The 34th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
(2010):
Section 1. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
amendments to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed.
A Connie Conroy Note (April
13, 2010)
Man‑oh‑man. What a performance! The Prez has set a speed record for
this one. Introduced in the
Congress on Opening Day, Tuesday, January 5, 2010, and a little more than
three months later—bang, we got it through the states, and almost
unanimously. The only
holdouts? Hawaii (too many slant‑eyes),
New York (too many Renegade Yids), Massachusetts (too many Kennedy‑Catholics),
and Vermont (who knows?). We'll
have to do something about them.
Anyway,
you gotta love the way the Prez sold this one. "Back to Original Intent," he said. "We just have to be consistent,"
he said. "I know the
liberals" (he meant "liberalnigger-lovers" but he does go out of
his way to be nice, this man) "are not going to be happy. But God, and our Party, and the American
people have not been happy about what the liberals have been doing to our
country since 1865.
"They have put the Federal government between the people and
the Constitution, between the people and their true voice, the state governments,
and they started it by sneaking these amendments we're now getting rid of
through Congress, when half the country wasn't even represented there. So we are going to put things
back, we are going to set things right, we are going back to the Original
Intent of the original Founding Fathers. And we are going to set this country on the path of righteousness
once again."
That is what
he said. That is what President
Jefferson Davis Hague said.
It's all
so simple. That stuff in the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments was anything but in the original Constitution.
Slavery was in the original constitution. Now, by God, no‑one (well almost no‑one) has any
intent to go back to slavery. It just doesn't work very well. And nobody needs field hands today anyway (heh, heh). But we have to be consistent, the
Prez sez. Oh yes, the Prez sez:
Original Intent is our guide. I
remember Clarence B. Carson's description of his great historical work,
Basic American Government, discussing this very issue (NLJ):
"It
would be considerable fraud to do a book on American government
which talked as if the Constitution were still being substantially observed,
that pretended that when presidents took the oath of office they
intended to observe the bounds set by the Constitution, that Congressmen
recited their pledges with the same intent, and that federal judges
were still construing the Constitution as it was written. In sum, any book on American government
worthy of the name ought to make clear how remote from the Constitution
the government has become."
Well,
this President intends to observe and is observing the bounds set by the
original Constitution, and thank God, we've got a 2/3's‑plus majority of
Congressmen who do the same. Since
we passed the 28th back in '99, we've been headed nowhere else but right
back to the Original Intent of the thing, what the Founding Fathers were
aiming for. And what had the
liberalniggerlovers done since 1865, from the conclusion of that
unconstitutional civil war (NLJ)? Taken us right the opposite way.
Take the
28th, our first effort. Well, it
didn't work very well. It didn't
get the budget balanced. But we
tried. And we've done better with all the ones we got passed since. Getting back the Constitution to
the way it oughta be: America for us. We put morality first. Then
we really balanced things, and got rid of the income tax (no Original Intent
anywhere in that dead letter). Then
we put God in first place, just like the Founding Fathers said (Falwell). So now we're just being consistent.
And who
needs those amendments, anyway? The 13th? Slavery's a dead letter. That reference to abolition in the Constitution just puts off so
many of our core white supporters around the country. We don't need it, so good riddance to it.
The
14th? A lot of the trouble started
when they extended due process to the states, as the boys used to say back
in the 90s. It's there in the 5th,
and if you ask me, one mention in the Constitution is enough for that
troublemaker of a clause. Section
2 of the 14th, that roundabout, really unfair, way they tried to secure
the vote for the niggers, was never used anyway. So we've just gotten rid of some clutter. Section 3, the one that put in
political penalties against former Confederate officials, was put to bed
by a 2/3rds vote of each House of Congress in 1898, so it's moot. Section 4, on Confederate debt, is moot
too. No reason not to toss them
all out.
And as
for the 15th, that direct guarantee of votes for niggers, just like with
Section 2 of the 14th, the liberal-niggerlovers back then were as lilylivered
as they are now: it was never enforced either. Funny, if it had been, the liberalniggerlovers never would
have needed their precious Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.
So
that's that. Our people asked for
a pure Constitution. And we gave it to them. It is just as pure now as the driven snow.
Author's Commentary
Consistency, "Original
Intent,"
and the Politics of
Mythology
According
to Conroy, all of this was done simply for the sake of consistency, and
following the "Doctrine of Original Intent" (Reynolds). In so saying, Conroy illustrated that
self‑contradictory thinking to which so many Right‑Wing
Reactionaries of her time were in thrall. It is very difficult for observers from our era, even conservative
ones, to understand it. Even
during the Transition Era most authorities on the Constitution of any
stripe other than Far Right‑Wing Reactionary did not give it any credence
at all. Recall, for example, the
writing of Federal Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, certainly
no liberal, that rather neatly disposed of the Doctrine (see Chapter
five).
For
the most part, all of the Right‑Wing Reactionary amendments to
the old U.S. Constitution Conroy cites were self‑evidently not at all
consistent with the Doctrine of Original Intent, as that doctrine was put forth
by its own supporters. Virtually
no basis for any of the provisions of the Amendments from 28 onwards could
be found anywhere in the original document (see Appendix I), either explicitly
or implicitly.
However,
almost all of the themes played out in those amendments can be found in
the 1992 Republican National Platform and other similar political
documents from the late Transition Era (see, for example, Chapter seven). Yet the supporters of all those provisions
that on their face were contrary to those of the original document were
the self‑same champions of the Doctrine of Original Intent.
As
examples that little in the Right‑Wing Reactionary agenda reflected
Original Intent as they themselves stated it, consider:
•The Founding Fathers had discussed requiring a balanced
budget and setting Congressional term limits and had rejected both ideas.
•A ban on immigration never crossed their minds, and given
the nature of the country at the time, wouldn't have. The "naturalization" process wasn't mentioned
until the adoption of the 14th.
•Legislating, and even worse, Constitutionalizing certain
views on morality was contrary to both the spirit and the words of the
Jefferson/Madison Bill of Rights, while repeal of the Fourth Amendment was
absolutely contrary to its letter.
•As for Presidential decree powers, that is precisely the
type of concentration of sovereign power typical of the monarchical
system of government the American Revolution had been undertaken to free
the former colonies from. Further, the whole complex system of
"checks and balances" was designed to prevent such a concentration
of power from happening in the future.
•And finally, putting the "Law of God" (as defined
by some men, of course) above that of the Constitution itself defeated the very
purpose of having a Constitution in the first place.
Thus
if there were consistency in the Right‑Wing Reactionary approach to
these issues at the time, it is hard to discern it from this historical
distance. It appears in fact that
during the Transition Era and early Fascist Period the only occasions on which
the Right‑Wing Reactionaries invoked the "Doctrine of Original
Intent" was when they were battling against some Supreme Court
interpretation of the Constitution that served to protect an individual right
or liberty.
When
they themselves were battling to limit individual rights and liberties, as for
example on the issues of freedom of choice in the outcome of pregnancy,
sexual identity/preference, relationship between church and state, or freedom
from unreasonable search and and seizure, the matter of Original Intent never
seemed to come up, with one exception.
When
Right‑Wing Reaction wanted to deny the possible existence of an
individual right, liberty, or freedom that wasn't specifically mentioned
in the Constitution, they always conveniently ignored one provision that
clearly is: the Ninth Amendment. It states: "The enumeration in the
constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage
others retained by the people." But once again, Right‑Wing Reactionaries were never
much for letting facts get in the way of ideology.
Nevertheless,
the themes of "Original Intent" and "consistency," repeated
over and over again by the Right‑Wing Reactionaries from the Transition
Era onwards, were what the Hagueites used to sell the 34th Amendment. In fact the public relations name they
gave to the Amendment was "Original Intent."
In
their sales campaign (to the extent they needed to sell anything political in a
setting in which they were virtually unchallenged), the Hagueites went back to
the theory that the Supreme Court had used in Anderson v. Board of
Education. (That was the case in
which the Court had removed from itself the power to review actions of the
other two branches of the Federal government for their constitutionality [see
Chapter five].)
You
may recall that the primary Transition Era exponent of the Doctrine was one
Judge Robert Bork (1993) (see also Chapter five). His position can be paraphrased in one sentence: "Principles not originally
understood to be and not clearly stated in the Constitution have no
constitutional validity." It
is certainly true that none of the principles stated in the 13th, 14th, or 15th
Amendments were "originally understood to be," much less
"clearly stated" in the Constitution. And so—out! But as illustrated above, none of the Right‑Wing Reactionary
amendments could be "understood to be" part of the original thinking
behind the Constitution nor "clearly stated" in it either.
It
was just that, as pointed above, almost all of them were advocated as part
of the Republican Party's own national platform, at least from 1992
onwards. But such inconsistencies
had bothered neither the Republicans, nor the Hagueites. It was all part of the "Politics
of Mythology" as Alex Poughton liked to call it.
The Right‑Wing
Reactionary Historical
Theory behind
the Amendment
In
historical terms, this Amendment represented a frontal assault on the whole
political basis for the structure of the country since the conclusion of
the First Civil War. Indeed, the
ratification day for the 34th was arranged by the Hague government to be on
Monday, April 12, 2010. That day
was the 149th anniversary of the commencement of the First Civil War, when
Southern rebel forces shelled the Federal Fort Sumter in Charleston (SC)
harbor.
As
has been noted, in the late Transition Era it was in vogue among the Right‑Wing
Reactionaries to blame everything that was wrong in the country not only the
(ill‑defined) "liberals" and the by‑then dead 1960s
"Counter Culture" of 30 years before, but also on President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and his "New Deal" of 60 years before. The Hagueites simply took this kind of
thinking one step further back in time.
The
Right-Wing Reactionary trend towards dating the beginning of the country's modern
troubles back to 1865 had begun in the late Transition Era and
had come to full flower in the early Fascist Period. It blamed everything
that was wrong in the country not only on the Transition Era's
favorite 20th century targets, but also on the First Reconstruction
era policies of the Radical Republicans 1865‑1876. (The latter were related only in
name to their late 20th century descendants.) It was the three amendments repealed by the 34th that
epitomized the First Reconstruction.
Thinkers
such as Brent Johnson (1995) claimed that "citizenship" as conceived
of by the Founding Fathers lay with the states, not the nation. This reflected the thinking of John C.
Calhoun (1782‑1850), chief ideologue of slavery (Niven). He held that within the United States,
sovereignty lay entirely with the State governments, and thus that citizenship
was entirely State, not Federal, in nature.
Calhoun's
ideological descendants went on to claim that it was only the 14th amendment
that created national citizenship, and that had by so doing somehow set the
"Federal government between the people and the states." In this view, the Federal government
had limited legitimacy on the one hand, and vast responsibility as the cause
of any difficulties faced by the nation on the other.
Supporters
of this view then went on to trace the origin of all the then‑current
problems of the old United States to the adoption of the 14th amendment. They put forth the notion that
citizenship should arise from each person's relationship to a state government,
not to the Federal government. It was on this basis that they advocated repeal of the 14th. It was then an easy leap to include the
13th and 15th as targets for repeal as well, "for the sake of
consistency."
In
undertaking such advocacy, such thinkers ignored the fact that the old U.S.
Constitution was designed specifically to develop a national government,
that both the Preamble and a number of its operative clauses (e.g.,
Article I, Section 8), gave the national government broad responsibilities
and powers, some of them preemptive, that by joining the union the states
specifically gave up certain elements of their sovereignty, and that
while the original Constitution did not define "citizenship" per se,
the Preamble begins "We the people of the United States," and the
body does refer to "citizen(s) of the United States" Article II, Section
1.
But
be all that as it may, in summary the "Doctrine of Original Intent"
seemed to provide an historical rationale for undermining both the foundations
of the power of the Federal government (except for the Executive Branch when
under the control of Right‑Wing Reaction, of course), and the
Constitutional protection of individual rights, freedoms, and
liberties. It thus attracted a
grand following among the Right‑Wing Reactionaries.
The True Political
Motives for the Amendment
1. Promotion of racism
As
far as can be discerned from the present historical distance, as Conroy
stated, the reinstitution of slavery was not among the intentions of the promoters
of the 34th (Calloway). But the
Amendment was nevertheless clearly intended to exacerbate racism. First and foremost, there was its
content, including the gratuitous repeal of the 13th Amendment. There were also the details. For example, the choice of the anniversary
of the First Civil War's commencement as the date for the final ratification of
this amendment could hardly have been coincidental.
As
has been noted before, using code words and coded signals, especially on the
race issue, was an old Right‑Wing Reactionary tactic dating from the Transition
Era. Listen, for example, to one
of the patron saints of Right‑Wing Reaction, Patrick Buchanan,
talking in 1993 about the First Civil War (EXTRA! Update): "The War Between the States was
about independence, about self‑determination, about the right of a people
to break free of a government to which they could no longer give
allegiance."
This
statement of Buchanan's could be interpreted as giving legitimacy to both
secession and slavery, in the name of "fighting for freedom" (a
strange juxtaposition, to be sure). But when in response to his statement the first black female United
States Senator, Carol Moseley‑Braun of Illinois, noted simply that the
Confederacy he was celebrating was built on slavery, Buchanan responded that
she was just "putting on an act."
Buchanan's
formulation on the nature of the War was contrary to the position taken by most
pre‑ and post‑Fascist Period historians from President Lincoln (see
his Second Inaugural Address) onwards down to our own time. In that view, the First Civil War was
primarily fought over the institution of slavery and the desire of the Southern
states to extend it into the territories, without limitation.
Buchanan
appeared to present the slave‑holders' position on the War, and by
implication their justification of slavery: that blacks constituted an
"inferior race." In
reversing the Constitutional sequelae of the Civil War, the 34th Amendment put
back into the Constitution the original formulation that a black
person was the equivalent of three‑fifths of a white, the baldest kind of
racist concept.
The
motivation for this? To maintain
its power, Right‑Wing Reaction needed to maintain the "Politics
of Difference" (Sklar; see Chapter four). The homophobia re‑generated by the previous year's
Proclamation of Right was already wearing thin because there just weren't
enough homosexual persons left out in the open to make any kind of believable
enemy. But there were still plenty
of blacks. It was a Right‑Wing
Reactionary political tradition to blame the country's troubles on the
blacks. The passage of the 34th
helped to recycle the hate, for the nth time in American history. It would prove very important for that
reason in the next year. It would
also prove important then for a legal reason.
2. The End of Due Process and Equal Protection, and
Expansion of the Camp System
Conroy
summarized the content of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments pretty
well. But whether intentionally or
not, she left out a couple of important details about the 14th, details
that had made major contributions to the development and maintenance of civil
liberties in the old U.S. In
addition to applying the due process clause to the states, the 14th defined
citizenship and required the states to provide "equal protection of the
law" for "any person within its jurisdiction."
The
purposes and uses of the camp system created by President Pine's "Real
Drug War" had long since been expanded beyond their original
focus. The first major expansion
was for enforcing the Constitutional ban on elective pregnancy
termination following ratification of the Morality (31st)
Amendment in 2005.
Since
the beginning of Hague's second term in 2008, especially following repeal of
the 4th Amendment that had been part of the 32nd Amendment of 2006, the camp
system increasingly had been used to incarcerate certain political enemies of
the Hague regime. Many were simply
murdered by the Helmsmen (HM) or their less well‑organized but equally
violent unofficial precursors in their "Death Squad" incarnation.
Other
opponents could be charged with a conventional crime, be convicted, and placed
in the ever‑burgeoning conventional prison system. That "crime" was usually
"drug possession." Convictions were readily obtained using police‑sourced
"evidence," the collection and presentation of which had not been
subject to Fourth Amendment protections since the late Transition Era. But still other opponents were neither
murdered nor confined to the conventional prison system on spurious charges and
convictions. They were simply picked up by the HM and sent to the camps, much
as the SS had simply picked up persons and sent them to the camps in Nazi
Germany.
Forever
having difficulty writing original material, the Hagueites borrowed the
language of the directive that established this latter function for the
camps from that of the Bosnian Serbs back in the First Bosnian Civil War of
1991‑95 when they established their own camps for punitive action
against Bosnian Muslims and other opponents in their territory (Gutman):
"Local citizens are to identify and expose ringleaders
and operatives of enemy and other destructive operations; the
security services are to arrest subversives, criminals, and the like; they may
detain certain persons in certain places, employing political isolation,
in combination with other measures and procedures, including physical
liquidation."
By
2010 too, the camps were becoming "home" to an increasing number of
people whose "crime" was simply that they were poor. The Morality Amendment had terminated
public welfare at the Federal, state, and local levels. For a time, voluntary agencies had been
able to cope with some of the load. But they were now being overwhelmed.
Similar
to the response to the much smaller numbers of homeless persons who had
appeared following the welfare and mental health system
"reforms" of the 80s and 90s, cries went up, encouraged by Right‑Wing
Reaction and their minions, to "get those irresponsible good‑for‑nothings
off the streets" (where they were increasingly accumulating). Where to put them? The camps, for them functioning somewhat
like the old 19th century poor‑house/workhouse system, of course.
But
there were these two legal impediments to all this arbitrary imprisonment (even
though the Hagueites never referred to the camps as "prisons"): the
"due process" clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments, and the
"equal protection" clause of the latter. Access to the courts was difficult, of course, especially
for the poor, for both economic and political reasons. But occasionally a poor person or a
political prisoner made it through to that venue. The result was occasionally embarrassing
or inconvenient for the regime.
By
2010, all the camps had been put under the administrative control of the
HM, just as Hitler from the beginning of the Third Reich had placed control of
his camps with the SS. But the HM
was a Federal agency, so 5th Amendment protections, in theory at least,
applied. The Federal due process
clause impediment to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment was dealt with
by transferring all HM functions, including the camps, to the states. That meant that the Federal courts
would simply no longer be involved with such matters.
Of
course, state control of the HM was on paper only. The Federal government financed their operations
completely, advised the States on who was to be in charge, and provided "Federal
oversight" of the program, to make sure that "the Federal
taxpayers' dollars were being spent wisely." Thus, while there was the occasional bureaucratic foul‑up,
the Hagueites maintained real control of the HM. But for the record, Hague could maintain that "the
peoples' voices," the governments of the States, were running it.
The
Fifth Amendment could have been repealed, of course, but to allow completely
unfettered exploitation of natural resources the Hagueites needed to maintain
its "just compensation" clause (see Chapter 14). Therefore, they just left the 5th
Amendment in place and made the due process clause functionally inoperative in
reference to the HM. Then, with
the 34th, the requirements for state due process and equal protection were
simply wiped out. The HM,
technically under state control, could operate without any judicial
impedimenta. All nice and legal,
just as on paper it had been in Nazi Germany (Deighton).
Although
there is still some controversy among historians on this question, it is likely
that Hague's primary motive for passage of the 34th Amendment was repeal of
these two critical civil liberties clauses of the 14th, that is, due process
and equal protection of the law. At any rate, removing the 14th Amendment from the Constitution
played a very important role in the process that lead to the formation of
the New American Republics, as we will see in the next chapter.
An Alex Poughton Letter
April 19, 2010
Dear Karl,
Today is "Patriot's Day" in
the state of Massachusetts (one of only four states not to ratify the 34th
Amendment, about which I presume you have heard by now). Although the true meaning of the event
has been lost on most people (as for the rest, the day is redolent with
irony), they still commemorate the 1775 Revolutionary War Battle of
Lexington on this day here.
They're
still running the Boston Marathon too, for the 114th time today. I'm up here to cover the "social
aspects" of it for the Sunday Times. "Social aspects," ha! I'm not allowed to mention that there haven't been any foreign runners
allowed in it for four years, or that because of that, the men's winner likely
will be someone who doesn't get below 2:15, while the winner in a rapidly
dwindling women's field (the result of the repeal of all Federal
requirements for equal treatment of women's sports a few years ago) probably
won't break 2:35.
It's all getting to be so hollow. God, I wonder what the Adams cousins
would think if they came back today. Or Crispus Attucks. Or Paul
Revere. Or the men who died at
Breed's Hill.
It's all
so sad. I still think that despite
the public face the Hague regime (I just can't bring myself privately to call
them a "government" or "Administration" anymore) puts
on things, the majority of Americans really don't approve of what is happening
to their country, a la Germany at the time the Nazis took over. That is a guess, of course, and perhaps
a wishful one. But I think it's
true. Everyone except the
ACNP actives is just so apathetic.
This
whole business just kind of crept up on the Americans. And it's all been legal, of
course. The Right won all these
elections with ever‑dwindling voter turnouts, but they won
them. The Democrats were just so
concerned with "me-tooing" all over the place, and the left could
never get out of its own way. So,
as I've said before, there was just no significant opposition.
And then
the Right just changed the Constitution in ways they had, for the most part,
told everyone they would do if they ever got power. And they wrote the laws they told everyone, for the most
part, they would write. And now
they've got the "HM" to put entirely "legal" force and
violence behind the whole thing.
And they
are loading up the racist cannon again. I wonder what's coming next. I don't think anything could surprise me, but you never know.
All
the best, Alex
References:
Barton, D., The
Myth of Separation, Aledo, TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1993.
Bork, R.H., "The Senate's Power Grab," New York Times, June, 23, 1993.
Calloway, C., The
34th Amendment: Motives Real and Imagined, New York: The Scattered Home
Press, 2043.
Deighton, L., Winter, "1933 ‑ 1938," New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.
EXTRA! Update, "News Briefs: The Noble South," October, 1993,
p. 2, quot-ing from a P. Buchanan
article that appeared in the New
York Post on
July 28, 1993.
Falwell, J., "The United States of America: Still
One Nation Under God," Faith Partners, Old Time Gospel Hour, Lynchburg,
VA, 1994.
Gutman, R., "Federal Army Tied to Bosnia
Crimes," Newsday, November
1, 1995.
Heard, A., "The Road to Oklahoma City," The New Republic, May 15, 1995, p. 15.
Johnson, B., "Freedom Bound promotional
material," Nevada City, California Republic USA: 1995.
Niven, J., "Secession," in Foner, E., and
Garraty, J.A., Eds., The
Reader's Companion to American History, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991.
NLJ: National Liberty Journal, "Conservative Book
Club advertisement for Basic American Government, by Clarence B. Carson, April, 1995, p. 16.
Reynolds, W.B., "Power to the People," New York Times Magazine, Septem-ber 13, 1987.
Sklar, H., "The Snake Oil of Scapegoating," Z Magazine, May, 1995, p. 49.
1.
Note: There is no indication or
evidence that Clarence Carson, Robert Bork, Brent Johnson, Patrick
Buchanan, or any of the other historical personages or organizations
mentioned or alluded to in this chapter or elsewhere in this book in a similar
manner, would necessarily have supported or approved in any way of the
repeal of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, or any of the successor
laws, regulations, policies, or procedures enacted pursuant to that repeal, or
of any of the events that subsequently occurred in the United States or the New
American Republics at any time in the future, subsequent to that repeal and the
implementation of the policies carried out pursuant to it.
2. Author's Note: At perhaps the height of irony,
and surely not knowing whom she was quoting, Conroy intoned the words
"This is what he said." That was a famous line given the voice of the narrator in the 20th
century American composer Aaron Copeland's cantata "A Lincoln
Portrait." Amazing. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. A man named for the leader of the
enslaving forces puts through a Constitutional amendment that reverses
Lincoln's greatest achievement, and one of the man's minions refers to his
words in words that had been previously reserved for praise of Lincoln.
In
doing this however, Conroy was unwittingly following the example set during
the Transition Era by certain Right‑Wing Reactionaries such as Ronald
Reagan and Newton Gingrich, of attempting to take over the legacies of great
liberal American historical figures such as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin
Roosevelt, and pretend that Right‑Wing Reaction was simply following in
their tradition, which by its own definitions it was not.
3. Author's Note: Repeal of the
14th Amendment was high on the list of demands of many a Right‑Wing
Reactionary Organization during the Transition Era. For example, one Linda Thompson, who termed herself the
"acting adjudant general" of the "Unorganized Militia
of the United States," called for repeal not only of the 14th, but also
the 16th and 17th Amendments (Heard). (The 16th, of course, went out with enactment of the 31st. The issue of the 17th would become moot
with the establishment of the New American Republics in 2011.)
4. Author's Note: Buchanan was
here using here the phraseology of the unreconstructed adherents of
the Confederacy and slavery. The
term "The War Between the States" was one of the most powerful
of the many code words/terms that Right‑Wing Reaction used from the
beginning of the Transition Era onwards to signal to its constituency
where it "really stood" on the race question. By using such using expressions,
rather than the explicitly racist language of such later spokesmen as Curley
Oakwood, Right‑Wing Reactionaries of the Transition Era were able to
"plausibly deny" that they were engaging in racism. In our time, most historians simply
apply the Dino Louis Duck Rule, and easily determine what was what and who was
who.