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Assessing Miller’s rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. From Du Bois’s perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of
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“The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
“By 1870, roughly 284,000 blacks accounted for 12 percent of the population of sixteen Western states and territories. But Negroes actually show up as early as 1790, in a Spanish census, where roughly 20 percent of the populations of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, and Monterey acknowledged African ancestry. Until the United States’ conquest of the Mexican territory, about 15 percent of Californians continued to acknowledge African heritage. But with the coming of US rule, the incentive to deny Negro blood resulted in the large-scale “disappearance” of that population. These largely mixed-race people were still there, of course. But now they had stronger reasons to disclaim their African roots.”
― Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
― Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
“Do people believe that police in their city and neighborhood treat individual whites and minorities differently? Most blacks and Hispanics believe that police in their city treat blacks worse than whites; three-quarters of blacks and just over half of Hispanics take this view. Roughly the same percentages think that police treat Hispanics worse than whites. Whites tend to take the opposite view: Three-quarters of whites, for instance, believe that police in their city treat whites the same as the two minority groups.”
― Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform
― Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform
“Backed by Klan-type organizations dubbed “Red Shirts” and “Rough Riders,” Democrats summoned thirty-two of the city’s prominent blacks and laid out their demands: All black officeholders in Wilmington must resign and Alex Manly must leave Wilmington. Then, while the black elite were formulating a response, the Democrats launched a wave of violence that steamrolled the scattered Negro opposition. The Republican-Populist administration was ousted and replaced with Democrats. More than 1,400 blacks abandoned their property and fled the city. One commentator called it “the nation’s first full-fledged coup d’état.”45”
― Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
― Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
Jonathan’s 2025 Year in Books
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288 books
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120 books
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780 books
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4 books
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