The Classical Liberal Foundation of Civil Rights

For too long, the history of race relations in the United States has been misrepresented as a battle between “progressive” liberals, supposedly partisans of policies that benefited racial minorities, and “conservatives” trying to block their advancement. Jonathan Bean’s Race and Liberty, of which the first edition appeared in 2009, constitutes an invaluable corrective to that portrayal. A partisan of the “classical” liberal tradition—the liberalism of the American Founders, who believed in the Lockean doctrine of limited government, aimed at securing the equal rights of all individuals—Bean (history professor at Southern Illinois University) provides a collection of over 75 documents, accompanied by helpful, brief editorial commentary, which correct the record. The readings cover not only relations between “whites” and racial minorities, but also immigration policy.

Besides an introduction and conclusion, Race and Liberty contains eight chapters, chronologically arranged, from 1776 to the present. As Bean explains, the classical liberal tradition “dominated the civil rights movement” from the outset. Classical liberals “fought slavery, lynching, segregation, imperialism, and racial distinctions in the law,” while defending what Bean calls the “’natural right’ of migration to America.” Yet contemporary academics misrepresent this tradition, even denouncing the classical-liberal goal of color-blindness in government policy as “objectively racist.” In place of the individualistic outlook of classical liberals, today’s racial “progressives,” such as Ibram X. Kendi, favor “group rights” (which incidentally favor the interests of the particular individuals who espouse them).

Bean rightly begins with early, eloquent American denunciations of slavery, on behalf of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as Christianity, by free blacks, including James Forten (1813) and David Walker (1829), along with Northern ministers. This chapter also contains the successful courtroom statements on behalf of the liberation of the slaves on the captured Spanish ship the “Amistad” (1841) by the evangelical businessman/abolitionist Lewis Tappan, by three of the slaves themselves, and by their legal spokesman John Quincy Adams. The chapter concludes with Frederick Douglass’s celebrated 1852 Fourth of July Oration.

The next chapter, “The Republican Era (1854–1876),” includes the libertarian Lysander Spooner’s 1860 speech asserting the unconstitutionality of slavery; excerpts from the Republican Party platforms of 1856 and 1860 opposing slavery’s extension (a theme repeated in Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address), and Douglass’s 1863 statement on “The Mission of the [Civil] War.” (In the last case, however, one must correct Douglass’s charge that Lincoln’s response to Horace Greeley that his primary aim was to preserve the Union with or without slavery indicated a lack of “moral feeling.” Douglass failed to acknowledge Lincoln’s political situation, needing to preserve support for the war among the Union population, not all of whom were abolitionists, and the fact that Lincoln never reneged on his commitment to preventing the extension of slavery on account of its wrongness, a stand that had originally set off Southern secession. And Lincoln had to know that a Union victory would end slavery (witness the Emancipation Proclamation).

Bean then provides documents illustrating the controversy over emancipation immediately after the war: an excerpt from the infamous Mississippi Black Code of 1866; editorials from Harper’s Weekly that helped impel Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act that same year, aimed at overturning such codes; and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, accompanied by testimony before Congress and a letter to President Grant portraying the horrors inflicted by the Klan.

As Bean reports in his third chapter, “Colorblindness in a Color-Conscious Era (1877-1920),” following the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South after the 1876 election, the former Confederate states imposed (in Douglass’s words) “slavery by another name” on nominally emancipated blacks, even as spokesmen for freedom like Douglass, Massachusetts Republican Senator George Hoar, Booker T. Washington, and NAACP president Moorfield Storey insisted on securing equal rights for all individuals. (Repeatedly, Federal legislation to effectuate that goal was blocked by Southern Democratic filibusters.)

In this chapter, Bean broadens his focus to highlight Republican-Libertarian opposition to exclusionary laws aimed at Chinese immigrants, as well as to imperialism (the Spanish-American War) and the denial of Native Americans’ property rights, along with actions designed to secure the property rights of American Indians. He stresses how classical liberals such as Douglass, Storey, and Louis Marshall (self-made Jewish businessman, founder of the American Jewish Committee, critic of Harvard’s quotas on Jewish admission, and lawyer for the NAACP), dismissed by progressives as “reactionaries,” favored the policy of self-help and therefore sided with business, in opposition to racially discriminatory labor unions, seeing in “capitalism” (as Howard University dean Kelly Miller put it) the means of Negro advancement. In a point that Milton Friedman would echo decades later in Capitalism and Freedom (quoted by Bean), businessmen as such have no interest in discrimination; they just seek to hire the best-qualified, most industrious workman at the most reasonable price. (To illustrate, Bean cites letters from a Georgia railway company to public authorities opposing Jim Crow laws as an inconvenience to its business, followed by letters from white citizens making the same complaint.)

A number of documents Bean selects further exhibit Republican support for black equality. These include addresses in the next chapter by Warren Harding (speaking in Birmingham!) denouncing lynching and the KKK and favoring equality of educational opportunity (1921); by Calvin Coolidge opposing white racism (1924), emphasizing blacks’ military service in World War I; and Herbert Hoover’s desegregation of the Commerce Department (1928). (By contrast, it was “progressive” Democrat Woodrow Wilson who had imposed segregation in Federal offices.)

Further, in the following chapter on “The Roosevelt Years,” Bean goes on to note the ostensibly “liberal” (in a new, “pragmatic” sense) Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to support anti-lynching laws; his refusal to authorize any increase in the immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe, consigning millions to death at the hands of the Nazis; and his discriminatory internment of Japanese-Americans once World War II began, despite lacking evidence of any disloyalty on their part. (Back in 1925, Roosevelt had published a newspaper column warning that having Japanese immigrants in California was a “nightmare” and expressing “repugnance” at the resultant danger of interracial marriage.)

Meanwhile, it was the anti-New-Deal Republican representative Hamilton Fish, mocked by Roosevelt, who repeatedly championed anti-lynching bills in the House, the African-American and Republican journalists (respectively) George Schuyler and R. C. Hoiles who opposed the internments, and the cantankerous libertarian H. L. Mencken who denounced both lynching and the internment and even advocated opening America to all Jewish refugees. (As the noted black writer Zora Neale Hurston observed, Roosevelt won black support, despite his unconcern about lynching, largely by increasing federal welfare programs.)

Republicans did not abandon their pro-civil rights stand after the New Deal era. Bean includes speeches by the conservative Republican leader Robert Taft, plus a minority report by Republican senators Styles Bridges and Bourke Hickenlooper, calling (successfully) for the Senate to refuse to seat the outrageously racist, demagogic Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo. Those selections are followed by a magazine article by New Deal opponent Hurston, praising Taft’s record of legislative action promoting the rights of African-Americans, and (through the Taft-Hartley Act) “protect[ing] Negroes’ right to work regardless of … discriminatory union rules.” Applauding Taft as a liberal in the original sense, Hurston denounced FDR’s policies for promoting dependency, while “leaving Government in the hands of a few.”

While referencing pioneering judicial decisions from this period, including Brown v. Board of Education and Loving vs. Virginia, striking down state laws banning interracial marriage, Bean also includes a 1956 speech by anti-New Deal baseball executive Branch Rickey, who had integrated the major leagues by signing Jackie Robinson, calling the practice of colorblindness “a call from God.” He also includes an excerpt from Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, frequently quoted by “classical liberal opponents of race preferences,” expressing the hope that his children would live “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Although so-called progressives often accuse their libertarian opponents of racism, Bean’s documents prove otherwise. For example, he includes Barry Goldwater’s speech explaining why he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on constitutional—not racial—grounds, since the senator foresaw that the law would (as Bean summarizes) “enable bureaucrats and judges” to use it to justify “treating members of certain government-designated groups more equally than others.” Though that was a consequence denied by the Act’s leading senatorial sponsor, Hubert Humphrey, it didn’t take long for Goldwater’s prophecy to be fulfilled (as described in an excerpt from Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer’s 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination). Goldwater, Bean emphasizes, was no racist: a longtime member of the NAACP and the Urban League, as Arizona governor, he had integrated the state’s national guard and supported integration of Phoenix’s public schools.

For a different example of how purportedly benign progressive policies injured blacks, Bean prefaces Goldwater’s statement with an excerpt from (future Reagan adviser) Martin Anderson’s prescient 1964 book The Federal Bulldozer, which describes how “urban renewal” policies—championed by reformist Democrats—destroyed respectable working-class neighborhoods, whose residents were channeled into monstrous “housing projects” that became cesspools of crime and disorder (and often later had to be torn down).

Of course, classical liberals’ fight for genuine equality did not end with the Civil Rights Act. In subsequent decades, they battled new race-based policies, starting with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 1965 demand that employers report the race of their employees. Although this requirement was ostensibly designed to facilitate “affirmative action” against racial discrimination, it was initially opposed, Bean notes, by the NAACP and other civil-rights groups because of its echoes of Jim Crow. But ironically, Republican President Richard Nixon’s Labor Department, seeking to overcome the effects of longtime labor-union discrimination against blacks in the construction industry, institutionalized a new definition of affirmative action, requiring Federal contractors to report “deficienc[ies]” in their “utilization of minority groups and women,” underutilization being defined as “having fewer minorities or women than would reasonably be expected by their availability,” and to institute “goals and timetables” for remedying such deficiencies.

Nixon’s policies were a foretaste of what later was called “disparate impact theory,” the notion that if the proportion of minorities or women in a given occupation were lower than those in the “available” population, such disproportion must be assumed to be the consequence of discrimination, and hence subject to executive or judicial correction. And Bean then quotes Justice John Paul Stevens’s opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, a “tortured” decision that purportedly banned “benign” racial discrimination in medical school admissions but “encouraged institutions to wrap their discriminatory practices in the new mantle of ‘diversity.’”

One of the best responses to the Bakke ruling, included by Bean, is black, libertarian scholar Anne Wortham’s dismissal of it as “a decision against meritorious achievement.” Her case for rewarding individual accomplishments rather than group accomplishments has been seconded by other prominent contemporary African-American writers that Bean cites (most notably Thomas Sowell). The recent “triumph of the color-blind Constitution,” as Bean terms it, at the judicial level, was the Supreme Court’s 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v President & Fellows of Harvard College ruling, from which he quotes the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts (“the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”) which followed Justice Clarence Thomas’s ruling in the 2007 Seattle School District case.

Bean’s last chapter also includes solid arguments against “black reparations” by African-American writers Coleman Hughes and Wilfred Reilly. And it provides defenses of liberal (legal) immigration as beneficial to the United States, so long as that is combined with policies aimed at assimilation rather than ethnic separatism. In this connection, however, Bean makes one error, claiming that classical liberalism authorizes “a natural right to immigrate.” While all individuals have a right to emigrate, nobody has a natural right to immigrate. Though humane, liberal nations should aim to accommodate refugees fleeing serious persecution, every nation has the authority to decide whom to admit.