One of my biggest complaints about the evening shows on MSNBC (Rachel Maddow followed by Lawrence O’Donnell) or Fox News (Bill O’Reilly followed by Sean Hannity) is that they tend to repeat a lot of the same partisan news, criticisms and talking points. In fact, MSNBC might be worse than Fox News, because of those very liberally partisan “Lean Forward” promotional spots it features all day long by the same evening pundits ( my favorite being Al Sharpton’s “Blueberry Pie” )….and last month PolitiFact Texas took one of the claims in those spots by Lawrence O’Donnell to task: that there were critics of the ultimately very successful G.I. Bill who called it welfare (youtube video below).
At the time (end of World War II), the few critics of it called it “relief” and “dole.” Those two words can be found all over the net as synonyms for present day welfare. The underlying argument, however, is that this laid the groundwork for one of the foundational principles of the future Conservative/Republican party: the concept that any type of welfare is meant to breed dependency on government, which Republicans want you to think is how the Democrats keep their constituencies. The aversion to this dependency was epitomized by Ronald Reagan in his claims about “welfare queens” and glittering generalities about “rugged individualism.” It was also about, as the traditionally southern Democrats turned Republican in the wake of Civil Rights, a veiled type of racism. In other words, Republicans have made the word welfare a derisive one.
(Sidebar: I remember in my carpool days when my favorite right-wing loon Rich Peasel told me that he himself had seen black people driving Cadillacs and dressed in diamonds and fur coats at the grocery store paying with food stamps [they were buying steaks, too]. While I don’t believe this is what he actually saw [he was fibbing big time], this is the personification of that principle.)
The term welfare came into common usage about the time of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society/War on Poverty.” In 1944, it was a word that may have been viewed positively, as reported in one linguist’s blog who was reviewing PolitiFact’s ruling strictly from a “historical sentiment” view: “In 1944, "welfare" didn't appear to have a pejorative sentiment.” Well, knowing how that pejorative sentiment came to be, however, it may support the terms “relief” and “dole” which at that time may have been pejorative.
The critic to whom Lawrence O’Donnell refers for the most part is a Mississippi Democrat who PolitiFact quotes as being “an ardent white supremacist” named John Rankin—who I guarantee would have jumped to the Republicans had he been around in the mid 60’s—and who could just come out and say it back in 1944 before the advent of dog-whistle politics.
(Sidebar: I remember in my carpool days when my favorite right-wing loon Rich Peasel told me that he himself had seen black people driving Cadillacs and dressed in diamonds and fur coats at the grocery store paying with food stamps [they were buying steaks, too]. While I don’t believe this is what he actually saw [he was fibbing big time], this is the personification of that principle.)
The term welfare came into common usage about the time of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society/War on Poverty.” In 1944, it was a word that may have been viewed positively, as reported in one linguist’s blog who was reviewing PolitiFact’s ruling strictly from a “historical sentiment” view: “In 1944, "welfare" didn't appear to have a pejorative sentiment.” Well, knowing how that pejorative sentiment came to be, however, it may support the terms “relief” and “dole” which at that time may have been pejorative.
The critic to whom Lawrence O’Donnell refers for the most part is a Mississippi Democrat who PolitiFact quotes as being “an ardent white supremacist” named John Rankin—who I guarantee would have jumped to the Republicans had he been around in the mid 60’s—and who could just come out and say it back in 1944 before the advent of dog-whistle politics.
If every white serviceman in Mississippi… could read this so-called GI Bill, I don’t believe there would be one in 20 who would approve of it... We have 50,000 Negroes in the service from our state and in, in my opinion, if the bill should pass in its present form, a vast majority of them would remain unemployed for at least another year, and a great many white men would do the same.
He was also the one who called it dole and relief: "The bane of the British Empire has been the dole system” and ““I see a tremendous inducement to certain elements not to try to get employment. It is going to be very easy, with all the inducements that all the agencies will have, to induce these people to get on Federal relief.”
As to the context of the “bane” of the dole system, Rankin stated “Now [we] are penalizing an industrious man who goes back into the shop and goes to work; [we] are penalizing him and compensating the man who delays hunting a job.” This goes to the heart of what I constantly see in the commentary from Republicans trolling the PolitiFact Facebook page, when they complain that their taxes are going to support the undeserving. The Response from MSNBC to PolitiFact Texas also notes the “my way or the highway” attitude so prevalent today with Republicans (i.e., the Tea Party): “He [Rankin] apparently had been willing to sacrifice the whole bill rather than grant the new veterans unemployment benefits.”
The “northern” non-racist Democrats took a more moderate review, as the MSNBC response points out from a Rep. Wright from Pennsylvania:
I do not think you are going to find very many veterans who are going to loaf in order to get $20 a week… I doubt you will find very many Americans anywhere who are going to loaf for 52 weeks deliberately in order to get $20 a week, when they could make more money working in industry.”
Maybe O’Donnell should have said there were “some” critics of the bill who called it a “form” of welfare. In my view this would have gotten it up to Mostly True. Clearly, as a Liberal, he was referring to those like John Rankin (and I’m sure there were others) who signified the future diktats of the Republican party and their opposition to any kind of government assistance which grew from these racial stereotypes.
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| MSNBC gives PolitiFact a big red "False." |
Rachel Maddow, in her televised piece that PolitiFact was now "dead" to her because this ruling should have been at least Mostly True, clearly ignored PolitiFact’s dependence on interviews with Stephen Ortiz and Nancy Beck Young, who said it “incorrect to say critics called the proposal welfare.” In a sense, she interpreted the statement in the same way as PolitiFact Texas: sort of making only a partial reliance without looking into the background of what was really being said.
On the other hand, it’s difficult for me to accept W. Gardner Selby’s summarization that he “found no evidence of critics referring to the GI Bill as welfare.” There was one huge critic who called it what “welfare” was termed at the time and made several attempts on that basis to kill the bill. O'Donnell, as it was noted, needed to use the modern term or he would not have been understood. O’Donnell’s whole reason for the “Lean Forward” spot was to make the case that the Republican claim that welfare is a failure has historical refutations and reveals where one of the party lines of the Republicans came from.
There was no “ignoring of critical facts” by O’Donnell, and MSNBC published a solid and elucidating response. His statement was more akin to “partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context” (Half True). And it doesn’t really take things out of context: the important detail left out is that the word “welfare” was not in use at the time: it was called “dole” or “relief” which were both used by one of its biggest critics at the time, in the context (by O’Donnell) of how the modern party is critical of similar “relief” today, and has turned the word welfare from a positive to negative one.
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