A Brief History of States' Rights

The New York Times and dagblog's own Larry Jankens reported today on the recent growth of the "states' rights" movement among right wing militants and Tea Party activists opposed to big government. The states' rights supporters are known as "Tenthers" for their veneration of the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states all powers that the Constitution does not explicitly grant to the federal government. They have succeeded in passing a number of hostile anti-fed resolutions in several states:

• South Dakota and Wyoming declared that federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used within the state.
• Oklahoma, Virginia, and Utah passed laws to block national health care reform in their respective states.
• Utah also declared its authority to appropriate federal lands under eminent domain and defended the "inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution."

While there is certainly a Constitutional role for states' rights, the recent clamor by the Tenthers unnerves me, perhaps because "states' rights" has long been Southern code for "Yankee, go home, and let us abuse our Negroes in peace."

Southern calls for states' rights predate the Civil War. At an 1851 States Rights Convention in Charleston, S.C., Robert Barnwell Rhett, a radical pro-slavery advocate, implored the Southern states to secede. Northerner newspapers called Rhett and his colleagues "states rights men" and nicknamed them "Fire-Eaters" for their partisan fury.

1858, Abraham Lincoln's Senate opponent, Stephen Douglass, declared to a cheering crowd, "This government can exist forever, divided into free and slave States as our fathers made it, each retaining the sovereign right to protect Slavery just as long as it chooses, and abolish it whenever it pleases. [Cheers] ... There cannot be perpetuity in this Government except by the administering it in good faith, upon these principles, upon which it was made, to wit, the right of each State, old or new, Free or Slave, to manage its own affairs to suit itself, and then mind its own business, and let its neighbors alone. [Immense applause.]"

States' rights returned with a vengeance during the Civil Rights era of the 20th century.

In 1948, Sen. Strom Thurmond split with the Democrats over their challenge to the Jim Crow laws. He created a new segregationist party commonly known as the "Dixiecrats" but officially called the States' Rights Democratic Party.

In 1957, Gov. Marvin Griffin of Georgia committed himself to the "sovereignty of the states" and vowed, "No white and Negro children will ever sit in the same classrooms so long as I am governor."  And Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, defying Supreme Court desegregation orders, declared, "The authority to control public education has never been delegated by the states to the federal government."

In 1960, a new party called the National States' Rights Party nominated Gov. Faubus for president. The party's founder, J.B. Stoner, was a Neo-Nazi and KKK organizer who was ultimately convicted of bombing a black church.

In 1963, George Wallace famously defied a federal court's desegregation order against the University of Alabama. When the U.S. Assistant Attorney General showed up with the National Guard to enforce the order, Wallace was there to meet him. He defiantly invoked Alamaba's rights under the 10th Amendment and declared, "The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government, offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government."

Among Republicans, Sen. Barry Goldwater invoked states' rights in voting against 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was no coincidence that in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater won only five states other than his native Arizona: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Four of these states hadn't voted Republican since 1876, and the fifth, Louisiana, had only made an exception for Eisenhower.

Finally, Ronald Reagan, who had also opposed the Civil Rights Act, followed Goldwater's footsteps in 1980 by invoking states' rights to a cheering crowd at his first post-nomination campaign stop in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Reagan's subsequent landslide completed the South's Republican transformation.

So when I hear the Fire-Eaters and "states' rights men" of the modern era agitate for freedom from the federal government, especially when they proclaim their fears that health care will be "redistributed" to the poor and to illegal Hispanic immigrants, you can color me skeptical and little bit nervous.