Loyalty oaths have bad reputation

Had S.C. Democratic Party officials not reversed themselves Monday and scuttled a loyalty oath for primary voters, they would have landed on the wrong side of history.

For more than 150 years, state and party officials have used oaths and affirmations to stop blacks from voting in Democratic primaries, to target civil rights activists for punishment, and even to promote slavery.

“It’s not something we ought to be trying to revive in the 21st century,” said University of South Carolina historian Dan Carter.

The latest attempt at a loyalty oath — in which voters would have had to “solemnly swear” they were Democrats — wasn’t as serious as those in the past.

But, Carter said, such a requirement sows suspicion and repels people from a political party that should be trying to build a broader base.

History books are full of tales of proposed oaths and affirmations.

In 1956, the S.C. General Assembly approved a law banning all members of the NAACP from employment by state, county or local governments, writes Howard Quint in “Profile in Black and White,” a study of South Carolina in the 1950s.

The law required teachers to fill out questionnaires, asking if they believed in the NAACP’s goals or if their relatives were NAACP members.

In that era, many whites despised the NAACP because its lawyers were winning lawsuits overturning an entrenched system of segregation.

Earlier, in 1948, the S.C. Democratic Party decided to adopt an oath every Democrat had to take.

“It was a transparent effort to keep blacks from the polls,” writes Nadine Cohodas in “Strom Thurmond & The Politics of Southern Change.”

Primary voters had to state their belief in segregation and states’ rights (that era’s code phrase for the right of states to pass laws denying blacks equal rights), Cohodas writes.

Criticism of this action was so intense that the Columbia Record newspaper editorialized that “only a member of the Nazi party in Germany could take the oath and mean it.”

NAACP lawyers took the Democratic Party to court. In the summer of 1948, U.S. District Judge Waties Waring struck down the oath as discriminatory.

“I’m going to say to the people of South Carolina that the time has come when racial discrimination in political affairs has got to stop,” Waring said.

Much earlier, in 1890, the supporters of Ben Tillman — a South Carolina governor and U.S. senator who led a major effort to deny blacks the vote — enacted a Democratic Party rule that said “only white Democrats shall be allowed to vote” in the party primary.

Democrats said the only exceptions were “Negroes who had voted for Wade Hampton in 1876, and who have voted the Democratic ticket continuously ... ” according to historian George Tindall in his book, “South Carolina Negroes: 1877-1900.”

The white Hampton was a former Confederate general who led the Democratic move to overthrow Reconstruction’s biracial government in 1876. The thinking was that any black man who voted for Hampton could be trusted with the vote; others couldn’t.

This rule “rapidly eliminated the Negro members of the party,” wrote Tindall.

Even before the Civil War, in 1833, the S.C. General Assembly required state militia officers to swear “true allegiance” to the state of South Carolina and a lesser allegiance to the U.S. government.

The purpose of this oath was to make sure state officials upheld slavery, writes the late historian David Duncan Wallace in “South Carolina: A Short History.”

A state court ruled the oath “invalid as impairing allegiance to the United States, and thereby violating the Constitution,” Wallace writes.

Carter said Monday one reason so many people were upset about the Democratic Party’s most recent oath is that South Carolinians pride themselves on being independent thinkers.

“It got their backs up in a way that someone should have anticipated,” Carter said.