I was not a fan of history in school. My history teachers, oddly enough, seemed to find the subject fascinating, and would go on and on about it for hours and days and weeks and months and…you get the idea. Some of the longest hours of my life were in history classes listening to teachers drone on about the important dates of this battle and that document and this king or some other famous person I didn’t know and probably wasn’t related to. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why we kept listening to teachers talk about what was to us, at least, ancient history that had little to do with modern life, and how that peculiar historical circumstance or that date or individual made the last half of many classes seem as if we had all been transported to the event horizon of a black hole where minutes of time were stretched by incomprehensible gravitic forces into days and weeks that seemed to have no definable end. I noticed some of my classmates experienced the same effects, and several occasionally succumbed to the power of the nap monster and were easily identified by the small puddle of drool that ran out of their open mouths onto their desks. The funny part came when we - I mean they - were startled by the sound of the bell and quickly looked around to remember where they were and whether or not the teacher had asked them a question they hadn’t heard, or if the bell had finally released us from the interminable drudgery of uninspired lecture.
After college, apparently as some sort of cosmic retribution, I discovered a fascination with history, and especially with biographies. These special history books seemed to transport me back to the actual time and to real people that, to me at least, were simultaneously interesting and highly personal. It wasn’t hard to identify with their internal and external struggles as they were faced with events and circumstances that became history to us but were really the actual occurrences of their lives, and that for them the choices they made were not always obvious and might just have easily gone in another direction and in so doing changed the history we know. In other words, I like history now and read what Mama would have called “a goodly amount” of it voluntarily, and in the most glorious liberating fashion, almost never give myself study sheets or tests at the end of the chapters.
I have recently become embroiled in the life of Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, hero of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, author and enforcer of the Indian Removal Act, intractable foe of the Second US National Bank and, along with Martin Van Buren, de facto founder of the Democratic political party. Jackson and his supporters earnestly believed the election of 1824 was stolen by opponents of Jackson in the House of Representatives, and that Henry Clay (Speaker of the House) made a deal with John Quincy Adams to serve as Secretary of State for Adams in exchange for his support in the House to elect John Quincy President. The Presidential race was given to the House of Representatives because none of the four candidates received a majority of the popular votes. Clay had the lowest vote total and decided he had no chance to win, but assuredly thought he could help John Quincy win if there was a little something in it for him as a reward for doing so. Jackson never forgave Clay for that, and he and Martin Van Buren worked tirelessly to build a new party and also to make sure Jackson was elected in 1828.
Democrats of the time saw themselves as “defenders of the people,” and believed government economic intervention benefitted special interests and the rich. Democratic efforts were geared toward the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society focused on the independence of the individual. Democrats believed strongly in individual rights and state sovereignty, opposed high tariffs, opposed the establishment of a public school system, supported Jackson’s commitment to Indian removal to the west, and supported the continuation of slavery in the US. They were, as a rule, least popular in the New England area, but strongly supported in almost every other geographic area of the country as it was at the time, especially the south. This was due in large part to their support of states’ rights and the continuation of slavery.
Oddly enough, the man who exemplified many of the ideals of what was to become the Democratic party, Thomas Jefferson, had originally included a provision in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence that “condemned slavery as one of the many evils foisted upon the colonies by the British crown.” The passage was removed from the final wording, most probably at the insistence of several southern colonies that were dependent on slave labor for farming. This support for slavery and, after the Civil War, enforced segregation, continued until the 1960’s as an integral part of Democratic Party policies. The KKK, created initially from the ranks of veterans of the Confederate armies, sought initially to address the grievances of Southern citizens at the hands of “carpetbaggers”, generally from Northern states, sent to impose integration, enforce the manumission of blacks, and ensure voting rights for black men upon the secessionist states. Violence, hangings, torture, night raids and other forms of intimidation were used by the KKK to intimidate the carpetbaggers, and to keep black men and/or Republicans from voting. In 1868, the Democratic selections for President and Vice President were Horatio Seymour and Francis Preston Blair. Their campaign insisted the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution freeing blacks from slavery and giving the right to vote to black men were not only unconstitutional, but illegal and revolutionary. Their campaign motto was “Our Ticket, Our Motto, This is a White Man’s Country, Let White Men Rule.” They were easily defeated by Republican Ulysses S. Grant.
The first (1865), second (1915) and third (1950-60’s) iterations of the KKK were all manifestations of members, primarily from the South but not exclusively so, of the Democratic political party, and all were opposed to any type of integration of blacks into American society. Political observers coined the phrase “Solid South” to describe the geographic tendency of practically all white voters in the south to support Democratic policies and Democratic candidates almost exclusively and to limit the rights of blacks and Republicans to vote. Democratic policies and platforms remained firmly segregationist until after 1964, with the exception of Harry Truman’s executive order of 1948 ordering the integration of all units in all branches of the US Armed Forces.
With the death of President Kennedy at the hands of assassins, Lyndon Johnson, with misgivings about the political expediency of doing so, passed and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, after a resounding victory in the Presidential election of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both were, from a historical perspective, the absolute right things to do, and legally ended the “separate but equal” policies of prior administrations. It also cost Democrats the Southern white vote and replaced it with the vast majority of black voters nationwide. Johnson saw his Great Society program as a continuation of the New Deal of his mentor, Franklin D Roosevelt. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, while well intended, led eventually to the destruction of the black nuclear family, the resultant loss of cultural stability, high minority incarceration rates and increased inner city poverty rates.
Here are some statistics - Black home ownership in 1970 was 42%. In spite of the Great Society programs and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, black home ownership in 2023 was 45%. In 1965, the percentage of blacks born to single mothers was 25%. In 2018 that percentage was 69.4%. That increase in percentages can be attributed primarily to a Welfare program that monetarily incentivized pregnancy for the poor. One of the primary predictors of criminal behavior in males, regardless of race, is that of coming from a home with no father. About 70% of all juvenile offenders in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes. The overall incarceration rate for the US in 1972 was 93 per 100,000 people. In 2021 the incarceration rate was 810 for every 100,000 people and blacks are SIX times more likely than whites to be imprisoned. The poverty rate among black families with both parents present is 8%. The poverty rate among black households with a single mother is 37%. White families receiving welfare in 1970 have hovered at and around 8-10% since the programs’ inception. Black families receiving welfare in 1970 were around 30%, and in 2019 were still around 27% of the black population. In 2019, a “new processing system” was implemented by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the percentage of black families on Welfare dropped to 7.3 in that same year. Welfare has grown exponentially since its inception, and currently distributes over $400 Billion annually. In the US in 1940, 5% of all adults and 1% of blacks had received a four-year college diploma. In 2019, those figures were 36% of all adults and 26% of blacks. High School graduation rates in 1940 were 24% of all adults and 7% for blacks. In 2020 90% of all adults and 88% of blacks had received high school diplomas. It would seem that compulsory education has worked remarkably well in comparison to any other Great Society program. It might also be said that graduation standards for most high school students regardless of race have been appreciably lowered.
There were over 200 programs and initiatives passed to help create LBJ’s vision of a Great Society. Among them were the Job Corps, Food Stamps program, ESEA of 1965, The Higher Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, The US Department of Transportation, The Community Action Program, Head Start, VISTA and far too many others to name here. The total monetary cost in 1963 was $1.7 Billion dollars. Many of these programs continue, as few things in life are harder to kill than a government bureaucracy. The total amount spent on these programs to date is estimated to be $15 trillion. Just to provide a mathematical comparison of how much money that is, one million seconds is around 11.5 days, one billion seconds is around 32 years, and one trillion seconds is 32,000 years. $15 trillion dollars divided by the current US population would be $44,643 for every man, woman and child in the US today. It would appear that, regardless of the intent, the actual effect of the money spent in the name of eliminating poverty has done more harm than good and serves to remind people once again that solutions to issues are never achieved by throwing money at the problems.
Say what you want about racism, when people of any color are given just enough to get by they eventually lose the will to improve or work for financial gain. The easy way to riches - the lottery, gang culture, pro sports, drug sales, drug production, promiscuous sex, and music that glorifies and celebrates it all - replace a work ethic and kids from disadvantaged backgrounds either never understand or are slow to learn society can work for them as well as it works against them when they ignore societal mores, laws and customs. What was meant to be a safety net often turns out to be a way of life provided by the government that it was never intended to be.
One thing the Great Society did create were government bureaucracies that do what bureaucracies do best; grow themselves. Programs that were designed to help others quickly became proficient at helping those that work within the program and learned quickly and effectively how to not just maintain their share of the Federal money pile, but to expand it. When these programs were created, they began as 20% of the Federal budget, and quickly established themselves as true entitlements. They learned to manipulate data to the continuation of their own employment while expressing eloquently how much good they were doing for others. Today their slice of the Federal pie has grown to 60% of the Federal budget and shows little or no sign of slowing their own growth. Their only real positive effect has been to expand their agencies’ work force exponentially in the name of helping others with no factual data to show they have done so, until, of course, they learned to manipulate the data to falsely show how important their job and their agency are.
Perhaps one of the fatal flaws of the Great Society was that its creators never really established an end goal other than the amorphous one of “ending poverty as we know it” through what amounted to a mass redistribution of wealth in America. What they have done is destroy the nuclear family for many Americans on the lower end of the financial spectrum and change the culture and expectations for those citizens. Considering the segregationist history of the Democratic party, perhaps some consideration may be given to thoughts that the destruction of black culture was, in fact, a purposeful decision. Whether intentional or not, the result was certainly negative. If it was indeed a nefarious scheme to create an expanded dependency on government support and intervention, then it might cause you to wonder whether this boondoggle was just a trial run, and, like it or not, the rest of the US population is next.