News at Home

How the Myth of the Lost Cause Tripped Up Trent Lott

by Robert Bonner

With 2002 drawing to a close, the ghosts of Southern history have become important players in national politics. The fallout from

The High Price Today of Immigration Reform in 1965

by Ben Johnson

  America's current mass immigration mess is the result of a change in the laws in 1965. Prior to 1965, despite some changes in the 50's, America was a low-immigration country basically living under immigration laws written in 1924. Thanks to low immigration, the swamp of cheap labor was largely drained during this period, America became a fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups were brought together into a common national culture. In some ways, this achievement was so complete that we started to take for granted what we had achieved and forgot why it happened. So in a spasm of sentimentality on the Right and lies on the Left, we opened the borders.

The Roots of Racial Profiling

by Anita L. Willis

How old is racial profiling? The Free Negro Registry was a means of identifying and tracking so-called Free Persons of Color. In colonial Virginia, all Free Persons of Col

Facts We All Need to Know About Smallpox

by Margaret DeLacy

For twenty years, smallpox has been declared dead. But as President Bush's new plan for vaccinating Americans makes clear, the danger of biological warfare makes this dread disease a fresh thr

The Real Third-Party Candidate in 1948

by Jim Sleeper

There's an odd, poetic justice in Trent Lott's downfall over his incautiously fond reminiscences about Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's Democratic re-election campaign. Thurmond had an opponent in that race whom almost no one has mentioned, because he and his followers were swept immediately into history's dustbin after that election. Now is the time for that untold half of the story. Everyone knows by now that Thurmond's States' Rights Party m

Why I am Opposed to War with Iraq

by Jesse Lemisch

The Speech by Hubert Humphrey that Helped Trigger Strom Thurmond's Candidacy for President in 1948

by HNN Staff

The event that triggered the formation of the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 was the hotly-fought passage of a ground-breaking plank calling upon Congress to approve a civil rights act to assure blacks of the right to vote, the right to equal employment opportunities, and the right to personal safety. Northern liberals cheered the civil rights proposal, which barely passed, but it alienated Southerners, prompting many (but not Strom Thurmond), to stage a dramatic walk o

What If ... Gore Had Won in 2000?

by Leonard Steinhorn

Debate: Was It a Crime to Have Supported the Dixiecrat Party?

Trent Lott ... Find Another Country to Be Part Of

by Derek Alger

Trent Lott Should Be History

by Ralph Luker

"1948 Candidate for President of the US, carried 4 States and received 39 electoral votes as States Rights Democratic candidate (third largest independent electoral vote in US history) &qu

What Would America Be Like If Strom Thurmond Had Been Elected President?

by Norman Markowitz

While channel surfing last week I suddenly came across a wacky propaganda film on C-SPAN about who else but Strom Thurmond. There was Strom being born in 1902, winning his first elective office the year Herbert Hoover became president (1929); becoming a count

In Defense of the Filibuster

by Joanne Mariner

When George W. Bush was asked about the federal judiciary during the 2000 presidential campaign, he cited Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as the Supreme Court justices he most admired."I don't believe in liberal, activist judges," he later explained

Do We Have to Worry About George W. Bush Packing the Courts?

by Evan Stephenson

President George W. Bush plans to “pack” the federal courts with conservatives. Or so say a growing list of important people: Senators Charles Schumer and Patrick Leahy, Representatives Elijah Cummings and Anthony Weiner, Yale Law’s B

Will George Bush Turn Out to Be More Like Reagan or Ike?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

9/11 led the United States to embark once again on a global campaign to make the world "safe for democracy." This time the enemy is terror, the military method favored by Islamism, a global ideology seeking to turn counties into Moslem the

There's Another Name for Regime Change

by Michael D. Richards

All indications are that regime change in Iraq is still on the agenda of the Bush administration. Ironically, the administration has created a situation in which anything less than the invasion, defeat and occupation of Iraq will be considered a failure.Why have President Bush and his advisers staked their reputation on such a risky policy as regime change? An examination of the Cold War policy of"rollback" may help explain this obsession."Rollback," a concept articulated i

Democracy in Iraq? Yes

by Mark Safranski

Commentators and activists of the far Left and Right are agitated at the prospect of an American attack on Iraq. This anxiety is for a variety of reasons but for both ends of the political spectrum the idea of an Iraqi democracy emerging from the rubble of Saddam's dictatorship appears to be particularly alarming possibility. The ability of the United States to shepherd a conquered state to democracy is dismissed as a hopeless quagmire by paleo-conservative author Larry Auster who de

The Paterson 'Protocols'

by Daniel Pipes

Arab Voice, an Arabic-language newspaper published weekly since 1993 from Main Street in Paterson, N.J., appears to be just another one of America's many ethnic publications. Its news pages are replete with items about Palestinian travails and possible war with Iraq. Its featured columnist is James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. Its publisher, Walid Rabah, modestly describes himself as"an activist with the Palestinian Writer's Guild in the United States." Its pages

The Bush Administration's Radical Bellicosity

by Joyce Appleby

The entanglement of the United States in Middle East politics gets tighter and tighter with every turn of events. Although the destruction of the World Trade Center burst upon us as a totally unsuspected development, the September attack in fact came after 50 years of American involvement in the affairs of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, not to mention Israel. As President Bush poises our armed forces to take action against Iraq should that nation fail to comply wit

Why the Democrats Are Favored to Win in November ... Unless They Blow It

by Eric Rauchway

With less than a fortnight before the US mid-term elections, pollsters still think the outcome too close to call - just as they did two years ago. The parties routinely ran neck-and-neck in the late 19th century too, which is why Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's political seer, studies the 1890s. Mr Rove believes his patron owns a coalition like the one that swept William McKinley into office in 1896 and again in 1900. But runes in the demographic sand suggest instead Mr Bush is