Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1907-01-10
POIiCQ| Comment.
To Make the Democracy Feeb,er.

To Make the Democracy FeebIer.
Ii the centenarian Morgan of Ala
bama has his way, the Democratic
party will be pushed as far into the
background in the voting in 1908 as
1t was in 1864. Morgan demands that
the next Democratic National conven-
ton declare in its platform that the
Democratic party of the nation is and
always has been white mans party"
As nobody has been trying to make
the democracy red mans, a yellow
mans or black mans party, the coun-
try will have some difficulty in grasp
ing the pertinence of this proclamation.
Neither the antediluvian from Alabama
nor any other man from his section has
been doing anything for the negro in
recent times which would make any
body believe that the democracy was
beginning to lean toward equal politi
cal rights for all races. Therefore, he
may have some trouble in convincing
the Democratic convention a year and
a half hence that 1t ought to fiaunt its
disregard of the organic law openly
before the country. Sitting close to
Morgan in the Senate Is a man from
South Carolina who is also opposed TO
all the war amendments. A few years
hence, if Morgan is alive at that time,
he may be REINFORCED by Vardaman of
Mississippi, who has started out to re-
peal the fourteenth and fifteenth
amendments. Tillman and Vardaman
will probably, if they are delegates TO
the convention Of 1905 favor MOrgan's
declaration that the democracy of the
nation is and always has been white
mans party
An immediate effect Of the adoption
of the Morgan plank for the Demo
cratic platform would be that that par
ty would become even more sectional
and diminutive than it has been in re-
cent times. In 1904 the democracy car
ried no States outside of the South, and
did not hold even all the South. The
great North and West, which contain
the brains, the wealth and the power
of the nation, repudiated and cast out
the Democratic party. The few mem
bers of the Senate from the North and
West which the Democratic party held
even through the Roosevelt landslide
two years ago are now taken away
from them. As a result of the cleo
tons a few weeks ago the Democrats
lost the Senators from Colorado, Idaho
and Montana; Republicans will take
the places of Patterson, Dubois and
Clark. In the entire country there is
no Democratic Senator except from the |
Southern States, and in some of those |
States, as in Delaware and West Vir- |
ginia, the Democrats are excluded. |
Throughout that part of the country |
which has two-thirds Of the popula- |
ton, threefourths of the wealth and |
nineteenth of the social and political |
influence the Democratic party is |
branded as an alien organization which |
deserves the contempt Of the American /
people.
Alabama's ancient Morgan is work
ing to make mis- party feebler and more
than it has been even in re-
cent years. The effect of his gratuitous
reversion toward barbarism would be
to destroy the faint clance which the
Democratic party has of gaining any
foothOld in any of the important States
of the North or West. Nobody in the
North or West is asking social equality
for the black man, but those regions
allow him at the polls all the political
rights which the law has guaranteed
to him. From the yellow the red and
the black man the Republican party
asks no favors. The Republican party
gives a square deal to everybody, re-
CARELESS Of the country of his birth or
the color of his skin. Morgan's pro-
gram would cover the democracy with
a ridicule which would make northern
and western Democrats ashamed in
this twentieth century to cast their
ballots for party with sixteenth cen
tury aims and prejudices-St. Louis