Black-Red View
December 2000

Specter of Tilden-Hayes

The cantankerous political struggle for the White House by the Republican and the Democratic parties isn't a new phenomenon. It had historic precedent in 1876 when the Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, a former Union officer and a three-time governor of Ohio, ran for president.

At the time the Republican Party was the party of labor and African Americans. It was as a result of this election and the maneuverings around gaining the political office that Republicans became the party of emerging American corporate capitalism.

Tilden won the popular vote. The winner in that election needed only the majority of the electoral votes from Oregon, South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, which were the decisive states at that time. According to historians, in those three southern States the election was fraudulent. Both parties were engaged in election malpractice. The Republican-controlled election board invalidated enough of the Democratic votes to give Hayes 185 electoral votes, a majority of one.

To determine whether the election of Hayes was legal Congress set up an electoral commission composed of Republicans and Democrats from the Senate and the House plus two Republicans and two Democrats from the Supreme Court to examine the charges of voting fraud. By a majority of one, the commission gave the election to Hayes.

Hayes' narrow congressional victory was only the tip of a political iceberg. The source of his victory was a secret bargain he had made with southern Congressmen, industrialists and railroad corporations, who wanted to exploit southern labor and natural resources. Hayes promised that he would adopt a southern policy which would open the South for their exploitation.

Thus, when Hayes became president, he ordered the withdrawal of Federal troops from the southern states; he stopped Reconstruction and gave "home rule" to the former slave masters and their henchmen, the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan spread beast-like terror among African Americans and their supporters and re-established a racially segregated society.

This historic counter-revolution against African- American freedom, 126 years ago, isn't just past history buried away in a textbook. African Americans are still fighting against the results of the so-called "compromise of 1876." It created the legal basis for ongoing segregation and open racism. It abandoned the spirit of the Civil War, which not only abolished slavery, but opened the way for Black self-determination during the reconstruction era.

Whatever the era, there is always a sharp contrast between the way the Black masses express their subjectivity and drive for self-determination and what becomes of it in the narrow legal arena. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s took up the struggle against the counter-revolution of 1876 and it won many legal victories that stopped and moderated many of the glaring features of racism, but it failed to uproot racism and transform America's racially segregated society.

We can't just mourn the incompleteness of past history. Instead there is a need to understand the dialectic of African-American history as it emerges in the self-consciousness of African-American masses in motion who do not fear facing the objectivity of today's reality because of the collective memory of their struggles.

That lack of fear, expressed in the outpouring of Black voters in this election, comes from Black masses wanting to overcome being just an Other in American society. As long as they remain an Other, the continuing drive for freedom results in a false opposite, a fixed determinateness of a narrow legal or political remedy.

Black masses are reaching for a self-determination that is universal, that as Hegel said in the "master/slave" section of his PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, recognizes its Other as its own Other through mutual recognition. Anything short of new human relations in everyday life creates a dual world of the subjective reach for freedom as the opposite of the determinateness in which social life becomes fixed.

The hope for the future is not in the decisions made in this election, but in the search for new forms for self-determination against this racist inhuman capitalism.