There’s a spreading trend that has me worried as a history major: historical revisionism. The practice has been around forever, from the Spanish-American War to the Gulf of Tonkin. What’s most alarming is that it’s done most frequently by people who really don’t know anything about history, like people who claim that taxes are at unprecedented levels (The top tax rate is currently 39%, it was 50% under Ronald Reagan)
Revisionist history can have serious implications, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t, from time to time, be delightfully entertaining. Prime example: the brand spankin’ new Republican National Committee website GOP.com, which claims on its “Heroes” page that several prominent black figures were Republicans.
One of these people is Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the color barrier. While black Republicans are not an unheard of group, it was a curious choice. Especially since the only real evidence for the claim is that Robinson once supported a Republican governor.
But he also had extremely harsh words for the Republican Party. Commenting on the shift towards Barry Goldwater-style conservatism by the Republican Party, Robinson said that he had “a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” That’s quite a statement coming from a party “hero.”
Regardless of Robinson’s role, any Republican “hero” before 1964 shouldn’t really count at all. In 1964, the United States went through the largest political shift since the Whig party dissolved. The Great Society was passed that year, and in it was a large and powerful civil rights act.
Prior to 1964, today’s traditional party roles were reversed. The Northern Liberal party with relatively heavy black leadership was the Republican Party, while the Southern Conservative Party was the Democratic Party. Which is to say a Republican today would have likely been a Democrat prior to 1964, and vice-versa.
So really, any Republican hero before 1964 should be re-branded a Liberal hero.
Which leaves the new GOP.com with Reagan and… Nixon?
So whenever you hear Sean Hannity say that the Republicans are the “Civil Rights” party because they passed the first civil rights bill, just remember this bit of inconvenient history.
This is what happens when conservatives take over school boards, and textbooks need to pass “patriotism panels” real science goes first, and history is always sure to follow.
Right now, in Texas, the Board of Education is attempting to remove civil rights leaders from the history books, to be replaced with more information about “real American” heroes like Christopher Columbus (who was neither the first explorer to discover the Americas, nor an American for that matter).
As the saying goes, “those who fail history are doomed to revise it.”
