Posted on 12/24/2002 11:43:09 PM PST by TLBSHOW
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:59:49 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Most of what has been hashed and rehashed about Sen. Trent Lott's infamous reference to Sen. Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential bid is of only passing interest now that the Mississippian quit the Senate leadership.
Some wanted a different Senate majority leader anyway and were secretly thankful for any excuse. Before the coup, only a couple of historical comments about the incident caught my attention. One was the observation that half of Americans were not even alive in 1948, and probably have no idea what Mr. Lott was talking about. The other was a poignant column by publisher Ralph Eubanks, offering his personal reflections on what it was like growing up black in Mississippi.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
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Uh, Tempis Fugit. The age of the average American is probably up to about 35. Close to 50% of Americans aren't old enough to have been around during Lyndon Johnson's time. Close to 65% weren't alive during JFK. 1948 is as ancient as the Civil War for most Americans.
Pinging you, hellina, because of your recent effort to educate that crazy German about federalism. Hope you're having a merry Christmas.
The link above is to a speech given by Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, in October. Here is an excerpt which I believe applies to the ongoing fight being waged against the encroachment of federal powers:
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The Last 30 Years
Consider now the modern history of Hillsdale College. In our first 30 years, we were fighting to save the Union. For the last 30 years, we have been fighting to keep the federal government out of our business. This fight actually started in the late 1950s, when the federal government decided to subsidize education. The leaders of Hillsdale believed that this federal subsidy was not constitutional. They also thought that it would distort liberal arts education. And so our College refused all that money. J. Donald Phillips was president then, and in 1966 he issued the Hillsdale College Declaration of Independence, a noble document that makes excellent reading still today.
In 1971, George Roche became president, and in 1975 the College got a letter from the U.S. Department of Education. It said that some of our kids were getting student aid – such as the G.I. Bill – from the federal government. It said that for Hillsdale to accept such students, it had to become a signatory to Title IV of the Higher Education Act. When I first came to the College, I ordered up a copy of Title IV. I started reading it, and after a few pages I decided that I am either not intelligent enough, or (I hope) too intelligent, to read it. So I ordered the kit that one uses to sign up for Title IV, and the kit was very understandable. To become a signatory, several people in the College would have to sign statements of personal liability to comply with Title IV, which is now almost 500 pages long. This would mean that the administration would have to do what federal regulators tell us, rather than what our board of trustees or our mission statement tells us.
Title IV says, among other things, that colleges must count their students and staff by the color of their skin. And as I mentioned, we had boys fight and die in the Civil War in opposition to just that. I told somebody in the Michigan Department of Education one time, “You came down here with a clipboard and walked around campus counting people by their color. This is an embarrassing thing to do, and you know it. I want you to know that we have spilled blood on the ground over that principle. We will not be made to violate it.”
The first thing that President Roche and the board of trustees did when they received this ultimatum from the federal government was to sue. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against Hillsdale nine to nothing. Along with Chairman Don Mossey and the board, President Roche decided to give up the federal student aid money. George Roche was, for 28 years as president, a brave and a firm man in commitment to Hillsdale’s principles. When he embarked on the effort to keep the College independent of federal control, neither he nor the board had any way to be sure they could find the money. Just like the founders of the College, they acted in faith that they were right and that a way would be found. It was a shining moment. Neither that moment nor the people who made it possible will be forgotten so long as our College stands.
Of course those who have fought this battle for Hillsdale College have won splendid results so far. The money we need to make up for the federal aid has increased by a factor of 15 since those first days. But we have been able to find it. We have been holding these conferences for 20 years, and they continue to be well attended by people like yourselves, people who love their country and wish to join together to put it right. We have been publishing Imprimis for 30 years. It has grown in circulation from 1,500 to more than 1,100,000; it has more than 150,000 additional readers since I came to the College. Just as in its early days, little Hillsdale College is a beacon to the nation.
Hillsdale was a patriotic college in 1980, just as it was in 1850. It holds to the same principles today, but now it is in conflict with the very thing it had fought before to preserve. This carries a lesson for every American.
Maybe this is a typo or word processing editing error, but the actual language is as follows: " The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Sorry to be a nitpicker.
When you see the GOP supporting "states rights", (which is, by definition, a SMALLER fed. gov't) watch out for flying pigs.
Not to sound negative, but the inevitable march toward federalism (i.e. bigger and bigger federal gov't) probably began before the ink was dry on the Constitution.
Now, after the Lott fiasco, with so-called "state's rights" supporters thoroughly marginalized and demonized, the march will only become a stampede. The day will come (if it hasn't already) when talk of any autonomy in state government will be looked at as a quaint tradition from an earlier age.
Merry Christmas.
The issue remains, as it was before The War, the extent to which the federal government's power extends. What has changed (besides the vast expansion of that power) is that this issue is no longer clouded by the question of whether slavery is acceptable in a society whose founding documents proclaim the equality of all men (used in the 18th century sense to mean all human beings).
A truly wasted effort, Stultis. ;D
But it looks like sometime yesterday, she found the firing squad and dared them to shoot. She's gone.
fed·er·al·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (fdr--lzm, fdr-)
n.
A. A system of government in which power is divided between a central authority and constituent political units.
B. Advocacy of such a system of government.
Is this not an example of the principle of "he who owns the language, controls the argument"?
Was it just the moderators tidying up at FR, or did they silence her?
Here, too, historical usage is unhelpful, as federalism morphs easily in the mind into federalist, the partisans of the centralization of state power in the early Republic. Whereas modern 'federalists' would be more at home, I think (save for on defense) in a more Jeffersonian republic, than in Adams' court.
Language is important, as you rightly point out. Finding language that is not negatively charged is hard. I've always liked classical liberal myself, but that really speaks to a subset of modern conservatism and embraces views that, in popular terms, are more 'liberal' on social matters than many conservatives today as well as views that are very 'conservative' on economics. Part of the problem reflects the tension among 'conservatives' between the religious conservatives whose views on economics are suspect (e.g. many Roman Catholics, given Rome's notorious hostility to capitalism and some fundamentalist Protestants) and more secularly oriented 'conservatives' who still regard themselves as children, if not the the entire Enlightenment enterprise, at least of Locke and the English Enlightenment.
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