[If contemporary leftists want to learn from the past, a better
example would be the most revolutionary parliamentary leader in our
history, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ]
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THE AMERICAN LEFT NEEDS A CONTEMPORARY THAD STEVENS  
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Van Gosse
September 8, 2019
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ If contemporary leftists want to learn from the past, a better
example would be the most revolutionary parliamentary leader in our
history, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. _

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Donald Trump’s presidency has accelerated what was already the
biggest upsurge for the American Left in several generations. The past
decade’s crises, beginning with the Great Recession of 2008 and then
the Republican Party’s lurch to the right under President Obama,
have radicalized many Democrats and young people, with thirteen
million people voting for an avowed socialist in 2016. This
realignment leftwards has increased since Trump’s election: hundreds
of thousands who had never participated in grassroots politics have
joined local groups like Indivisible;  socialists are running for
and winning office in many parts of the country; mainstream Democratic
presidential candidates are vying to propose the most comprehensive
programs for economic and social transformation.

The present momentum is a great opportunity for practical radicals,
but they need to get serious about politics if they expect to seize
this day.  Protest, “resistance,” and speaking truth to power
are no longer enough. Leftists need to think about how to wield power
in our complex political system.

For many, the sudden proliferation of radical movements and ideas
evokes “the Sixties” or even “the Thirties,” when powerful
movements drove massive social change. But today’s party and
electoral politics differ profoundly from those two eras.  For most
of the last century, the key ideological divisions in U.S. politics
were not partisan, but regional and cultural. As Joe Biden’s recent
gaffes have reminded us, only a generation ago the Democratic
Party’s congressional leadership still included Southern white
supremacists controlling key committees. When Jimmy Carter took office
in 1977, the most powerful Democratic Senators were two
Mississippians, John Stennis (Chairman of the Armed Services
Committee) and James Eastland (Chairman of the Judiciary Committee).
These men entered politics in the late 1920s and the Senate in the
1940s, and both remained obdurate foes of racial equality and any use
of federal authority to guarantee black civil and voting rights.
Conversely, in 1977 and after, some of the strongest defenders of
black rights were northern Republicans like New York’s Jacob Javits,
New Jersey’s Clifford Case, and Rhode Island’s John Chafee. The
twentieth century’s only black Senator until 1993 was Massachusetts
Republican Edward Brooke. Nor were civil rights a residual exception
to an otherwise clear distinction between the parties. On other key
issues, whether environmental, peace, or social welfare, Southern
conservatives (mostly still Democrats) voted with conservative
Republicans, and Northern liberals voted as a bloc across party lines.

Since then, we have lived through a fundamental
realignment.  Democrats like James Eastland and Republicans like
Jacob Javits are long gone.  Today the most powerful Southern
Democrat is Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina. Like
Clyburn, the majority of the Democratic party in South Carolina is
African American (in the state where Radical Reconstruction crested).
The Republican progressives are extinct and, while caucuses of
center-right Democrats remain, the Solid South’s “yellow dog
Democrats” committed to racial domination have disappeared—or
turned Republican, with Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms leading the way
in the 1970s.  

Having finally attained ideological clarity in our party system, there
is a historically unprecedented opportunity to make the Democratic
Party what this country has always lacked: a party of working people
and all those historically excluded by race, gender, sexuality,
religion, or nativity—the party of human rights, if you will. Since
Thomas Jefferson, Democrats have claimed to be the “party of the
people,” but that boast always was qualified by white skin and
manifold exclusions.  Myths aside, the party always included plenty
of rich planters like Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and later James
Eastland, plus the oilmen and agrobusiness interests whom Lyndon
Johnson and others faithfully represented for decades, and more
recently, the financial and tech sectors avidly pursued by Clintonian
neoliberals.

Today’s left-wing Democrats need to examine which legacies from U.S.
political history they should draw upon in remaking their party.
Mainstream pundits are waking the ghost of Eugene V. Debs, five-time
Socialist presidential candidate in 1900-1920, as a forerunner to
Bernie Sanders. Debs was a remarkably effective agitator who
repeatedly went to jail for his principles and put socialism on the
map in American politics, but he is not a model for the intra-party
struggle American radicals need to wage now. Debs never held elective
office, and his party never managed even a small caucus in Congress or
any state legislature outside of Oklahoma (a “red” outlier during
the ‘Teens).  Their greatest accomplishment was periodic control
of city hall in industrial towns like Reading, Pennsylvania,
Schenectady, New York, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, and one major
city, Milwaukee, a far cry from national power. 

If contemporary leftists want to learn from the past, a better example
would be the most revolutionary parliamentary leader in our history,
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Stevens was
an extremely effective legislative infighter in Pennsylvania and then
in Washington, renowned for his deadly acuity in debates, admired and
feared by both allies and enemies. He was Lincoln’s bane during the
Civil War, relentlessly pushing the President to do what needed to be
done--free the slaves and crush the slaveowners. 

Stevens understood that at key moments politics really is a zero-sum
game, in which you either win or lose.  Moral victories are
bittersweet consolations; prevailing over one’s opponent is what
matters. In 1866-1868, he helped unite the Republican Party in pushing
through the House all the key measures of Radical Reconstruction,
including the Thirteenth Amendment (uncompensated freedom for all
slaves) and the Fourteenth (making the “freedmen” into citizens
with equal rights which no state could abrogate).  He passed the
crucial Reconstruction Act of March 1867, which imposed military
governments over the former Confederate states to block their
legislatures’ efforts to recreate slavery via Black Codes
controlling the freedpeople. That legislation authorized the Army to
hold elections for state constitutional conventions in which all men,
regardless of race, could vote. 

Stevens and the other Radicals grasped the essence of “movement
politics,” to push from the outside and mold public opinion via
ceaseless agitation while carefully maneuvering on the inside to get
the votes needed for decisive policy changes.  These are the lessons
we need to learn now, post-haste. It is also worth noting that Stevens
was fearless in the face of significant disabilities. He was born with
a club foot and ceaselessly mocked as a “cripple,” and in his
youth suffered a disease which left him hairless, requiring
ill-fitting wigs for the rest of his life.  For decades, he lived
openly with his black housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, ignoring
salacious rumors. In 1851, while a Congressman, he defended 33 black
men in the largest treason trial in U.S. history after some of those
men killed a Maryland slave-owner who crossed into Lancaster County to
claim his escaped chattels.  

Thaddeus Stevens gave no quarter to the enemies of liberty.  He
focused relentlessly on how to defeat them, by any and all means
necessary, to bring about a true republic. When he died in April 1868,
he lay in state in the Capitol with an honor guard of black soldiers.
He asked to be buried in Lancaster’s one integrated cemetery with
the following epitaph: “I have chosen this that I might illustrate
in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life,
equality of man before the Creator.” We need women and men like him
now, in Congress and in the statehouses, and in power.

Van Gosse

Pennsylvania DSA member Van Gosse is a professor of history at
Franklin and Marshall College.

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