Impeaching Racist Mofos is a Good Thing
December 13, 2019 9:14 AM   Subscribe

Novelist, poet, and journalist Michael Harriot posts a twitter thread on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson [threadreader] which shows how dangerous it is to have a racist in the white house and how Lincoln's most serious error may have been his attempt to compromise with racists by selecting Johnson as VP. (n.b., while Johnson was successfully impeached, the Senate failed to convict him)
posted by CheeseDigestsAll (11 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hannibal Hamlin stan here. Given that Lincoln won the 1864 election in a rout, there was really no good reason to drop him from the ticket. Hamlin instead of Johnson succeeding Lincoln is one of the great what-ifs of American history.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:47 AM on December 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


I distinctly remember learning in high school about how unfair the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was, specifically because the Tenure in Office Act removed his ability to choose his Cabinet. And this was in Nevada in the 1980s.
posted by Etrigan at 9:51 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


My grandparents named my dad after Hannibal Hamlin, and my brother and I each got one of those names as a middle name (my brother got the better-known one, though it's better known for other reasons.)
posted by spacewrench at 9:58 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


Given that Lincoln won the 1864 election in a rout

The National Union convention was in early June, 1864. The withdrawal of the Radical Democrats and the fall of Atlanta both happened in September. Lincoln had many talents, but apparently seeing into the future wasn’t one of them.
posted by zamboni at 10:19 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh, if I could dream, the 1864 running mate would've been Thaddeus Stevens. (I know he was fairly old and unhealthy by then but a man can dream).
posted by tclark at 10:34 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


Stevens was too old, Edward McPherson was too young... but a better running mate than Johnson could've been located via wide arm swing.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:54 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


Lincoln saved the Republic in life only to doom it with his death. It's the example of the ultimate inefficacy of the radical Republicans (no the other ones) under much more congenial political circumstances that has me sitting in a pit of despair wrt reversing the fascist accelerationism of the last half century.
posted by PMdixon at 12:09 PM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Harriot is a living national treasure, and his history threads are possibly the one solid reason for using twitter. It seems like every week or so, sometimes more than once, he’ll drop an exquisitely documented explanation of how the current received truth is utterly wrong, and based on falsehood and structural racism. His recent thread responding to Nikki Haley’s retread of the confederate flag as a misunderstood symbol of heritage should be required reading, as well as his deconstruction of the myth of confederate statues, showing how most of them were built under Jim Crow, rather than immediately after the civil war, for the purposes of intimidation and false narrative creation.

If you haven’t yet, follow this guy on twitter, and read his columns on The Root.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:08 PM on December 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


^Harriot's Buttigieg two-fer last month at the Root (Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF, on 11/25, and Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here's What Happened, on 11/26) were fantastic.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:32 PM on December 13, 2019 [7 favorites]


Seconding Harriot as a national treasure. It saddens me that I only learned of his twitter like two weeks ago. Check out the intense scholarship he shares with the public.
posted by panhopticon at 2:57 PM on December 13, 2019


Sometimes I think about how close the US came to having Joe Lieberman as a VP and wonder if the Republicans hadn't Supreme Courted a victory over Gore and something happened Gore where we would be now.
posted by srboisvert at 5:32 AM on December 14, 2019


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