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GERALD HORNE: It's complicated. Look at the party configuration coming out of the US Civil War, that is to say post-1865. You have the Republican Party, the party of abolition, the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass says is the ship and all else is the sea, and the Republican Party is basically comprised of Black male voters in Dixie and white middle-class and white elite forces in the north. Then you have the Democratic Party, which is basically comprised of white workers in the south and white workers in the north.
Obviously, that's a screwy political configuration. Beginning in 1932, you began to see a mass defection of Black voters to the Democratic Party, driven by the Great Depression and the inertia of the Herbert Hoover administration that preceded the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Black workers started flooding into the Democratic Party in 1932 and 1936, they did not necessarily receive a warm greeting from their fellow white workers. In fact, one of the reasons why the New Deal programs were so stingy with regard to coverage of Black interests and coverage of Black workers was precisely because of this antipathy from the Dixiecrats.
The question is, could Franklin Delano Roosevelt have done more? I think that's a fair question but I think that objectively speaking, like political leaders before and since, he was faced with a rock-solid granite wall of white supremacy within the ranks of his own party and that is a force that is very difficult to overcome.
PAUL JAY: So, he's left with the choice that if he wants this New Deal, social democratic legislation, he can't take on the south, the Dixiecrats and has to essentially concede to a certain amount of discriminatory practices.
GERALD HORNE: I'm sure you recall the discourse in this country in the last eight to nine years, when it was often cited, this remark that was made by FDR, President Roosevelt, where he challenges unions and progressive forces to make him move in a progressive direction. That was cited, of course, when we were confronting President Barack Obama. I think that if you understand that particular conversation, you'll understand that despite the fact that the left was rising in the United States in the 1930s, the Communist Party was at its zenith. It had a membership of about 80,000 in 1938. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, as already noted, was also ascending. It had organized the auto workers, and the steel workers, and the rubber workers in Akron, Ohio. Having said all of that, they were still not powerful enough to overcome the rock-solid Jim Crow that is part of the mother's milk of the politics of the United States of America.
PAUL JAY: In this series we've been doing with historian Peter Kuznick and now Gerald, and we may introduce some other historians, the theme is you have this New Deal, Roosevelt's New Deal, which has mostly to do with the capitalist crisis. It's an alternative to the European response, which was fascism. It's also a way to try to prevent a strengthening of the socialist and communist movement in the United States and save the capitalist system, to mitigate the worst of the crisis on American workers. That social safety net that gets created starts to get eroded, Peter Kuznick says, as early as '39-'40. Even Roosevelt seems to lose some of his commitment to it. There's a proposal for universal healthcare which Roosevelt does not support. Then with the overthrow of Wallace, his vice president, he does not become the next president. You have Truman.
The next big beats in terms of the New Deal, am I right to say, the next big beat is in the 1960s, where Johnson's War on Poverty then actually builds on the New Deal and extends it within, you could say, the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and a massive mass movement demanding reform and civil rights for African Americans? Talk a bit about that and then we can talk about what happened to all of this legislation.
GERALD HORNE: Certainly the 1960s was a turning point in terms of trying to construct a social safety net in this country. It was not only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which helped to erode some of the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow. Perhaps more important was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which not only granted the right to vote to many Blacks in Dixie, but also granted the right to vote to so-called language minorities. That is to say that ballots could now be printed in Spanish, ballots could now be printed in Chinese languages, and this helped to open the door to more ethnic and racial minorities getting the right to vote. In turn, they were able to elect more progressive representatives, who in turn were able to enact programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, or PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, and more aid to education, for example, and also more legislation with regard to fighting housing bias and housing discrimination.
As we know, there was a counter-revolution beginning in 1980, that is to say in August 1980 when Ronald Wilson Reagan kicks off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the place where three civil rights workers were slain tragically in 1964. This sends a signal to Dixie that the bad old days, from our point of view are back. That leads to a counter-revolution, a counter-reaction from 1980 to 1988.
PAUL JAY: Gerald, before we get into Reagan, just a little more on some of the legislation from the '60s. If I'm correct, food stamps comes out of the legislation of the 1960s. I think there's a strengthening or expansion of Social Security.
GERALD HORNE: Medicare, Medicaid.
PAUL JAY: Yeah, go on.
GERALD HORNE: Yes. As noted, food stamps come out of the 1960s. I have to say, like many starving graduate students, I utilized food stamps when I was attending graduate school. Also, Medicare and Medicaid come out of the 1960s. Medicare is part of the step-by-step expansion of health security, Medicare basically applying to those who are considered to be senior citizens and then Medicaid, which applies to those who would be below a certain poverty line. This was a tremendous step forward and as we know in 2018, they're going to be on the chopping block.
PAUL JAY: Is it fair to say what I said in the introduction, that these reforms in the 1960s were more equitable to Black Americans than the New Deal of the '30s?
GERALD HORNE: Yes. I think it's only because of the different era. That is to say that the 1960s witnessed a tremendous erosion of the walls of Jim Crow and bigotry. The walls of Jim Crow and bigotry, as already noted, helped to prevent the expansion of New Deal programs in the 1930s but with the erosion of the 1960s, it was possible to have a more equitable distribution, if you like, with regard to food stamps, for example. Certainly the 1960s were a great leap forward in terms of the fight against racism and bigotry.
PAUL JAY: Reagan kicks off a real energized campaign to undo the New Deal, undo the reforms of the '60s. We're going to trace this forward to Clinton and beyond, but why do you think this takes place?
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