Dick Gregory's Political Primer

Dick Gregory,James R. McGraw

• Verlag: Amistad
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063042568
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire afro-américaine

A unique and timeless guide to American government and its electoral process—as relevant today as when it was first published in 1972—from the voice of black consciousness, cultural icon Dick Gregory, the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and author of the NAACP Image Award–winning Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies and the classic bestseller Nigger: An Autobiography. For most of his life, Richard Claxton "Dick" Gregory worked to educate Americans about the issues—and the forces of power—shaping their lives. A brilliant and informed student of the American experiment, he viewed and understood politics with an acuity few possess. Nearly fifty years ago, on the eve of Richard M. Nixon's reelection, he wrote a classic guide to the American political system for ordinary folks. Today, when American democracy is threatened, his primer is more necessary than ever before.

In Dick Gregory's Political Primer, Gregory presents a series of lessons accompanied by review questions to educate and empower every citizen. He provides amusing, concise, and clear information and commentary on the nature of political parties, the three branches of government and how they operate, how the campaign process works and the costs, and more. Gregory offers imaginative comparisons such as the Hueys—Long, the populist Louisiana governor and Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panthers—and numerological parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. He also includes a trenchant glossary that offers insights into some of the major players, terms, and institutions integral to our democracy and government.

An essential guide to American history unlike any other, Dick Gregory's Political Primer joins the ranks of classics such as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and is essential reading for every American.

Lesson Two

Parties Prevail

Let me begin this lesson with a warning to the student: it may be very, very confusing. The lesson seeks to explain how the United States moved from a situation where there were no political parties to the contemporary political scene where two parties dominate elections, leaving the voters with little real political choice. On top of that, we will see that the first party which was liberal in orientation, advocating more democratic principles throughout the land, was known as the Republican Party. Years passed, names changed, and today the Republican Party is viewed as the party more conservative in its orientation.

The other party in the two-party structure is the Democratic Party, supposedly more liberal in its outlook and political theory. In practice, the Democratic Party does not want to give the impression of being too liberal, thereby turning off a large number of voters; just as the Republicans do not want to give the impression of being too conservative, thereby turning off a large number of voters. The Republican Party tried going the conservative route in the national election of 1964, under the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and was overwhelmingly defeated at the polls. A safer conservativism was adopted in 1968 under the candidacy of Richard M. Nixon, and the Republicans won the election. However, in states like New York the liberalism of the Democratic Party is distrusted enough for there to be a Liberal Party, and the conservativism of the Republican Party is distrusted enough for there to be a Conservative Party. In 1970 the Conservative Party elected a Senator from New York, James L. Buckley. When Senator Buckley got to the Senate, the Republicans wanted to claim him, thereby keeping the two-party system intact.

The situation is still more confusing when one considers that all Democrats claim to be republicans—that is, concerned with the preservation of the Republic as well as its advancement. And all Republicans claim to be democrats—that is, committed to the true ideals of democracy and operating in the best interests of all the people. So that today candidates wear party labels for identification more than anything else, much like convention delegates wear name tags. The name tag doesn’t tell you much about an individual’s beliefs, but it lets you know where he is from. Political parties are vehicles for winning elections and gaining control of government.

Feds in Control

From the days of the American Revolution, there were groupings, factions, caucuses, committees of correspondence, or whatever you choose to call them. The Revolution itself grew out of the activities of such groupings, linking sympathizers together from colony to colony. The Whigs or “Patriots” were those who looked with disfavor upon King and Royal Governors calling the shots for the colonies, and who strongly supported local self-government and colonial legislatures. The Tories were the “Toms” of the monarchy and usually sided with the King and the Governors. The Whigs won the Revolution, eliminated the opposition faction, and the leading Tories split to Canada or the Bahamas. Today Canada has become more of a haven for revolutionary spirits, while the Bahamas are the retreat of the wealthy, those more sympathetic toward preserving the status quo and, as we shall soon see, heirs of Alexander Hamilton.

But at the time of George Washington’s election to the Presidency, there were no political parties as such. Again, the debates at the Constitutional Convention had produced two groupings (or factions): the Federalists, basically merchants, landowners, and bankers, who supported the new Constitution; and the anti-Federalists, workers, farmers, and local politicians who feared the loss of state power and local self-government and thus looked with disfavor upon the new Constitution. George Washington was elected unanimously since he was the one man who had the respect and trust of Federalists and anti-Federalists alike, receiving all 69 votes of the first meeting of the electoral college (4 votes were not cast). John Adams received 34 votes, the second highest number, and thus became the first Vice President.

The electoral-college system for electing President and Vice President, as originally drafted in the US Constitution, was designed to preserve a partyless situation. Each state was to appoint a number of electors equal to the total number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the state was entitled, in a manner to be decided upon by the state legislatures individually. The electors would meet in their respective states and cast their ballots for two people, at least one of them being a resident of another state, and send the lists of names and the number of votes received to the government of the United States. Then the President of the Senate, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, would tabulate the votes. The candidate receiving the highest number of votes was the President-elect; the person receiving the second highest number of votes would be the Vice President-elect. If more than one candidate had a majority, or if there was a tie vote, the House of Representatives was to vote immediately and choose one of the candidates. If no candidate had a majority, the House of Representatives was to choose among the top five names on the list.

Thus the electoral college represented, as advocated by such Founding Fathers as Alexander Hamilton, an elite group that had complete freedom of choice in Presidential balloting, surveying the entire spectrum of potential leadership in the nation. Such an elitist approach kept the actual election of a President rather remote from the voters themselves.

The system held up through the elections of 1792 and even 1796. George Washington was persuaded to serve again in 1792, and, as usual, he was a sure winner. But the makings of party politics were beginning to take root, and John Adams was the target candidate. The real target, however, was Alexander Hamilton, who was now seen as a super-Federalist. Hamilton had the confidence of George Washington, and although Washington wanted to remain aloof from the parties and party politics, he was identified with the Federalist camp. Adams was accused of being “antidemocratic” and secretly a “monarchist” by the newly forming Republican Party, and George Clinton was pushed as a Vice Presidential candidate against John Adams. Adams won by a vote of 77 to 50.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were the leading figures in formulating party opposition to the Federalists. Although Jefferson became the main figure, and the party’s Presidential candidate, he was really a late recruit to the party, and James Madison was the one who first began to oppose Hamilton and Federalist policies. Hamilton was seen as hiding behind the mantle of George Washington, thereby getting his measures pushed through Congress and making it all but impossible for opponents to criticize him, since they would be accused of committing the unpardonable sin of criticizing George Washington. Norman Small described this technique in his dissertation, “Some Presidential Interpretations of the Presidency”:

. . . by shielding his political maneuvres behind the cloak of the President’s reputation, Hamilton not only carried out his program with little interference, but practically deprived his opponents of a means of protest; for the latter refused to risk popular condemnation by an attack which, though directed against the Secretary [Hamilton], would have unavoidably included the President. Thus proceeding boldly in pursuit of his policies Hamilton submitted reports to Congress, expounding in detail both the reason why and the manner in which the financial recommendations contained in the President’s messages should be adopted, saw to it that party associates in accord with his opinions were appointed to committees deliberating on his measures, and finally when a doubt arose as to the fate of his program, rounded up his political adherents in order to secure a majority vote in favor of his bills. In fact the conduct of the Federalists in Congress was invariably predetermined by the decisions reached in their own secret party meetings at which Hamilton presided.

Not only did George Washington enjoy the enormous prestige he earned in the Revolutionary War, but he consciously tried to enshroud the new office of President with a formality and court etiquette worthy of the trappings of the King of England. Theodore Sedgwick wrote a letter in 1789 describing a dinner with George Washington: “Today I dined with the President and as usual the company was as grave as at a funeral. All the time at table the silence more nearly resembled the gravity of [illegible] worship than the cheerfulness of convivial meeting.” In 1793 Thomas Jefferson recalled an observation that James Madison had made to him in 1790, showing that Madison had obviously been to some Presidential dinners, too, “that the satellites & sycophants which surrounded him [Washington] had wound up the ceremonials of government to a pitch of stateliness which nothing but his personal character could have supported, & which no character after him could ever maintain.”

Madison was right, and a dinner recollection of Theodore Roosevelt shows how Presidential eating habits and ceremonies had changed:

When the dinner was announced, the mayor led me in—or to speak more accurately, tucked me under one arm and lifted me partially off the ground, so that I felt as if I looked like one of those limp dolls with dangling legs carried around by small children. . . . As soon as we got in the banquet hall and sat at the head of the table the mayor hammered lustily with the handle of his knife and announced, “Waiter, bring on the feed!” Then, in a spirit of pure kindliness he added, “Waiter, pull up the curtains and let the people see the President eat.”

In spite of Washington’s attempts at formality, sometimes poor old George couldn’t quite pull it off. In his Journal, Senator William Maclay described a scene when members of Congress had an audience with President Washington:

The President took his reply out of his coat pocket. He had his spectacles in his jacket pocket, having his hat in his left hand and his paper in his right. He had too many objects for his hands. He shifted his hat between his forearm and the left side of his breast. But taking his spectacles from the case embarrassed him. He got rid of this small distress by laying the spectacle case on the chimney piece. . . . Having adjusted his spectacles, which was not very easy considering the engagements of his hands, he read the reply with tolerable exactness and without much emotion.

Republican Reform

The party which Jefferson was to head was known by the name of Republicans. As mentioned earlier, it is really the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party. But in the 1790s the term “democrat” had the same kind of negative connotations to many folks that the word “radical” has today. A person who was a “democrat” was in favor of mob rule and favored all the head-chopping going on during the French Revolution. So Jefferson would no more run as a “democrat” in 1796 or 1800 than Hubert Humphrey would run as a “radical” in 1968.

It seems to be a recurring theme throughout this primer, and throughout American political history, that money is a source of conflict: how to get it for the have-nots, and how to keep and increase it for the haves. So that first source of opposition to Hamilton and the Federalists was disagreement over his money policies.

Hamilton was interested in developing a plan to pay off the national debt. The Republican opposition was in complete agreement with that goal. The question was how to do it. Madison and others felt that any legislation had to make a distinction between moneyed speculators who had purchased securities from original landholders, usually at a fraction of their original value, and the original holders themselves, who most often were former soldiers in the Revolution or people who had provided money and supplies when the chips were really down during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War.

There was popular support for the Republican point of view, as well as popular distrust from the common folks toward the Federalists. A farmer wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1790: “The farmers never were in half the d...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• To the Student: Bicentennial Breakthrough
• Lesson One: That Long, Hot Summer—1787
• Lesson Two: Parties Prevail
• Lesson Three: The Primary Objective
• Lesson Four: Politics on Parade
• Lesson Five: Pounding Out Platforms
• Lesson Six: Promises, Promises
• Lesson Seven: The High Cost of Conviction
• Lesson Eight: Power to What People?
• Lesson Nine: Missing the Party
• Lesson Ten: The Constitution’s Institutions
• Lesson Eleven: Now That Voting Has Caught Up with the Draft
• Lesson Twelve: Techniques of Persuasion
• Lesson Thirteen: Studying War No More
• Lesson Fourteen: A Turnip in Every Plot
• Lesson Fifteen: Citizen Surveillance
• Lesson Sixteen: Planetary Politics
• Lesson Seventeen: How to Evaluate a Candidate
• Acknowledgments
• Appendixes
• Notes on Sources
• About the Author
• Also by Dick Gregory
• Copyright
• About the Publisher