Have Conservatives Ever Been on the Right Side of History?

con·serve
/kənˈsərv/
to keep and protect something from damage, change, or waste.

Can an ideology that exists to keep things the way they are, ever be on the right side of history? Has it ever been? Let’s take a look at some of the largest civil rights movements in American history & see where the conservative positions were, & how we view those positions retrospectively

The Emancipation of Slaves

It is clear that the common prevailing wisdom of The United States, for its first handful of centuries, even before the country was free was that slavery was an acceptable thing to benefit from. There were an occasional handful of abolitionists during our nation’s founding, especially in Northern states, but in the South it was almost unanimously accepted, due to their economy’s reliance on agriculture. As the decades went on, radical abolitionists in the North began proposing the idea that slavery is immoral & needed to be abolished in its entirety.

At first, these progressive ideas were very unpopular & ridiculed for being radical. John Brown is one of the most famous & “radical” abolitionists, who is considered by some to be the first “domestic terrorist”. He wanted to give a “death blow” to the institution of slavery by any means necessary. In the Spring of 1856, a pro-slavery mob came into Kansas which at the time was still just a territory, undecided on whether or not to allow slavery or not. The mob came with the goal of attacking the town of Lawrence founded by & lived in by Pro-Abolitionists. They burned down buildings, newspapers, & even killed a resident. So in retaliation, John Brown led a guerilla squad to find a well-known Pro-Slavery settler group & murdered them. Later as the issue of slavery reached its boiling point John Brown aimed to ransack a federal armory and arsenal in Harper’s Ferry to arm slaves & start a slave rebellion in Virginia. His raid failed, as local Pro-Slavery militia & federal troops got involved & ended it. John Brown’s name was synonymous with radicalism & was used by pro-slavery as an example of the violence of abolitionists long after he was executed for his actions.

But, as we know, the abolitionists continued to grow & their labels as radical slowly dissolves as their ideas normalize, with John Brown going from “terrorist” to “martyr”. Eventually, the conflict over slavery leads to The American Civil War, the Northern abolitionists win & with that the traditionalist Southern Confederates trying to keep the institution of slavery alive as it had been since the 1600s lose & become one of the most detested villains in all of American history. Pro-Slavery which was once a commonplace stance ends up becoming one of the most unanimously loathed positions Americans have ever had.

The Organized Labor Movements of the early 21st century

As industrialization began in the mid to late 1800s in America, the average American worker was overworked, underpaid & working in unsafe conditions. Many were working 100 hour weeks, many were children & many were injured or killed due to their lack of safety protocols. The way to earn a living changed from making your own goods and selling them to making large amounts of goods for someone else, and making a small percentage of their earnings. Once again, workers who revolted were seen as radical, and the majority of Americans did not support the growing labor movements. Especially conservative governments. The Labor Knights group was formed to try and create a Union to fight for fewer hours and failed to gain traction after a protest in 1886 turned violent, with a bomb going off & violent police retaliation. Labor leaders were imprisoned, many were hanged, and many of those who were hanged, weren’t even at the protest. This controversial event is now known as the “Haymaker Affair”. Fast forward a few decades, the public warms to labor rights, & advances are made, but the new group the “Industrial Workers of the World” are once again labeled as radicals for being Socialists & not supporting America’s involvement in World War I, causing many of them to be imprisoned & labeled as anti-American traitors.

Eventually though, the government’s conservative stance against the Socialist Union groups softened & changed as a pro-Union President Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected & permanently implements many of the labor union’s demands. While not all people agree with FDR’s policies, it is generally agreed upon that the Union leaders of the 1860s-1930s were on the right track. Fighting for 8-hour work weeks, banning child labor, increasing pay & drastically increasing workplace safety with fire safety protocols & protection against handling sharp & dangerous mechanical components becoming requirements over time, once again placing the conservative governments before FDR as being on the wrong side of history.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

Traditionally speaking for the first few hundred years of the country, men were always seen as the leaders, the educated, wealthy, powerful figures. Women on the other hand were the mothers, & the housekeepers, not meant to be taken very seriously. They weren’t allowed to have a voice in politics, which manifested itself mainly in the form of women not having the right to vote, with very few & short-lived exceptions. They also couldn’t own property, their own money, or start businesses with few exceptions, exceptions that began to grow with different territories & states during the early to mid-1800s.

The radical suffragists & women’s rights advocates were originally scoffed at by men who couldn’t take these women seriously. Men who sided with the suffragists, commonly known as “suffragents” were seen as weak unmasculine men & were berated or even attacked by the “traditional masculine man”. Fast forward to today, while there are still some major male figures who denigrate women, & women’s rights to bodily autonomy are still in question, those historical traditionalists who fought against women’s rights are seen as being in the wrong, unanimously, & once again the progressive suffragists & suffragents fighting for a once powerless minority are seen as the heroes.

The Civil Rights Movement

After the abolition of slavery, black Americans were still not equal to whites in many regards. Even if they were free, societally speaking they still weren’t expected to mingle or interact much with white people in the early days, culminating in a series of laws known as Jim Crowe Laws, which legalized separation between black & white people, with the caveat being that it must be “separate but equal”, which of course, it wasn’t. Even Abraham Lincoln, who was considered progressive for his time & was praised for his Emancipation of Slaves said “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people.”

African Americans fought for decades against these long-lasting mentalities of white people having & deserving better infrastructure, products & residencies than their black counterparts. Martin Luther King Jr. is considered one of the most iconic heroes in American history, with a federal holiday devoted to him. Yet, back in the 1960s, despite his peaceful means he was hated by traditionalists living in the South trying to keep things the way they’ve always been. Separate.

MLK Jr. was considered radical, anti-American, & Marxist & was smeared for being the figurehead for a movement that the southerners considered to be non-peaceful, despite his peaceful dialogue. The newspaper ran political cartoons showing a destroyed city with MLK Jr. saying “I plan to lead another non-violent march tomorrow”, once again implying that he wasn’t actually peaceful at all. Ironically while MLK Jr. was being smeared for his violent movement & ideology, mob violence, beatings, lynchings & other murders were commonplace in the deep south by white pro-segregationists against black people.

Not even children weren’t safe with the well-known tragic stories of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy beaten & tortured to death by a group of segregationist men & the Little Rock 9, who were elementary-aged children trying to go to white schools & needing military escorting to avoid getting mobbed by the hundreds of angry segregationists outside of the school. Even in the 1970s, after the passing of The Civil Rights Act, the desegregation of busing was a controversial issue, with violent threats made to school buses full of children if school districts allowed black kids in their white buses.

Fast forward to 2020, and another civil rights movement known as “Black Lives Matter” forms & just like with the Civil Rights Movement, is overwhelmingly peaceful, with a handful of exceptions with looting & largescale riots smearing the entire movement to the traditionalists who are trying to keep things as they are, & not push progressive policies to benefit African-Americans. Only time will tell if BLM & its supporters are historically praised as the heroes, but with all of the parallels to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, I suspect the “White Lives Matter” detractors will be looked at similarly to their Segregationist predecessors in the future.

The LGBT Rights Movement

Most recently (& still hot on the news) the LGBTQ community has been long ridiculed by traditionalists trying to preserve conservative Christian values. For an overwhelming majority of America’s history, the concept of homosexuality was not often thought about & when it was, it was looked at as an affront to God. Gay people were widely closeted for fear of persecution, both socially & even legally. It wasn’t until 2003 that America legalized homosexual relations & not until 2015 that two gay people could be legally married. As recently as the 1990s, not even Democratic politicians widely supported LGBTQ rights.

The first politician who openly supported Gay Rights was Harvey Milk of San Fransisco, who was openly gay himself, & had groundbreaking stances on the LGBTQ community for an American politician of the 1970s. He received massive opposition, including some opponents using gay slurs against him & others saying brutally homophobic things like “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards.” During this time, there was a pervasive sentiment that gay people were also aligned with or more likely to be pedophiles, or at the very least morally corrupt in other ways, leading to anti-gay groups being formed in California like “Save Our Children” & bills banning gay people from working in grade schools.

Despite these common sentiments held across the country, even in San Francisco, a city stereotyped for its progressivism, Harvey fought diligently to progress gay rights until his assassination by a disgruntled ex-politician who worked with Milk & clashed with him on many policies. Milk grew into this legendary martyr for the LGBTQ community & as time went on, more & more people, & politicians began supporting LGBTQ rights. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s did not help the LGBTQ movement as many began seeing them as gross sexual deviants or thought of it as a punishment from god, but for the most part, the country was moving into a more accepting & empathetic direction.

Conclusion

Now, once again after a surge of anti-trans sentiments, & a mass shooting committed by a trans-man it’s becoming somewhat common once again for politicians & people to advocate against the rights of gay & especially trans people. Conservatives are continuing this pattern of choosing a group of people to vilify, or a stance to hold based on keeping things how they were. But when they did this about slavery, they were wrong. When they did this about labor rights, they were wrong. When they did this about women’s rights, they were wrong. When they did this about the civil rights movement they were wrong, & when they did this towards LGBTQ people they were wrong. With a long expansive history of choosing the wrong positions, consider the idea that perhaps moving forward is the correct way for society to move, rather than an eternal stagnation based on this idealized version of the past & of traditions that make you comfortable. It’s normal for humans to be afraid of change, but this fear cannot outweigh the rights, dignity, & lives of innocent people. If it does, you may be the next villain of the history books of the future.