This week marks Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, a national holiday. Decades after his first civil-rights marches, what is the meaning of King's legacy? And what do we know about the man himself? Below, read some of the best TNR articles from our archives:
"A Moral Revolutionary" by Garry Wills (09/13/82) The life and trials of MLK.
My friend, and TNR alum, David Greenberg writes in the Los Angeles Times:
If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum.
Monday, October 9
Dear Damon,
CATHOLIC MATTERS: CONFUSION, CONTROVERSY, AND THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH
By Richard John Neuhaus
(Basic Books, 272 pp., $25)
Now that George W. Bush has been reelected, the presidential debates keep returning to taunt me, especially the first one. As everyone knows, Bush's muddleheaded, bumbling performance surprised even his supporters, while John Kerry, the accomplished, if long-winded, technocrat, was pronounced the winner by all. There was, however, a little-remarked upon flight of rhetoric during Bush's two-minute closing statement that startled me at the time: "We've climbed the mighty mountain.
As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.
When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.
There were two Americans who attempted to forge one nation from the two societies created by the Founders' failure to resolve the problem of slavery. One was Abraham Lincoln, whom we honored only implicitly on Presidents' Day (the billing being shared with George Washington). The other was Martin Luther King Jr., for whom there is a national holiday. The reason we honor King and not Lincoln lies in the strategies and tactics that each man employed in attempting to make this a single nation.
In his belated support for a day honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan predictably recalled the man as an inspiring—and innocuous—advocate of good will, brotherhood, and harmony. Such a carefully cropped portrait of Dr. King has gained wide popularity, perhaps because it enables the nation to create a comforting icon out of the career of a political iconoclast. Yet the heart of King's legacy was not his teachings as a gentle minister, but his influence as the most skilled protest leader of our age.
