Re: CHAT: Gale Norton (was Californian secessionists)

Quoting Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>:

> >Andrew Chaney wrote:
> >
> >>>In any event, in the more conservative parts of the country,
> >>>such as the Mountain states and the South, the pre-1860 notion
> >>>of "state-sovereignty" is still surprisingly widely held, as
> >>>Bush Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, reminded us all so
> >>>stunningly this year.
> >>>
> >>
> >> How so? What did Gale Norton do?
> >
> >She said that Confederate soldiers died to defend state
> >sovereignty, and that they were right to do so, essentially.
>
> "States' rights" sounds good, but the trouble with it is that it
> usually turns out to mean letting the scoundrels who control the
> states run unchecked. In the Civil War many Floridians initially
> joined the Confederate army because they didn't think someone in far
> off Washington not familiar with local conditions should tell them
> what to do. They found out, to their sorrow, that the planters
> were worse.
In Texas, the reverse tended to be true.  The planters were more
progressive and less rabidly racist than the rest of the population,
even if they were slaveowners. This is at least partly because the
planters did not have to deal with a 1000-mile long, bitterly violent
interior frontier like the other settlers did. In any event, the War
obliterated them as a class in Texas.

One of the reasons that Texas's governor is one of the weakest in the
nation (a fact Bush conveniently forgot to mention on the campaign trail)
is that after the Civil War, the Republican Governor Davis,
backed by what was effectively a Northern military junta, proved
so wholly corrupt, autocratic and inept (he more than once asked
President Grant to keep him propped up) that as soon as the Constitutional
Convention was held, the office was stripped of most of its powers
to appoint members of his cabinet and of the courts, which were all
made elective offices.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III

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