Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
Dinesh D’SouzaRegnery Publishing, 2016
Reviewd by Tadashi Hama
On the surface, history appears to be nothing more than a cycle of action-reaction, ofwaves endlessly washing upon a shore. To fully grasp history and to learn from it, one
needs to go beyond the cycle and examine the people creating the waves. Thus,personalities and backgrounds are crucial elements in a complete understanding ofhistory. What would history be like if someone else made the crucial decision? For
example, during the Versailles Pease Conference following World War I, Japan raised aproposal to include a racial equality amendment to the Covenant of the League of Nations.
The Conference Chairman, US President Woodrow Wilson, rejected such an amendment.
Why did Wilson reject Japan’s proposal? President Harry Truman ordered the atomic
bombing of Japan despite serious reservations from his advisors and American
government knowledge that Japan was actively seeking to terminate hostilities.
Defenders of Truman’s use of nuclear weapons state that he merely wished to end thewar, but what really motivated him? Both Wilson and Truman, elected to the highest
public office in the United States, were members of the Democratic Party. Is it possiblethat their actions were shaped in part by the history and philosophy of the DemocraticParty?
Author, filmmaker and political commentator Dinesh D’Souza suggests that this could
have indeed been the case. Recently, the Democrats and their “progressive” allies havebeen particularly strident in condemning the maltreatment of the American Indians andBlack slavery, chastising “White Americans” for the former and “the South” for the latter.
Upon closer examination, however, D’Souza states that responsibility for these ills rests
squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party. D’Souza dismisses the popular notionthat the Democratic Party is the party of the “common man,” of “racial equality, social
justice, and equal opportunity,” and asserts that the Democratic Party, from its founding,is the party of “exploitation, murder, and plunder” and “white supremacy”.
Readers of the current book learn that the father of the Democratic Party is Andrew
Jackson, then known as the “common man’s president.” Prior to becoming president,
Jackson “and his cronies” obtained American Indian territory through force, threats andintimidation, selling the land to poor White settlers for a tidy profit. The land Jackson
obtained through his chicanery would eventually become five southern states. In
gratitude, White settlers put Jackson in the White House in 1828 and 1832, vowing theirpolitical support to the Democrats. As president, Jackson signed legislation ordering
Indians to move west of the Mississippi River, despite previous US treaties thatguaranteed protection. For Indians who were unable to move, they were “rounded up ininternment camps” in a “policy reminiscent of the Japanese interments that a later
Democratic administration would enforce during World War II.” The book states that1

White settlers quickly bought up the now vacant lands, further enriching Jackson “and hiscronies.” For his “land stealing,” Jackson was “immensely popular with ordinary people.
Jackson’s treatment of the Indians marked the “beginning of a long subsequent
Democratic Party history of dispossession, cruelty, bigotry, and theft,” and his “proteges
dominated the Democratic Party … until the Civil War.”D’Souza goes on to show that the Democratic Party was the “party of slavery,” a party
that did everything it could to protect Black slavery in states where it was allowed and tospread it into new American states. The support base of the Democratic Party comprisedof slave owners and those who saw slavery as a “natural and normal condition ofsociety.” D’Souza points out that northern Democrats also supported slavery, dispellingthe mistaken notion that only “southerners” supported slavery. Pro-slavery supporters
said that slaves were fed, housed and otherwise taken care of--thus, slavery was “ablessing to the slave and a blessing to the master.” (In 1858, Republican US Senate
candidate Abraham Lincoln derided slavery, a system wherein “you work and I eat, youtoil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”)D’Souza suggests that it is no coincidence that the modern welfare state envisioned by
the Democratic Party reflects the “plantations” of the 19th century South—the state (or“master”) should be responsible for its citizens’ well being. It was the Jackson
Administration that gave poor Whites access to cheap land on which to build their homes.
Slavery was seen as a “positive good,” as it took care of the needs of Blacks from cradle
to grave in exchange for their labor—every plantation was a “little community, with themaster as its head…”.
With the abolition of slavery following the Civil War, D’Souza states that the Democrats
utilized “white supremacy” to amass White support in former slave states—“it was an
essential part of the Democratic Party’s strategy.” Since Democrats still held politicalpower in the South, Democrats placed legal obstacles that prevented former slaves fromfully utilizing their legal rights and backing the Republicans. Indeed, D’Souza notes, it
was the Republicans who were overwhelmingly against slavery before the Civil War andafter the Civil War, Republicans enacted Constitutional Amendments that outlawedslavery and gave freed Blacks full legal rights as American citizens, including the right tovote. While the Democrats ruled a racially segregated South from the “1870s to the1930s” the rest of the country was mostly Republican, winning “most presidential
elections from 1865 through the 1920s.”
One can now view President Wilson’s and President Truman in light of the history of theDemocratic Party. While the Democratic Party may not be the origin of their views, bothmen did grow up in the Democratic South and were apparently very compatible withother Democrats. One could speculate that by the time these men were able to chose, theyfell in with the Democratic Party as the party’s philosophy was entirely compatible with
their own. Given today’s politically correct social climate, retelling of Wilson’s andTruman’s sordid pasts, as told by D’Souza, will never be found in any grade school
history textbook.

2For example, in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson held a screening of the film The Birthof a Nation at the White House for cabinet members and invited guests. The film
portrayed the Ku Klux Klan, characterized by D’Souza as the “terrorist wing” of the
Democratic Party, as “heroes,” taking on northern “carpetbaggers” and “protecting thehonor of the South.” The film paraphrased from Wilson’s A History of the American
People and drew from it as a reference source. While the Klan was depicted as heroicsaviors of the White race, its real work involved terrorizing Blacks, preventing them fromexercising their political rights. As to the claim by D’Souza that the Klan was the“terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, he notes that “every prominent leader [of theKlan] was a Democrat.”
In keeping with the Democratic Party’s white supremacist policy, candidate Wilson in1912 stated that he opposed Chinese and Japanese immigration because, he believed, they
were unassimilable: “We cannot make a homo-geneous population out of people who do
not blend with the Caucasian race… Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem
to solve, and surely we have had our lesson.” As president, Wilson “mandatedsegregation for all the agencies in the federal government.” In defense of this, Wilson
stated that “segregation was in fact beneficial for blacks.” It should be noted that futurepresident Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as Secretary of the Navy in Wilson’s cabinet,“never objecting to the de jure segregation that Wilson had imposed…”
D’Souza further adds that Wilson espoused a belief in a racial hierarchy, that some races
were more “evolved” than others. For example, he considered “Orientals” an advanced
race, but this group had “degenerated, basically lowering them into the black and brown
category,” which, to Wilson, were lower than Whites. By viewing Wilson’s backgroundand thinking on race, we can understand why he rejected any thought of “racial equality”
as proposed by Japan.
It was ultimately President Harry Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against
Japan. Truman made his decision on July 25, 1945 and first and foremost, his biographers
have noted, was his desire to force Japan to capitulate. The current book does not explore
the possibility that Truman’s racist attitudes played a key role in his decision to use
nuclear weapons against Japan. However, upon noting Truman’s background, one could
say that use of a weapon with unimaginable destructive force against a non-White enemy
came as an easy decision to him. Had nuclear weapons been developed a year earlier,would Truman have ordered Berlin be reduced to radioactive rubble?
Truman’s upbringing could have been explored in more depth by D’Souza. Elsewhere, it
is noted that Truman freely admitted that “I was raised amidst some violently prejudicedSoutherners.”1 Truman’s younger brother and sister declared their distain of “niggers”
and Harry “shared this outlook.” He took a dim view of nonwhites as he wrote in a June
22, 1911 letter to his future wife Bess Wallace: “I think one man is just as good as
another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Wills
says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, and then threw what
1

Leuchtenburg, W.E. (2005). The White House Looks South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press.

3was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race
prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa,yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.” Bess shared in his
disapproval of being in the company of non-Whites, stating that “blacks should have theirschools and we should have ours.”
Truman’s views on Blacks persisted through out his tenure as President. However, he didsign an executive order in 1948 to desegregate the US armed forces. (In 1948, Truman
faced a presidential election.) Nonetheless, American military units remained segregatedup until the Korean War. Rather than Truman’s order, the need for manpower during thewar forced the military to integrate Blacks into White units. Truman’s view on theChinese may have shifted a little over time. While visiting San Francisco’s Chinatown in
1944, Truman supposedly stated that “those Chinese are wonderful, they are the only
colored people I trust.”
Truman’s exact feelings toward the Japanese during his tenure in office are not entirelyclear, but he likely considered them “subhuman” and that “the only good Japanese was adead one” as most Americans did during World War II. His former boss, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, had no need for the Japanese race.2 Truman referred to them as “beasts”
following the dropping of the atomic bombs. Truman’s “white supremacist” views are infact aligned with that of his party and they do not appear to have hinder his decision tovaporize non-White cities with nuclear weapons.
The current book describes history and role of the Republicans as a counterbalance to the“racist Democrats”. As the current book was written in 2016 and released before the 2016
US presidential election, one could imagine that the main purpose of the book was to castthe Democrats and its presidential candidate in the worst possible light. Whether readers
were swayed by D’Souza’s portrayals on Election Day is not known. Equally importantis whether D’Souza’s findings will resonate beyond 2016.
Nonetheless, the main value of the current book is its unflinching depiction of the historyof the Democratic Party, a history that has been, as D’Souza puts it, “whitewashed,” anddeserves wide attention, internationally and domestically as well. A limitation of thecurrent book is that D’Souza restricts the sociopolitical effects of Democratic thinking tothe US and does not survey the Democratic Party’s feelings for non-Whites at theWhile FDR in “Shall We Trust Japan?” (Asia, July 1923) wrote approvingly of the Japanese, stating thatthey were a “race … of acknowledged dignity and integrity,” and hoped that the US and Japan would findcommon grounds for cooperation, he opposed Japanese immigration into the US: ‘’So far as Americans areconcerned, it must be admitted that, as a whole, they honestly believe—and in this belief they are at one
with the people of Australasia and Canada—that the mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive
scale is harmful to our future citizenship…As a corollary of this conviction, Americans object to theholding of large amounts of real property, of land, by aliens or those descended from mixed marriages.
Frankly, they do not want non-assimilable immigrants as citizens, nor do they desire any extensive
proprietorship of land without citizenship.” Roosevelt, in justifying his position, asserts that the Japanese
were of like mind (Robinson, G. (2001). By Order of the President. Cambridge, MA; Harvard UniversityPress). During the war, FDR inquired about the possibility of “solving the Japanese problem” by forcing
the Japanese to interbreed with other Asian groups (Robinson, G. (2012) After Camp: Portraits inMidcentury Japanese Life and Politics, Oakland, CA: University of California Press).
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international level. Since a number of crucial interactions between Japan and the US
occurred under Democratic leadership, to predict the outcome of future interactions
between Japan and American Democrats, it is imperative to get a true accounting of theirbeliefs, which form the basis of their behavior. Conversely, what kind of treatment could
Japan expect from Republicans? What do Republicans believe?
D’Souza makes the Republicans the heroes of the current book, but it is not entirely clear
what their attitudes are to non-Whites. While US House Democrats overwhelmingly
supported the 2007 “Comfort Women” Resolution, Senator Daniel Inouye, a Democrat,
urged restraint on the issue. Many Republicans, such as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, thenranking Republican member in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, took theDemocrat’s cue and chastised Japan, demanding that they “apologize”. Then thereare
Republicans such as Dana Rohrabacher. He wondered aloud if there was any merit insupporting the resolution, as he characterized Japan as a “reliable security partner of theUS” and commended the Japanese government for its “role in enhancing stability in theAsia-Pacific Region”. In the end, however, Rohrabacher voted in favor of the Resolution.
Then there are other Republicans, such as Representatives Ron Paul and Thomas
Tancredo, who criticized their fellow representatives for forcing Japan to perpetuallyapologize for something that the current generation of Japanese had no responsibility andfor picking sides in what is essentially a political issue between Japan and Korea. (Pauland Tancredo voted against the Resolution.) It would not be wise to assume that all
Republicans will come to the aid of Japan on historical issues or that all Democrats willcondemn Japan for taking the “wrong interpretation” of history. However, in Japan, there
is a lack of understanding of the distinction between the two major American politicalparties and perhaps greater understanding of the history of these American politicalparties will lead to better understanding of their behavior. D’Souza’s book is a step in thisdirection.

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