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December
13, 2002 8:45
a.m.
Birthday-Cake Exegesis
What
are Trent Lott’s true thoughts on segregation?
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here are two
aspects to the Trent Lott story that need focus. The first, What did he
intend to say? The second, What are his true thoughts on the subject?
It's hard to believe
that Trent Lott's words at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, saying that
the country would have been better off if Thurmond had won the election
of 1948, are the equivalent of a secret-handshake policy message. Is it
suggested that he was saying, "I know that you lost, Strom, but the
policies you then advocated are policies which in my role as majority
leader, I will attempt to insinuate into national policy."
A moderately exhaustive
probe of the inventory of anti-Lott references, of which journalist Joshua
Micah Marshall appears to be the curator, reveals not a single legislative
initiative by Sen. Lott suggesting racial bias. (We don't count as racist
declining to endorse a petition to establish a national commemorative
day to honor the three civil-rights workers slain in Mississippi in 1964.)
It is safe to conclude that Lott was engaged in partygoing hyperbole ("And
I say, Strom, let's count on your giving us another hundred years!").
Yes, if Trent Lott
had been of voting age, he'd have voted for Thurmond in 1948. So did practically
every white voter in that part of the world. Thurmond, after all, carried
four states.
But given the fact
that Thurmond himself — the candidate Lott said he wished had been
successful — has been sitting in the United States Senate longer
than any American in history, it seems odd suddenly to concentrate one's
resentment of another senator, who was congratulating the guest of honor
in birthday-cake prose. If Thurmond could sit on and on in the Senate
without disgracing the republic, why not Lott, who was seven years old
when Thurmond ran for president?
What the critics
are saying is that however much we can assume that the old days of Jim
Crow are behind us, to hear it said from the majority leader of the Senate
in 2002 that he wishes things had been different, prejudices right reason.
They are correct. And Lott acknowledges that they are correct by apologizing
for what he said and classifying it as "terrible."
A case can be made
that anyone that careless in his language oughtn't to occupy a high seat
in the nation's councils, but much more than that is being said. The New
York Times characterized the world of Strom Thurmond 50 years ago
as one of "poll taxes and lynchings." That designation is as
extreme as anything Lott said at the birthday party. But the question
is legitimately raised: Does the Republican leader in the Senate pine
for the days when black men were required to use toilet facilities marked
COLORED?
One doubts that the
specifically Jim Crow features of the old world in the South are those
that Trent Lott pines for. When Senator Richard Russell joined most southern
senators in the late Fifties to plead the cause of "interposition,"
they were asking that the Supreme Court be denied the authority it was
arrogating to be the agent of social change. Randall Jarrell, in his novel
Pictures from an Institution, frames the idea of the nostalgia
of one professor with great wit: "He had diabetes and used to get
an injection of insulin every day, but I don't believe he ever got one
without wishing it was Galen giving it to him. There were two things he
was crazy about, the thirteenth century and Greek; if the thirteenth century
had spoken Greek I believe it would have killed him not to have been alive
in it." It should not be supposed that someone who pines for the
days of Rome, or pines for the days of Washington and Jefferson, pines
for the restoration of slavery.
But Sen. Lott will
probably have to face it, that whatever else is to be said about the old
South, segregation was an ugly feature of it, and that to think back poignantly
about how it was in those golden days requires, if you are a public figure
doing the nostalgia, the reiterated expulsion of features of that life.
Not the kind of thing that goes well with birthday-cake festivities, but
Lott got into this mess, and has now to get out of it.
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