In the 1860’s it was the Republican Party in Washington - the home of former abolitionists – that sought to grant legal rights and social equality to blacks in the South. The Democrats of the day had broad support among white Southerners and conservatives in the North.

The Republicans, then dubbed radical Republicans, managed to enact a series of constitutional amendments and reconstruction acts granting legal equality to former slaves, giving them access to federal courts if their rights were violated. But Lawrence Goldstone says that in a series of cowardly rulings, the Supreme Court undermined those laws, and laid the basis for years of lynchings and Jim Crow rules in the South.

We’re in a period of incredible volatility. The last time our country went through a period like this, you could argue, was in the years after World War II, when between 1946 and 1952, the House changed hands repeatedly. …But I think it means the public’s impatient, the public’s worried, the public’s lurching a little bit from side to side saying ‘We’ll take a chance on you. No. We don’t like what you’ve done. We’ll take a chance on the other guy.’ And I think what it means in the short-term is it’s a very cautionary tale for John Boehner and the Republicans and I think John Boehner’s well aware of this. They have to be very careful with how they handle their majority or they’ll lose it.

— Todd Purdum on the massive changes taking place in American politics

Glenn Beck, The Tea Party and The Republicans

Our guest tomorrow, history professor Sean Wilentz, on Glenn Beck and the Tea Party’s Cold War roots.