Greatest American? (All Over on Page Eight)

[diaglo]

i still say my grandfather.

he came here as a cook on a ship during ww i

filipinos could only be cooks or engine room in the US Navy then.

despite the fact he was treated as a second/third class citizen. he made it.

he married my grandmother in detroit. another immigrant. and during the great depression provided for his family and his in-laws. all of them 8 siblings plus parents.

he lost an eye, his hearing, and several fingers working in a factory for years. and still raised my dad and his siblings.

he lived to the ripe old age of 104. he saw three centuries.

born june 15, 1897 .. in the Spanish owned Philippines.
died dec 26, 2001 in new jersey.

he taught me that you can be whatever you want no matter what people do or say otherwise.

 

[Elf Witch]

Sure there were some people who tried to profiteer. And who were caricatured by hostile Southerners as carpetbaggers. Voting Republican, for blacks, wasn't about "Northerners getting them to vote the way they wanted them to", it was about voting against the position of the KKK laden Democratic Party of the era in the Southern states.

[/i]

And that happened long after the KKK had worked to ensure that they would be in that position. Up through Harrison's administration, the Federal government tried to improve the plight of blacks in the South. A concerted effort by what would now be called terrorists prevented this, and a political compromise forced by Harrison's weakness as President sealed the deal.

[/i]

Only because the KKK and similar organizations (like the Democratic Party of the 1880s-1930s) prevented it from changing these things.

Where was the norths outrage over the mistreatment? Why did Harrison have problems getting backing from the Republicans?

After the war was over most people lost intrest in the situation. The blacks were no longer slaves and other issues took over.

It took a hundred years for the civil right movement to start addressing the issues. I am sorry but that fact that it took that long just shows that Washinton dropped the ball.

 

[billd91]

I grew up in the deep south I remember segreation. I saw a lot of poor blacks who did not have any poltical or economic freedom. And it was just not the Klan doing it. Washington itself rarely stepped in.

No matter how you look at the blacks in America were failed by the goverment for a l very long time after the war.

Definitely true. It wasn't just the Klan oppressing southern blacks. And Washington shouldn't have had to step in.
But, not long after the so-called Radical Republicans' fire began to wane, the south became business as usual again with the same old political elites stepping back into power, disenfranchising the blacks who had only recently gotten the vote.
Given that track record, maybe the feds were a little too lenient on the former Confederate states. Maybe the feds should have been a little more paternalistic it protecting its recently freed charges. But I don't think you could have seen a federal government doing anything quite that level until after FDR and the New Deal significantly changed the role of government in the every day lives of citizens. The New Deal brings in a massive change in the way government is conceived that makes a good many things possible. WIthout that change in conception, I doubt you'd have seen Brown v the Board of Education or quite a few civil liberties and civil rights decisions out of the Supreme Court that have all gone to protect our freedoms from the power of the states.

 

[Mark]

i still say my grandfather.

(snip)

he taught me that you can be whatever you want no matter what people do or say otherwise.

That is impressive.

 

[billd91]

Where was the norths outrage over the mistreatment? Why did Harrison have problems getting backing from the Republicans?

After the war was over most people lost intrest in the situation. The blacks were no longer slaves and other issues took over.

It took a hundred years for the civil right movement to start addressing the issues. I am sorry but that fact that it took that long just shows that Washinton dropped the ball.

I think this leads to some very unpleasant instruction in the American political system. It's only been comparatively recently that the federal government, in any really meaningful sense, has become a body that serves the public in general rather than powerful elites. The civil rights movement in America campaigned long and hard for the gains they managed in 1948 with the desegregation of the armed forces, the desegregation of schools, the desegregation of public facilities, and the protection of voting rights. Heck, the NAACP was founded nearly 100 years ago (96 years ago, I believe).
A significant part of 20th century American history is centered on the struggle of activists to organize regular folk into campaigns for protection and reform. Reform of the economy and employment practices. Reform of racist and sexist establishment structures. Protection from exploitation from independent powerful elites, whether it be exploitation of ourselves, our bodies, or our surroundings. And finally, not just the struggle to organize and be heard but also succeed in securing those changes.
And pretty much all of it has been extracted out of the government, local, state and federal levels, after years of long and painful work. And you still find many people who don't see any of these changes as good things who are actively trying to dismantle parts of them, indicating that these may still have to be fought for, constantly, to keep them even at the level they're at now.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

The problem with disscusions like this is when people bring modern day ethics into it. All southners are evil because they supported slavery or supported a goverment that allowed it.I guess anyone who has Italian blood has some taint because the Romans kept slaves oh so did a lot of the celtic populations and lets not forget the medeval serfs.

Probably makes me glad, from some people's POV, is that I'm not a true "southerner". Sure I live here, my family's here but I wasn't BORN here...

Slavery has been around probably nearly as long as mankind has been here... The Romans were probably one of the bigger, if not the biggest, bunch of slaveholders in history. They enslaved anyone who was 1) not a Roman Citizen or 2) one of the conquered "barbaric" tribes they encountered. It wasn't racial to them. Just conquerer vs. conquered. Because most of their slaves were of the same race as they, with a smattering of Moors (and other Africans) thrown in for "good measure". But the majority were white like they were. Serfs had a bit more freedom than a slave did. They had a piece of their lord's lands that they worked and gave a portion of their crops as payment to the lord for the land they were granted the use of.

If you truly want to understand history you have to be able to look at it without so much prejudice. I have said before that I as a modern person find the idea of slavery to be truly evil and wrong. But I don't know what my belief would be if I was born 100 years earlier and raised in the south of that time.

That's true. You have to be objective towards history as the people of the varying time periods had different views of things than we do today. Slavery is a prime example. The average Southerner before the Civil War accepted slavery as a part of southern life. It has been there and, if it hadn't been for a war, probably would STILL be there. Both the laws and religion seemed to "support" the idea of slavery from the viewpoint of those who were there at the time.

People are a product of their upbring and their enviorment. Unfortunetly most people back then were bigots who really believed that blacks were an inferior species. It was this same mindset that allowed white settlers and Washington to allow the destruction of Indian tribes and to justify stealing their land.

Only from the point of view of modern man. We think they're a bunch of bigots but they didn't think so at the time.... it was "normal" for them to think that having slaves was ok and chasing Indians out of their ancestral lands was ok.

I can study the civil war and understand why the south did what it did. They were fighting for their way of life. And I admire a lot of the southern generals and the soldiers who fought a much larger and better equipped force. The war should have been over a lot sooner but those southern soldiers were fighting for their homes and that made them fight harder and longer. I can admire that.

The war woulda been over alot sooner had the southerners put down their pride and accepted Lincoln's offer of surrender and the allowance back into the Union. But they wouldn't give that up so that made the war drag on for about another 2 years longer than it should have.

Just like I can admire the settlers who braved the unkown to head west. And admire the indian tribes who fought to keep what was theres.

I can agree there. The settlers were quite brave to travel to a distant, strange land to struggle to live there despite lots of hardships from both the land and unfriendly Indians who didn't want "those palefaces" in their ancestral lands, taking them over from them.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

There's not even a basis for that sort of comparison.

The States had agreed to the government of the United States via the U.S. Constitution, and were represented in Congress, allowed to vote for President and so on. They consented to the sovereignty of the United States by participating in the 1860 elections.

By contrast, the colonists were not represented in Parliament, had no say in the selection of their nation's chief executive, and could not fairly be said to have consented to their government at all.

It's kind of hard to have a say in the selection of monarch as that's hereditary and not elected like our presidents are.

Legally, it's hard to say which is more wrong.... The American Revolution to make ourselves our very own sovereign nation or the southern states seceding from the Union because they didn't agree with certain things.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

Lincoln and the north may have freed the slaves but they did nothing to make sure the freeded slaves would be okay.

It's theorized that the "reconstruction period" the South went through would've been alot easier had Lincoln not been assassinated by Booth. He was more willing to work with the South to reintegrated them back into the union. And definitely alot more compassionate than his successor, Andrew Johnson, was. And he was willing, yes WILLING (a shocking prospect at the time) to allow blacks the right to VOTE. It's ideas like this that, had they come to fruition, might have staved off the need for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s as the blacks would've had these same rights long before they had to fight for them, instead of having to wait 100 years and they still have problems with equality even now.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

Yeah, it kind of makes you want to defend your homeland doesn't it?

Ain't my homeland, bro... I just live here. But, as in an earlier post, I wasn't BORN here. Technically, I'd be a "Westerner".

 

[Darth K'Trava]

but there was no telephone. he didn't know that.

Kinda hard when the telephone wasn't really invented until 1875, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone as we know it today. Sure there were earlier versions but not as effective as his version.

In the Civil War, they had to survive on the telegraph and messengers.