Explain Carol Swain -- Part I

I appreciate it when people question things that are presented to them instead of accepting them at face value. That's the way you can filter real information from lies and myths. It's also legitimate to ask the meaning of a statement when it's not clear. However, when the person asking the question simply refuses to listen to the answer they drift into the realm of pure heckling. Last week I posted a statement by Dr. Carol Swain on a meme that appears above. The quote was probably distributed in order to illustrate the points made in Donald Trump's speech last week in Dimondtown, Michigan that addressed the Democratic Party's effects on the inner city communities.

The Premise

Dr. Swain is a law professor at Vanderbilt University, and a conservative Christian. Her points of view have put her at odds with black academia and liberal academia in general. In July after criticizing the BLM movement for their hair-trigger response to shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, her university disavowed her viewpoints so as not to anger BLM and cause disturbances by their campus activists. So what was she talking about in the quote? Carol Swain was making a commentary on the modern Democratic Party and its modern agenda of "income inequality" and class warfare. So why is it that this philosophy WOULD NOT appeal to black people? After all, as someone asked me, wouldn't the most disadvantaged group seek to support a belief system that would gain them full equality in every sense. Well the hypothesis might make sense, but the evidence shows otherwise. . . 

The store is open but no one's buying

Blacks have traditionally voted Democrat in higher numbers
since the 1930s, but that has almost nothing to do with a
Marxist worldview, because at the time the Party held very
anti-communist positions.

To claim that Swain is saying that there is NO appeal to be found in Marxism among black America is completely missing the point. Of course there have been prominent blacks involved in the general socialist movement, and there have been black communist and socialist movements that have supported a Marxist system for either America as a whole or a separatist black state. The point is that these people have had virtually no success at drawing a loyal public. The Niagara Movement, led by black socialist WEB du Bois, in the early 20th century lasted only about three years, and he moved on to more general civil rights activities including founding the NAACP. One of the problems encountered by these early socialists was organizational division, and general American suspicion towards socialism. In the 1950s Du Bois's radicalism became even more pronounced when he ran as a US Senate candidate for the American Labor Party, earning slightly less than 4% of the vote. This was at the beginning of the Cold War, and right after the fall of China to communism, so perhaps these were mitigating circumstances.

Henry A Wallace was a qualified candidate, a
socialist, and was a courageous civil rights activist.
So how come 77% of blacks voted for Truman.

The Wallace-Truman Choice

However, if we want to deal with general Marxism, black OR white, the appeal among blacks has been spotty. In 1948 the Progressive Party mounted one of the best mainstream insurgent candidacies in decades, having attracted respected former Vice President Henry A. Wallace of Iowa. Wallace campaigned not only on a pro-labour, civil rights, plank but actually campaigned in the South in order to end segregation and suffered from threats, riots and intimidation. Though not officially a member, he was endorsed by the Communist Parthy (CPUSA), a fact that actually harmed his candidacy with the public at large. In the general election, Wallace earned a 4th place showing with 2.37% of the popular vote and no electoral votes. The top two states for his support were California and New York, both of which had concentrated black communities, but were also leading epicenters of the communist movement. Of the other ten states where he made any dent in the polls, the only one with a significant black population was Michigan. 1948 would be the first year that the overwhelming majority of blacks voted Democrat, with 77% supporting Harry S. Truman, the highest percentage that would vote that way until 1964. 

Yet at the time the Democrats were very much anti-communist. It begs reasoning why the black population shifted so substantially towards the Democrats in 1948 by a whole 9 points. Remember, Wallace had been ditched by the Democrats in 1944 from being FDR's running mate and later fired by Truman from being Secretary of Commerce because his "soft" approach to the USSR was an embarrassment to US-UK relations at a time when the Cold War was beginning. His replacement was the much more "safe" Harry Truman. So Americans in general as well as blacks in particular had the option of voting for one of two FDR vice presidents, both with strong Democratic credentials, one on the far left and the other being a centrist. Both Wallace and Truman, along with Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey were supporters of federal civil rights reforms. Evidently, the Truman campaign was able to capitalize on residual New Deal gratitude, as well as his willingness to reject the racist Dixiecrat wing of his party. 

Stay tuned. . .

The 1948 election plainly showed three streams in the Democratic Party and their trajectories for the future:

• The mainstream northern wing led by Truman that would remain dominant for the time being.
• A recalcitrant southern wing led by Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC) that would be a thorn in the side of Democratic unity multiple times in the coming years and refused to accept racial equality. This was the Dixiecrat Party and later George C. Wallace's .
• A far left wing that was rejected for years by the majority of Americans. This was the Progressive Party and it would remain hesitant to rear its head during the McCarthy hearings and until the 1970s.

In the next segment, you will learn how the Democratic Party did change from what it was back then, and that it was in this form that they would secure the loyalty of large minority populations even though its message had changed.

Here are some questions for you to consider in the mean time:

1. Marxist parties were existent in the USA since the 1910s. Why is it that even once a credible leader like Wallace joined them they garnered so little support, including among black voters.
2. Black voters overwhelmingly backed Truman in 1948 as well as Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952, even though Stevenson's only electoral victories were in the segregated South where blacks had the highest proportion of the population but were prevented from voting. Why then did they support him elsewhere? This was not a fluke, Stevenson ran once again in 1956, won only southern states, and won the black vote again but by a shorter margin.