Viewing page 7 of 43

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS      SECOND QUARTER 1972

York City alone had 175,000 burglaries reported last year. At the other end of the spectrum, stealing and fraud in the marble halls of the Stock Exchanges and oak panelled [[paneled]] rooms of the money managers amount to an estimated $400 million yearly in the theft of securities, bonds and other such promissory notes. In the film and other mass media of the arts, the artistic expression of a dying social order finds the inhuman, the vulgar and the cynical being championed as the values inherent in human nature. Pretending to support the democratic demand of the period for racial integration in films and other art forms, the response by the film makers is to include blacks and other minority groups as subject matter sharing these anti-human characteristics. 

The U.S. is often described as "the richest country in the world" by its leading propagandists but this has hardly more than an ironic meaning for the 17 million working-poor whose ranks are growing; or for the 14 million of the aged, the dependent children and mothers currently on the welfare relief roles. The general social condition of all of these is one of deprivation, and their ranks are made up of a racial and ethnic cross-section of the U.S. population.

During these forty years, it is only because the black community and organized labor built mass movements of public pressure on the Democratic Party, while continuing to vote within the Democratic Party, that some concessions were won in the areas of minimum wages, the right of workers in the mass production industries to organize, civil rights legislation which abolished public segregation and restored the ballot, Unemployment Compensation, Medicare for the aged and other such elementary human rights demands. From time to time, a very small minority of Republican Party spokesmen also supported these efforts. Nevertheless, the only section of the population to benefit consistently from the workings of the two-party system is the rich.The industrial and financial oligarchies of wealth as represented by the biggest banks and insurance companies, the oil and aero-space industries with their depletion allowances and lucrative defense contracts, have been the chief beneficiaries of the workings of the two-party system. This has been the routine of political life regardless of which party happened to be in the White House or which had a majority in the respective state legislatures.

This continuing historical fact can perhaps best be focused if we trace the historical relationship of the black community to the two-party system in general outline over the past century since the Civil War. In the period 1860-1880, the period of Civil War and the attempt

106
 

THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM.         O'DELL

at Reconstruction, it was the Republican Party that served as a political vehicle of the coalition which abolished slavery and carried through certain democratic constitutional reforms in the area of citizenship rights. During this period it was the newly enfranchised black community in the South which gave the Republican Party a political constituency in that region of the country and thereby made it into a national party, geographically speaking. After the defeat of Reconstruction and the reign of terror that followed, which was aided and abetted by the Republican administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes, the blacks were driven out of Southern politics. The Republican Party gave up its base among the blacks in the South as it moved to the right and crystallized its role as the representative of big business. It abandoned this Southern base in exchange for the cooperation it would get from Southern Democrats in guaranteeing the defeat of progressive legislation at the federal level and maintaining the Southern states as an agricultural hinterland of under-paid labor and cheap raw materials to the benefit of Northern industry. Consequently, the period from 1880 to 1932 and the beginnings of the Great Depression was for us a period of political disfranchisement in that area of the country where the majority of our people still lived. Within this period however came the migrations to the North during World War I and the beginnings of such important political black ghettos as Harlem, South Side Chicago, Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Politically we remained loyal voters in the Republican Party regarding it as "the party of Lincoln," and the first black Congressman to be elected in this century was Oscar DePriest on the Republican ticket from the black metropolis of Chicago. The Republican Party through this entire 50-year period remained a national party despite the elimination of its Southern base because it was a major party every- where else outside the South. With the Great Depression in 1982 and President Roosevelt's progressive New Deal program, a massive shift in voting patterns took place away from the Republican Party, which enabled the Democratic Party to become geographically a nation-wide party.

With the severe economic crisis of the 30's, the Democratic Party was able to extend its base from confinement in the South to become the major party of the big city population centers as well as establish a base of support among the poorest stratum of the mid-western farmers who were losing their farms during the depression. By 1936, the black community had joined the New Deal coalition in full force, and in the presidential election that year President Roosevelt carried

107

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 15:07:23