A Golden moment for stuck GOP?

The racially troubled 1950s in North Carolina did not leave much room in civic life for humor, but the period’s peculiarities invited – even required – gentle satire.

Lynchings were past by then and the Ku Klux Klan had been unmasked or driven underground, but schools were still segregated, non-whites were confined to the back of buses, side entrances and poor seating areas in theaters, and banned from most restaurants.

Among a small group of Southern writers and social critics, Harry Golden, a New York-born Jew, watched from his office-home in Charlotte as Carolinians struggled with the slow-motion collision of entrenched history and approaching modernity – at least as much modernity as ’50s North Carolina could provide.

For 24 years (1944-68) Golden published The Carolina Israelite, a one-man, casually periodic and perpetually late newspaper with a national following among progressives and a fairly large but mostly underground fandom within the state.

As Theodore Salataroff wrote in “Commentary” in 1961, “Golden accomplishes on paper what Norman Rockwell does on canvas.” He wrote hundreds of pieces of social criticism, sometimes playful commentary and artful insights for an audience of subscribers ($2 a year, at first) that by 1957 included 60 members of Congress and, among other notables, William Faulkner, Earl Warren, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Harry Truman and Carl Sandburg.

By 1956, white Charlotteans, like all Southerners, were struggling to absorb the implications of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation decision. Golden, a long-time advocate of integration, watched the tension and fear build, then in 1956 unveiled to Israelite readers his solution: the “Vertical Negro Plan.”

He observed that blacks and whites in the South seemed to have no trouble walking side by side or standing together in line at the bank, but when they tried to sit down together, problems started. Since “vertical integration” had already been achieved, he argued, the logical next step would be to replace school seats with standing desks and remove the stools from lunch counters. With everyone vertical, he argued, the problem would be solved.

Perhaps our Republican Congress could draw from his example, as it seems baffled by the problem it created when it malevolently nicknamed the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” and vowed for seven years to repeal it. But it has not been able to figure out how to do away with it and have its benefits, too.

Their problem is all those promises and no place to hide from the approaching 2018 mid-term elections when control of both houses of Congress could be at stake.

Outright repeal would be a political death warrant for them and, for some number of the nation’s 24 million newly insured people, a literal one. Repeal and replace could work, but the “with what?” part of replace is elusive in a deeply divided party.

So how about a little Harry Golden magic?

Pass outright repeal – slaking the far right’s blood lust and giving it a slogan for 2018 – but make the repeal effective Dec. 31, 2020. That would give the winners both the time and a powerful incentive to resolve things.

But if that doesn’t work by late 2020, repeal the repeal and replace it with another repeal effective Dec. 31, 2026 and start all over.

Nobody took Harry's “vertical integration” plan seriously either, but, with time, things did improve.

This story was originally published April 11, 2017 at 5:01 AM with the headline "A Golden moment for stuck GOP?."