September 24, 2006
Little Rock Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:45 PM EST This website notes that today is the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s decision to send the National Guard to enforce the desegregation of the schools of Little Rock, the desegregation having been ordered by the Little Rock school board, itself acting under orders from a Federal judge. But this is not quite what happened. It was Governor Orval Faubus who called out the National Guard, to obstruct the desegregation of the schools; Eisenhower then federalized the Guard and sent it back to its barracks. When mob violence threatened the nine students who had been sent to Central High School, Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to protect the students. That happened on September 24, 1957, so that would be the anniversary we are today remembering. The anniversary is worth pondering for a number of reasons. First of all, there is nowadays much lamenting of the role of the courts in usurping legislative prerogatives: both Right and Left tend to speak of the imperial judiciary. So we might want to recall that the courts began their current rise to dominance, if that is what they in fact enjoy, when they had to do what legislatures refused to do, which was enforce Brown v. Board of Education. Liberals admired the courts and looked to them as the source of moral and political progress, because the courts were among the heroes of the civil rights movement, in which they arguably played the decisive role. Direct action was necessary, and certainly very brave, but after direct action moved the nation’s conscience, it was the courts that had to step up, when everyone else had failed to do so. It was a court that struck down segregation, and more remarkably, other courts that took a major role in enforcing the decision. So it was the imperial judiciary that was indispensable in erasing the greatest stain from our society. Now that the shoe is on the other foot—the courts on a number of recent occasions have struck down provisions of bills passed by liberal legislators—liberals (I’m one) sometimes lament the antidemocratic power of the courts. The paradox remains inescapable: Judicial review is an antidemocratic provision of our otherwise strikingly democratic political culture, and judicial review serially gores oxen owned by all sorts of people. September 24, 1957, is also noteworthy because it was perhaps the last time all liberals looked on the 101st Airborne with undisguised delight. The division had fought in Normandy, the Netherlands, and the Bulge, and it would soon enough fight on Hamburger Hill and in the A Shau Valley. The 101st lost over 4,000 dead in Vietnam, and it is now fighting in Iraq. Most analysts think the division has won all its battles, but the record on its masters winning our wars has been more mixed. At Little Rock, the 101st Airborne fought for liberty and won. If you watched that happen—and the fight was televised, so most people did—it is hard to have a bone-deep scorn for the political utility of the American army, or too cheap a certainty that violence is always the lamentable failure of politics. Violence is a tool of politics, and in Little Rock it was used by people who sought to maintain gross injustice. The use of political violence was defeated only by the threat and use of greater force. This sequence was not unique to Little Rock. At the time, the mobs beaten back by the paratroopers called the action a second federal invasion of Arkansas. They were right.
|
