Whigs and Democrats

Henry Clay: Whig leader known as the “Great Compromiser”; would have fit right in with today’s Democratic Party

In the course of reading T.J. Stiles’s excellent biography of Jesse James as background for a review of movies about the famous bandit, including the latest with Brad Pitt in the leading role, I came across a number of references to the Whig Party’s efforts to straddle the fence between anti-secessionism and support of slavery. Robert Miller, the editor of a Whig paper in Missouri in the 1850’s, wrote “Where there is no legal sanction of slavery the masses, the laboring portion of the people, are oppressed and run over.”

Stiles describes Miller as “a Whig, struggling like all Missouri Whigs to cling to his party even as it disintegrated.” Whig leader James S. Rollins wrote that his party was “ready to resist illegal Northern aggression and abolition on the one hand, and to suppress the Southern fanaticism and nullification on the other.” In other words, they stood for everything and for nothing.

Eventually, the Whig Party disappeared because it proved incapable of challenging the Democrats who did not have divided loyalties. Some Whigs ended up joining the Republican Party, which was up to the task of confronting the Slavocracy even if they were not totally committed to abolitionism at the outset. The most famous of them was Abraham Lincoln, a great admirer of party leader Henry Clay, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846.

Henry Clay was known as the “Great Compromiser”. When I first came across Stiles’s reference to the Whigs, I began taking a closer look at this party and came to the conclusion that they were the Democrats of their day. If the Whigs imploded because they were incapable of developing an adequate response to the crisis of their day–slavery–then one can surely anticipate the Democrats to begin to disintegrate in the 21^st century for analogous reasons. War, racism, ecological destruction and a host of other ills are associated with the slavery of our time–namely wage slavery. By issuing empty denunciations of these ills, as Al Gore does in “An Inconvenient Truth,” and refusing to tackle the underlying cause of such ills, they prove incapable of sustaining the support of their base, as the low approval rating for Congress today would indicate.

The Republicans have their own contradictions, but by no means as extreme. This is a party whose social base and economic goals are much more in alignment. They oppose any limits on personal enrichment, even if it means abolishing every last vestige of the welfare state and turning back the clock to 1890. The Democrats claim to oppose this socio-economic agenda but rely on the very same corporations for funding that the Republicans do. In effect, they are opposed to the excesses of wage slavery but will never call for its abolition.

In 1820 a dispute arose over the extension of slavery into Missouri, which was not then yet a state. Henry Clay worked out a compromise in Congress that made Maine free and Missouri slave. This maintained the balance in the Senate, which had included 11 free and 11 slave states. Except for Missouri, it would ban slavery north of Arkansas. The Missouri Compromise sounds exactly like the kind of legislation that the Democrats would come up with nowadays, especially in light of Mukasey’s approval and the continued funding of the war in Iraq.

On May 1, 1957, Senator John F. Kennedy made a statement on the floor of the Senate on the occasion of the hanging of portraits of five former Senators there, including the one of Henry Clay seen above. With respect to Clay, Kennedy had the following to say:

Senator Henry Clay, of Kentucky, who served in the Senate 1806-7, 1810-11, 1831-42, 1849-52. Resourceful expert in the art of the possible, his fertile mind, persuasive voice, skillful politics and tireless energies were courageously devoted to the reconciliation of conflict between North and South, East and West, capitalism and agrarianism. A political leader who put the national good above party, a spokesman for the West whose love for the Union outweighed sectional pressures, he acquired more influence and more respect as responsible leader of the loyal but ardent opposition than many who occupied the White House. His adroit statesmanship and political finesse in times of national crisis demonstrated the values of intelligent compromise in a Federal democracy, without impairing either his convictions or his courage to stand by them.

As the words “courage to stand by them” would indicate, Clay was also honored by Kennedy in his “Profiles in Courage.” That a president who would eventually be seen as some kind of “friend of the Negro” could speak so favorably about a Whig leader might be puzzling at first. This does contradict, after all, John Kerry’s acceptance speech to the Democratic Party in 2004, where he referred to JFK’s election as a “beginning of a great journey - a time to march for civil rights, for voting rights…”

But a deeper investigation of Kennedy’s attitude toward Blacks might clear things up:

Not only were the Kennedys hostile to the Civil Rights Commission; they appointed 5 segregationist judges to the federal bench, including Harold Cox, who had referred to blacks as “niggers” and “chimpanzees.” Robert F. Kennedy preferred Cox to Thurgood Marshall whom he described as “basically second-rate.” Kennedy frequently turned to Mississippi Senator James Eastland for advice on appointments. According to long-time activist Virginia Durr, Eastland would “invite people over for the weekend and tell them to ‘pick out a nigger girl and a horse!’ That was his way of showing hospitality.”

Even in their selection of voter registration as the least confrontational tactic in the South, the Kennedys were loath to put the power of the federal government behind it. When the KKK targeted civil rights workers trying to register black voters, Robert F. Kennedy bent over backwards to appear conciliatory toward the racists. He said, “We abandoned the solution, really, of trying to give people protection.” This indifference was one of the main reasons the racists felt free to kill activists in the Deep South.

One such assassination took the life of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, who was gunned down in the driveway of his home. In keeping with his accomodationist policies, Robert F. Kennedy told the media that the federal government had no authority to protect Evers or anybody else. Such responsibilities rested with the state of Mississippi!

The mass movement against racial discrimination continued unabated, without the support of the Kennedy White House. In 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama unleashed attacks by Police Commissioner Bull Connor who used nightsticks, police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses and mass arrests. JFK complained about the protests that they made the USA “look bad for us in the world.” His brother opined that 90 percent of the protestors had no idea what they were demonstrating about.

Nation Magazine contributor Jon Wiener wrote a blog entry there on October 31 posing the question: Is Hillary the Next Grover Cleveland? It begins as follows:

“We hope we’re about to elect FDR,” New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman told me earlier this week, “but we might be about to elect Grover Cleveland.” He said he was referring to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

Grover Cleveland, for those who don’t know their 19th century presidents, was the only Democrat who made it to the White House between 1860 and 1912, the decades when Republican big money ruled the country. Cleveland, elected in 1885 and again in 1893, mobilized the army to crush the 1894 Pullman strike of railroad workers, and joined Wall Street in supporting the gold standard. “He was what they called a ‘Bourbon Democrat,’ as in the French royal family,” Krugman explained. “He wasn’t that different from the Republicans at the time.”

Perhaps that is true, but Wiener and Krugman–as one might expect–pose the question in terms of the individual rather than institutions. Clinton is seen as a “Bourbon Democrat”, where the goal ostensibly would be to return the party to its progressive roots. What would this mean? A return to JFK, with his indifference to Klan killings in the South?

I would suggest that the problem is institutional rather than individual. The big bourgeoisie, to use a bit of Marxist jargon, has been bent on rolling back all the gains of the New Deal era and returning to conditions that existed in the late 19^th century. It has embarked on this road not because it hates poor people (although it does) but because the boom years of the post-WWII period are long gone. In a showdown with rival capitalist powers, it is imperative to reduce labor costs and government spending on “wasteful” items like education, health, housing and the environment. Once it made this turn, the underlying economic raison d’etre for the Democrats disappeared. If it could not deliver the goods, there was no reason to support it unless one rationalizes to oneself that it is not as bad as the Republicans.

Looking back in retrospect, one might say that the same thing was true of the Whigs. They were not as bad as the Democrats. As the social crisis of the 19^th century deepened, a new party was formed that could inspire working people, farmers and manufacturers who saw slavery as inimical to their own class interests. Surely, a new crisis of the 21^st century will propel new class forces into motion that will organize a new revolutionary party capable of eradicating the slavery of our epoch–one resting on wage exploitation.