Principles, compromises, and elections
When doing the right thing works politically
Recently Matt Yglesias invoked the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to suggest that achieving durable political change typically requires making compromises. Only later do we remember the elected officials who sought change as courageous idealists rather than as the pragmatic compromisers they really were.
For example Yglesias notes correctly that Roosevelt stood aloof from federal anti-lynching legislation in order to placate southern Democratic segregationists in the Senate. Today we look back on such an accommodation in horror, as did a good many people in real time up to and including Eleanor Roosevelt.
But to FDR this stance came down to cold political facts. He calculated that federal anti-lynching legislation had no chance of surviving a southern filibuster in the Senate. Why alienate the very senators he needed to pass New Deal legislation and confirm sympathetic Supreme Court judges? “Real, meaningful political change requires a lot of winning,” Yglesias concludes, “and the people who are best at winning often err on the side of pragmatism.”1
Naturally we can never know what would have occurred in a 1930s counterfactual where FDR chose to mount an impassioned crusade on behalf of federal anti-lynching legislation. What we can say, however, is that political calculations alone can be a decisive factor. Consider the contrast between Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
When Truman supported federal anti-lynching legislation in 1948, it wasn’t because he was more progressive or more principled than FDR. Truman simply believed he operated with more political freedom of movement than did his predecessor. For years southern Democrats in the Senate vowed they would filibuster or simply block their Democratic president’s agenda if the administration took any meaningful steps against Jim Crow. But when Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress after the 1946 midterms, this longstanding threat became a moot point.
Southern Democrats didn’t control the Senate anymore. The GOP did. Truman’s cold political facts were different than FDR’s. In 1948 Truman calculated he had more to gain from Black voters in New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the fall presidential contest than he had to lose from the solidly Democratic white South, both in the election and in Congress.
Possibly Truman and FDR alike fit seamlessly within a 100-year pattern of choices made by white politicians. When it was politically advantageous to try to do the right thing, the choices could appear noble. Politically advantageous stances can on occasion also be principled.
A politician is happiest when principle and significant electoral or legislative advantage work in harmony. Those stars aligned for Abraham Lincoln when his great rival Stephen Douglas succeeded in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln was nothing if not principled in his antislavery convictions (which, as abolitionists were quick to note, weren’t abolitionist convictions). But Lincoln’s career as a Whig in a Democratic state took off only when his party died and a majority of Illinois’ male voters found themselves in full agreement with him on Kansas-Nebraska. Like Lincoln, those voters believed Kansas-Nebraska marked a dangerous step toward slavery’s nationalization. From Lincoln’s Peoria Speech in October 1854 right up through November of 1860, it was politically advantageous for him to express his true and principled sentiments. Lincoln’s eloquence was equal parts sincere and self-serving.2
The Civil War and in particular the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ushered in a much different political configuration.3 As it happens white politicians navigating this new terrain made what we now know to be a faulty strategic assumption for the better part of 40 years. In both the North and the South those politicians believed the two-party system would likely revert to what they saw as “normal.”
Under this assumption even the Deep South would again see robust two-party competition, just as Democrats and Whigs had vied for advantage there for two decades up to the mid-1850s. Today the endless attempts by Gilded Age Republicans to assemble a coalition of enfranchised Black men and “old Whigs of the South” in locales like Mississippi or Georgia look farcical. But the GOP officials trying to do that heavy lifting and the Democrats opposing them furiously couldn’t know in real time how those attempts would fare.
In September 1875, the Republican governor of Mississippi informed the Grant administration that U.S. troops would be required in order to hold a fair election that fall. But by the mid-1870s northern whites had wearied of Reconstruction. Grant was told bluntly by a contingent of northern Republicans that sending armed forces to Mississippi would cost the GOP the state election in Ohio in October. The question was one of “duty on one side, and party obligation on the other,” Grant later recalled. “Between the two I hesitated, but finally yielded to what I believed was my party obligation.” Once again, political calculation proved decisive.
Conversely, Republicans could work to defend Black voting rights when it served the party’s interest. We see this most vividly in the debate on and ultimate demise of the so-called Lodge Bill in Congress in 1890-91. When Yglesias says Republicans “proved unwilling to sink meaningful political capital into preserving Black voting rights in the 1880s and 1890s,” he overlooks the noteworthy but ultimately doomed Lodge Bill.
Introduced in the House by 40-year-old Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the Federal Elections Bill would have put congressional elections under federal supervision. The measure was championed by President Benjamin Harrison only to be denounced in the South and by Democrats nationally as the Force Bill.
Plainly it was in the narrow political interest of the Republican party that the Fifteenth Amendment be enforced. The GOP stood to benefit if Black men exercised their constitutional rights by voting in congressional elections. By pursuing its own self-interest the Republican party could in this instance do the right thing. For their part Democrats focused on precisely this charge of self-interest as well as on the putative sanctity of states’ rights. The Lodge Bill was nothing less than “treason disguised,” according to Democrats. The Atlanta Constitution called on the South to boycott all imports from the North. Democrats in the Deep South were gravely concerned the bill would be enacted and that Black men would indeed enjoy free and unfettered voting rights in races for the House of Representatives.
In 1891 the Lodge Bill was defeated in the Senate as Democrats and a crucial handful of Republicans found common cause in burying it without a vote. Colorado GOP Senator Edward Wolcott gave the measure what was in effect its epitaph: “There are many things more important and vital to the welfare of the nation than that the colored citizens of the South shall vote.”
For Democrats it wasn’t enough that the Lodge Bill had been defeated. The party found competitive benefit in the fact that the measure had even been proposed. Grover Cleveland, the former and future president, spoke at Cooper Union in the fall of 1891 and claimed the nation had witnessed Republicans “planning to retain partisan ascendancy by throttling and destroying the freedom and integrity of the suffrage through the most radical and reckless legislation.” In his 1892 campaign for the presidency Cleveland fairly waved the bloody shirt of the Lodge Bill. “I regard it as a most atrocious measure,” he wrote in a public letter that summer, “and I do not see how any Democrat can think otherwise.”
As with the example of Lincoln in the 1850s, Lodge personally was in all likelihood genuine in his motives. “No people can afford to write anything into their Constitution and not sustain it,” he claimed, adding in his own journal, “I believe more deeply in the cause than in anything I ever thought of.” His actions were perhaps both partisan and principled.4
The exception to this rule of interwoven idealism and self-interest would appear to be Lyndon Johnson’s storied quote about Democrats losing the South for good by virtue of his signature on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet even here the politician doing the right thing may not have been completely immune to competitive calculations. When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act that July he knew Barry Goldwater had in effect sewn up the Republican presidential nomination. By pushing the bill through Congress Johnson now stood in stark contrast to the GOP nominee, a prominent opponent of the measure.
Politicians can and usually will disappoint us when it’s in their competitive interest to do so. But every once in a while, as examples from Truman to Lincoln and Lodge to LBJ suggest, doing the right thing can coincide with partisan advantage.
If anything FDR’s pragmatist streak went deeper still. The Democratic coalition coming out of the 1932 landslide was extraordinarily diverse. President Roosevelt believed it was in his best interest and that of his party to try to keep everyone on side, including even (what to modern eyes are) incorrigibles like Gene Talmadge, the segregationist governor of Georgia, and William Randolph Hearst, the red-baiting media titan. As it happens FDR failed and both men opposed the president in 1936. Talmadge even embarked on a national speaking tour as part of an ill-starred challenge for the presidential nomination. But FDR did try.
Lincoln of course lost his Senate race against Douglas in 1858, but he made his name as a national figure as the greatest and most persuasive antagonist of the Little Giant. Throughout the late 1850s he was one of the most sought after speakers in the burgeoning national Republican party. Indeed Lincoln received votes for the 1856 GOP vice presidential nomination despite a thin resume that showed just one term in Congress in the 1840s. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, the consequent demise of the Whig party, and, no less, the emergence of Illinois as a swing state experiencing explosive population growth all fueled Lincoln’s rise to prominence in 1854-55.
Before passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 white southerners typically rebuffed calls for enfranchising Black men by noting that in this respect the North was being hypocritical. The southerners had a point. In his definitive history of American suffrage Alexander Keyssar noted that between 1863 and 1870 “proposals to enfranchise [Blacks] were defeated in more than 15 northern states and territories. Most of these decisions came in public referenda, and the vote rarely was close. Indeed, prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, only Iowa and Minnesota, in 1868, adopted impartial suffrage, and the Minnesota vote was facilitated by wording that masked the subject of the referendum….Although most northern Republicans supported black suffrage, Democrats adamantly were opposed, and they generally were joined by enough Republicans to guarantee popular or legislative defeat….”
President Harrison appears to have been a true believer in the Lodge Bill as well, even granting a rare newspaper interview: “It will not do for the people of any section to say that they must be left alone, that it is a local question to be settled by the States of whether we shall have honest elections or not.”