The TRUE History of the Two Major Political Parties

The TRUE History of the Democrat Party

(Note: the vast majority of the content below came from 2 videos from Prager U: The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party and The Inconvenient Truth About the Republican Party)

Since its founding in 1829 the Democratic Party has fought against every major civil rights initiative and has a long history of discrimination.

The Democratic Party

• defended slavery

• started the civil war

• opposed reconstruction

• founded the Ku Klux Klan

• imposed segregation

• perpetrated lynchings (through the KKK predominantly)

• Passed the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation following the Reconstruction period in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by blacks

• fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

In contrast the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Its mission was to stop the spread of slavery into the new western territories with the aim of abolishing it entirely. This effort however was dealt a major blow by the Supreme court in the 1857 case Dred Scott versus Sanford. The court ruled that slaves are not citizens but the property of their owners. The seven justices who voted in favor of slavery were all Democrats, while the two justices who dissented were both Republicans.

The slavery question was ultimately resolved by the bloody Civil War. The commander in chief during that war was the first Republican President Abraham Lincoln - the man who freed the slaves. Six days after the Confederate army surrendered, John Wilkes Booth - a Democrat - assassinated president Lincoln. Lincoln's vice president - a Democrat named Andrew Johnson - assumed the presidency; but Johnson adamantly opposed Lincoln’s plan to integrate the newly freed slaves into the South’s economic and social order. Johnston and the Democratic Party were unified in their opposition to the 13th amendment which abolished slavery, the 14th amendment which gave black citizenship, and the 15th amendment which gave blacks the right to vote; but all three passed only because of universal Republican support.

During the era of reconstruction federal troops stationed in the South secured the rights for the newly freed slaves. Hundreds of black men were elected to state legislatures as Republicans and 22 black Republicans served in the US Congress by 1900. The Democrats did not elect a black man to Congress until 1935 but after reconstruction ended when the federal troops went home, Democrats roared back into power in the South and quickly re-established white supremacy across the region with measures like “black codes” laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and run businesses, and they impose poll taxes and literacy tests used to subvert the citizen’s right to vote.  

These laws were enforced by terror. Much of it was instigated by the Ku Klux Klan, founded by Nathan Bedford Forrest - a Democrat. In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party. President Woodrow Wilson - a Democrat - shared many views with the clan he re-segregated many federal agencies and even streamed the first movie ever played at the White House, the racist film “the Birth of a Nation”, originally entitled “The Klansman”.

A few decades later the only serious congressional opposition to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 came from Democrats. 80% of Republicans in Congress supported the bill but less than 70% of Democrats did. Democratic senators filibustered the bill for 75 days until Republicans could get the few extra votes needed to break the logjam.

When all of the efforts to enslave blacks and keep them enslaved and then to keep them from voting had failed, the Democrats devised a new strategy. As president Lyndon Johnson was reported to have said about the Civil Rights Act “If black people are going to vote, I'll have them all voting Democrat for 200 years”. With his “War on Poverty” agenda, the Democrats instituted the welfare system designed to “keep blacks on the Plantation” by incentivizing them to substitute at-home husbands and fathers for the government “sugar-daddy”.  So now the Democratic Party prospers on the votes of the very people it had spent much of its history oppressing.

The Bottom Line

• Democrats falsely claim that the Republican Party is the villain when in reality it's the failed policies of the Democratic Party that have kept blacks impoverished
• Massive government welfare has decimated the black family
• Opposition to school choice has kept them trapped in failing schools
• Politically-correct policing has left black neighborhoods defenseless against violent crime

The True History of the Republican Party

In 1854 the first Republican Party platform promised to defeat polygamy and slavery because both might become permanent parts of American life as more states were added to the union. The Democrats were so opposed to the Republicans and their anti-slavery stance that in 1860, just six weeks after the election of the first Republican President Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina - a state dominated by Democrats - voted to secede from the union.

The civil war that followed was the bloodiest war in US history where over 350,000 white men gave their lives for the cause of the emancipation of blacks. It led to the passage by Republicans of the 13th amendment which freed the slaves, the 14th amendment which gave them citizenship, and the 15th amendment which gave them the vote in 1870.

The result was that many blacks became elected to government positions over the next 100 years. As a matter of fact, every black representative in the house until 1935 was a Republican, and every black senator until 1979 was, as well. All minorities and women were welcomed into the Republican base during those years. The first female member of Congress was a Republican, the first Hispanic governor and senator were Republicans. The first Asian senator was a Republican.

In 1862, the Morill Anti-Bigamy Act was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress to outlaw polygamy. In 1920 - after 52 years of Democratic Party opposition - the 19th amendment (giving women the right to vote) was ratified thanks to the Republican Congress, which had to pressure Democratic president Woodrow Wilson to drop his opposition to women's rights. In the final tally only 59% of House Democrats and 41% of Senate Democrats supported women suffrage compared to 91% of House Republicans in 82% of Senate Republicans. There certainly was a war on women and it was led by the Democratic Party.

 In the 1920s Republican President Calvin Coolidge declared that the rights of blacks were just as sacred as those of any other citizen. By contrast, when famed black sprinter Jesse Owens - a Republican - won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics he was snubbed by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who only invited white Olympians to the White House. Two decades later it was a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the 101st airborne division to escort black students into Little Rock Central High when the Arkansas governor - a Democrat - refused to honor a court order to integrate the state’s public schools.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed poll taxes and other racist measures meant to keep Blacks from voting, was filibustered by 18 Democrats for 125 hours. Not one Republican senator opposed the bill. Its follow-up bill - the Civil Rights Act of 1964 i- s one of the landmark pieces of legislation in American history that was opposed by a filibuster by Democrats. Thanks only to overwhelming Republican support the bill survived.

The truth is that there is a major political party with a long history of racism and sexism, but it’s not the Republicans.

 So, when you think about racial equality and civil rights, which political party should come to mind?

• By Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University, for Prager University

1. Wikipedia; 13th Amendment Site

2. http://russp.us/racism.htm; com, National Constitution Center

3. com, LinkedIn.com

4. American Spectator, The Blaze, Prager U

5. http://russp.us/racism.htm; In the Senate, the bill faced strong and organized opposition from Southern Democrats. Influential senators like Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd, William Fulbright, and Sam Ervin joined together to launch a filibuster that lasted for 57 days and almost killed the bill. Due to extra efforts by the Republicans, the bill passed. Source: The Daily Signal