BEWARE A GLOBAL GESTAPO!
Hesseltine, William B.
Beware A Global Gestapo! By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fourth and test of a series of articles by Pr«of. Hesseltine on American experience with the policing of a conquered...
...The Republican Party, freed from responsibility to the electorate, became rotten...
...it would sweep away all opposition the intelligent class might make...
...Americans, too, have tried military government and peace-with-policemen before—and the experiment was a failure...
...Bat the Negro showed remarkable power for learning polities quickly...
...But, as the picture of Southern conditions unfolded, the people began to perceive the fundamental conflict between economic and political control...
...Before many years, the Negroes became dissatisfied with their new guardians...
...But, not only did the Southern white rebel, the Northern white man revolted as well...
...They were manned by carpetbaggers, who were frequently venal, and by Negroes who were mostly ignorant...
...South Carolina's debt went from $6,000,000 to $25,000,000...
...The KXK Comes To Life In fact, the state governments in the South, maintained in power by the Army, were designed for loot rather than profits...
...1877...
...Disillusioned, they were a dangerous element in society...
...If these "ignorant voters" combined with the Southern Negroes they might, indeed, have been "dangerous to the interests of society," Faced by such a danger, even Big Business determined to abandon Reconstruction...
...The final act in the Reconstruction drama came in April...
...Virginia, for example, had had a state debt of $16,000,000 at the close of the Civil War...
...Slavery had been a poor school of citizenship, and the ex-slaves floundered at first into the Republicans' outstretched arms...
...The only permanent results of the program were the Bourbon-dominated "Solid South," an intensified race prejudice, and a deep-seated bitterness between the sections...
...Under carpetbag misrule...
...Of course, there's more pro-war propaganda than post-war promise in such globaloney, but, if it weren't for one fundamental defect, the dream might come true...
...The United Nations should know as much: in one form or another, they have tried military government and police methods enough times before to know that they will not work...
...The system provided none of these, and, in the end, it even failed to bring profits...
...The results of their work were seen in the mounting debts of the states...
...But the Negroes began to learn the lessons of politics...
...The black voters compared their return to virtual slavery with the roseate promises the carpetbaggers had made...
...Eventually, the Northern people came to understand that the Southern policy was costing the whole nation more than it was worth...
...In addition, the Southern States sent representatives to Congress who became tools in the hands of Big Business...
...Of course, it's possible to have a world of plenty, a world of decency and democracy, an earthly paradise of brotherly love and human perfection...
...Under their rule, the South witnessed a riot of corruption...
...The Secretary of War took a bribe for appointing an Indian trader, and President Grant's private secretary was secret agent for a "Whiskey Ring" which defrauded the Treasury of internal revenue...
...He was not President by the free choice of the independent voters...
...Reconstruction ruined the South and did permanent damage to the nation...
...In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant had been elected with a popular majority of 300,000 votes...
...The act symbolized the complete failure of the ill-advised effort to police the conquered South...
...They perfected means of corrupting the ballot-box, and they won control of their states, despite the military, by fraud and violence...
...The system was really designed to exploit the South for Northern profits, but it was justified on high-sounding grounds of morality, democracy, and justice...
...They held taxpayers conventions to protest expenditures, but the tax-makers in the legislatures were not property holders and had no sympathy with the plight of their former masters...
...POSTWAR PLANNERS with pipe dreams of an era of prefabricated houses with ice-boxes containing built-in television sets, of plastic and streamlined automobiles, and of the abolition of obituary columns through the use of penicillin, usually base their predictions on the assumption that an international police force will preserve peace, prosperity, and pleasure forever in their soy-bean world...
...Many thoughtful Men are apprehensive that the ignorant voters will, in the future, form a political party by themselves as dangerous to the interests of society as the communists of France...
...The carpetbaggers—as any intelligent Negro could see—took all the better offices, and the colored voters began to question the proportionate division of the spoils...
...Hesseltine on American experience with the policing of a conquered people...
...Texas' from nothing to $4,000,000, and Louisiana's from $6,000,000 to $50,000,-000...
...Such was the American experience in preserving peace and prosperity through policemen...
...by 1870 it was $40,000,000 and taxes amounted to more than a million dollars a year...
...Finally, the tax-burdened and disgusted people turned to extra-legal means...
...But one element in the picture of prosperity and peace through plastics and policemen is fatal— the policemen...
...As part of a bargain in the Disputed Election of 1876, President Haves withdrew the Federal troops from the South...
...When Republicans split into factions, Negro politicians played politics for their own profits...
...Big business—"the intelligent class"—might well have been pJarmed at the prospect...
...At the close of the Civil War, the victorious North imposed military government on the defeated South, and for a dozen years supported an occupying army which maintained satellite governments in the Southern states...
...GOP Grows Rotten Moreover, Northerners began to see that the South "was corrupting the nation...
...The rising tax rates and the mounting corruption finally drove the Southern whites to desperation...
...With the troops gone, the carpetbag governments could not stand, and the last carpetbag governors quit their offices...
...So long as corruption, supported by Federal troops, held sway in the South, the conquered region gave no security for Northern investments...
...Race prejudice and lyach-law were the permanent results of the white man's revolt...
...Peace, prosperity, and plastic helicopters ean be had—but not so long as steel for plowshares is perverted into swords...
...At the moment, the National Labor Union was organizing a Labor Reform P-"»-tv annonjr eastern workers, and the Patrons of Husbandry were organizing Granges among western farmers...
...If these were added to the Negroes, he proclaimed, "so vast a mass of ignorance would be found that, if combined for any political warpose...
...Congressmen voted themselves increases in salary in a "back-pay steal," sold appointments to West Point, or took shares of stock in the infamous Credit Mobilier...
...Even the Big Business beneficiaries of the system began to realize that they were playing with fire...
...The memory of Reconstruction might well induce a skepticism about present-day plans for a global police force, military governments, and subservient nations...
...Originally, the Northern people had had a humanitarian interest in the Negro and had regarded the South as a field for economic development...
...One alarmed observer estimated that there were 6,000 illiterate white males in Georgia...
...They developed the underground Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Negroes and to beat and murder carpetbaggers...
...The carpetbaggers and Negroes financed railroads out of the state treasuries, engaged in every known form of governmental graft, developed bribery into a high art, and raised the tax rates to extortionate heights...
...So long as the newly-freed Negroes of the South remained placid and grateful, they elected—under the ultimate authority of the military—the "right" kind of state officers and sent compliant representatives to Congress...
...But 402,000 controlled Negroes in the South had voted for him while Southern whites were excluded from the poll's...
...In rapid succession, after the election of 1872, a series of scandals broke upon the nation...
...Federal troops in the South were keeping the Republican Party in control at Washington and the nation's Government was tending to be as corrupt as South Carolina's...
...In 1872 Grant was reelected by Negro votes...
...But it cannot be had under the auspices of a global Gestapo, a worldwide FBI, of an international police force...
...A Harvest Of Bitterness Moreover, economic conditions in the South were rapidly transforming the masses of Negroes into sharecroppers...
...It failed to achieve its noble, humanitarian promises, or its real, predatory purposes...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 18
