Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, historian Robert McElvaine offers what may be the worst historical analogy ever. The Iraq war, he argues, is not another Vietnam but another Civil War. And that's a bad thing. He rejects the idea that liberating Iraq is analogous to the civil rights movement of the 20th century:
Even if the avowed objectives of the outsiders [in Mississippi] in 1964 and today were similar, the means they employed to try to achieve those ends were radically different. That difference points up the wrongheadedness of the Bush policy in Iraq. The outsiders, joined by many blacks and a few whites in Mississippi, sought to bring freedom and democracy to this state peacefully.
The use of military force to improve the situation of African Americans had been tried a century before, in the 1860s. The result was more than a half million people killed. Slavery ended, but freedom and democracy lasted only during the period of military occupation that followed the Civil War. Little more than a decade after the end of that terrible war, the occupying forces were gone, and the undemocratic elements had been restored to their dominance and oppression.
This is mostly true, but the North's chief aim in the Civil War was not to improve the situation of Southern blacks. It was to preserve the Union, and in that it succeeded, albeit at enormous cost.
What would have happened in the 20th century if the North had lost the war, or had decided not to wage it and let the Confederate States of America have its independence? There's no way of knowing for sure, but we do know that achieving full equality for blacks involved strong actions by all three branches of the federal government, over the vigorous and sometimes violent objections of Southern politicians.
President Truman's order desegregating the military, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have had no force in the South if the South were not still part of the United States. It's hard to deny, then, that preservation of the Union via the Civil War was a necessary condition for black equality, even if the latter came about a century late. |
