No avowedly democratic state has made a serious effort to make equality of economic opportunity a social relaity; for this concession to the peole would haved jeopardized the plutocratic aims of the middles class [here he means capitalists]. In this country Jacksonian democracy stopped with the fiction of social equality. Economic inequality and the fictitious character of social equality provide the first step of American capitalism to rationalize its power. Working with the reality of economic disparity, capitalism made secure the doctrine of social equality, and fought on that basis the War Between the States, which finally consolidated its power. [my emphasis]Tate's Southern Agrarian vision insists that the "Jacksonian" policy of social equality is a lie. Part of the Southern Agrarian schtick was to use "capitalism" as a pejorative against Yankee industrialism. There actually is a serious discussion among historians as to what extent the antebellum Southern economy had feudal as distinct from distinctly capitalist features. But the business of Southern agriculture was carried on within a capitalist economy. It takes some imagination for the Agrarians to conceive of the antebellum South or of postwar subsistence forming as somehow other than "capitalist."
Tate gets all Calhounian here, using arguments that could be cut and pasted to sound like a leftwing, labor-oriented criticism of the capitalist system. But it isn't. It's an indictment of the Yankee political and economic system in Lost Cause terms. In a particular twist, though, that I don't recall encountering elsewhere, he makes the historical argument this way:
Our capitalism [Yankee industrialism] has contrived to make, first, a special myth of its own origin: the myth that it rose with the salvation of democracy and the Union. It has constructed, secondly a pseudo-moral sanction fo itself: its origin being heroic, its mission to the American people is necessarily to give them the benefits of "democracy". ...For those of us not blessed with the conservative passion, this kind of convoluted argument is less a wonder to be admired than a headache-inducing mind-twister. My own translation of this would be: The Yankees are big ole hypocrites, because they like to talk about democracy and national unity but really they destroyed both! We had real democracy when chattel slavery was legal, when the slaveowners shut down freedom of speech and the press even for whites who wanted to criticized slavery in the South and worked hard to impose the same regime on the North, and when slave states thought they could just overthrow the Constitutional government in a bloody civil war whenever they decided the Yankees were offending their Sacred Honor too much. And so now, everyone - even inferior sorts like blacks and women - theoretically have the right to vote and to fair trials and the like, and that's un-democracy. And the nation is united but that's just a big fake and the Civil War actually destroyed the Union.
American capitalism has thus followed the pattern typical of all ruling classes: it has disgusied its origins and it has issued a "moral" sanction. It is becoming increasingly evident to the historians that the transitional period of early American politics, known as democracy, was not perpetuated, but was crushed out of existence by the Confederate War; and that the Union, instead of being preserved as a real union of interests, survived as a fiction by which capitalism enormously extended its power, at the expense of local, agricultural interests.
Well, I guess something that is gobbledygook in the original is a bit hard to translate into something reasonably intelligible. But as far as I can tell, that's the general idea.
I don't want to tag Herbert Agar with Tate's dubious analysis. But in the world of up-is-down history writing that Tate reads from Agar, it wasn't Andrew Jackson who routed what the Democrats of that time called the Money Power in the form of the Bank of the United States. Instead, it was his predecessor and bitter opponent, John Quincy Adams! Tate writes that Agar's "portrait of J.Q. Adams as the last president who made a serious attempt to rescue the country from the explotiation of money power will doubtless influence future writers, and correct a prevailing error in American history." Well, maybe in some future Southern Agrarian dystopia of subsistence farming when most people won't have access to all that thar useless book-l'arnin'.
But Tate gives the following quote from Agar, which gives another headache-causing historical interpretation of a weird Lost Cause variant, which makes Abraham Lincoln into a Confederate at heart! Agar, with Tate's brackets:
[L]incoln had no knowledge of the economic revolution that was taking place, no prevision of its effects on politics. It is this ignorance that accounts for Lincoln's belief that the Southerners were seceding because of what they thought was a threat to slavery. When they disregarded his honest and explicit promsies that their slave property would not be touched, Lincoln thought they were bemused by disloyal leaders. ... There is no telling whether he would have made [war] if he had realized that the South was fighting for an agrarian society against the threat of a business man's oligarchy. Lincoln would have hated that oligarchy almost as much as did Jefferson Davis, and if he had grasped the main issue, Lincoln might have felt that his real fight lay elsewhere.We can safely count this as proof that crackpot history did not begin with Glenn Beck!
Tate concludes his dose of Southern Agrarian history-writing with the following that directly follows the Lincoln quote. It explains that because Honest Abe didn't recognize that he really in his heart of hearts supported Jefferson Davis, now the Commies may git us!
Because the real fight lay outside the false issue of freedom or slavery, capitalism was able to step in, in the Reconstruction, and seize the power. After we have bemused ourselves with the equally false issue of "capitalism v. the work", what monster will rise upon our delusion to enslave us again? It is likely that its name will be Communism - a new rationalization of industrial power copleting the reduction of free citizens to the ignominy of servitude.Tate's review is another grounds to suspect that Southern Agrarianism had less to do with imagining an agrarian ideal than with defending Southern "folkways" with all the Lost Cause pseudohistory baggage that came with it.
Tags: allen tate, andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2011, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism
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