GOP the "Party of Lincoln?" Not So Fast There...

During his poorly attended, virus-ridden June campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump once again pulled out the GOP’s favorite meme, that the Republican Party was the “party of Lincoln.” Republicans love this claim because it fits so nicely into the grade school lessons most people remember—that is Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the GOP ticket and reelected again in 1864 on behalf of the Grand Old Party.

Republican Lincoln ran for
reelection with Democrat Johnson 
as his running mate.

The problem is Lincoln did not actually run for reelection on the Republican Party ticket. And if you remember back to your high history lessons, you'll remember Lincoln's running mate in 1864—Andrew Johnson—was a Democrat. A Democrat running on a Republican Party ticket? How could that be?

When confronted with that fact today, the GOP simply claims they temporary changed the party’s name for that one election. It wasn’t that simple. The National Union Party was comprised of both Republicans and Democrats.

Party Schisms

This bizarre fact of history came about because by 1864 a political schism slashed through the Republican Party. First, Lincoln was a dark horse candidate that no one in the party ever expected to rise to be their presidential nominee. Even after his election, Lincoln never really received the full support of his party.

One reason for that was a faction of the party called the Radical Republicans who were strong proponents of abolition, the enfranchisement of blacks, and—after secession—ensuring the South paid dearly for its treason. They disliked Lincoln and his call for a gentle reintegration of the South after the war. And in a political case of you can't win for losing, many Republicans were outraged by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, especially since four Union states— Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky—were still slave states. Those who opposed Lincoln's policies demanded he step down after his first term.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Party was experiencing its own policy split. Before the war, the Democrats were the party of the South and of slavery. After the Southern secession, those Democrats who remained loyal to the Union were split into two categories—the War Democrats who supported Lincoln’s war to force the South’s return into the Union, and the Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, who opposed the war and demanded a peace settlement with the South.

For the 1864 presidential election, both parties experienced so much division it was impossible for the traditional two-party balloting to take place. The Radical Republicans formed a separate party, the Radical Democracy Party, and nominated John C. Frémont, famed explorer and the Republican presidential nominee in the 1856 election. War Democrat John Cochrane, a former Union Army general, was his running mate.

 Other War Democrats joined Republicans in forming the National Union Party, which nominated Lincoln for president with War Democrat Johnson as his running mate.

The Democratic Party, now largely a Copperhead party, nominated former Major General George McClelland, whom Lincoln had fired as head of the Union Army, as its presidential nominee.

National Union
campaign poster

Couldn't Win as a Republican

As much as today’s GOP likes to describe itself as “the party of Lincoln,” the truth is Lincoln faced losing reelection if he ran solely on a Republican Party platform. Many of the National Unionists would not vote for a Republican candidate. Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, chairman of the National Union Party’s convention, declared to Lincoln, “As a Union party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. But as an Abolition party, as a Republican party, as a Whig party, as a Democratic party, as an American [Know-Nothing] party, I will not follow you one foot.”

The Radical Republican’s attempt to win the presidency did not last long. Realizing that his third-party candidacy might hand the White House over to McClelland and the Democrats, Frémont withdrew from the race. McClelland himself did not agree with the Copperheads’ platform demanding a peace settlement with the Confederacy, but the National Unionists used that platform to discredit the one-time hero of the Union.

Lincoln won reelection by a landslide. The Republicans and the Democrats of the National Union Party returned to their former entities, as did the Radical Republicans and the Copperheads. By the end of April 1865, Lincoln would be dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. But, for the few remaining months of his presidency, Lincoln was not a Republican president or a Democratic president, but a National Union president supported openly by members from both traditional national parties.

So, when today’s GOP claims to be “the party of Lincoln,” they are simply wrong. Lincoln transcended any one party. Unlike Trump, Lincoln was a president for the nation.

Ayn Rand's Corrosive Influence on American Politics

The three and a half years he’s been in the White House, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a greedy, self-involved, narcissistic, sociopath. At the same time, Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate to be of like mind with Trump. It’s not difficult to understand why; their brand of political conservatism is, at its heart, sociopathic.

But the true inspiration behind their hard-edged conservatism is neither Pinochet nor Friedman, but a mediocre, early 20th century novelist and self-proclaimed philosopher named Ayn Rand. Rand’s brand of social Objectivism has been the center of extreme right philosophy. GOP Senator Rand Paul, along with his former Republican congressman father, Ron Paul, are hard-core adherents to Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Her belief system was also behind the Tea Party movement.

Her novel, The Fountainhead, is one of the few books Trump said he enjoyed reading. When he became president, Trump proclaimed he would appoint Rand acolytes to cabinet posts. One of those, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Post, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me.” Pompeo is said to be currently facing multiple internal corruption probes.

The problem is, Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing are sociopathic.

The Russian-born Rand has been poisoning the minds of self-absorbed adolescents for decades with her philosophy of the individual as the center of the universe. That philosophy holds well with high schoolers who truly believe the universe revolves around them. Most people say adieu to Rand and her rants as they mature. Those that don’t become sociopaths— as Rand was herself.

The terrorist-hero of The
Fountain was based on a
real-life psychopathic killer.

Had she ever laid herself on a psychiatrist’s couch, Rand no doubt would have been diagnosed as sociopathic. Throughout her life, Rand—like the heroes in her best-known books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—believed whatever was good for her was right. She once wrote the basis of her philosophy stemmed from her childhood in post-Revolution Russia when her parents refused to buy her a dress she wanted or give her a cup of tea like the grown-ups were drinking. She believed if she wanted something, she should have it. It is said she once took money that her family needed for food to buy tickets to the theater.

Rand was so enamored with the idea of the unfettered self, she developed an infatuation with the notorious psychopathic serial killer, William Edward Hickman. In 1928, Hickman kidnapped his last victim, a 12-year-old girl, and held her for ransom. When the girl’s father paid the ransom, Hickman dumped the girl’s eviscerated and dismembered body in the street. At the time, it was considered one of the greatest crimes of the century.

Psychopathic 'Superman'

Ayn Rand felt otherwise.

In her notebooks, Rand wrote admiringly of Hickman. “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote. She added, using words eerily prescient of what the Nazis would be saying a few years hence, that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

Hickman, who was executed in 1928, became the model for Rand’s Fountainhead hero, Howard Roark, a self-absorbed architect who wins a woman’s devotion by raping her, and ends up committing an act of terrorism—blowing up the Fountainhead building—because he didn’t get his way.

Howard Roark, like his real-life model, was one sick puppy.

Rand’s self-proclaimed Objectivism philosophy basically says man makes his own reality. Whatever he determines to be, is. Evidence of how wide-spread this narcissistic philosophy is among the extreme right of the Republican Party was seen when Karl Rove, then chief advisor to President George Bush, told journalist Ron Susskind, “we create our own reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

Former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan, also an Ayn Rand fan, carried that same philosophy to the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention when, as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he delivered a diatribe on the Obama administration that was so separated from reality that even Fox News criticized its lies.

Kindred Spirits

Ryan, in fact, has a lot in common with Rand. Like her, Ryan likes to bite the hand that fed him. Ryan, youngest son of an upper middle-class family, received Social Security survivors’ benefits after his attorney father died of a heart attack. Since his family didn’t need those benefits to survive on, Ryan stuffed them away and used them to pay for his college education. Later he advocated doing away with Social Security for those who do need it.

Ryan's home in Wisconsin was declared a national historic site, meaning the Ryan family receives a taxpayer subsidy to maintain it. Since graduating from college, Ryan drew a government paycheck, first as a congressional aid, then as a congressman. Now retired from Congress, Ryan continues to collect a government pension and tax-payer subsidized health care.

Ayn Rand, too, took advantage of a government-sponsored education in the Soviet Union, and then turned against the system as soon as it no longer benefited her. She was the beneficiary of many government programs in the United States, as well. When her first play abruptly closed in 1938, the Works Progress Administration took it on a nationwide tour and paid Rand a weekly salary. In her old age, Rand regularly criticized those living on Social Security, even though she was receiving Social Security benefits under a married name.

Like Trump, Ayn Rand was an amoral, narcissistic, sociopath, and her poisoned pen continues taint American political thought and corrupt American political morals.

_____________________

UPDATE (July 8, 2020): Like the woman whose juvenile rhetoric they advocate, the Ayn Rand Institute admitted on July 7 that it had received up to $1 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program approved by Congress to help businesses during the Covid-19 crisis. The institute, which continues Rand's criticism of government welfare of any kind, used twisted logic to rationalized why it took the bailout. Apparently it isn't enough for the institute to keep Rand's childish philosophy of greed and selfishness alive, they also follow her hypocrisy, too.

 

For further reading:

Trump Administration Embraces Ayn Rand's Disdain for the Masses

US Republican leaders love Ayn Rand

The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

‘We Took PPP Funds and Would Do It Again’

In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan

American Fascists: A Forgotten History

As many American cities burned in the wake of the police killing of an unarmed black man, videos taken by news crews and private citizens revealed a part of America that has been hidden—or more accurately, ignored—for decades. But since the election of Donald Trump, Americans brandishing swastikas and raising their arms in the Nazi salute have become almost a daily sight. Many patriotic Americas have asked who are they and where did they come from?

The appearance of these cretins doesn’t surprise me. Fascism, in its various forms has been part of the American underbelly for the better part of a century. The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of fascism not only in Europe, but in the United States as well.

Members of the German American Bund parade
 through Camp Norland in New Jersey. (Source: National
Archives)

Throughout Thirties brown-shirted and jackbooted thugs of the German American Bund—essentially the Nazi Party affiliate in the U.S.—marched proudly through American streets, spreading their religion of hate and racism. There were Nazi enclaves in the woods for training, and summer camps for the children of American Nazis. In 1939, 22,000 Bund members held a massive rally in New York's Madison Square Garden. The Bund also affiliated with America’s first terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.

They Weren't Alone.

Even before the Bund, there was the Fascist League of North America, an umbrella group composed primarily of Italian-American supporters of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, considered by many to be the father of modern fascism. Mussolini coined the word fascism, comparing the rule of government by corporations for corporations to a fascine, in which weak sticks bound together create a strong foundation.

The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts due to their uniforms' silver camp shirts, at one time boasted at least 15,000 members. They owned a militarized compound in the hills surrounding Los Angeles in which they expected Adolf Hitler to stay after the Nazis took over the U.S. In 1936, their leader, William Dudley Pelley, ran for president on a third-party ticket.

The German-American Businessmen's Association, commonly called the DAWA (the German acronym for the Deutsch Amerikanischer Wirtschaft Auscbuss), focused primarily on ruining Jewish-owned businesses. Instead using the physical brutality the Nazis in Germany did on Kristallnacht in 1938, the American DAWA used boycotts to destroy Jewish businesses.

Closely allied with these groups—particularly the Bund—was the Christian Front which, despite calling itself Christian nevertheless sowed violence throughout New York. The Front denounced Jews and other non-Christians, and praised Hitler and Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Included Members of Congress

It would be easy to dismiss these groups as simply a fanatical political fringe, but the bloody fingers of fascism reached deep into 1930s American politics. Many members of Congress—mostly Republican but also some conservative Democrats—openly supported in speeches these American fascist groups as well as the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. In 1942, mystery novelist Rex Stout published The Illustrious Dunderheads, a collection of pro-fascist speeches given by conservative American politicians during the 1930s.

There were some American fascists who chose action over words. In 1933, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, was approached by two men representing wealthy and conservative American bankers and industrialists. The men explained they had been sent to Europe to study fascism and how best to bring it to the United States. Their backers decided a coup was the best idea, and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Butler played along and gathered evidence for the FBI and a subsequent Congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Known by many names—The Business Plot, the Wall Street Plot, and The American Putsch—the plot was largely swept under the Capitol's rug, since so many well-known millionaires (and political contributors) were apparently involved.

In 2007, the BBC reported Prescott Bush, father, and grandfather of two American presidents, was one of those wealthy financiers involved in the American Putsch. Bush was a well-known supporter of Hitler's rise to power and was prosecuted for continuing to do business with the Nazis even after Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

Forgotten History

In the aftermath of WWII, many wanted to forget the exuberance with which they embraced fascism in the 1930s. The rise of the Soviet Union as the next great enemy gave many conservatives what they needed to distract Americans from the recent past. The McCarthy Era with its numerous and unsubstantiated claims of "commies everywhere" was simply a means of making voters forget the sins of the conservative right prior to the war.

Since WWII, American fascism had lain hidden in the political shadows. Certainly, over the decades, overt images of it—neo-Nazis, KKK, and so on—were occasionally seen in the media. But there also was a latent vestige of fascism that shunned the term "fascist" but cheered the concept of "nationalism"—one of the markers of fascist thought—and its memes like "American exceptionalism." Sinclair Lewis predicted this in his book, It Can't Happen Here, when he wrote: "[T]he worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Decades ago, American writer George Santayana warned us, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As seen at the top of this blog, those words are the motto of this site. And they are good words to live by.

References and further reading:

German American Bund: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-nazi-organization-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/

Fascist League of North: America: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1977.tb00427.x/epdf

Silver Legion: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116684/Hitlers-Los-Angeles-bunker-planned-run-Nazi-empire-war.html

German-American Businessmen's Association (DAWA): http://archive.jta.org/1934/05/13/archive/jewish-merchants-in-yorkville-ruined-as-dawa-presses-war

Christian Front: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F04EEDF1E3EE23ABC4A51DFB766838B659EDE&legacy=true

Illustrious Dunderheads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261112-the-illustrious-dunderheads

House Committee report on the American Putsch:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC1.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC2.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC3.pdf.

Prescott Bush and the American Putsch:

 https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a

Nearly 100 Years after the Bonus March, Trump is Making the Same Mistakes

A beleaguered president, facing an uncertain reelection amid the worst economic crisis of the century, unleashes the U.S. Army to attack nonviolent demonstrators protesting the president’s policies in front of the White House.

If you think I’m talking about Donald Trump’s June 1 use of federal troops to clear the streets in front of the White House of protesters, you’d be right. But there was another failed president who also used federals troops to attack demonstrators. If Trump thinks a “show of force” against recent protesters—not to mention his threat to send federal troops into states to quell demonstrations and riots—will get him reelected, he should look back on how such actions worked for one of his Republican predecessors, Herbert Hoover.

Nineteen thirty-two was an election year. Hoover was beleaguered by the Great Depression which started in 1929 when the stock market crashed. The last thing Hoover needed was a horde of ragged protesters setting up shanty towns in Washington, DC, and calling them “Hoovervilles.”

Promised Bonus for Veterans

The protesters in this case were veterans of the First World War, then known only as The Great War. In 1924, Congress authorized compensating war veterans for the wages they lost while serving in the military. However, this “bonus,” as it was called, would not be paid out until 1945.

As the Depression flung much of the country into poverty, war veterans began lobbying Congress for an earlier pay out of the bonus. Congress agreed to provide the veterans half of their bonuses as “loans.” That, however, was not enough and the veterans began marching toward Washington demanding the remainder of their bonuses. Thus, began the Bonus March.

The first Bonus Marchers reached D.C. that May and set up camps along Pennsylvania Avenue and other parts of the city. By summer, the number of protesters swelled to more than 40,000. Only around 17,000 were actual veterans; most of the rest were family members of the marchers. Though the vets fought the war in segregated units, there was no segregation among the Bonus Marchers. Black and white veterans marched shoulder to shoulder.

On July 28, then Attorney General William Mitchell—in a move that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr­ would repeat nearly 100 years later—ordered Washington police to disperse the protesters. The veterans resisted, and two were killed by police. Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear away the marchers and their Hooverville campsites. The man in charge of the operation was then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur organized a force of 500 infantrymen, 500 cavalrymen, and six tanks backed by some 800 police officers. Leading the cavalry was Maj. George Patton, Jr. Both men would go on to become WWII legends. But they had something else in common.

Unusual Army Officers

MacArthur and Patton were both wealthy officers in a time when the U.S. Army was woefully underfunded and most officers and enlisted men were little better off than their civilian counterparts. MacArthur was the scion of Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, Jr., a Civil War hero whose rose to one of the highest ranks in the Army. Patton was born into a modest family, but married a wealthy woman and adopted her family’s political views.

MacArthur viewed the veterans as traitors, accusing them of being communists and saying, “Pacifism and its bedfellow communism are all around us.” Patton also saw the protesters as “reds” and told his men, “If you must fire do a good job—a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson…”

Among the marchers was Joe T. Angelo, who had been Patton’s orderly during the war. Angelo received the Distinguish Service Cross for saving Patton’s life on the battlefield.

Bonus Marchers flee Army tear gas.
 Source: National Archives

In the late afternoon, the federal troops began to move against the bonus marchers. Patton’s cavalry led the assault, followed by the infantry and tanks. The horse soldiers charged into the protesters with sabers drawn. The infantry followed with fixed bayonets and lobbing tear gas at the marchers. Tanks rolled over the shanty towns. Soldiers set the remains ablaze.

Two veterans died in rout, and dozens more were injured. A baby also died, apparently asphyxiated by the tear gas.

In the aftermath of the battle, Angelo approached his former commanding officer whose life he’d once saved. Patton refused to acknowledge the veteran, saying, “I do not know this man. Take him away and under no circumstances permit him to return.”

The next day, Hoover’s election opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, read a newspaper account of the attack. He turned to campaign aide, Felix Frankfurter, and said, “Well, Felix, this will elect me.” FDR went on to win in a landslide.

Repeating Mistakes

Nearly 100 years after the Bonus March, we are now seeing many of the same social elements that created that disaster—joblessness, poverty, and economic and social repression—compounded by a deadly pandemic and the unprecedented incompetence of Donald Trump and his fellow travelers. Trump blames the violence of the demonstrations on the today’s “reds,” the anti-fascist Antifa. (In fact, there is evidence agitators from the misnamed and extremist right-wing Patriot Movement may be to blame.) Desperate to look in control of the situation—or in his defense secretary’s words “dominate the battle space”—Trump has and continues contemplating turning the American Army on the American people.

One can almost hear Joe Biden turning to one of his campaign aides and saying, “Well, this will elect me.”