Grand Old Pluralism

13 October 2009

The Grand Old Party has a Grand New Web Site, which includes a helpful graphics-rich page listing the Republican Party’s noteworthy accomplishments.

From this, you can learn that

• the Republicans in Congress emancipated all of the District of Columbia’s slaves in 1862
• the Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution
• the Republicans established the “Buffalo Soldiers”, six regiments of African-American troops
• the Republicans set up Howard University for the purpose of giving higher education to African-Americans
• Justice John Marshall Harlan, who dissented from Plessy v. Ferguson, was a Republican
• a former slave chaired the 1884 Republican National Convention
• the Republicans gave US citizenship to Native Americans
• the first Hispanic governor, the first African-American senator, the first Hispanic senator, the first Asian-American senator, and the first woman mayor were Republicans
• a Republican President appointed the first Jewish Cabinet secretary
• the Republican platform of 1940 called for integrating the armed forces
• the Republicans passed civil-rights laws in 1871, 1875, 1957, and 1960
• a Republican appeals-court judge ordered the University of Mississippi to admit its first African-American student
• a Republican President used the National Guard to integrate the Little Rock public schools
• a Republican Supreme Court justice wrote the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education

Reading that list, you’d think that for the first hundred years of its existence, the Republican Party did practically nothing to help white men.

via Steve Benen

• Later: See it in the new feature film, “Twilight of the Goths”
• Earlier: Teach the children well, and maybe they won’t fall for this when they grow up