Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton PDF
Preview Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton
U.S. S:V >0 CAN $37.00 I n 1970, President Nixon entertained, a mostly white media elite at the annual Gridiron C b dinner with a musical routine in honor of his racially divisive “Southern Strategy. After a bit of banter, in which Vice President Agnew answered the president in “darky dialect,’ Nixon began to play the favorite songs of FDR, Truman, and Johnson. A few bars into each, Agnew drowned the President out with a manic “Dixie’ as the crowd roared. Kenneth 0 Reilly, whose Racial Matters blew the lid off the FBI’s investigation and harassment of black leaders, now scrutinizes each president’s record on race. Nixon's Piano reveals that instead of being the agents of progress in racial relations, American presidents have a long and consistent history of supporting slavery, obstructing civil rights, and deliberately fanning racism. With the exceptions of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, argues O’Reilly, every president has sacrificed black rights for white votes. Perhaps most alarming, 0 Reilly offers substantial evidence of presidents whose repressive political policies violated their own moral code. George Washington cor- responded with Lafayette about the evils of slavery and mused about establishing a plantation for freed blacks, but President Washington kept his slaves and refused to lend the weight of his office to the abolitionist move- ment. Jefferson, certain and eloquent on the subject of equality in the Declaration of Independence, found no voice as president to oppose slavery. Lincoln, the first president to allow blacks at White House social func- tions and the eventual hero of the abolitionist move- ment, opposed black efforts to vote, sit on juries, hold office, or marry whites. Like many other presidents, Lincoln supported the colonization movement as the simplest solution to the nation’s racial strife. FDR, the father of twentieth century social reform, but fearful of offending white voters, refused to support an anti- lynching law, banned black reporters from press confer- ences, and undermined his own Fat Employment Practice Committee. More recent presidents, according to OML illy, have pursued a racial politics ranging from the amid to the devious. JFK wooed the black vote by mentionic: Africa 479 times in three months on the campaign trail while (continued on bc < ap) NIXON’S PIANO THE FREE PRESS New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore For M.A.O
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