Many ignorant pundits feed the public impression that the partisan bickering in Washington today, and the insults to our President, are unprecedented. Nonsense. Essentially the same virulent hatreds ran around the country from the beginning to this very moment.
Most schoolchildren in the US are informed that Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, something that politicians other than Zell Miller simply do not engage in any more. But we do not generally learn that much of the animus between Hamilton and Burr was over politics.
Similarly, most of us have heard of Rep. Preston S. Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner almost to death on the floor of the Senate in 1856, even if we can't remember their names, or precisely what that was about. Something to do with slavery, of course, but what, and why?
And don't forget the other political murders and attempts throughout our history. What was said about these Presidents and other leaders to send so many off the deep end? How does that compare with the language used against Obama?
Well, let's head below the jump for a sampling of what the pundits and pols of the day had to say about the Glorious Founders and other leaders of this great nation.
Every President has been viciously maligned in the press, in the pulpit, and in a wide range of other speech. This includes George Washington, even though he was elected President twice, unopposed both times. Some accused him of trying to make himself King, for example. (There is no truth to the pious fiction that he had been offered, and refused, a Kingship after the Revolution, years before.)
Given this universal history of opprobrium, I have to give only a few selected examples here. I choose those most often accused of tyranny, a charge much in the news today, and one who went the other way.
- George Washington & Alexander Hamilton
- Thomas Jefferson & John Adams
- Abraham Lincoln
- Rutherford "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes
- "That man", FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Barack Obama
George Washington & Alexander Hamilton
Washington agreed with Hamilton's plan to create a strong financial system for the Federal government, including a national bank and repayment of the national debt, mainly incurred by the Continental Congress in order to pay for the Revolution. In the process, Hamilton set off one of the earliest crises of the nation by proposing a tax on distilled spirits—whiskey—which provoked the Whiskey Rebellion in the West. Cries of "Tyranny" were raised from Western Pennsylvania through the mountains of Georgia, and conventions organized on the model of the Continental Congress. When Pennsylvanians tarred and feathered tax collectors, and then took up arms, Washington rode out at the head of the militia forces sent to quell them. Nevertheless, vehement, occasionally violent resistance to taxes on home-brewed grain and corn whiskey (moonshine, white lightning, mountain dew, blockade...) for local sale continued unabated, and is with us to this day. It is not the strongest reason for hatred of the Federal government and its Revenooers, but it is definitely the most enduring one.
Thomas Jefferson & John Adams
The US Constitution was designed in the quite reasonable expectation that Washington would be the first President, and would personally set the standards for the office. (There was no such office under the Articles of Confederation.) The Constitution was also designed in the vain hope of avoiding the development of "faction", that is, of party politics. In spite of constant bickering between Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in Washington's Cabinet, faction did not become a major problem until Washington announced his intention of stepping down after two terms. At that point, the Federalist Party coalesced around Vice President Adams, and the Democratic-Republican Party around Thomas Jefferson.
One source describes events this way:
From 1794 to 1797, Thomas Jefferson operated as the informal leader of what would become the nation's first opposition political party, the Democratic-Republicans...As was the aristocratic custom of the day, neither Adams nor Jefferson personally campaigned. Rather, the campaign battles were waged between the political party newspapers, a propaganda device rooted in the anti-British pamphlets of the American Revolution. These publications mercilessly criticized their respective opposing candidates.
Given the intense rivalry and conflict involved, it is not surprising that the 1800 election reached a level of personal animosity seldom equaled in American politics. The Federalists attacked the fifty-seven-year-old Jefferson as a godless Jacobin who would unleash the forces of bloody terror upon the land. With Jefferson as President, so warned one newspaper, "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes." Others attacked Jefferson's deist beliefs as the views of an infidel who "writes against the truths of God's words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians."
Thought Obama was getting it bad, did you? And how about that Gay Agenda, hmm?
The luckless Adams was ridiculed from two directions: by the Hamiltonians within his own party and by the Jeffersonian-Republicans from the outside. For example, a private letter in which Hamilton depicted Adams as having "great and intrinsic defects in his character" was obtained by Aaron Burr and leaked to the national press. It fueled the Republican attack on Adams as a hypocritical fool and tyrant. His opponents also spread the story that Adams had planned to create an American dynasty by the marriage of one of his sons to a daughter of King George III. According to this unsubstantiated story, only the intervention of George Washington, dressed in his Revolutionary military uniform, and the threat by Washington to use his sword against his former vice president had stopped Adams's scheme.
In his first inaugural address in March 1801, Jefferson pleaded for national unity, insisting that differences of opinion were not differences of principle. Then he said, with much hope, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."
How Obama-ish! However:
In 1804 Jefferson called the Federalists a prigarchy, a play on the words "prig" and ["oligarchy,"] because of their unwillingness to open the party to populist elements. The Federalists denounced Jefferson's immensely popular Louisiana Purchase as unconstitutional. They also desperately exposed the President's alleged relations with his slave, Sally Hemings, as a national scandal. Jefferson kept a public silence on his relationship with Hemings.
What if that had been Bill Clinton and a Black intern, like Strom Thurmond and the maid, Carrie Butler?
Abraham Lincoln
Thomas Jefferson's decision, going against his advisors, to introduce slavery into the Louisiana Territory created the Deep South, that Down the River that all slaves further North feared. It also made the Civil War inevitable.
The successful slave rebellion in Haiti triggered slave uprisings on Southern plantations, which in turn triggered ever more onerous measures to prevent them. in Notes on Virginia, Jefferson compared the situation to a man who has a wolf by the ears, and dare not let go.
Tensions and passions rose for decades, while the North grew in population and wealth, and the South largely stagnated. Both North and South felt aggrieved by the Constitutional balance of power between them, which gave the South control of the House of Representatives through the Three-Fifths rule for counting slaves in the census, and resulted in a precarious tie in the Senate, desperately maintained for decades amid ever-more radical threats of Nullification and Secession, and increasing violence from both sides, such as Bloody Kansas and John Brown's raid.
Most of the South cheered when Rep. Preston Brooks viciously caned Sen. Charles Sumner, the leading Abolitionist in the Senate. The occasion of the beating was a vituperative speech in which Sumner attacked Sens. Stephen Douglas and Andrew Butler (Brooks's uncle) over the Fugitive Slave Law. It took three years for Sumner to recover and resume his position in the Senate.
The struggle was not just between slave plantations and factories employing free workers, but between two radically different ways of life, and ways of thinking about life. Three, if you count the slave point of view, which had no say in the political struggle. After the Southern Baptist churches split from the North over slavery, the political contest became rooted in religion on both sides, each denouncing the other as doing the work of the Devil.
When Abraham Lincoln campaigned for President on the promise to bar slavery from all remaining Western territories, abolitionists complained that he wasn't going to root out slavery immediately, while Southern slave owners realized that their national political power was doomed, and that slavery could only be maintained in the long term by leaving the Union.
Lincoln won with no Southern Electoral College votes. Secession had begun by the time Lincoln took office, but no fighting, until Gen. Beauregard's forces in South Carolina attacked Fort Sumter, and the war was on.
Lincoln's reputation was mud in the South ever since he had begun working to restrict slavery in the territories. His firm commitment not to interfere with slavery where it existed meant nothing, in light of obvious political trends. He was a tyrant of the worst order, an enemy of Christianity, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Rather than go through the rest point by point, I prefer to quote Frederick Douglass, speaking eleven years after Lincoln's murder.
The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time. Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was most bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.
"Rutherfraud" B. Hayes
Lincoln intended to follow a conciliatory policy in Reconstruction, but his murder resulted in a policy, Radical Reconstruction, more of revenge against the South. The result is comparable to the result of the punitive Treaty of Versailles after World War I: sullen resistance, conspiracy theories run riot, and preparation for another war, under the slogan, "The South Will Rise Again". That, of course, did not happen, but the Ku Klux Klan (and many other such organizations) and Jim Crow did. A comparison with the Nazi Brownshirts and the Nuremberg laws would only inflame this conversation, so I omit it.
The next key event in this sorry story is the election of 1876. Rutherford B. Hayes is the only President to have been installed by a Congressional commission. He fell short in the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House. The secret Compromise of 1877 is believed to be an informal agreement between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats for 20 Democrats to vote for Hayes, in return for Hayes then removing Federal troops from the South, and leaving Redeemer Democrats to build up the vast edifice of Jim Crow laws without tyrannical Yankee interference. The intent of the Redeemers was to restore the former Southern way of life as much as possible.
Naturally Hayes was vituperated in the press and elsewhere, and naturally nothing came of it. He had a quiet and peaceful Presidency while the South erupted in further violence, which continued into the Civil Rights era in the 1960s.
"That Man"
The worst of the worst, by acclamation, is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took the side not only of Blacks, but of all of the poor and oppressed, railing against "economic royalists" as his cousin TR had railed against "the malefactors of great wealth" [Corrected, thanks. TR didn't made the cut. Doing everybody would be a book.] and pushing through measures such as Social Security, deposit insurance, bank regulation, and unemployment insurance. He was not only "a traitor to his class", but was hated so vehemently that people could not bring themselves to utter his name, referring to him only as That Man. The practice then became an affectation of the Right for a considerable time after.
The Right has been at great pains to claim that all of the New Deal legislation was actually harmful to the economy and to the country in general.
- The Federal Reserve, not the 1929 Crash, caused the Great Depression
- The New Deal is Socialism, which is Communism
- Unemployment is caused by paying people not to work through unemployment insurance
- The rich should have the lowest taxes, in order to encourage them to invest
- Markets need no regulation
- Regulation is tyranny
- Regulation drives up the price of everything, and kills businesses
- The 1929 Crash was not the result of a stock market asset bubble; there is no such thing as a bubble
- Government spending cannot stimulate the economy; only tax cuts for the wealthy can stimulate the economy
Of course, what this legislation really prevented was people making excessive profits by lying, cheating, and outright stealing. When you can make more money by driving up your stock price than by providing goods and services, nobody bothers about production, and a crash will inevitably follow. A bubble is just a self-working Ponzi scheme where earlier investors make money by getting others to invest, with the standard promise that it will never end. Like the man who fell off the 40th floor of a building, and was thinking, "So far, so good."
There are not, in fact, words sufficiently strong with which to excoriate the memory of Milton Friedman, the Apostle of Market Fundamentalism, his hordes of deluded followers, and those in the great Economics Departments of our universities who have sold their souls for power, money, and above all, tenure. Friedman and his acolytes at the University of Chicago are the sources of many of the lies listed above. There are few American texts more egregious than Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. Well, of course, there is Alan Greenspan's favorite.
Atlas Shrugged is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown, with great force.
—Dorothy Parker
Barack Obama
Most of the following are explained in more detail on my dKosopedia pages, Code Words, and Lies and Lying Liars. Basically, "HE'S BLACK!!!!", as I explained the other day in Negrophobia for Fun and Profit. Although the President pointed out on the David Letterman show that he was a Black man before the 2008 election.
- Abraham Lincoln wannabe
- Al Qaeda sympathizer
- alarmist about Global Warming
- anti-Capitalist
- Antichrist
- anti-family
- anti-Israel
- anti-Semitic
- atheist
- beholden to the special interests
- big government supporter
- celebrity
- Chairman Mao
- Communist
- community organizer. "Huh, what's that?" "Ze-ro, ze-ro."
- corrupt
- Darwinist
- death panelist
- death taxer
- domestic terrorist
- election stealer
- elitist
- Fascist
- Godless
- gritless
- Hitler
- Hollywood Liberal
- hypocrite
- ideologue
- illegal immigrant
- inexperienced
- Kenyan
- Keynesian
- liar
- Liberal
- Marxist
- Messiah
- Muslim
- moral relativist
- Nazi
- North Korean
- out of the mainstream
- Pinko
- racist
- radical
- reparationist
- Stalin
- secular humanist
- Socialist
- statist
- terrorist
- "That boy"
- The One
- traitor
- tyrant
- ultrapartisan
- unAmerican
- unpatriotic
- unsound
- uppity
And then they tell you to pray for Obama: Psalms 109:8–9
Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
I rest my case.