Donald Trump Celebrates Black History Month 2025

February 1, 2025 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, History, Multiculturalism, Negroes, Race Relations 0

In honor of Black History Month 2025, I want to draw your attention this morning to how race relations began to change as Reconstruction shaded into the Gilded Age.

The following excerpt comes from Robert W. Merry’s book President McKinley: Architect of the American Century:

“The 1876 outcome, viewed by many at the time and later as a stolen election, turned out to be a turning point suffused. Republicans had used antiblack discrimination as a basis for challenging the presidential vote totals in the South and then sealed the deal by ending Reconstruction and turning back to the South much greater leeway in managing the region’s race relations. This inevitably meant more widespread antiblack discrimination. For a dozen years, lingering Civil War passions had dominated national politics, reflected in the penchant among Northern politicians to “wave the bloody shirt,” emphasizing what many Northerners considered the South’s profound civic transgressions leading to and during the war. Southern politicians responded with equal asperity, and there didn’t seem to be much hope for any lessening in interregional acrimony.

Then McKinley’s mentor, in a move born of political necessity, sacrificed the protection of Southern blacks in favor of fostering greater prospects for healing the wounds of war among the nation’s whites. As far as is known, McKinley never commented on this fearsome tradeoff, either publicly or in private letters or conversation. While he took pride his his lifelong antislavery convictions and his wartime part in saving the Union and emancipating black Americans, he seemed to accept widespread racial prejudice as an inevitable fact of life that would direct the course of national politics long into the future. The result was a kind of patronizing attitude toward African Americans – lamenting their tragic fate and cheering them on as they struggled against it but offering little in the way of political action aimed at ameliorating their condition.”

The following except comes from Jon Grinspan’s The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915:

“Attacking cranks was a useful political tool. As the revolutionary possibilities of the postwar era settled into the cynical machine politics of the 1880s, practical politicians and mainstream journalists had an epithet to limit the horizons of public discourse. The term race crank was hurled at anyone, Black or White, who focused inordinately on racial issues, be they defending Black voting rights or excessively preaching White supremacy. Socialists, anarchists, and third-party voters were easily dismissed as “cranks – crack-brained, semi-idiotic.” Even the mild George Willian Curtis, already skewered so mercilessly by Conkling, was mocked as a crank who “imagines that by softly stroking his side whiskers he can purify the Republican Party.”

Americans didn’t embrace White Nationalism in the Gilded Age.

The country simply gave up on Reconstruction. Massive negro fatigue set in. The culture rapidly shifted away from trying to expand minority rights toward material concerns like economic growth, the tariff, debates over the currency like free silver, greenbacks and the gold standard.

The term “race crank” was the Gilded Age version of “woke.” It was used to bludgeon and marginalize anyone who was overly obsessed with race. Blacks were still given lip service by Republican politicians throughout this period, but this gradually diminished over time. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It was signed into law by President Chester Arthur. It was the first in a series of laws that restricted immigration and culminated decades later in the Immigration Act of 1924.

In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision laid the constitutional foundation for segregation, which began to emerge in the South in the late 1880s and early 1890s as the interregnum of “colorblindness” gave way to white supremacy. Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895. Republicans gave up on black rights after the the failure of the Force Act of 1890. In 1901, Rep. George H. White gave his Farewell Address to Congress. Blacks disappeared from Congress for a generation. Southerners elected men like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and James K. Vardaman.

The country took a hard right turn on race. Thomas Dixon Jr. published The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan in 1905. It was made into The Birth of a Nation in 1915 by D.W. Griffith. By the early 20th century, the descendants of Union soldiers were LARPing as Klansmen. The Confederate monuments which were torn down by leftist mobs were erected in this period. It probably never occurred to them to stop and think much about how that happened in the first place.

Anyway, I thought I would share that because I was amused by the parallels. Trump gives lip service to blacks like McKinley and other Republicans of his era while eviscerating their racial agenda. It is all being done in the name of colorblindness too which is something we have seen before.

Note: Hegseth has scrapped the liberal calendar in the Defense Department.

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