Bilbo the Wraith Remains

Look too long into the shadows and we might despair. Instead, I choose mostly to look at the sunlit realm. Humanity has men and women who got the big question of their day right, but every so often we must note that we have also given power and privilege to men who got the big question of their day wrong.

Why?

We might pretend that our problems were long ago, back then, and that when echoes of those evils bubble up in our time that this is almost (if not quite) quaint. We need not fear the alt-Right or renewed white racialism, because: “MLK, Obama, and the Civil War was over 150 years ago.”

No.

In 1947, in the lifetime of many still alive, an American state sent an open white nationalist, Theodore Bilbo, to the United States Senate. This man, who had been a powerful and progressive governor, openly advocated for white supremacy and white nationalism. He wrote a book attacking interracial marriage as leading to national decay. He defied our best history, ignoring heroes such as the Rev. Haynes, an African-American Minuteman and pastor, who married and raised a large, happy family that was interracial.

His fake history had no place for Rev. Haynes who fought for our freedom from Britain, but glorified those who rebelled against the Constitution and tried to divide our nation. Theodore Bilbo preferred the treason of Jefferson Davis to the patriotism and Christian service of Rev. Haynes.

He wrote a book from the Senate. I read it so you do not have to do so. It is a summary of his struggle against liberty and humanity and for a peculiar, parochial twisting of Christianity. It has no place for the glorious Christian nation of Ethiopia, but instead twists Scripture to his own devilish ends.

And the people of his state kept sending him to Congress.

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization says nothing that alt-Right trolls do not put on my Twitter feed, only from a US Senator. He spoke his hate in my father’s lifetime and men like my father had to oppose what he said. Theodore Bilbo passed laws, kept people from voting, and his heritage did not die at the moment he died.

People may have become more subtle, but the people who elected this progressive to office, kept doing so. In fact, Bilbo represents a pathway to power that (thank God) did begin to fade: the Big Government white nationalist. Bilbo spent much of his career providing for the poor of his state if they were white and would give crumbs to African-Americans if they knew “their place.”

Of course, Bilbo was the last gasp of the dream of some white Americans that the “race problem” could be solved by getting the “problem” to go back to Africa. That evil delusion had infected good men including Abraham Lincoln. Bilbo adopted the worst ideas of good men, so he could continue to get the big thing, racial equality, wrong. It is as stupid as if one was not so keen on Churchill’s opposition to the Nazis, but doubled down on his defense of colonial India.

The open racism of Bilbo was fading even in his lifetime. The New Deal and FDR had been built around accommodating white racialism, but Lyndon Johnson and other Democratic leaders were getting ready to change the party.

To think the racialism vanished is foolish. It was cleaned up, got a social media feed, but it still exists. Reflect on the harm done by big-government Bilbo, racialist Bilbo, and look for his ilk today.

How? Look for the light of Christian charity and that begins with this great truth: all men are created equal. The people that put a “but” to that statement have gone into the shadows with Senator Bilbo, peculiar American.