Professors Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, and Woodrow Wilson

This week Newton Gingrich has become the Republican Party Presidential primary candidate best positioned to beat front-runner Mitt Romney. Before he was a politician Newt was a History Professor. President Obama was a Law Professor before he became a politician. When you look at the history of American Presidents, college professor is not a very common occupation. The other exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Political Economy at Princeton.

While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).

There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?

Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.

While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.

In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.

For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.

Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.

For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.

Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.

The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.

He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.

I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.

The Brown v. Board of Education Murders

Most Americans who are not totally ignorant of U.S. history know about the law case Brown v. Board of Education (See text of Brown v. Board of Education). In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that public schools segregated by the race of the students were inherently discriminatory. This reversed the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, in which the Supreme Court ruled that separating the races was legal in the United States.

Until I read David Halberstam's The Fifties (See pages 430-441) I did not know about what could be called the Brown murders. After the Brown decision was made the usual racist social institutions, particularly but not exclusively in the states of the former Confederacy, organized a backlash. This consisted largely of threatening rhetoric and well-established methods of economic coercion and public humiliation of African Americans

The Reverend George W. Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi tried to pay his poll tax and register to vote in 1955. When the local sheriff, Ike Shelton, refused to accept the poll tax, George Lee threatened to take the matter to court. On May 7, 1955 Lee was murdered while driving his car. Sheriff Shelton engineered a cover-up. No one was arrested.

A small number of African Americans had been registered in the South since the Xth Amerndment had given them the right to vote; most were registered Republican not just because Lincoln had freed the slaves but because the Democratic Party and racism were synonymous throughout that period of time. Lamar Smith, however, must have been Democrat, but that did not help him when he voted in the Mississippi Democratic Party primary in Brookhaven. In broad daylight on August 13, 1955, in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse, he was killed by a shotgun blast. No one was brought to trial for the murder.

It was the 3rd Brown murder that shook the news media and then the nation from their slumbers. Emmett Till was fourteen years old. He lived in Chicago, but had gone to Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, to spend the summer with relatives. He was not a civil rights activist, but he made the mistake of making a lewd remark, or a remark that was interpreted as lewd (we don't know his side of the story) to Carolyn Bryant a married white woman who worked as a store clerk. Till was murdered by the the husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam a few days later. He was shot in the head and dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28, 1955. He had been brutally beaten before being shot.

This time there was a trial. This time the national press showed up. Among others, a black Congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, attended the trial. The jury set the men free. Bryant and Milam later sold their story to Look magazine for $4000 described the killing in detail.

But outside the South both white and black Americans were repulsed by what they had heard. Even among predjudiced white segregationists in the South their was repulsion at the brutality of the murder.

It would be a many years before civil rights legislation would end most segregation in the United States. But with then Vice-President Richard Nixon pushing for executive action to uphold the Supreme Court ruling, with the national press largely turned against segregation, and with African Americans willing to push harder for their rights, in retrospect we can see that the tide had turned. Civil Rights were for all American citizens, not just white men.

Barack H. Obama's True Colors

The Democratic Party's long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity is nowhere near complete, not if the junior Senator from Illinois and Presidential (okay, vice-presidential) nomination seeker Barack Hussein Obama gets his way. This week Barack proved his national security credentials by threatening to bomb Pakistan if elected.

How much do you want to bet that the left wing of the Democratic Party, the people who style themselves "progressive," and "for peace," abandon Barack and seek a new candidate. I am betting against it. Because every Democrat I have ever met has been willing to rationalize Democratic Party war crimes and crimes against humanity. Otherwise they would not be Democrats.

Barack is seeking to become the first black, or sort-of black, President of the United States. Most African-American politicians are Democrats, and most African-Americans vote for Democratic Party most of the time. If you know anything about history that might seem strange. Boiled down, it comes to this: the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. The Republican Party was the party that ended slavery. (For details see my Brief History of the Democratic Party and my Brief History of the Republican Party). Most African-Americans are descended from slaves.

Before analysing Mr. Obama's war on Pakistan, which would become part of the ongoing U.S. War Against Asia, and which fits perfectly with long-standing ruling class policies, I want to state why I think African Americans are mostly Democrats. Most were Republicans in 1930; at that time they could not even vote in states dominated by the Democratic Party. But in 1932 the Democrats swept into power and set up the New Deal. African-Americans were allowed to receive welfare benefits under the New Deal (denying them that would have hurt white Democratic Party businessmen in the South). Politics is mainly about gravy-trains, and the Democrats controlled the gravy trains. So in the north, where blacks could vote, most black politicians became Democrats. In the South, well, anyone wanting to be a black politician was lynched by the Democrats, so most politically active blacks remained Republicans or were non-partisan or joined a socialist or black nationalist group.

In the 1950's the Republicans aided the fight for civil rights for African Americans in the South; Vice-President Richard Nixon deserves a great deal of credit for this. But the Republican Party had voting base in the South (hence it could afford to support civil rights and alienate white southern voters).

In 1961 Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. Yet civil rights for southern African Americans were not high on their agenda. True, John F. Kennedy and others realized the tremendous propaganda value that Communists derived from advertising the practice of segregation in the Democratic Party-controlled southern states. But he knew that the segregationists in Congress had enough votes to derail any and all of his programs (a situation President-for-Life Franklin Delano Roosevelt had shared). So he did what self-serving politicians always do: he talked about civil rights without doing anything much about civil rights.

After Kennedy's death President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, did push for black civil rights; despite being a war criminal of epic proportions, this was a good and brave thing he did. But I don't think that is why blacks in the South joined the Democratic party. They joined it because their leaders joined it, and their leaders joined in because that was where the gravy was. There was no Republican Party in the South at that time worth joining. In addition the southern Democrats knew a flood was about to hit them; black political leaders were needed to keep the flood in acceptable channels.

Given the economic conditions of black Americans at the time, the choice becomes more understandable. Convert the charge of "tax and spend" Democrats to "tax and buy votes" Democrats, and you have boiled down reality pretty well. I like Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, but effectively it taxed the middle class to buy the votes of poor (not just black) Americans with various forms of welfare. And in the long run we have learned it was not the best solution. But neither was the Republican attitude that once you removed legal barriers blacks would just start little businesses and soon be millionaires. There were tens of millions of poor whites living in the U.S. back then, as now; poverty has other causes besides legal barriers.

So most black Americans are Democrats today, and most of them, so far, are supporting Hillary Clinton. It is a simple equation: bet on the most likely winner. That is where the gravy is.

How removed is Mr. Obama's threat to bomb Pakistan from George W. Bush's threat to bomb Iran? To me they are one and the same, a combination of lunacy and criminal intent. But to the left wing of the Democratic Party they are very different, because one was proposed by a Republican, and the other by a Democrat.

Who, exactly, would we bomb in Pakistan? Doesn't anyone remember that the Taliban soldiers were all, to a man, orphans brought up in religious orphanages? Is creating more orphans and more people pissed off at the U.S. going to solve this problem? It's like bombing Pendleton, New York because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew up. In Afghanistan we learned that many of our bombing targets were proposed by confidential informants who were simply settling old tribal scores. Do we have no learning curve?

How often to you get to test the moral character of the left wing of Democratic Party by seeing if they will withdraw their support from candidates who premeditate war crimes and crimes against humanity (because that is what aerial bombing amounts to)?

I think the left-wing of the Democratic Party is as morally bankrupt as its "centrist" leadership, and in many ways more bankrupt than the Republicans. Just registering Democrat is an act of self-corruption because you are becoming an apologist for its past war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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