Posted on 08/20/2009 11:42:00 PM PDT by Def Conservative
In fact, as the historian David Southern has documented, the worst evils of the South's Jim Crow regime, including segregation, disfranchisement, mob violence, and lynching, all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Remember that progressives wanted an interventionist government with sweeping powers to regulate all walks of life, an approach that fit nicely with Jim Crow's bullying assault on economic liberty and freedom of association.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
There had to be a nanny state to be sure those “uppity blacks” didn’t get outta hand.
(I’m not saying I agree with either the goal or the method, of cuss! I’m saying that’s how they thought.)
Southern Progressives may well have been racist, but it is not at all clear that they were much different in their views on race from most white Southerners in that era. That said, the end of Republican rule in 1912 and the election of progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson was a major reverse for Black Americans. Wilson was a Southerner, a pernicious racist, and a determined segregationist.
There is nothing about SOCIALISTS or FASCIST in this.
To use the word "PROGRESSIVE" is
Funny that “progressive” is an empty puff term like “hope and change”. It leaves totally to the imagination what is being progressed toward. Yesterday it was white supremacy, today it is some self contradictory goal of combined racial equality and black exaltation. Almost everywhere it’s used, it seems to turn out to be “hell in a handcart.”
In that era, the US was prospering and developing at a rapid pace, but corruption was rampant at all levels, effective sanitation and health and safety measures virtually absent, and public education and municipal services in their infancy. Progressives sought to attack those problems.
Much of progressive doctrine was wrong and later went in dangerous directions, but there is a lot to be said for having reliable water and sewer services, honest police, and public officials and bureaucrats who are not on the take. If only progressives had stopped there!
Progressives also had the view that people themselves should be reformed through public education founded on progressive principles and measures against corruptions of race and national identity.
Initially, this led to urban public school systems that educated and Americanized immigrants and their children. But the result today is the profoundly dysfunctional American K-12 school system.
In keeping with what passed for scientific theory in that era, Progressives regarded Blacks and most immigrant whites as inherently inferior. Progressives therefore supported racial and eugenics measures that had demonstrably evil consequences.
Moreover, the general Progressive belief in the power of government was (and is) at odds with the traditional American suspicion and fear of government as a source of oppression and a danger to liberty. Add a heavy dose of Marxist economic and social theory to the progressive belief in the reformative and redemptive power of government and one has the ideology of the modern Democratic party.
Are you talking about the civil rights act? Passed in 1965 I think.
CRA of ‘64. Albert Gore, Sr. filibustered the bill, if only to make a truly cynical appeal to Segregationists in TN (since he was up for reelection). He won, carried across by the LBJ tide, but he then just as cynically switched to being pro-Civil Rights (and anti-Vietnam) by 1970, by which time he was equally hated on the right and by Blacks, and almost lost renomination, but was finished off in the general election. You’re also correct that the liberal Fulbright was anti-Civil Rights (as was Byrd).
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