The Communist Plan to Conquer America to be by Inciting Anarchy via Black Racism & Anti-Gentilism

Workers Library Publishers,an arm of the Communist Party, originally published this pamphlet in 1928; a template for inciting racism and labor strife among other torments in American culture. They have been splendidly successful amongst the innocent, trusting, and uninformed Americans. This pamphlet is quite scarce in the original. We scanned this from the original booklet.

THE COMMUNIST FIGHT FOR THE NEGRO CAUSE...how it began, Communist publication

  AMERICAN

NEGRO PROBLEMS
  

AMERICA NEGRO PROJECT
WORKERS LIBRARY PUBLISHERS
35 East 125th Street New York
 
  THE WORKERS LIBRARY

No. 1-THE TENTH YEAR-The Rise and Achievements of Soviet Russia (1917-1927)
By J. LOUIS ENGDAHL . . . 10 CENTS
No. 2-THE COOLIDGE PROGRAM-Capitalist Democracy and Prosperity Exposed
By JAY LOVESTONE . . . 5 CENTS
No. 3-QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS TO AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISTS-Stalin's Interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia . . . .25 CENTS
No. 4-I 928-The Presidential Election and the Workers
By JAY LOVESTONE . . . 20 CENTS
No. 5-THE TROTSKY OPPOSITION-Its Significance for American Workers
By BERTRAM D. WOLFE . . . 25 CENTS
No. 6-WHY EVERY MINER SHOULD BE A COMMUNIST.
By JOHN PEPPER . . . 5 CENTS
No. 7-THE COMMUNIST NUCLEUS-What it is; How it Works
By M. JENKS. . . 15 CENTS
No. 8-WHY CO-OPERATION? ---Consumers Co-operative Movement in the U. S. A.
By GEORGE HALOMEN . . . 10 CENTS
   
Copyright 1928
WORKERS LIBRARY PUBLISHERS, INC
Foreword

THE COMMUNIST FIGHT FOR THE NEGRO CAUSE   The two major capitalist parties, the Republican and Democratic, and their small brother, the Socialist Party, have an unwritten "gentleman's agreement" on the Negro question. According to this sacred "gentleman's agreement," which no capitalist politician has dared to violate in the present election campaign, there is no Negro question in the United States, there are no problems of social and political equality, no questions of discrimination against the Negro masses. 

During the whole course of the election campaign there has been only one political party which has had the courage to violate this "gentleman's agreement" to keep a deathly silence on the Negro question. The Workers (Communist) Party of America has come out in its election platform and in its whole election struggle as the fearless champion of the Negro masses.

The southern states are stirred up by the political struggle of the communist speakers and organizers for the Negro masses. Communist anti-lynching leaflets are being distributed everywhere.

The candidates of the Communist Party are everywhere putting up a courageous fight for the full social and political equality of the Negro race.

The meetings of the Communist Party have been broken up in Arizona, in Texas, in Delaware, and in other southern states, because the communist spokesmen dared to tackle the Negro question and were bold enough to call the Negro workers to their meetings.

The Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the forces of police and other organs of governmental terrorism are mobilized everywhere against the communists, because the Communist Party is the only party of the working class and of the oppressed Negro masses.

One, if not the most outstanding, feature of the election campaign of 1928 is the fact that communist speakers, organizers, and candidates for President, vice-president, and Governor are being jailed everywhere because of their uncompromising struggle for the Negroes.

To this brief foreword to the following essay on some of the basic Negro problems in America, we wish to add the principal demands for the oppressed Negro masses as embodied in the Platform of the Workers (Communist) Party of America:

1. Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, political, and social equality for the Negro race.

2. Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of Negroes. Abolition of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against Negroes in selling or renting houses.

3. Abolition of all laws which disfranchise the Negroes.

4. Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races.

5. Abolition of all laws and public administration measures which prohibit, or in practice prevent, Negro children or youth from attending general public schools or universities.

6. Full and equal admittance of Negroes to all railway station waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, and theatres.

7. Federal law against lynching and the protection of the Negro masses in their right of self-defense.

8. Abolition of discrimination practices in courts against Negroes. No discrimination in jury service.

9. Abolition of the convict lease system and of the chain-gang.

10. Abolition of all Jim Crow distinction in the army, navy, and civil service.

11. Immediate removal of all restrictions in all trade unions against the membership of Negro workers.

12. Equal opportunity for employment, wages, hours, and working conditions for Negro and white workers. Equal pay for equal work for Negro and white workers. J. P.

American Negro Problems

By JOHN PEPPER

The Negro question in America must be treated in its relation to the liberation struggle of the proletariat against American imperialism. The struggle against white oppression of the Negro masses is a tart of the proletarian revolution in America against capitalism. The American working class cannot free itself from capitalist exploitation without freeing the Negro race from white oppression. What Marx said about the United States is still true:

"Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

At the same time the Negro question in the United States of America must be treated in its relations to the huge Negro masses of farmers and workers oppressed and exploited by white imperial-inn in Africa and South America, The Negroes of the United States are the most advanced section of the Negro population of the world and can play a decisive role in helping and leading the liberation movement of the Negro colonies. Within the Negro population of the United States, the Negro working class is destined to be the vanguard of all liberation movements and may become the vanguard of the liberation movement of the Negro peasant masses on an international scale.

A NEGRO PROLETARIAT APPEARS

The industrialization of the agrarian south of the United States, the concentration of a new Negro working-class population in the big cities of the east and north, and the entrance of the Negroes into the basic industries on a mass scale, have been changing, in the last few years, the whole social composition of the Negro race in America. The appearance of a genuine Negro industrial proletariat creates an organizing force for the Negro race, furnishes a new working-class leadership to all Negro race movements, creates the possibility for the Negro workers under the leadership of the Communist Party to assume the hegemony of the Negro liberation movement, strengthens immensely the fighting possibilities for the emancipation of the Negro race and increases the importance of the Negro question for the revolutionary struggle of the American proletariat.

American imperialism oppresses in the most terrific way the nearly 11 million Negroes who constitute not less than one-tenth of the country's total population. White capitalist prejudice considers the Negro race a "lower race," the born servants of the lofty white masters. The racial caste system is a fundamental feature of the social, industrial and political organization of the United States.

The Workers (Communist) Party of America, in its fight against imperialism, must recognize clearly the tremendous revolutionary possibilities of the liberation movement of the Negro people. Today the "solid south," the millions of Negro farmers of the "black belt," living under the most oppressive conditions, "half-feudal, half-slave" (Lenin) constitute one of the props of American imperialism. It is the basic duty of the Communist Party to develop all revolutionary possibilities of the Negro race, to transform the "solid south" and the "black belt" from "reserves of forces for the bourgeoisie into reserves of forces for the proletariat" (Stalin). The Communist Party must consider itself not only the Party of the working class generally, but also the champion of the Negroes as an oppressed race and especially the organizer of the Negro working-class elements. The Communist Party cannot be a real Bolshevik Party without being also the Party of the liberation of the Negro race from all white oppression.

THE SOLID SOUTH-AN AMERICAN COLONY

The Negro tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural workers of the south are still, despite all the pompous phrases of "freeing the slaves," in the status of virtual slavery. They have not the slightest prospect of ever acquiring possession of the land on which they work. By means of a usurious credit system they are chained to the plantation owners as firmly as plantation slaves. Peonage and contract labor are the fate of the Negro cotton farmers. The bankers of the east and the south are increasingly becoming the landowners. The landowners, who are at the same time the merchants, having a monopoly of marketing the crops of the Negro tenant farmers, and of the government in the south, rule over the Negroes with a merciless dictatorship.

The most backward half-feudal, half-slave methods of exploitation by the plantation owners, are merged in the south with the most modern forms of capitalist exploitation by the huge trusts and banks of financial capital. No other section of the American toiling masses feels the ruthless capitalist dictatorship of the much-vaunted American bourgeois democracy more than the oppressed Negro masses. The Negroes of the south are disfranchised politically. Sheer force prevents the Negroes from exercising their so-called political rights. Lynch law is the law over the Negroes. The terror of the Ku Klux Klan is the constitution for the Negroes. Most infamous segregation policies prevail everywhere against them. The white masters try to reduce the Negroes to illiteracy.

The "black belt" of the south, with its starving and pauperized Negro farmers, and Negro agricultural working masses; with its Jim-Crowism, its semi-feudal status and its political system still bearing the earmarks of the period of slavery, constitutes virtually a colony within the body of the United States of America. The super-profits extracted from this Negro "colony" are one of the most important sources of the growth of American imperialism; the oppression of the Negro race is one of the most important bases of the government apparatus of American capitalism. The prejudices created in the minds of large sections of the white workers against the Negroes are the most dangerous obstacles to the unity of the American working class.

CLASS DIFFERENTIATION OF THE NEGROES

A sharp class differentiation has taken place in the Negro population in recent years. Formerly the Negro was in the main the cotton farmer in the south and the domestic help in the north. The peasantry (the Negro farm owners, the share-croppers, the Negro tenant farmers) and the agricultural workers are still the largest stratum of the Negro race. Out of eight million Negroes in the south, there are six million still on the land. In the big cities and industrial centres of the north there is concentrated to a growing degree a Negro working-class population. There are already one and one-half to two million Negroes in industry in the north. At the same time there is a rapid development of a Negro petit-bourgeoisie, a Negro intelligentsia and even a Negro bourgeoisie. The very fact of segregation of the Negro masses creates the basis for the development of a stratum of small merchants, lawyers, physicians, preachers, brokers, who try to attract the Negro workers and farmers as consumers. There is no Negro industrial bourgeoisie. Predominance of white trusts restricts the young and weak Negro bourgeoisie to the fields of trade and second-rate banking.

It would be a major mistake to overlook the existence of class differences among the Negroes, especially the crystallization of a Negro bourgeoisie. There were in 1924, 73 Negro banks, carrying an annual volume of business of over 100,000,000 dollars. There are 25 Negro insurance companies; 14 of these have assets totalling 6,000,000 dollars and during 1926 alone paid over 3,000,000 dollars in claims. This Negro bourgeoisie is closely tied up with the white bourgeoisie; is often the agent of the white capitalists. Economically the Negro banks are often part of the Federal Reserve System of banking.

Politically the Negro bourgeoisie is participating, to a growing degree, in the so-called "commissions for inter-racial cooperation." These committees exist in eight hundred counties of the south and are spreading all through the "black belt." But the ideala~tica1 and organizational bearer of the national racial movement of the Negroes is today rather the intelligentsia and petit-bourgeoisie.

PROLETARIANIZATION AND PAUPERIZATION OF THE FARMER

There is a growing process of disintegration going on among the Negro farmers. Ever larger sections are transformed into agricultural workers (2,000,000) and hundreds of thousands of Negro farmers and agricultural workers desert their lands and migrate to the big cities and industrial centres. This migration is not only to the industrial centres and big cities of the east and north, I but also to the rising industrial centres of the south. There is even migration from the plantations to the villages of the south where there is a non-agrarian Negro population of about two millions.

Lenin pointed out back in 1913, as one of the foremost characteristics of the southern rural areas, the fact that "its population is deserting it." The disintegration of the Negro peasantry means partly proletarianization of the Negro share-croppers, partly pauperization of the Negro masses. In the past the south has had a stratum of "poor whites," today it is developing a new statum of "poor blacks"- driven completely outside the process of production.

The southern plantation owners and their government have tried to hold the Negro farmers and agricultural workers in the southern cotton fields by force, but even their brutal terror has not been able to stop the mighty migration from the Cotton plantations to the industrial centres. This migration is an "unarmed Spartacist uprising" against slavery and oppression by a capitalist and feudal oligarchy. The Negro has fled from the south, but what has he found in the north? He has found in the company towns and industrial centres of the north and cast a wage slavery virtually not better than the contract slavery in the south. lie has found crowded, unsanitary slums. He has exchanged the old segregation for a new segregation in the worst sections of the cities. He is doing the most dangerous, worst-pad, unskilled work in the steel, coal and packing industries. He has found the racial prejudice of a narrow white labor aristocracy, which refuses to recognize the unskilled Negro worker as its e1tial. He has found the treachery of the bureaucracy of the A. F. of L., which refuses to organize the Negro workers into trade unions; he has found betrayal by the renegade Socialist Party which capitulated completely to white chauvinism. The lynchings of the south have their counterpart in the race riots of the east. The employing class deliberately arouses the racial hatred and prejudices of the white workers against the Negro workers with the sinister aim of splitting and dividing the ranks of the working class, thereby maintaining the exploitation and oppression of both the white and Negro workers.

"A cropper is a tenant who works the land for his landlord without supplying any of the working capital, but he might a1most as well be regarded as a laborer who accepts a share of the crop as his wages . . . The payment for their services in the form of a share of production rather than in the form of a stated weekly or a monthly wage is the part of a plan whereby the landlord is able to insure himself of their continued services throughout the season. In other words, while tenancy in theory represents mere/v a method of holding possession of the land, in practice it sometimes works out into a method of obtaining laborers to work on the land." Goldweiser and Truesdell "Farm Tenancy in the United States." Census Monographs IV. Washington, 1927).

THE SLOGAN OF SELF-DETERMINATION

The Workers (Communist) Party of America puts forward correctly as its central slogan: Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial) social and political equality for the Negro people. But it is necessary to supplement the struggle for the full racial, social and political equality of the Negroes with a struggle for their right of national self-determination. Self-determination means the right to establish their own state, to erect their own government, if they choose to do so. in the economic and social conditions and class relations of the Negro people there are increasing forces which serve as a basis for the development of a Negro nation (a compact mass of farmers on a contiguous territory, semi-feudal conditions, complete segregation, common traditions of slavery, the development of distinct classes and economic ties, etc., etc.). It is true, the Negro people in the United States

have not their own language as distinct from the language of the oppressing white nation; but there is a certain amount of special Negro culture; there is still alive the Common, deep-rooted tradition of the bitter centuries of slavery; there is developing a new Negro literature and press.

First of all, we must consider the compact Negro farming masse of the "black belt" as the potential basis for a national liberation movement of the Negroes and as the basis for the realization of i/s right of self-determination of a Negro state. Despite growing migration to the north, in 1920 there were still over 3,000,00 Negroes who constituted a majority of the population in 219 counties over a contiguous area in the "black belt." There are many national movements of the Negro city petit-bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. The fact that the most important mass movement of this kind, the Garvey movement, was a sort of Negro Zionism and ha such reactionary, extremely harmful slogans as leaving the Unite States and back to Africa, should not blind us to the revolutionary possibilities of the Negro national liberation movements of the future. It is unquestionable that first of all the Negro farmers can be the basis of a Negro national liberation movement of the future, despite the fact that today the Negro farming masses of the south are so oppressed that they do not, yet show any signs of national awakening.

The Negro national liberation movement has tremendous revolutionary potentialities, despite the fact that at the outset its bearer will likely be the rural and urban petit-bourgeoisie. Lenin has stated: "There can be no doubt that all nationalist movements cannot be but bourgeois-democratic movements." But the knowledge of this fact did not prevent Lenin and the C. I. from recognizing the tremendous unexhausted revolutionary possibilities of the national liberation movement of the colonies and oppressed nations and races generally. As the national liberation movement grows, the Negro proletariat will play an increasing role in it and will struggle for the hegemony over it. There is a certain amount of assimilation going on among the Negro industrial workers in the north and east. The Negro worker works shoulder to shoulder with the white worker in the factories and plants, but at the same time it is necessary to recognize that there is practically no social contact between these workers. The social and residential segregation of the Negro workers in the north is complete and manifests an increasing tendency. Veritable Negro cities are being created in Harlem, New York, and on the south side of Chicago. This segregation of the Negro working class creates an economic basis for the development of a Negro petit-bourgeoisie even in the north and east, which loads additional exploitation onto the backs of the Negro workers and as a result of this distinct development, strengthens the basis of the Negro national movement in the north and east.

The Workers (Communist) Party of America must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of national self -determination for the Negroes, but at the same time the Communist Party must state sharply that the realization of this self-determination cannot be secured under the present relations of power under capitalism. National self-determination for the Negro is a bourgeois- democratic demand but it can be realized only in the course of the proletarian revolution. The abolition of the half-feudal, half-slave remnants in the south will also be only "a by-product" (Lenin) of the general proletarian revolution. It would be a ma/or mistake to believe that there can be any other revolution in imperialist America, in the country of the most powerful, most centralized and Concentrated industry, than a proletarian revolution.

 The Communist Party of America must recognize the right of national self-determination for the Negroes and must respect their own decision about the form of the realization of this self-determination. The Negro Communists should emphasize in their propaganda the establishment of a Negro Soviet Republic.

AGAINST WHITE CHAUVINISM

Not only the labor aristocracy but large sections of the American working class as a whole are permeated with white chauvinism. 'White chauvinism reflects itself in various forms even in some sections of the Communist Party itself. Individual comrades and even some local organizations have yielded occasionally to the racial prejudices of the white workers and retreated, instead of waging a courageous struggle against it. (Gary, Detroit, St. Paul, Harlem). The C. E. C. of the Communist Party of America stated in its resolution of April 30th that "the Party as a whole has not sufficiently realized the significance of work among the Negroes and that such work should be considered not as a special task of the Negro comrades, but as one of the special revolutionary tasks of every communist, of the whole Party."

It is imperative to begin outside and inside the Communist Part a relentless campaign of self-criticism concerning the work among Negroes. All signs of white chauvinism must be ruthlessly uprooted from within the ranks of the Communist Party. In this aggressive fight against white chauvinism, the Party must carry on a widespread and thorough educational campaign within the Party utilizing for this purpose to the fullest possible extent, the Party schools, the Party press and the public platform to stamp out all forms of antagonism or even indifference among our white comrades towards the Negro work. This educational work should he conducted simultaneously with broad campaigns to draw the white workers and the poor white farmers into the struggle for the support of the demands of the Negro workers and tenant farmers.

The struggle against white chauvinism must be combined wit the struggle for genuine internationalism in the ranks of the working class and in the ranks of the Communist Party. The Communist Party of America must emphasize in all its campaigns the solidarity of the white and black workers. In the ranks of the Communist Party there can be no place for nationalism. The Communist Party must be the Party of internationalism.

TASKS OF THE COMMUNISTS IN NEGRO WORK

The appearance of a Negro industrial proletariat on a growing national mass scale makes it imperative that the main emphasis of the Party work should be placed on these new proletarian forces. The Negro workers must be organized under the leadership of the Communist Party and drawn into joint struggle, together with the white workers. The Party must understand how to link up all racial, national demands of the Negroes with the economic and political struggles of the workers and poor farmers. Much more emphasis than before must be laid on the trade-union organization of the Negroes. The Party must penetrate all existing Negro trade unions. It is a basic task of the Communist Party to organize the Negroes into trade unions. In all the work of organizing the unorganized carried on under the leadership of the Communist Party, we must insist upon the inclusion of Negro workers with white workers in the newly organized trade unions. In the existing trade unions, the Party must fight for the admittance of Negro workers. Where the labor bureaucracy refuses to admit Negroes, it is the duty of the Communist Party to organize Negro trade unions. At the same time the principle of one union for each industry, embracing white as well as Negro workers, should be the aim of the Communist Party.

The importance of trade-union work imposes special tasks upon the T. U. E. L. The T. U. E. L,. has neglected the work among the Negroes, notwithstanding the fact that these workers are objectively in a position to play a very big part in carrying through the programme of organizing the unorganized. Greater contact must he established between the T. U. E. L. and the Negro masses. The T. U. E. L. must become the champion of the rights of the Negroes in the old unions and in the organizing of new unions for Negroes and whites, as well as separate Negro unions.

It is one of the biggest tasks of the 'Workers Party to extend its activities to the "Solid South," the beginning, of which has been made in the election campaign.

The Party was not able to carry on any work among the Negro farmers and agricultural workers of the "black belt." It is the duty of the Party to study and analyze the conditions of the Negro farming masses, to work out demand to meet their situation, to organize special Negro farmers' organizations as well as organizations of the agricultural workers. It i necessary that the Party should establish new district organization in the south, especially in the most important industrial centres. The Party organizations in these industrial centers of the south should b the bearers of the educational and organizing work of the Party among the Negro farmers and agricultural workers.

The fight against segregation, lynching, and political disfranchisement of the Negroes, must be organized. It is necessary to help the Negro masses to organize themselves for active resistance and self defense against the lynching terror of the Ku Klux Klan and similar terroristic gangs of the white bourgeoisie. 

The I. L. D. which so far has almost completely neglected work amongst the Negro masses, must hereafter put in the forefront of its propaganda, agitation and activities, energetic campaigns against lynching and juridical oppression of the Negroes.

The communists must participate in all national liberation movements of the Negroes, which have a real mass character. The existing national organizations and movements of the Negroes are today under the domination of the Negro petit-bourgeoisie and even their bourgeoisie. The aim of the Communist Party must be to fight for the hegemony of the working-class elements in the national liberation movement. The basic task of the communists is to form working-class organizations for the Negro proletariat and agricultural workers, and farmers' organizations for the Negro farmers and to turn these organizations into energetic integral forces of it whole class struggle. The communists must not forget for moment that the struggle for the national liberation of the Negro includes the relentless struggle against the Negro bourgeoisie and the struggle against the influence of the petit-bourgeoisie over the Negro proletariat. It is permissible to form a united front (f 1 example in the form of a Negro Race Congress) of the working class elements with the petit-bourgeois elements. The policy of the communists within this united front must be:

(a) To free the working class from the ideological and organizational influence of the petit-bourgeois elements.

(b) To begin the struggle for the leadership of the working class.

The communists must bear in mind that the alliance of the Negro working class with the Negro petit-bourgeoisie can be maintained only under the following conditions:

(a) A revolutionary fight of the petit-bourgeoisie for Negro race demands against American imperialism.

(b) No obstacles by the petit-bourgeoisie against the special class demands and organizations of time Negro workers and exploited farmers.

The communists must under no circumstances merge their organization with the petit-bourgeois organizations and must reserve for themselves fullest rights of criticism and propaganda.

The American Negro Labor Congress which is still very weak, must he reorganized and activized. The communists working within this organization should try to make it serve as an intermediary mass organization, as a medium through which the Party can extend its work among the Negro masses and mobilize the Negro workers under its leadership. After careful preparatory work which must be started at once, another convention of the American Negro Labor Congress should be held. For this convention a carefully worked-out program should be prepared. It should contain not only demands of the Negro workers, but also the agrarian demands of the farmers and agricultural workers.

The Negro miners' relief committee and the Harlem Tenants League are examples of united front organizations, which may be set up as a means of drawing the Negro masses into struggle. But these organizations can be considered only as a beginning. The communists working within these organizations should try to broaden them, and similar committees should be organized in other Negro centers. In every case the utmost effort must be made to combine the struggle of the Negro workers with that of white workers and to draw the white workers' organizations into such united front campaigns.

One of the greatest shortcomings of the work of the American Party among the Negroes is the lack of sufficient Party cadres among the Negro comrades. The next and most important task of the Party in this respect is the selection and education of a cadre of Negro communist workers. The proletarian character of the Negro Party leadership must be brought forward more clearly than before.

At the same time the proletarian Negro intellectuals must be utilized to the full. It is imperative to utilize all Party schools in the U. S. A. and abroad to train Negro comrades as leaders and for special work among the Negro farming masses.

The activities of the Negro comrades should not be confined exclusively to the work among the Negroes, but they should participate in the general Party work. 

Simultaneously white comrades must be specially trained for work among the Negroes. The Negro Champion must be published regularly. Every effort must be made to develop it into the mass organ of the Negro workers and working farmers. The general Party press must be utilized to its full extent for propaganda among the Negroes. A regular Negro news service must be built. 

The utmost effort must be made to attract Negro workers and Negro agricultural laborers as members into the Communist Party. The present Negro membership of the Communist Party is inadequate to fulfill the great tasks before it. A special recruiting campaign for Negro workers should be initiated in connection with the general economic and political campaigns of the Party. In the present election campaign, wherever possible Negro communist candidates should be nominated in the important Negro centers.

The Negro question in the United States must be treated in its relation to the general international Negro problem. The question of a Negro World Congress should be considered but it can be realized only if a Negro working-class leadership in the Congress can be secured. One aim and purpose of the work among the Negroes in the U. S. A. should be to organize them as the champions of the Negroes all over the world, against imperialism. A strong Negro movement in the U. S. A. will be able to influence and direct the Negro movement in all those backward parts of the world where the Negroes are oppressed by the various imperialist powers.


As testimony to the Communist affection for this destabilizing publication, they've published it as a resource document on their own site!

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The Governing Class - Rushdoony- Chalcedon

The Lastest News &
Information

January
12, 2015 

By Rev. R.J. Rushdoony – bio

G. William Domhoff, associate professor of Psycholory of the University of
California at Santa Cruz, has written a very interesting study of Who Rules America?
(Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. 1967)  The book is extensively researched; Domhoff goes to conservative sources, such as Dan Smoot, as well as to very liberal writers. But he could not be more wrong in his conclusions. Domhoff finds that “the American upper class” controls the executive branch of the U.S. government, controls foundations, education, the C.I.A, most important corporations, mass media, and much more. There is a “governing class” in America, he believes, and he lumps together such families as the Rockefellers, the Pews, and the Lillys as a more or less working team in this “governing class.”

How does he define this “governing class?” Here Domhoff is a faithful scholar: he gives us his premise:

A “governing class” is a social upper class which owns a disproportionate amount of a country’s wealth, receives a disproportionate amount of a country’s yearly income, and contributes a disproportionate number of its members to the controlling institutions and key decision-making groups of the country. (p. 5)

The key word here is “disproportionate:” it can mean whatever we want to make it mean. If the governing class earned their income and power, is it disproportionate? If they exercise their income and power in the name of the people or as the dictatorship of the proletariat, does it cease to be disproportionate?

The plain fact is that any and every society has its “governing class” in Domhoffs sense. Does a group represent a conspiracy simply because they govern? There has never been a society without a “governing class.” Sometimes that governing class has gained power fraudulently, but, all the same, in every society it is there, for better or worse.

Domhoffs thesis is not unlike C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite. And there are many such studies written, from both the right and the left.

Let us examine this idea from the perspective of an old American belief, in the natural aristocracy of talent. The founders of the United States believed in an aristocracy, but not an hereditary one but in the natural aristocracy of ability and talent. Such an aristocracy always rises to the top: the best attitude of a country should be to further its progress to the top rather than to impede it. In other words, superiority asserts itself and governs. If the moral character, if the faith of a people is defective, then the superiority which prevails is of an evil sort, but, if the character be godly, then a godly superiority prevails.

This does not eliminate the fact of conspiracies. Any group of people who take counsel together to gain an end or goal are conspiring, whether for good or evil. If the times are evil, then the superior men of evil will prevail. If it be an age of sound faith and character, then superior men of righteousness will prevail.

With this in mind, let us examine some of the conspiracy ideas which are commonly bandied about in some circles. Some maintain that a Jewish conspiracy secretly governs the world; what they are actually saying then is that the Jews are the world’s true elite and that a handful of them can govern the vast masses of the world. Others hold that the real conspiracy is a German one, and everything is viewed in terms of a new German threat; again, these people are declaring implicitly the superiority of Germans and their belief that only a world anti-German policy can save us from the German menace. Still others see the threat as an English one, involving the Rhodes funds and much more; again, this is a confession of English superiority.

But there are conspiracies, and they are a threat, some will protest, and they are right—up to a point. Let us examine one of them, where court and federal records document the conspiracy: communism. 

In the hands of Karl Marx, a sorry, disorganized bumbler, Marxism was simply wild, confused hatred. But superior men, but evil men, took over, and they made Marxism an instrument of power and superiority. Take Lenin: vicious, depraved, ruthless, all that and more, but also very intelligent, clearly superior. His writings are still amazing reading, and they explain why, in an evil age, he could ride that tide to power. For example, he saw clearly that any abandonment of gold as money, and the adoption of a central banking system, was nine-tenths of socialism, so that the logic of economics would drive a world going off gold and into central banking into communism in time. We are busy today proving Lenin was right here and elsewhere. When Khrushchev said, “We will bury you” he had in mind the inevitability of the forces at work in the free world. Get rid of every communist in the United States, sever relations with the Soviet Union, and defeat communists in Vietnam and elsewhere, and the U.S. will still go communist because of its present monetary policy, one in operation for a generation and more. The worst “communism” in the U.S. is that which is written into our monetary policy, and there is no sign of a change.

Am I suggesting that we stop fighting communism? Far from it. But you can’t fight atom bombs with pop guns.

Let us examine the basic issue: First, a natural aristocracy of talent always rises to the top in a society congenial to its moral bent. This is true even where a hereditary caste exists. Over the centuries, many of the nobility, and royalty, rose and fell in terms of their ability or inability to rule. We may sometimes regret the passing of a good line, but if it fell, it was either through inability to rule, or, if they were still able, because the moral foundations of their rule were destroyed. In old Russia, the schools and universities created a generation of men whose moral foundations were anarchistic and anti-Christian: this new breed represented tremendous but evil ability, and the war enabled them to capture power. The moral foundations were at the same time destroyed in a number of countries: the difference in the time of collapse was made by the crisis of the war and the blockade of Russia. Today, those same moral foundations are virtually gone everywhere.
 
Second, because there will always be a governing class, and that governing class will reflect the good or evil directions and impulses dominant in society, it is important therefore to do things, one to produce and train a superior class, andtwo, to produce and train a vast body of people who will want the leadership that new superior class can provide.

It is most certainly necessary to fight against subversion and against heresy, but something more is needed, a new faith and character in society at large, and a new leadership, a new governing class in terms of that faith and character.

Today, the liberal and leftist establishments or governing classes prevail in virtually every area of the world. They are powerful, but they are sterile. They have promised the humanistic masses they rule a paradise on earth, and increasing disillusion with their promises and abilities is leading to a generation of drop-outs, people who believe the liberal myth but disbelieve increasingly in its leaders. These revolting youths are themselves sterile: they share the same myth and lack the capacity to communicate it or realize it.

What needs to be done is, first, to bring forth a new people. This is the basic task of evangelism. Moral dry-rot has not only destroyed the older Christendom but the newer humanistic world order. There can be no new class as long as we remain tied to the forms of the old, such as statist schools. Truly Christian schools must be established, and both old and young re-educated in terms of a total faith. Every sphere of life must be viewed in terms of the whole counsel of God.
 
Second, new leadership must be trained, a new aristocracy of talent in terms of the new humanity of Christ. This leadership must re-think every discipline in terms of Biblical thought: theology, philosophy, science, economics, statecraft or political science, law, and all things else must be re-thought and re-established in terms of Biblical premises.

Remember, there will always be a governing class. Our present schools, colleges, universities, churches, and foundations are essentially geared to producing a humanistic leadership. Fight this order all you will, but as long is it shapes the minds of the leaders and the followers, it will continue to prevail. Document its evils and chronicle its corruptions all you want, and you will not change it unless at the same time you work to establish a new people, and a new leadership.

This is our purpose. Are you with us?

Taken from Roots of Reconstruction, pp. 660-663.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony 
(1916-2001) was the founder of Chalcedon and a leading
theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works
on the application of Biblical Law to society.

Kindergarten’s Socialist Origins

Posted on November 25, 2011

by Al Benson Jr.

Most schools today, both public and private have kindergartens. They have become an accepted part of educational life in this country and others as well.

This was not always so. When I first attended public school, way back in the mid-1940s, there was no kindergarten where I went. Although some schools undoubtedly had them, all schools did not.

They had not become totally entrenched, although their promoters had been working on that project with much zeal. Their efforts seem to have paid off. Kindergarten is now as much a part of school life as the seventh grade.


I have, in the past, written articles and even a couple booklets, dealing with the origins of public, or government, schools in this country. These “institutions of learning” have a history that is never quite openly discussed in all of its ramifications. We often see the names of founders and promoters of public education mentioned in articles or essays, but we are seldom told all that much about these people and what they really believed. Most educators don’t want us to go there.

We are told that Horace Mann, the “father of the common schools” was among the most zealous of their earliest promoters and we are told about how hard Mann labored to make sure there was compulsory attendance for public schools because he was so concerned about the lack of education. We are told of Robert Owen, a “philosopher and pedagogue” who promoted public education. This is usually all most sources tell us about these men. They never really tell us why they did what they did. We are not supposed to ask.

Thus, most folks never find out that Horace Mann was a Unitarian who denied the deity or lordship of Jesus Christ, a man who hated the influence that Calvinist church schools had in New England so much that he sought to come up with another system of education that would negate what the church schools taught.

Most are never informed, regarding Robert Owen, that the “philosopher and pedagogue” was a socialist and atheist who did not believe that man’s original sin caused man’s problems, but rather, man’s problems were the fault of his environment. Thus, if you could just provide the right educational environment, via a public school, that would take care of everything. So Unitarians and socialists worked hand-in-glove to promote public education and to denigrate Christian education and schools. And, unfortunately, the Christians bought it.

Now, regarding kindergartens, http://en.wikipedia.org informs us that Elizabeth Peabody, in 1860, founded the first English-language kindergarten in America, after she visited Watertown, Wisconsin. What this source neglects to mention is that Elizabeth Peabody was Unitarian Horace Mann’s sister-in-law. Why did Ms. Peabody visit Watertown, Wisconsin before starting her kindergarten you may wonder? She went there because the first kindergarten in the country was founded there by Margarethe Meyer-Schurz in 1856. The kindergarten classes in Watertown were conducted in German, but Ms. Schurz’s sister had also founded the first kindergarten in London, England. If the name Schurz sounds familiar to some of my readers, it should. You see, Margarethe Schurz was the wife of Carl Schurz, one of those socialist revolutionaries that came to this country after the socialist revolts in Europe in 1848 failed.

You can read about her husband, Carl, in more depth in the book Lincoln’s Marxists (Pelican Publishing) that Donnie Kennedy and I co-authored. Mr. Schurz was one of the most prominent of the “forty-eighters” who came to this country after their attempts to install socialism in Europe failed. They came here to accomplish what they had failed to do in Europe. Before his illustrious career was over, Carl Schurz ended up becoming the Secretary of the Interior in the Hayes administration. As you can see, socialism pays in Amerika!

An Article by Ann T. Allen on http://www.ohio.edu/ noted that: “The kindergarten, though at first attracting little attention, gained popularity among liberal reformers as part of the surge of interest in new educational methods prompted by the 1848 revolution…Meanwhile 31 kindergartens were founded, many by women’s organizations, in German cities between 1848 and 1852. The women who staffed these institutions expressed the utopian spirit of the era by their commitment to overcoming class differences…The kindergarten movement also influenced the most radical experiment in women’s education of the revolutionary period…”

Much of the impetus for the kindergarten movement came from Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). R. J. Rushdoony, in his book The Messianic Character of American Education has said of Froebel that: “The fountain-head of all this, Friedrich Froebel, well before Darwin, not only held to cosmic evolution but saw education as a major element in that continuing process. For Froebel, the entire universe was a living, evolving organism, the unity of which is called God.” Now there’s a unique worldview for one of the main movers and shakers of the kindergarten movement–an evolutionist even before Darwin! The whole “evolving” universe is supposed to be God. You don’t suppose any of this sort of mindset ever seeped through to others, teachers or students, do you?

Not surprisingly, the kindergarten movement in Europe became associated with the radical feminist groups who had their own ties to the 1848 socialist revolts in Europe. (See Addendum III, Socialist Influence on Feminism, on page 307 of Lincoln’s Marxists. With all the socialist baggage attending it, it should come as no surprise that, in Prussia, the government that put down the 1848 revolts issued an order in 1851 that banned all Froebel-inspired kindergartens. Karl von Raumer, the Prussian minister of culture and education condemned the kindergarten as “a center of atheistic and socialist subversion.” Gee, wonder where he ever got that idea! Other German states soon followed the Prussian example.

Seeing that they could no longer make a go of socialistic kindergartens in Germany, the “forty-eighters” brought them to America as part of their socialist agenda, and we eventually bought into them the same way be bought into the rest of the public school system.

Don’t be surprised that your “history” books fail to mention most of this. You really are not supposed to know it, and our “educational leaders” would much rather you didn’t.

source: revisedhistory

NYC Comrade Mayor Bill de Blasio - the Reddest of the Reds

Elementary character formed in Cambridge, MA, advanced subversive studies @ NYU

Wild-haired: Bill de Blasio, pictured in NYU's Loeb Student Center in September 1980, was active in student politic

INTRODUCTION

Early Life and Name ChangeBill de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm Jr. on May 8, 1961 in New York City and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating with a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1983, he legally changed his name to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, adding his mother's maiden name to his identity. In 2002 he changed his name for a second time and became Bill de Blasio.

Radical Parents

Historian Ron Radosh describes de Blasio as: (a) "a far left radical whose ancestors are the New Left and the Communists"; and (b) "a bona fide red diaper baby" who, "like many of his generation ... kept his parents' ... pro-Communist politics not far from his heart." Both of de Blasio’s parents were far leftists—most likely, members of the Communist Party USA or some of its numerous front groups. His mother, Maria de Blasio, worked in the early 1940s at the Office of War Information—a U.S. government agency staffed largely by pro-Soviet leftists who depicted the USSR in a positive light.

SUPPORTER OF COMMUNIST & ANTI-AMERICAN CAUSES IN THE 1980'S

In 1983, while he was still at NYU, Bill de Blasio toured parts of the Communist Soviet Union. organizer with the anti-nuclear, anti-American organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.

de Blasio and Comrade Al Sharpton discuss strategy

This was a period of significant Cold War tension between the United States and the USSR, as the Soviets were attempting to permanently solidify their nuclear superiority over the U.S.  Notably, de Blasio at one time served as an

De Blasio took his first job in 1984 with the NYC Department of Juvenile Justice. Three years later, having recently earned a master's degree at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, he was hired to work as a political organizer by the Quixote Center (QC), a Maryland-based, Catholic social-justice organization with Marxist leanings.

In 1988 de Blasio, an ardent supporter of Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista government—which was backed by the Soviet Union, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization—joined a number of his QC colleagues in a ten-day trip to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine to people who had been affected by the violent revolution that was raging there. (The Reagan administration, meanwhile, was giving financial and military aid to the Contras, who were seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime.)

Upon returning home from Nicaragua, de Blasio began working for a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health care in Central America. Continuing, moreover, to support the Sandinistas in whatever way he could, he joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, an organization that held meetings and fundraisers on their behalf. De Blasio also subscribed to the Sandinista party’s newspaper, Barricadda. He continues to speak admiringly of the Sandinistas to this day, lauding the “humble” and “really inspirational” blend of “youthful energy and idealism” that they brought to the task of “trying to figure out what would [make their society] work better.” “I’m very proud to have been deeply involved in a movement that rightfully thought U.S. policy toward Central America was wrong-headed and counter-productive and not in line with our values,” de Blasio said in September 2013. “I’m proud to have been involved in the effort that was challenging that.”

POLITICAL ALLIANCES, 1989-2000

David Dinkins

In 1989 de Blasio served as a volunteer coordinator for the NYC mayoral campaign of Democrat David Dinkins. Following Dinkins' victory, de Blasio became an aide in City Hall.

The New Party

When asked in 1990 to describe his political views, de Blasio replied that he was an advocate of “democratic socialism.” In the mid-nineties, he served as executive director of the New York branch of the New Party, a pro-socialist, ACORN-affiliated entity to which Barack Obama likewise belonged.

Charles Rangel; Cuba

In 1994 de Blasio managed New York Congressman Charles Rangel's re-election campaign. When de Blasio married former lesbian activist Chirlane McCray that same year, the couple honeymooned in Fidel Castro's Cuba, in violation of the U.S. ban on travel to that country.

Bill Clinton & Al Gore

In 1996 de Blasio ran the New York state operation for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign.

A younger Bill de Blasio poses for a photo with his wife, two children and Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Twitter/@BilldeBlasio)

Andrew Cuomo

From 1997-99 de Blasio served as the New York/New Jersey regional director of the Clinton administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where he served under HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo. During that period, said HUD inspector general Susan Gaffney, de Blasio's region lost approximately $23 million to scams perpetrated by public-housing officials, mortgage companies, and nonprofit groups that received grants from HUD. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that in 1998-99, several people had defrauded HUD of $70 million in federally insured loans on more than 250 New York properties.

Hillary Clinton

De Blasio left HUD in 1999 to become campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's 2000 U.S. Senate bid.

NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL MEMBER

From 2001-09 de Blasio served on the New York City Council, representing District 39 in Brooklyn.

Honoring Robert Mugabe

In 2002 de Blasio joined a number of fellow legislators—mostly from the City Council’s Black, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus—in a City Hall ceremony honoring Robert Mugabe, the openly anti-white, Marxist dictator of Zimbabwe.

PUBLIC ADVOCATE

In 2009 de Blasio was elected as New York City's third Public Advocate. His candidacy was supported by the SEIU, UNITE HERE!, and the pro-socialist Working Families Party.

Supporter of ACORN

In September 2009, when the community organization ACORN was engulfed in several major scandals involving voter-registration-fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and racketeering, de Blasio wrote a letter to ACORN's leaders reaffirming his support for the organization, though noting that he was “troubled” by the recent revelations.

Opposed the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision

De Blasio was a vocal opponent of the January 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which: (a) struck down a ban on corporations and labor unions using money from their general funds to produce and air campaign ads in races for congressional and presidential races, and (b) overturned a prohibition against corporations and unions airing campaign ads during the 30 days immediately preceding a primary or the 60 days preceding a general election.

Supporter of Occupy Wall Street

In the fall of 2011 de Blasio expressed solidarity with the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement.

RUNNING FOR NEW YORK CITY MAYOR

Support from Prominent Leftists

In January 2013 de Blasio announced his candidacy for Mayor of New York City. His campaign received endorsements from such notables as Alec Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Jerrold Nadler, Barack Obama, Sarah Jessica Parker, Susan Sarandon, Charles Schumer, George Soros, Kathleen Turner, and many others. After de Blasio won the Democratic primary that September, it was announced that he would also be the nominee on the Working Families Party line in the general election.

Patrick Gaspard, a former New Party staffer and Obama administration official with significant ties to ACORN, is a close friend of de Blasio and played a key role in shaping the latter's mayoral campaign.

In August 2013, de Blasio received the endorsement of the billionaire financier George Soros, who contributed the legal limit of $4,950 to the campaign. Soros’ relationship with de Blasio actually dated back to 2011, when Soros had given $400,000 to de Blasio’s Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending.

After de Blasio's primary victory in September 2013, longtime ACORN leader Bertha Lewis, who said that her political and ideological ties to de Blasio “go back a long time,” predicted a comeback for ACORN’s successor group in New York—New York Communities for Change—under a de Blasio administration. According to a Democratic insider, “ACORN’s long-range plan since 2001 was to elect de Blasio mayor. De Blasio was a big ACORN project.”

A Self-Described "Progressive" Influenced by Liberation Theology

"Just kidding.....just justifying the End by the Means"

As he pursued the office of NYC mayor, de Blasio was a self-described “progressive” whose political views represented a blend of European social democracy, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and liberation theology. (The latter was a Soviet KGB creation in the late 1960s, designed to infiltrate Christianity with Marxist principles.) “I’m ... very deeply influenced by liberation theology, which I learned a lot about in the years I worked on Latin America,” said de Blasio.

Openly Advocating "The Heavy Hand of Government" ….

Finish reading…

 

About Lincoln and His Republicans You Might Not Know

Little attention is given to the punishing protective tariffs imposed by the Republican congress on the South to eliminate the import of foreign manufactured goods. As industrial production of the ante-bellum period was largely in Pennsylvania and purchased by the southern agrarian states, the additional penalties were passed along to the South. Today, we call a government "law" such as this a "wealth transfer scheme", or more accurately Corporatism or Fascism.

As it is, reading the below certainly screams out to be identified as a repeat of Washington's policies to interfere in America's cultural, race, and economic mix. Even the coloreds of today now recognize it as a scheme to import foreigners to take their jobs. 

Union members can see it as a hammer to break unions, replacing any strikers with immigrant scabs (union leaderships cannot be counted on to 'interfere' to protect their current members).  Organized workers: Look to whom your union dues are politically supporting - Republican or Democrat is inconsequential. Tell us how tolerant communist governments are of labor unions - - only in the establishment of total government, then jettisoned and banished under death. While your union job may have been exported from the US, was it re-incarnated in Red China?

 

Corporatist dinner menu - we're still on it

Only communist or fascist you say? Bone-up on the Versailles Treaty after WWI prompting German workers in the Ruhr Valley to strike because Germany could not pay the horrendous reparations to the allied victors.

Indeed, we do not learn from history because human nature does not change.

---

The 'Great Emancipator' and the Issue of Race

Abraham Lincoln's Program of Black Resettlement

By Robert Morgan

Many Americans think of Abraham Lincoln, above all, as the president who freed the slaves. Immortalized as the "Great Emancipator," he is widely regarded as a champion of black freedom who supported social equality of the races, and who fought the American Civil War (1861-1865) to free the slaves.

While it is true that Lincoln regarded slavery as an evil and harmful institution, it is also true, as this paper will show, that he shared the conviction of most Americans of his time, and of many prominent statesmen before and after him, that blacks could not be assimilated into white society. He rejected the notion of social equality of the races, and held to the view that blacks should be resettled abroad. As President, he supported projects to remove blacks from the United States.

Early Experiences

In 1837, at the age of 28, the self-educated Lincoln was admitted to practice law in Illinois. In at least one case, which received considerable attention at the time, he represented a slave-owner. Robert Matson, Lincoln's client, each year brought a crew of slaves from his plantation in Kentucky to a farm he owned in Illinois for seasonal work. State law permitted this, provided that the slaves did not remain in Illinois continuously for a year. In 1847, Matson brought to the farm his favorite mulatto slave, Jane Bryant (wife of his free, black overseer there), and her four children. A dispute developed between Jane Bryant and Matson's white housekeeper, who threatened to have Jane and her children returned to slavery in the South. With the help of local abolitionists, the Bryants fled. They were apprehended, and, in an affidavit sworn out before a justice of the peace, Matson claimed them as his property. Lacking the required certificates of freedom, Bryant and the children were confined to local county jail as the case was argued in court. Lincoln lost the case, and Bryant and her children were declared free. They were later resettled in Liberia.¹

In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, who came from one of Kentucky's most prominent slave-holding families.² While serving as an elected representative in the Illinois legislature, he persuaded his fellow Whigs to support Zachary Taylor, a slave owner, in his successful 1848 bid for the Presidency.³ Lincoln was also a strong supporter of the Illinois law that forbid marriage between whites and blacks.⁴

"If all earthly power were given me," said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, "I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land." After acknowledging that this plan's "sudden execution is impossible," he asked whether freed blacks should be made "politically and socially our equals?" "My own feelings will not admit of this," he said, "and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not ... We can not, then, make them equals."⁵

One of Lincoln's most representative public statements on the question of racial relations was given in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857.⁶ In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state:

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ...

Racial separation, Lincoln went on to say, "must be effected by colonization" of the country's blacks to a foreign land. "The enterprise is a difficult one," he acknowledged,

but "where there is a will there is a way," and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.

To affirm the humanity of blacks, Lincoln continued, was more likely to strengthen public sentiment on behalf of colonization than the Democrats' efforts to "crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him ..." Resettlement ("colonization") would not succeed, Lincoln seemed to argue, unless accompanied by humanitarian concern for blacks, and some respect for their rights and abilities. By apparently denying the black person's humanity, supporters of slavery were laying the groundwork for "the indefinite outspreading of his bondage." The Republican program of restricting slavery to where it presently existed, he said, had the long-range benefit of denying to slave holders an opportunity to sell their surplus bondsmen at high prices in new slave territories, and thus encouraged them to support a process of gradual emancipation involving resettlement of the excess outside of the country.

Earlier Resettlement Plans

The view that America's apparently intractable racial problem should be solved by removing blacks from this country and resettling them elsewhere -- "colonization" or "repatriation" -- was not a new one. As early as 1714 a New Jersey man proposed sending blacks to Africa. In 1777 a Virginia legislature committee, headed by future President Thomas Jefferson (himself a major slave owner), proposed a plan of gradual emancipation and resettlement of the state's slaves. In 1815, an enterprising free black from Massachusetts named Paul Cuffe transported, at his own expense, 38 free blacks to West Africa. His undertaking showed that at least some free blacks were eager to resettle in a country of their own, and suggested what might be possible with public and even government support.⁷

In December 1816, a group of distinguished Americans met in Washington, DC, to establish an organization to promote the cause of black resettlement. The "American Colonization Society" soon won backing from some of the young nation's most prominent citizens. Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, John Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Charles Carroll, Millard Fillmore, John Marshall, Roger B. Taney, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln were members. Clay presided at the group's first meeting.⁸

Measures to resettle blacks in Africa were soon undertaken. Society member Charles Fenton Mercer played an important role in getting Congress to pass the Anti-Slave Trading Act of March 1819, which appropriated $100,000 to transport blacks to Africa. In enforcing the Act, Mercer suggested to President James Monroe that if blacks were simply returned to the coast of Africa and released, they would probably be re-enslaved, and possibly some returned to the United States. Accordingly, and in cooperation with the Society, Monroe sent agents to acquire territory on Africa's West coast -- a step that led to the founding of the country now known as Liberia. Its capital city was named Monrovia in honor of the American President.⁹

With crucial Society backing, black settlers began arriving from the United States in 1822. While only free blacks were at first brought over, after 1827, slaves were freed expressly for the purpose of transporting them to Liberia. In 1847, black settlers declared Liberia an independent republic, with an American-style flag and constitution.¹⁰

By 1832 the legislatures of more than a dozen states (at that time there were only 24), had given official approval to the Society, including at least three slave-holding states.¹¹ Indiana's legislature, for example, passed the following joint resolution on January 16, 1850:¹²

Be it resolved by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana: That our Senators and Representatives in Congress be, and they are hereby requested, in the name of the State of Indiana, to call for a change of national policy on the subject of the African Slave Trade, and that they require a settlement of the coast of Africa with colored men from the United States, and procure such changes in our relations with England as will permit us to transport colored men from this country to Africa, with whom to effect said settlement.

In January 1858, Missouri Congressman Francis P. Blair, Jr., introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to set up a committee

to inquire into the expediency of providing for the acquisition of territory either in the Central or South American states, to be colonized with colored persons from the United States who are now free, or who may hereafter become free, and who may be willing to settle in such territory as a dependency of the United States, with ample guarantees of their personal and political rights.

Blair, quoting Thomas Jefferson, stated that blacks could never be accepted as the equals of whites, and, consequently, urged support for a dual policy of emancipation and deportation, similar to Spain's expulsion of the Moors. Blair went on to argue that the territory acquired for the purpose would also serve as a bulwark against any further encroachment by England in the Central and South American regions.¹³

Lincoln's Support for Resettlement

Lincoln's ideological mentor was Henry Clay, the eminent American scholar, diplomat, and statesman. Because of his skill in the US Senate and House of Representatives, Clay won national acclaim as the "Great Compromiser" and the "Great Pacificator." A slave owner who had humane regard for blacks, he was prominent in the campaign to resettle free blacks outside of the United States, and served as president of the American Colonization Society. Lincoln joined Clay's embryonic Whig party during the 1830s. In an address given in 1858, Lincoln described Clay as "my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all of my humble life."¹⁴

The depth of Lincoln's devotion to Clay and his ideals was expressed in a moving eulogy delivered in July 1852 in Springfield, Illinois. After praising Clay's lifelong devotion to the cause of black resettlement, Lincoln quoted approvingly from a speech given by Clay in 1827: "There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children," adding that if Africa offered no refuge, blacks could be sent to another tropical land. Lincoln concluded:¹⁵

If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost fatherland, with bright prospects for the future, and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.

In January 1855, Lincoln addressed a meeting of the Illinois branch of the Colonization Society. The surviving outline of his speech suggests that it consisted largely of a well-informed and sympathetic account of the history of the resettlement campaign.¹⁶

In supporting "colonization" of the blacks, a plan that might be regarded as a "final solution" to the nation's race question, Lincoln was upholding the views of some of America's most respected figures.

​FINISH READING​