GOP-praising letter writer leaves out a few details
Larry Faulkenbury’s letter Feb. 8 praising the accomplishments of the Republican Party since its start in 1854 conveniently stops in 1972.
He left out their recent 47-year history of pandering to racists in the South with Nixon’s Southern strategy to get Southern Democrats to vote Republican because they were now the party of “states rights” and “law and order,” code words used to allow states to resist racial integration in schools and society and any further civil rights legislation. It was successful, because all Southern states today are reliably Republican.
It was the national Democratic Party that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968 with no help from Southern Democrats and help from some northern Republicans. Lyndon Johnson said in 1964 it would turn the south Republican and he was right.
By the 1980s the Democratic Party was the one supporting the EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Civil Rights progress and not the Republicans, who are still hostile to these today. And by the way, President Kennedy started the first federal affirmative action program, not Nixon.
Hillary was exactly right when she said the Republican Party today is made up of 25 percent deplorables and they started supporting and voting for this party in the 1972 election and continue today.
LEE LEWIS
Centerton
Democratic policies cited fault of Southern branch
A recently published letter from Rogers presents a rather naïve picture of the role of the national Democratic Party in politics. The thesis in that letter is that the Democratic Party is responsible for the Civil War and state actions, such as Jim Crow, lynchings, voter-intimidation, etc.
The letter ignores the fact that in the election that nominated Lincoln for president, the Democratic Party convention split into what I will call “the Democratic Party” and the “Southern Democratic Party.” Each party had its own nominee for president. At that point this nation had a three-party system, with the Southern Democrats as the third party. This situation has continued to the mid-50s since the Southern Democratic Party has voted nationally as a block with the possible exception of the 1932 and 1936 national elections.
Within the Southern states, this party had total local control and promoted all the racial evils laid out in the above-published letter and which were at variance with the policies of the Democratic Party. Nationally, the Southern party had more power in Congress if it did not formally leave the Democratic Party, since the seniority system for committee chairs gave it almost total legislative control. Therefore, it disguised its role as a third party in American politics.
The letter is correct in that Lincoln saved the Union. However, complimenting Eisenhower for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock ignores that the sending was only because of the urging of his attorney general. Nixon was responsible for a number of progressive acts. However, he and Sen. William F. Knowland of California closed China to the rest of the world in the first place, and it seems a little hypocritical to give him credit for subsequently opening it. The power of the Southern Democratic Party was broken when Harry Truman effectively threw it out of the Democratic Party in 1948 and subsequently in the ’50s when the seniority system for congressional committees was reformed.
It has finally found its home in the Republican Party.
OTTO HENRY ZINKE
Fayetteville