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Dialogue Of Cultures

SCHILLER INSTITUTE
Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference
"The Palmerston Zoo"

Jim Crow, a cultural weapon in
the hands of the Confederacy

by Dennis Speed

Presidents Day, 1994

This report is adapted from presentations delivered to the Conference of the Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference in suburban Washington, DC., on President's Day weekend, 1994. See Solving the Paradox of Current World History" for the setting of the following articles. It was published as a special report by EIR, and is available in photocopy. Contact Schiller Institute at email or phone numbers listed below.

Links to the all the panel presentations are included below.

Solving the Paradox of Current World History - Nancy Spannaus, Panel Chair

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Jim Crow, a cultural weapon in
the hands of the Confederacy

by Dennis Speed

Chorus: Today, in 1850, Great Britain and the United States are traditional enemies moving toward their third military conflict after the American Revolution and the War of 1812. During the Civil War, the United States and Russia will together confront Lord Palmerston with a kind of League of Cambrai experience: the specter of these two great powers arrayed against the British Empire and its stooges, in a world war that London would almost certainly lose. After the Confederacy's defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, the British will resign themselves to the continued existence of the United States for some time to come. They will rather focus their endeavors on using the United States and its power as a weapon in their own hands against Germany, Japan, Russia, and the developing countries. Cultural and financial subjugation will precede military exploitation; the Specie Resumption Act, the control of the the U.S. public debt by J.P. Morgan, and the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, will mark the way toward the so-called "special relationship," with American muscle working for the brain in London. Under these auspices, British geopolitics will organize two world wars and 40 years of cold war.


From the years 1866-71, the United States witnessed the most revolutionary legislative and constitutional process in its history, since the founding of the nation in 1787-89. It was the revolutionary state legislatures of the South, that were the theater of that transformation.

We may gain a visual sense of the swiftness of that transformation, by viewing three illustrations. The first is of Frederick Douglass. Douglass, together with John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln, was America's most eloquent voice in defense of the Constitution. Douglass had been born a slave. Next to him are his sons, who fought against their father's former slavery, in the war of 1860-65. Finally, there is Douglass and his grandson Joseph. Joseph Douglass was an accomplished violinist, and played Schubert duets with his grandfather Frederick Douglass, who was also a violinist.

From slave, to freeman, to soldier, to artist: The evolution of the Douglass family, was, in one sense, the evolution of mankind that Schiller called for in his essay "On the Aesthetic Education of Man." Schiller said: "Every individual man carries a purely ideal man within himself. This pure man, who gives himself to be recognized more or less distinctly in every subject, is represented through the state. It is his objective form, in which the multiplicity of subjects strives to unite itself. Now, however, let two different ways be considered, how the state can maintain itself in the individual: either that the pure man suppresses the empirical, that the state abolishes the individual; or, that the individual becomes the state, that the man of time ennobles himself to the man in the idea."

Schiller had also, as an historian, written a seminal study on the legislation of the poet Solon of Athens, who abolished slavery in his famous constitution, as opposed to the laws of Lycurgus of Sparta, whose well-ordered society depended on slavery to function.

Lincoln had spoken of the tragic dimensions of the American conflict most eloquently in his Second Inaugural Address of 1864: "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Each looks for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Each side reads the same Bible, each side prays to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces. But let us not judge, that we be not judged."

Indeed, between the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, and the 1873-76 counterrevolution of the Ku Klux Klan, a great tragedy of truly classical dimensions would take place, one in which the conflict between the notion of a social order, as promulgated by Solon of Athens, briefly triumphed over the slave order of Lycurgus of Sparta that had been in existence in the United States up to that time.

Nor were the protagonists in the drama unaware of the central issue. In South Carolina, black and white debating societies had discussed the topic of Solon versus Lycurgus from the time of the 1840s. The exact topic was, "whether the laws of Lycurgus, or of Solon, are most likely to bring about a condition of happiness in the constitutional state."

But by 1865, the chief protagonist of this drama—Abraham Lincoln—lay dead, assassinated by a conspiracy run by the Scottish Rite of Freemasons on behalf of the British Empire. And though there were great men throughout America, and though there were individuals who well understood the revolution on which they were embarked, there was no individual other than the slain Lincoln, who was capable of understanding, communicating, and actualizing this revolution.

With the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, the counterrevolution led by the Scottish Rite, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, turned the tide, in a way that they were unable to do on the battlefield of 1860-65. When the battle shifted to irregular war, the patriots lost, and the "race-patriots" won.

Our time is entirely dominated by and determined by the failure to win that irregular war with the Scottish Rite of Freemasons, and its most active deployment, the B'nai B'rith. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy; the attempts against the lives of others; the harassment and extermination of other political movements; the control of the media—these things would not be possible, except for the Jim Crow cultural war won by the Scottish Rite.

The origins of 'Jim Crow'

Rather than focus on the invention of those pseudo-scientific frauds known as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the social sciences more generally—and all degrees granted in these fields can be seen to be essentially worthless by any honest observer—we will focus on a critical cultural dynamic that to this day defines the modes of behavior of virtually the entire American population. This is called "Jim Crow."

"Jim Crow" refers to a popular form of entertainment in the United States of the period of the 1820s. It is also known as the "minstrel show." It comes from a white actor who viewed a crippled black slave doing a dance; he copied the crippled slave's dance and called it "Jumpin' Jim Crow." We see that the idea of black people as lazy, shiftless, no-good, was made central to the political propaganda of the United States in the period immediately after the Civil War.

There are the "coon songs" of the period of the 1880s and 1890s, which greeted Dvor@akák when he came to America at that time to attempt to create a National Conservatory of Music.

There were the various forms of snide, and clearly racist humor; and finally, there was the minstrel show.

Jim Crow is usually identified with the set of laws that was passed, starting about 1901, codifying segregation throughout the South. In 1868, the South Carolina legislature mandated public education for the black and white population, and gave every male over 21 the right to vote. This predominantly black legislature enfranchised the white male population, 90% of whom had not owned enough property to be eligible to vote prior to the war. Integration of schools, including colleges, became law in 1868. In Alabama, which would be the site of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, public transportation was fully desegregated in 1869! All of this, as well as the election of African-Americans to the United States Senate and Congress, or to governorships of states, would be swept away by Jim Crow.

But Jim Crow represented a cultural value which was in the ascendancy in the late nineteenth century, and whose major spokesmen were British, or Anglo-American. These were the people who believed that the northwest states of the United States should be preserved as an Anglo-Saxon estate for a Nordic-based racial stock. These were the people who would found the Immigration Restriction League, and would eventually, by 1924, severely restrict the immigration of eastern Europeans, Italians, and other "Mediterranean peoples" to this country. Ultimately, it would be because of these restrictions, in part, that when Jews would attempt to flee Europe because of the rise of fascism, they would not be admitted to the United States; and it would be the Joint Distribution Committee and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), that would oppose anti-Nazi activity by Jewish organizations in the United States.

'Race science' in America

We do not exaggerate in referring to "Palmerston's Zoo." Anthropology, otherwise properly known by its original name of race science, was introduced in America by putting "primitive races" on exhibit in St. Louis in 1904. Humanity was said to have evolved from the "most primitive"—the pygmies of the Congo—to the brown races, then to the red, then to the yellow, and then to the white. The American Museum of Natural History advocated this theory, and stuffed an Eskimo and put him on exhibit. At the Bronx Zoo, William Temple Hornaday placed the pygmy Ota Benga on exhibit as the "missing link" between the ape and man, as the exemplar of "primitive man," and that exhibit was maintained throughout 1905-06.

In the last three years, we have exposed the FBI program known as "Primitive Man" or "Frühmenschen"—a racist program to target African-American politicians, who make up a minuscule percentage of elected officials, but the preponderance of "corruption" cases in the United States.

To understand the roots of this, you must understand the racist roots of anthropology. You must also understand that it was the movie Birth of a Nation that had given this "primitive" characterization, in its attack on the South Carolina legislature, to all black political figures that would follow.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's task was conceived to be like that of Ota Benga's captor and "benefactor" Samuel Phillips Verner: Put the apes in the zoo—in the "pen"—where they belong.

You had the practice going on simultaneously with this, of renewed slavery in the Congo. Leopold of Belgium exacted for his rubber trade, and for the labor required, a high penalty. When laborers were unable to meet the quota, they were dealt with harshly; frequently their hands were chopped off.

But not only the "right wingers" believed in race theory, in race science, in eugenics in America. Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University and later President of the United States, was the leading promoter of the Confederate-Klan myth, which was the basis in America for the toleration of the resurgence of the Klan in 1915—for which purpose the movie Birth of a Nation was made. In 1915, however, the Klan's major deployment was not against blacks, but against German-Americans, and against those who argued that the United States should not ally with Britain in World War I.

Wilson's father had been a Confederate officer in the Civil War, and had taught Mazzini's theories of race revolution at Princeton. Mazzini had supported the Confederacy and the abolitionist causes, because, in his schema, both the Confederacy and the abolitionist secessionist movement could be used to divide the nation, so long as Lincoln and Douglass's constitutional perspective were not to prevail.

Wilson's way had been paved by the arch-racist Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had been President for two terms prior to Wilson, paved the way for Wilson's election through a third-party tactic called the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt today is immortalized in front of the race-patriot center in New York City, the Museum of Natural History, in a statue which is supposed to represent the superiority of the so-called "white race" over the "colored races." We also remind you that George Bush kept a picture of Teddy Roosevelt on his wall throughout his occupation of the Oval Office.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the Museum of Natural History; his associate Madison Grant, trustee of the New York Zoological Society; and Bernard Baruch, a Jewish businessman and part of a Southern Confederate Jewish slave-holding family—these, among others, promoted the pseudo-science of eugenics, along with Averell Harriman, later to become the major mover and shaker in the Democratic Party.

During the 1930s, the Museum sponsored a conference on eugenics, and had Dr. Ernst Rudin, Hitler's top race scientist, come to that conference to receive an award.

Until his death in 1986, Averell Harriman was a major force in the Democratic Party's opposition to Lyndon LaRouche. The first "Pike campaign" that would be carried out by the LaRouche forces, was launched in 1982 against Harriman, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Museum of Natural History. It caused Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, famous for his racist attacks on the African-American family, and for his policy of "benign neglect" toward the poor of America's cities, to deploy his campaign manager, Eric Breindel—a former heroin addict and now editorial page editor of the New York Post and board member of the ADL—to denounce the LaRouche forces as "racist" and anti-Semitic." This came from the defenders of the major American institution in support of Hitler's racial policies: the Museum of Natural History. The "crime" was that the LaRouche forces had attacked the Palmerston Zoo, to whose defense, the "spalpeen" Moynihan would always hasten.

High-tech stereotyping

Why does America tolerate this? Americans tolerate this because they are, in large measure—particularly since the Kennedy and King assassinations—creatures in a multicultural zoo.

A teacher in the Washington, D.C. area recently supplied insight into the results of the several years of emphasis on multiculturalism in schools and society in America. In a survey he did of his class of 29 pupils—24 of whom are black—he found that the students held the following beliefs:

* "Blacks are poor and stay poor because they are dumber than whites."

* "Black people don't like to work hard."

* "Black people have to be bad, so they can fight and defend themselves from other blacks."

* As students, they see their badness as "natural." They don't mean any disrespect to the teacher; it's just "how they are."

* "Black men make women pregnant, and leave."

* "Black boys expect to die young and unnaturally."

* "White people are smart and have money. Asians are smart and make money. Asians don't like blacks or Hispanics."

* "Hispanics are more like blacks than whites: They can't be white, so they try to be black."

* "Hispanics are poor and don't try hard, because, like blacks, they know it doesn't matter."

The teacher was mystified; but he failed to recognize that multiculturalism is simply high-technology stereotyping.

Let us look at the problem of racial stereotyping. Let us take the case of the African-American male. The African American male falls into seven stereotypes. This is not to assert that the individuals who are represented here as examples of the stereotype, necessarily actually conform to such; but of course, no real human individual ever corresponds, since all stereotypes are mythical.

The first stereotype is "Bubba," the super-athlete:

There is "Reverend Chicken-wing."

There is "Step 'n' Fetchit."

There is "Nat Turner."

There is "Superfly."

There is "Jigaboo Jive."

There is "Dr./Prof./Gen. I.M. Halfwhite."

There is "Kuweka Iwuz Blak Befoy'all."

And there are the Jim Crow variations, such as Elvis.

Now, these individuals may have other substance as real people; they may be induced, encouraged, or forced to act out a stereotype. However, they are only socially recognizable in the guise of the cultural stereotype to which they conform. Otherwise, they are invisible, or nonexistent, or "dead."

The purpose of multiculturalism is to "suggest" to the African-American male, that these are the limitations of his identity. All of the roles do not preclude, for example, sexual promiscuity—a trait presumed by all these stereotypes to be virtually, if not actually, genetic. If you do not correspond to one of these stereotypes as an African-American male, you are, as the author Ralph Ellison termed it, an "invisible man." If you assert your existence through some act or thought, you threaten the master-slave relationship between the zookeepers and the animals. There is only one way out for you: Conform to the stereotype, or die.

Here are some images of people who did not conform to racial stereotyping.

There is the composer Harry Burleigh.

There is the great tenor Roland Hayes.

There is Marian Anderson, perhaps the greatest singer of this century.

There are the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who, following the Civil War strove to elevate the Negro spiritual to the level of a German art-song.

There are contemporary figures that also do not conform:

There is New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.

There is Malcolm X.

There is former Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack, one of the founders of the National Democratic Policy Committee along with Lyndon LaRouche.

There is Martin Luther King, who, though he is said to have conformed to such stereotypes, successfully violated them, by leading an integrated movement that dared to publicly practice Christianity.

There is Minister Louis Farrakhan.

And there is Lyndon LaRouche.

These are figures whose images evoke "discomfort." Think of how they are described: "extremists." But what does that term actually mean? "Not clearly on the left or right"—what does that phrase actually mean? "A threat to our notion of the democratic process"—what does that mean? It is not the cognitive meaning that is significant here; it is the affective meaning—the sense of uneasiness, of vague upset, of "they-just-aren't-the-right-kind-of people"-ness—which is essential. That affective meaning is the generator of stereotyping. When you are caused to empathize, in so-called non-cognitive education, with how people feel about something, rather than with how they think about something, you will generate stereotyping, not discourage it.

The major weapon of the Scottish Rite of Freemasons in the destruction of the American Revolution which was successfully waged by Lincoln and others, was the assertion of Jim Crow as a cultural value-determinant. It was against this, that King uniquely, of all Americans, rallied the nation as a whole—not its African-American population solely. Today, the ADL, using "multiculturalism," seeks to wipe out the African-American intellectual—not only out of racism, but because such intelligence might become one catalyst to freeing all the other animals in the theme park.

King's message is well contained in the statement of the Apostle Paul (Galatians 3:28) that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor slave, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." That advanced statement of Christian civilization, which became the street practice of America's citizens in the 1960s through the civil rights movement, is still the key to unlocking the chains of illusion that keep us imprisoned in the multicultural zoo.

Epilogue

Chorus: Toward the end of the twentieth century, in the storms of the breakdown crisis that will follow the end of the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation, human beings will be forced to choose between two conflicting definitions of themselves.

On the one hand, they will be able to choose, as human beings always are, creative reason, scientific discovery, and a true world order, a community of principle, of sovereign nations seeking progress through economic development. If the persons of those coming days are able to lift their eyes to the stars, they may be able to cease killing one another in order to possess a few square miles of mud on one small planet. If they are capable of recognizing the inherent universality of the human personality, the equality of each person as imago viva Dei, then the domain of humanity will be without limit.

But in those same days, the heirs of Mazzini and Lord Palmerston and B'nai B'rith, the servants of a dying Britain, will try to pull the world with them into the abyss. They will say that identity is that of an ethnic group, and that ethnicity controls man's destiny as it does among the animal species. They will tell Americans of the melting pot, and so many others who have no ethnic identity, that they must acquire a synthetic one. They will rewrite history around a thousand false centers in order to deny that human progress is One. Nor will the minds of little children be exempted from these torments. Others will talk of multiculturalism in a time when the human image will be lacerated and violated and immolated as never before in the face of all the nations. If these voices prevail, then an eon of darkness will surely cover the world.

When Palmerston ranted his "Civis Romanus sum" in the Parliament here in Westminster just a short time ago, he thought that the empire was made, and that there would never be a reply. But a reply will come, after the British drive will have fallen short, 13 years from now, when Abraham Lincoln will stand among the new graves and promise that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.


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