Emerson's Rhetorical Bomb at Harvard Divinity Became Foundational to U.S. Culture With Murfin Verse

 

A centennial edition of the speech that threw down a gauntlet.

It was a fine Summer Sunday afternoon on July 15, 1838 when fewer than 100 people jammed into a small second floor Divinity Hall chapel at Harvard.  The occasion was the commencement ceremony for the latest crop of Harvard Divinity School graduates.  There were seven that year, six of whom were in attendance.  That was more than enough young men to meet the needs of Unitarian congregations that were clustered mostly in New England.  The class selected the main speaker for the day—a youngish former Unitarian minister now making a name for himself as a lecturer, essayist, and poet.  His heterodox views were well known, but Harvard authorities probably hoped that he would mute them in deference to his old alma mater and prevailing Unitarian sensibilities.

That Ralph Waldo Emerson did not do.

Instead, he read an indictment of Unitarian worship and preaching, which he charged was disconnected from life and drained of spirituality. He went on to a critique of Christianity in general as practiced.  He discounted the miracles of the Bible, and rejected the divinity of Christ, mocking the attention to the person of Jesus as a distraction from his message.  He offered novel alternatives to the authority of the Church—the direct experience of the divine.  It was a clarion call for what might be called post-Christian religion.  There would soon be a name for it—a name Emerson did not particularly like—Transcendentalism.

The young graduates may have been inspired by the challenge Emerson laid before them.  Their professors, the worthies of Harvard, the parents of the graduates, the learned clergy of Boston, and both the denominational and public press were united in outrage, especially when Emerson’s Divinity School Address was published.  Despite his soaring reputation as America’s most significant intellectual and most original philosopher Emerson would be banned from speaking again at Harvard for more than 30 years.

The leading Unitarian journal, The Christian Examiner dismissed Emerson’s comments as, “…so far as they are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructors of the school, and to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither good divinity nor good sense.”

                                    Harvard professor and historian of American Unitarianism Andrews Norton led the conservative charge against Emerson's perceived apostasy.

Andrews Norton, a professor at Harvard, the recent author of the definitive history of Unitarian thought, and with William Ellery Channing a leading figure in the denomination, led the charge against Emerson and his heresy.  The so-called “Unitarian Pope” responded to Emerson in an address the following year to the alumni of the Divinity School at their Commencement reunion.  His lecture, the Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, indicted the European philosophers Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and Hegel, on whom he blamed transcendental error and refuted Emerson by indirection, without mentioning him or taking explicit issue with his views.

When Emerson’s friend and ally George Ripley answered and refuted Norton in a pamphlet of his own, the controversy erupted on a more personal note and Norton, a daring liberal thinker in his youth, spent most of the rest of his life as a neo-orthodox reactionary to the new theological thinking, and in the process muddied his own reputation.

If the establishment rallied against Emerson and his new-fangled ideas, he had his supporters.  Along with Ripley other ministers offered support including Frederic Henry Hedge, who first convened the meeting of what would become known as the Transcendentalist Club, and rising star Theodore Parker who would come to fame as the preacher of his own proto-mega church and as a fiery abolitionist who was also shunned by the closed club of Unitarian ministers.  Channing, who occasionally attended Transcendentalist Club meetings, while disagreeing with Emerson on some points, refrained from joining the attack on him. 

Emerson also enjoyed the support of the growing salon of intellectuals he gathered around him and who became collectively one of the most significant, if not the most significant, philosophical movements in American history.  These included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), the Peabody Sisters, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing (not to be confused with his near-namesake cousin), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller among others.  Together they would amplify Emerson’s philosophy and imbed it deeply into American culture.

The young ministers who invited Emerson that day and the generations that followed them would themselves become, more or less, Transcendentalist.  Within a generation they supplanted the old establishment and bring Unitarianism itself into conformation with the new ideas.  Which is why Emerson later in life could comfortably return to his old faith home and why Harvard, at long last, forgave their most illustrious son and not only invited him back to speak but elected him to the Board of Overseers.

All is forgiven now at Harvard.  The cramped Chapel where Emerson delivered his address is now named for him and the speech is annually celebrated.

But if the Divinity School Address was simply a revolution in the minor American sect of Unitarianism, it would be, at best, a footnote to history.  But its implications reverberated across American culture and resonate today.  In fact, they resonate with even more urgency and reflect the values of a growing generation that has defined itself as “spiritual but not religious.”  Emerson sounds almost as if he were speaking for them.

So what, exactly, did he say?  Here are some samples. 

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages…

… The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, — by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I ought;” when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown….

… Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain…

… Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America, is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be “A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,” than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature; you must accept our interpretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it…

… Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dullness and ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged…

… Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, “I also am a man.” Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel…

… I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

 

                           

                                    Emerson about the time of the Divinity School Address.

In reflecting on all of this one lazy Sunday afternoon some years ago, I set down my own thoughts.

Here’s to You, Ralph Waldo

 

You have reached across time

and found me dozing on an afternoon,

reached your hand down

and shaken me by the toe

until I stir bewildered.

 

Wake up! you cry,

the world is waiting to be noticed,

the very autumn air vibrant with miracles,

the incessant sun prying into every dark space

for you, if you will see it,

if you will be it!

 

The deadest of white males,

you have climbed long-limbered

from the pages of a book

splayed open on my desk,

swept your arm wide around the random piles,

            half-read volumes,

half-completed projects,

half-lived life that is my study

and demanded I seize my life,

clear my head of every derivation,

even that from the dust of your own mouth,

and speak at last my own revelation.

 

So, here’s to you Ralph Waldo,

Dreamer,

Darer,

Doer.

 

—Patrick  Murfin

 

From We Build Temple in the Heart, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2004.

France’s la Fête Nationale or Bastille Day--Parisiens Celebrate the Revolution not the State

  

Many popular images of the storming of the Bastille are highly romanticized like this English school text illustration.  In reality there was relatively little fighting and only seven inmates were freed including common criminals.

It’s Bastille Day, of course, commemorating the day in 236 years ago in 1789 when the Paris Mob set off the French Revolution by storming the Bastille, a fortress prison traditionally used by the monarchy to detain its political enemies without benefit of civil appeal.  The French make a big deal of it. 

In the United States it is marked by an exceptionally busy evening in French restaurants.  A few years ago, the long-time loathing of all things French by the right wing stretching back to the panic of Federalists over the Revolution was revived and we were told that patriotic Americans must despise the Frogs and their damned holiday. 

There was a brief thaw after the Charlie Hebdo massacre if only because it gave American xenophobes an opportunity to paint Muslims as a universal threat to Western Civilization.  Then Donald Trump went to Paris.  French President Emmanuel Macron publicly made nice with the Cheeto-in-Charge and gave him the full glitz and pomp of a state visit.  They also watched the annual military parade which so deeply impressed Donnie Boy that he had to have one of his very own back home, which finally came to a feeble fruition with his Fourth of July farse with tanks on the National Mall in 2019, last Summer’s Army/Trump Birthday Parade embarrassing fizzle, and this year's U.S. Semisesquicentennial/America's County Fair debacle. 

 

Witnessing the grand military parade gave Donald Trump such a hard on that he decided that he wanted one of his very own minus the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity nonsense. 

But the flirtation with France was short-lived after Macron chimed in with other European and allied leaders, pointing out what a bonehead, bully, and bullshit artist Trump was.  Pretty soon Fox News talking heads, Congressional chest beaters, and Alt-Right hate peddlers were back on the familiar ground of dissing the French.

In France the holiday is known as La Fête Nationale—the National Celebration and it does not officially commemorate the revolutionary event at all, but rather the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and supposedly symbolizing the unity of the nation under the constitutional monarchy that preceded the First Republic.  The national holiday was established in 1880 after observances had been popularly revived in 1878 and ’79.

Celebration of the storming of the Bastille was neglected during the turbulent and bloody periods of the Revolution and suppressed under the Napoleonic Empire, the later Bourbon Restoration, and the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon.

 

More than 30,000 Parisians were executed by the National Guard after the Paris Commune was crushed in 1871.  The reactionary new Republican government was in no mood to celebrate any kind of revolutionary or insurrectionist activity.

After the Paris Commune was crushed by the National Guard in 1871 in the aftermath of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Louis Napoleon which resulted in more than 30,000 Parisians being executed, celebrations of revolutionary action by the Paris mob were naturally discouraged. 

But by the end of the decade the conservative Second Republic was searching for ways to restore national unity and reassert national pride.  On June 30, 1878 the City of Paris declared a feast in honor of the Republic which became a gay affair with boulevards lined with the Tri-color flag.  The following year the feast was moved to June 14 and a reception was held at the Chamber of Deputies, a military parade was staged, and celebrations spread to other cities giving the day semi-official recognition as a national event.

 

The flag be-draped spectacle of Paris's 1878 feast in honor of the Republic was captured by Claude Monet. 

But debate the next year about establishing Bastille Day as a national holiday in the Chamber was often bitter and divisive.  Monarchists, some of the senior military who had been involved in crushing the Commune, and other conservatives were bitterly opposed.  Instead, they proposed August 4, the anniversary of the end of serfdom under the constitutional monarchy in 1789.  But the people’s enthusiasm for Bastille Day could not be denied.

 

Celebrating the conservative Republic, national unity, and reasserting military glory not revolution was the goal illustrated in  La République triomphante 1880. 

In the end a compromise was reached to commemorate not the revolutionary action, but the Fête de la Fédération.  Authorities also made sure that the central event of the new national celebration when it was held for the first time in 1880 would be a grand military parade.  The holiday was intended to be less a celebration of the still dangerous ideas of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) than one of martial nationalism.

To this day the grand military parade, the oldest such tradition in the world, presided over by the President of the Republic and spectacular fireworks in the evening are the center pieces of the official celebration. 

 

Besides the grand military parade and fireworks spectacular ordinary Parisians traditionally celebrate by dancing in the streets. 

But stop a Parisian on the street and ask what he or she is celebrating and there is no talk of the Fête de la Fédération.  Paris celebrates Bastille Day.  There will be dancing in the streets.

 

Defections to the Right, Defections to the Left--HST Charged into Dewey's Guns

 

Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey stoked the rage of Southern delegates to the 1948 Democratic National Convention with his call for a strong Civil Rights plank in the platform.  He also made himself a national figure and leader of the liberal wing of the party.

Things were tense in the steaming Convention Hall in Philadelphia on July 14, 1948 as delegates prepared to vote on the nomination of Harry S Truman for a full term in his own right.  Delegates from the Solid South were restive and angry.  Earlier the youthful Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey roused liberal delegates with a rip-roaring appeal for a strong Civil Rights plank in the Party Platform.  Outraged Southerners booed and cursed.

Harry Truman was considered by many that year as “a gone goose,” in the words of Clare Booth Luce speaking to the Republican Convention in the same city three weeks earlier. The GOP had already captured both Houses of Congress by secure margins for the first time since 1928 in mid-term elections.  The established press and much of the country considered Truman at best an accidental place-holder and a Missouri hick unfit for the demands of the office and the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The Republicans nominated popular governors Thomas E. Dewey of New York for President and Earl Warren of California as his running mate on a relatively liberal platform.

Moreover, Truman was under attack by the left wing of his own party unhappy with his increasingly hostile relations with former World War II ally, the Soviet Union and suspicious of his commitment to Civil Rights and a continuation of New Deal policies.  They were rallying behind popular agronomist and former Vice President and Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace who would soon bolt the party and run on the independent Progressive Party ticket.

Just before the convention this cartoon shows Truman as most concerned with a brewing liberal rebellion.  The sweating men included New York Mayor William O'Dwyer and James Roosevelt, son of FDR. 

But Truman’s real problem in the Party was in the South.  Traditionally conservative Democrats had generally gone along with the New Deal, using their seniority in Congress to shepherd through much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda.  In exchange, to the dismay of northern liberals and his wife, Roosevelt had not advanced a Civil Rights program.  But the war changed that.  Moves were made to pay for Black troops and sailors serving in segregated units the same as Whites and, after Bayard Rustin threatened to lead a war-time march on Washington, a guarantee of equal opportunity and pay in defense industries.  Both actions were an anathema to Southerners who also now feared an influx of “cocky” Black veterans ready to challenge the existing order.  Now Truman, with the strong backing of the beloved and influential former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was supporting strong new Civil Rights legislation.

Truman, hoping to shore up his shaky support on the left and as a signal that he was committed to Civil Rights, was hoping to have the young and very liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas as his running mate.  But Douglas had him down preferring to remain on the Court with a chance for promotion to Chief Justice.  Instead, Truman turned to an old war horse, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had galvanized the Convention on opening day with a rousing, chest thumping stem-winder of a Keynote Speech.  Perhaps Barkley presence on the ticket might also re-assure the restive Southerners.

Truman tapped popular New Dealer, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky as a running mate hoping to shore up his support from Roosevelt loyalists and in the hope that the border state figure would reassure Southern delegates.  It worked on the former, failed with the latter.  Here the running mates are seen on Truman's Whistle Stop campaign tour.

The agenda was packed on the final day of the Convention.  The first order of business was the adoption of a Party Platform including Humphrey’s Civil Rights Plank which enjoyed the support of the President. The bitter debate dragged on far past schedule.  When the vote was taken party liberals with the strong support of labor delegates edged the South.

Angrily, Governor Strom Thurman of South Carolina stormed out of the Convention trailing 36 delegates including the entire Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama’s.  They met as a rump in a hotel room to watch the rest of the Convention unfold on the first televised broadcast.

The Mississippi delegation followed Strom Thurman out of the Convention in mass.  The Black newsboy seems caught by surprise. 

The remaining Southern delegates put Georgia Senator Richard Russell in nomination.  Although the results were never in doubt, the nominating speeches and long-winded orations excoriating the President and the Convention during the Roll Call of the States kept Truman waiting in his hotel room until well past midnight.

At 2 am on the 15th the President, in a crisp white summer suit, finally took to the podium for his acceptance speech, well after most radio listeners and television viewers had gone to bed.  But Truman electrified the convention with an aggressive speech that set the stage for his famed underdog campaign.  He vigorously defended the New Deal and pledged to continue its reforms.  He lashed the “Do nothing Congress” and said he would call it into special session and dare the Republican body to enact the provisions of their liberal party platform.  “The battle lines of 1948 are the same as they were in 1932,” he declared, “when the nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction.”  And he refused to back down on Civil Rights.

                          

                                        Truman gave an electrifying acceptance speech--at 2 am long after most American had gone to bed.

If the folks at home only got to see the performance in newsreels a few days later, Truman’s performance rallied most of the rest of the convention delegates who began to believe that he might actually prevail in November.  But those remaining Southerners either left in disgust or sat on their hands.

Shortly after the Convention, Truman defiantly signed the long-anticipated Executive Order desegregating the Armed Forces.

In response, Southerners met at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for President and Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for Vice president. The new party named itself the States’ Rights Democratic Party but was universally referred to as the Dixiecrats.

The Dixiecrat ticket.

A few weeks later at a second meeting in Oklahoma City, they adopted a platform that made it crystal clear what they stood for:

We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights…. We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.

The strategy of the Dixiecrats was simple.  They would take over state Democratic Parties where possible and replace Truman with Thurman while running no state or local candidates.  Failing that, they would get on the ballot as a third party.  They succeeded in taking over the parties of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina and were on the ballot of the remaining states of the Old Confederacy and in some border states—but not Truman’s Missouri or Barkley’s Kentucky.

As the campaign heated up Wallace and the Progressive party began to flounder, especially when he refused to renounce the public support and endorsement of the Communist Party.  Many liberals, fearing the three-way party split would usher in the Republicans, returned to the Democratic fold, if not entirely enthusiastically.  

Former Vice President Henry Wallace tried to run as the true heir to FDR and the New Deal, but his campaign collapsed over the endorsement and support of the Communist Party.  The left wing of the Democratic Party was virtually destroyed.

In the meantime, Wallace’s connections with the Communists re-assured voters tempted to stray to the Republicans that the President was not himself the Red menace painted by the right of the GOP and the Dixiecrats.

Then Truman turned in the greatest campaign in American history, his famed Whistle Stop Tour where he stirred up voters with his famous Give ‘em Hell speeches.  Dewey and Warren ran predictable, dull campaigns making boring speeches full of safe, empty platitudes to polite partisan crowds in major cities.

Early polling showed the GOP with such a heavy lead that most news providers decided to suspend polling to save money.  The press, ensconced in the big cities, hardly noticed the growing enthusiasm for Truman everywhere he appeared.  The pundits unanimously regarded the splintered Democrats as dead in the water.  Almost everyone predicted a Dewey landslide.  The Chicago Tribune confidently printed a headline announcing “Dewey Beat Truman” in its early edition the morning after the polls closed but before the actual results were in.

            The most famous photo in American political history.

In the end, of course, Truman was the gloating winner.  Despite the multiple parties on the ballot the President almost won an outright majority of the popular vote—49.6%.  He swamped Dewey with 45.1%, Thurman with 2.9%. Wallace was not far behind that. 

The Dixiecrats were able to carry four states—Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana plus one Congressional District in Tennessee for a total of 39 Electoral College votes.  The Republicans carried most of the Northeast except for Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as two Mid-western states, the Prairie States from Kansas to North Dakota, and Oregon for 189 Electoral votes.  Truman took the rest of the states, including those who had been in the Confederacy, for a whopping 303 Electoral votes.  Although Wallace ran a close fourth in the popular vote, he failed to carry a single state and his utter defeat, along with rising anti-communist hysteria, crushed the far left of the Democratic Party.

After the election the Dixiecrats all returned to the Democratic fold.  Those in Congress, where Democrats had resumed control in the House of Representatives and Senate by comfortable margins, were allowed to retain their seniority status, including the Chairmanships of many of the most important committees.  Truman would have to rely on these former foes to advance his agenda. They generally did, although they blocked his Civil Rights program and his proposal for universal health care insurance.

Segregationist Democrats remained in power across the South, although their voters were more restive each election about the national ticket.  With the adoption of a succession of major Civil Rights bills culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Southern Democrats began their stampede away from the Democratic Party, just as Lyndon Johnson ruefully predicted.  Many supported arch-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace in his 1968 Presidential bid under the American Independent Party banner, and his 1972 run for the Democratic Party nomination which only ended with the attempted assassination that left him gravely injured.

In 1968 Richard Nixon launched his ultimately successful Southern Strategy to lure Wallace and conservative voters to the GOP.  Over the next decades the once Solid South turned increasingly Republican, symbolized by the defection of Senator Strom Thurman himself.

By the early 21st Century the process was complete, and the South was such a solid base for the Republicans that it drove the erstwhile party of Lincoln further and further to the right.  Along with libertarian ideologues and MAGA zombies the modern GOP is now unrecognizable from its historic roots.  Despite Donald Trump’s disastrous first term, the 2022 Capitol insurrection, and his criminal convictions, he made an astonishing come-back against Joe Biden. 

And in so many ways this whole landslide of history began with the snit and walk-out of the Dixiecrats 78 years ago.

Adams the Younger--The Son Also Rises Part II

                 

                            John Quincy Adams presidential portrait.

The years of the Monroe Administration were already being called the Era of Good Feelings because following the War of 1812 the Federalists had all but disappeared making the Democratic Republicans the single major political party.  But it was unwieldy and had lost the ideological cohesion of the heady days of the Revolution of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and the party swept into office, crushing John Adam’s hopes for a second term.

The orderly system of party caucus which anointed the favorite of the sitting President had broken down and the era of Revolutionary Founders had run out.  Despite the advantage of being Monroe’s obvious choice and a distinguished eight years as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams found himself no more than a regional choice of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.  Other regionally backed candidates emerged to challenge him—John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, William H. Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. 

Each also represented a nuanced political difference.  Calhoun was a fierce nationalist in those days. Clay was the leader of a faction that wanted western expansion and Federally funded internal improvements like canals and roads.  Crawford was the choice of former Presidents Jefferson and Madison as the logical defender of traditional Republicanism.  And the bellicose Jackson ran as an old conservative favoring limited Federal authority on one hand and western populism on the other.  Adams was left as what we would call today a technocrat who had no independent patronage base.

With no unseemly public campaigning by any of the candidates, the race devolved into complicated jockeying for position in the background.  Calhoun dropped out of the race, presumably in favor of Jackson, but possibly also to benefit his fellow Unitarian Adams—the two were among the co-founders of Washington’s All Souls Church.  At any rate, both Adams and Jackson named him their vice-presidential running mate. Crawford, with strong support across the old South, fell ill and for a while looked like he might also have to drop out.  The popular Jackson swamped Clay in the West.  

After the November election there was no clear Electoral College winner.  Adams carried 7 states with 84 Electoral Votes.  Jackson did even better—12 states with 99 votes, but not enough to carry the day.  Crawford lagged far behind with 2 states and 41 votes.  With the race destined to go to the House of Representatives the odd man out Clay, who carried three states but only 37 votes despite besting Crawford in the popular vote, threw his considerable support in the House to Adams insuring a victory in that body.  Clay’s national program was clearly closer to Adams than any other candidate and he personally distrusted his regional rival Jackson.

Jackson, the leader in both electoral and popular votes was outraged.  That outrage grew when Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State.  Jackson furiously charged that the election had been stolen from him by a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay.  He immediately launched what amounted to a four-year campaign to build a political organization to crush Adams in 1832 and win the Presidency and vindication.

Adams, a stickler for separation of church and state, became the only man to be sworn into the Presidency with his hand on a copy of the Constitution not the Bible.

With most pressing foreign policy issues laid to rest by his own successful eight years as head of the State Department, Adams concentrated on domestic issues, at first with some success.  With the support of Clay, now his most trusted advisor, the President pushed an aggressive program of internal improvements and won funding for such projects as the extension of the Cumberland Road into Ohio, the beginning of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, the construction of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal and the Louisville & Portland Canal around the falls of the Ohio, the connection of the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana; and the enlargement and rebuilding of the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.

He also supported a high protective tariff, popular both in industrializing New England and Mid-Atlantic states and which was a keystone of Clay’s American System.  But as maneuvering for a new, higher tariff bill went forward, Adams’s supporters in Congress, now known as National Republicans, lost control to Jackson’s supporters, now known as Democrats.  In tricky and duplicitous maneuvering designed by Vice President Calhoun, tariffs on raw materials thought to be obnoxious to New England were added to the bill in the hope that many representatives of that region would be forced to abandon their support.  Then the Southern Democrats, who put forth the program, would withdraw their support, dooming the tariff.  But it did not work out that way.  A substantial minority of New Englanders in Congress supported the Tariff as best for the whole nation.  When not enough of them turned against it, the Tariff of 1828 passed. 

Adams signed it in the face of voracious opposition from the South which labeled it the Tariff of Abominations because of the hardships it imposed on the Planter class, which was dependent on cheap imported manufactured goods. Adams knew it was probably the end of his presidency.

In the election of 1828, the careful plans of Jackson and his new Democratic Party came to fruition.  Adams, like his father, was swept out of office by a virtual bloodless revolution.  Jackson conducted the first real popular election campaign for president while Adams sat traditionally above the fray and reluctant to engage in retail politics to shore up support.  

This map shows how overwhelmed John Quincy Adams was in the election of 1828.

Jackson, with Calhoun once again his running mate, won 15 states, 178 Electoral College votes, and carried a landslide 56% of the popular vote.  Adams and new running mate Richard Rush could only garner 83 Electoral votes from 9 states.  Despite not caring much for the job, the rejection stung.  Like his father before him, Adams left town before his enemy’s inauguration.

Adams decided to do what no other former President had ever done, and none has done since—run for election to the House of Representatives.  He was handily elected as a National Republican in 1840 and went on to be returned to the House seven more times until he literally died in his traces.

In his early years in the House, he led opposition to Jackson’s popular Indian Removal policies and defended the Second Bank of The United States, the main target of Jackson’s wrath.

A run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1834 failed when he lost to a Democrat.  But he kept his House seat.

Adams became increasingly concerned with rising sectionalism, and particularly the issue of the expansion of slavery.  He felt that slavery would either destroy the Union or be ended by a blood bath slave insurrection.

In 1836 the House voted for the so-called Gag Rule which immediately tabled any petitions about slavery, banning discussion or debate of the issue.  The crafty Adams found a way to bring the discussion to the fore anyway.  He laid a petition from a Georgia man calling for disunion to support slavery in the South.  Although he did not support the petition, he did so because it violated the Gag Rule.  Infuriated Southerners called for his censure.  But in his defense in a trial before the House, Adams was able to bring up the topics of slavery and the dangers to democracy by the Gag Rule.  He wielded control of the debate for two solid weeks, gaining national attention.  When the Democratic majority realized that they had been trapped, they tried to withdraw the charges.  But Adams would not let them.  He insisted on an up-or-down vote which he won.

Adams would challenge the Gag Rule again and again, proud to “be obnoxious to the faction.”

If he was obnoxious before, he doubled down during the Amistad Case.  A shipload of chained slaves destined for sale in the Caribbean managed to take control of their Spanish slave ship, La Amistad in 1839, killing many of the crew and forcing the survivors to return them to Africa.  The crew tricked the mutineers and instead sailed north into American waters where the ship was intercepted by a Revenue Cutter off the shores of New York. 

The slaves were taken into custody and the Spanish government demanded the return of its “rightful property.”  A Federal District Court, however, ruled that under the terms of a treaty between Great Britain and the United States which outlawed the international slave trade, Spain had no claim on the men.  Moreover, it ruled that they had properly taken action to free themselves from what amounted to an illegal kidnapping.

The decision outraged Southerners and set up a major diplomatic crisis with the Spanish.  President Martin Van Buren ordered the Justice Department to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.  Congressman Adams offered his assistance in arguing the case before the Court.  After Roger Sherman Baldwin, the young lawyer who represented the slaves from the beginning opened with two days of argument, Adams stood before the Court on his own on February 24, 1841.

John Quincy Adams arguing in defense of the Amistad rebels before the Supreme Court.  The skilled and detailed summation of the issues went on for hours and one justice literally died on the bench.

He boldly attacked President Van Buren for inappropriately assuming unconstitutional powers in the case by ordering intervention.  Then as the most experienced diplomat in American history and the actual author of some of the Treaties cited by Attorney General Gilpin who was personally arguing the case for the government, Adams skillfully demolished claims that the treaties demanded the return of the men to Spain.  Adams argued for eight and a half hours during which time Justice Philip Barbour died.  After a recess for the funeral, he concluded his arguments on March 1.

The Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling on March 9 with Justice Joseph Story citing many of Adams’s arguments in the ruling that freed the rebels.

Adams became a hero of the cause of anti-slavery and more of a villain than ever to the South.

Back in Congress he continued to oppose slavery in any way possible and continued his attacks on the Gag Rule.  He led opposition to the Annexation of Texas as a slave state.

His other major contributions in Congress included authoring a compromise on the Tariff of 1828 that he himself had signed ending the Nullification Crisis and the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution with the funds bequeathed to the United States by English millionaire James Smithson for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” A lot of hands were out for a slice of that pie, but Adams insisted on the creation of a national academy.  When the bequest was unwisely invested in shaky bonds, Adams argued to immediately accept the money with repayment of the losses.  Congress decided to accept the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836.

John Quincy Adams became the first President ever photographed when he sat for this daguerreotype as a member of the House of Representatives shortly before his death.

Indefatigably, Adams plugged on despite deteriorating health and advaanced age. But on February 28, 1848 Adams rose to speak against a resolution honoring officers who served in the Mexican War, which he had voraciously opposed.  With opponents trying to shout him down, Adams suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage while standing at his desk and collapsed.  He was carried to the Speaker’s Room off the floor of the House where two days later he died after whispering to his wife and son Charles Francis, “This is the last of earth. I am content.”

John Quincy Adams on his death bed in the Speaker's Room of the House of Representatives in a late 19th Century print.

After a brief internment in the Capitol crypt, his remains were returned to Quincy where he was first laid to rest in the church yard of First Parish Church.  Later his remains were moved to a crypt inside the church next to his mother and father.  The resting place can still be viewed at the Unitarian church that came to be called the Church of the Presidents.