black history: trump’s election and policies are reminiscent of the racial capitalism that ruined reconstruction in the 1860’s

By Nick Douglas, AFROPUNK Contributor

The history of South Carolina provides a devastating lesson on the Trump administration. It shows how his un-making of America is a losing formula.

Promising to “Make America Great Again” helped Trump get elected, despite the many great achievements of the Obama administration. Obama’s accomplishments include: giving more than 20 million Americans access to affordable healthcare, saving the world from a financial meltdown, bailing out the auto industry (which also saved numerous other industries and made a considerable profit for the U.S. Treasury), the appointment of more women and minorities to cabinet positions and the Supreme Court, 72 consecutive months of job growth, low inflation rates, tripling the stock market, extending LGBT rights, and leaving combat in Iraq.

Trump has tried to characterize these achievements as a failure and sought to undo any legislation enacted by President Obama, no matter how trivial.

Trump and his Republican cronies have tried and failed at repealing health care, backed out of the worldwide climate accord (Syria is the only other country not to commit to the agreement), rescinded DACA. By appointing Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA, Trump is attempting to destroy the legacy that President Obama left at those agencies. Trump has even pettily renamed a mountain that President Obama named during his administration.

Trump has allowed Neo-Nazis to march freely throughout the country. He has not only welcomed them into the Republican Party but he made them part of the inner sanctum of his White House, appointing Steve Bannon as his adviser. Neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville have been characterized by the Trump as “some good people.”

Examining the history of South Carolina firmly ties the Trump administration to some of the most anti-American virulent racists and white supremacists in U.S. history. But the real story is that Trump’s pandering to America’s underlying racism is being used as a distraction—as it was in South Carolina—to again transfer more wealth to the top 1%.

Before the Civil War, blacks were 57% of South Carolina’s population. This included about 10,000 free people of color mostly from Charleston, many of whom were highly skilled and educated. Black men who were free before the war (freedmen) became important leaders in South Carolina’s Republican Party during Reconstruction, making up 26 percent of those elected to state office between 1868 and 1876. In 1866 white South Carolinians were the minority in the state, just like Trump supporters were the minority of voters in the 2016 Presidential election. (Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes to Hillary Clinton.)

After winning the election of 1866, Radical Republicans took control of the Reconstruction process. They accomplished this by federally enforced martial law and having the Army register all male voters. South Carolina’s government was composed of freedmen, “scalawags” (Southerners who supported Reconstruction) and some white Democrats.

By a constitutional convention with Radical Republicans in control of the legislation, newly enfranchised voters created a new constitution in 1868. The new South Carolina Constitution established: a balanced, tripartite form of government for the first time in South Carolina’s history, comprehensive local governments, replacing the patchwork of specialized commissions which handled everything from roads to welfare, a detailed Declaration of Rights which mandated political equality regardless of race, state-wide public education for the first time, a welfare program for the poor, aged, and disabled funded by taxing the wealthy and channeled revenues through county governments.

Yet white South Carolinians could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law. The black legislature of South Carolina was called a menagerie and a “monkey house.” Planter William Gregorie commented, “I think the time will come, if we ever have a white man’s civil government again, when [there] will be more slaves than [there] ever were.”

There are stark similarities to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Republican lawmakers could not bear the idea of a black President and a multi-ethnic electorate governing the nation. Since 2008 their only legislative agenda has been to UN-make anything he accomplished. They pledged to make Obama a “one-term” president. They voted against his healthcare bill, though it was modeled on Republican Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts. They never considered Obama’s choice, Neil Gorsuch, for Supreme Court justice even though Republicans had praised him in the past.

Vilifying black legislators in 1868, Democratic South Carolinians spread the lie that only 14 of the representatives were on the tax list, insinuating that black legislators had not paid taxes. In reality 31 of the 71 black legislators were on the list with property valued at more than $1,000, then a substantial sum of money. Trump vilified President Obama for five years, saying he was not a U.S. citizen. (He also falsely claimed the President was bugging Trump Tower during the elections and that President Obama did not call the families of fallen soldiers.)

The real story about the black legislators in 1868, is better represented by this observation of a reporter from the New York Daily Times “The colored men in the Convention possess by long odds the largest share of mental calibre. They are all the best debaters; some of them are peculiarly apt in raising and sustaining points of order; there is a homely but strong grasp of common sense in what they say, and although the mistakes made are frequent and ludicrous, the South Carolinians are not slow to acknowledge that their destinies really appear to be safer in the hands of these unlettered Ethiopians than they would be if confided to the more unscrupulous care of the white men in the body.”

In 1873 white supremacists and redeemers in South Carolina used the chaos of an economic depression to begin to reverse the gains made by Radical Reconstruction.

Trump creates his own chaos, generating meaningless tweets and off-hand remarks, which create firestorms of controversy until his next insane statement. Chasing these provocative, nonsensical comments distracts from following and unearthing the dirt that Trump and his cronies actually do.

In 1876 Wade Hampton, one of South Carolina’s most popular Confederate veterans, was nominated for governor. Hampton’s supporters became known as “Red Shirts” because they wore red shirts and began forming “rifle” and “gun” clubs, which they used as a premise to disrupt Republican gatherings. They made it known that they intended to carry the election no matter what. One planter remarked that they would win even “if we have to wade in blood knee-deep.” Their violence killed more than 100 blacks during the political season of 1876.

If the forming of gun and rifle clubs sounds familiar as a form of disruption and intimidation we need to look no further than requests by Tea Party and right wing vigilante groups to have armed rallies in the nation’s capital during the Obama administration, something unheard of in any previous presidency. During the 2016 election cycle more than 100 new hate groups were formed. Republicans’ refusal to enact any meaningful gun-control legislation even after increasing numbers of mass shootings is a reminder and a continuation of the historical use of armed intimidation in South Carolina.

There was extraordinary fraud throughout South Carolina on election day. Armed Democratic horsemen surrounded a polling place in Edgefield. In Abbeville County armed Democrats attacked polls. In Barnwell, Democrats fired on the polling place, driving off both voters and managers, then stole the ballot box.

When Hampton won by a slim margin, county commissioners in Edgefield and Laurens reported fraud (in both counties Democrats received more votes than there were voters). U.S. military troops were called in to maintain order, but for months South Carolina was in disarray. Two different houses were seated—a Republican House in the State House and a Democratic House in nearby Carolina Hall. Eventually the troops were removed and Hampton took office.

Hampton’s election had an effect on the presidential election. The election of 1876 was so close that it was decided by Congress. Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner, but as part of the Bargain of 1877 Hayes was forced to recognize Democratic control of the South and remove the last federal troops. This move ended Reconstruction in the South.

In 1876 Wade Hampton was elected governor of South Carolina through intimidation and voter fraud. In 2016 Trump won because of the antiquated Electoral College system, neither had a popular mandate from the voters.

The Hampton legislature ended laws that raised taxes that provided benefits to blacks and poor whites. Funding was cut to the state hospitals and asylums. The law allowing poll taxes to be used to fund public education was repealed, virtually eliminating public education. Laws were passed making oral contracts binding, even without witnesses, which favored the plantation owners in disputes with blacks and poor whites. A law was even passed that gave planters the right to hold laborers who were indebted to them on their plantations until the laborers worked off their debt.

If what Hampton did in 1876 sounds familiar, it is exactly what Trump is trying to do in 2017.

The current tax plan cuts Medicare and Medicaid benefits while lowering corporate tax rates by 15% so that the wealthiest 1% can have a tax cut. He has called for stripping down the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and virtually ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Both were implemented during the Obama Administration and helped protect citizens following the financial meltdown of 2008.

In South Carolina election of 1878, Republicans did not even offer a candidate for governor. The federal government stood silently by as Southern states passed numerous laws stripping African-Americans of their rights, including their right to vote. By 1894 voter fraud, physical intimidation of black voters, and voter suppression in South Carolina reached ludicrous proportions. One law required potential voters registering for the first time to provide detailed personal information, as well as affidavits from two reputable citizens attesting to the applicant’s good character. The South Carolina Constitution of 1895 completed the disenfranchisement by requiring a literacy test, and requiring the payment of a poll tax six months prior to the election.

By October 1896, there were 50,000 whites registered voters, but only 5,500 blacks, in a state in which blacks were the majority. The 1900 census demonstrated the extent of disfranchisement: a total of 782,509 African Americans made up more than 58 percent of the state’s population, essentially without any representation. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Voting Rights decision gave Republican—c controlled states the power to change voter protections put in place by the Federal government during Jim Crow. During the 2016 election cycle Trump mobilized his right-wing vigilantes to “look out and monitor for fraud” in predominantly minority voting districts.

Racism was used as a Trojan horse by the former Confederates in South Carolina to un-make social progress and return the state to pre-Civil War status. In the South the top 1% of income earners were former slaveholders, Confederates and their sympathizers who benefited from undoing the policies of black legislators. This same 1% enacted policies allowing them to hold workers on their property to work off debts and created generations of poor white sharecroppers as well as black sharecroppers.

Today Trump is using racism to un-make the previous administration’s policies and give the top 1% of the population a huge tax break, all under the guise of “Making America Great Again.”  In 1876 South Carolina racism was combined with the backlash over losing the Civil War and against Radical Republicans, who called for Confederate sympathizers to be barred from voting and running for office.

The results of South Carolina’s un-making of progressive legislation had a huge economic and social cost for its citizens, both black and white. Today South Carolina ranks in the lowest third of U.S. states, 39th in health care, 41st in public health, 50th in education, 41st in reducing crime and the proportion of citizens in the correctional system, 41st in maintaining infrastructure, and 48th in economic opportunity.

We can avoid these pitfalls by learning the lessons of South Carolina after Reconstruction. Reversing the work of black and Radical Republican lawmakers in favor of a few former slaveholders was disastrous for South Carolina. You cannot UN-make a state great again, any more than you can UN-make our country great again.

South Carolina history shows us how reversing social progress in order to benefit the wealthiest 1% has always been a losing formula.