago – the irony in the press-beloved heralding of Republican political victories in Arkansas as the “first since Reconstruction.”
Great column for history buffs, with some pertinent present-day analysis.
The reference to Reconstruction does more than define the length of time—138 years—since Republicans last owned a legislative majority. It also defines a cause—maybe the biggest cause—of the shifting allegiance of a large share of white voters in Arkansas and the South over that period.
That is the attitude toward black political participation and power. There is no point in arguing over the precise share of the electorate that has been and still is governed in no small degree by fear of the exercise of political power by black citizens and now consummately exercised by a single black man, Barack Obama. More than 70 percent of white voters in Arkansas voted for Mitt Romney, a man with whom most of them shared few economic and social goals and little culturally, but they took him eagerly over the Democrat who was nothing but a champion of the middle class in all his tax and budget policies, his giant healthcare reform, his banking reforms, college loans, and on and on. What would account for that but race?
If only modern-day Republicans were like those Reconstruction Republicans.
Republicans today would call them flaming liberals. With whites, nearly all Confederate sympathizers, sidelined, about 1,300 immigrating Republicans and 23,000 freed slaves did the voting and elected themselves to office, installing exactly one Democrat in each house of the legislature.
The Republicans enacted full rights for African-Americans, raised taxes everywhere, began a system of publicly funded universal education for both whites and blacks and the first state college, built railroads (662 miles), turnpikes and levees, and passed the first environmental laws. They would have been called socialists but the planters hadn’t heard the word. Those Republicans were a trifle corrupt and they ran things with an iron fist. The latter was fully justified by the relentless violence and intimidation, most of it undertaken by stray vigilantes but also by the Ku Klux Klan and county militias organized by both the Republican and Democratic parties, which murdered and plundered with impunity. One estimate was that 385 Republicans were murdered in two years.
While we’re talking history – and since Arkansas Republicans seem intent on erecting a facsimile poll tax by making it expensive to impossible for many poor people to vote in the future – you might do well also to review the history of the poll tax in Arkansas, from the Enyclopedia of Arkansas.
Ernie’s full column follows on the jump.