Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: Racism as a justification for slavery

One doesn't need to be an economic determinist to recognize that economic changes had a great deal to do with generating shifts in the ideology used to justify human bondage. As Bruce Franklin writes in The Victim As Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (1978):

Slavery, as we now recognize, went through a fundamental change around 1830, completing its evolution from a predominantly small-scale, quasi-domestic institution appended to hand-tool farming and manufacture into the productive base of an expanding agricultural economy, utilizing machinery to process the harvested crops and pouring vast quantities of agricultural raw materials, principally cotton, into developing capitalist industry in the northern states and England. Prior to the 1830s, open assertions of the "permanent inferiority" of Blacks "were exceedingly rare." [quoting George Fredrickson] In fact, many eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century apologists for slavery defended it as a means of "raising" and "civilizing" the poor, benighted, childlike Negro. But in the 1830s there emerged in America a world-view based on the belief that Blacks were inherently a race inferior to whites, and as part of this world-view there developed a scientific theory of Blacks as beings halfway, or even less than halfway, between animals and white people. This was part of the shift of Blacks from their role as children, appropriate to a professedly patriarchal society which offered them the opportunity of eventual development into adulthood, into their role as subhuman beasts of burden, the permanent mainstay of the labor force of expanding agribusiness.

As Franklin explains, these pseudoscientific racist views were advocated in books like Richard Colfax's Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes (1833) and Samuel George Morton's book Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844).

The late Stephen Jay Gould devotes a portion of his 1982 book The Mismeasure of Man to an discussion of Morton's work, which was based on craniometry, the study of skulls. Gould goes back to Morton's orginal physical data and re-examines it. What he found was that, even assuming that differences in cranial size in skulls was some kind of significant measure of intelligence (which we have long since known it is not), Morton had flat-out misinterpreted his own data. The skulls with which he worked showed "no significant differences among races" in terms of cranial size. Gould found that Morton had skewed his measurements and interpretations in line with his hypothesized ranking among the races.

But he also claimed that "I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation" in Morton's work. He believed from his examination of Morton's studies that the problems were due to Morton's "a priori conviction about racial ranking so poweful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines."

This line of thinking about racial differences was known as "polygeny". Gould writes about the public reception of such works:

The leading American polygenists differed in their attitude toward slavery. Most were Northerners, and most favored some version of Squier's quip: "[I have a] precious poor opinion of neggers...a still poorer one of slavery."

Yet another reminder that white supremacy, racism and hatred of the institution of slavery could go together, a reality which Lost Cause advocates find it convenient to obscure.

But the identification of blacks as a separate and unequal species had obvious appeal as an argument for slavery. Josiah Nott, a leading polygenist, encountered particularly receptive audiences in the South for his "lectures on niggerology" (as he called them). Morion's Crania Aegyptiaca received a warm welcome in the South ... One supporter of slavery wrote that the South need no longer be "so much frightened" by "voices of Europe or of Northern America" in defending its "peculiar institutions." When Morton died, the South's leading medical journal proclaimed (R. W. Gibbs, Charleston Medical Journal, 1851 ...): "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."

Tags: bruce franklin, confederate heritage month 2008, racism, slavery

The King assassination: the aftermath

Martin Luther King, Jr. with, uh, Malcolm X: how we will explain this to Bobo?

The endless fount of Republican hackery that we know as Big Pundit David "Bobo" Brooks gives us a good white Republican conservative's view of Martin Luther King, Jr., in his column The View From Room 306 New York Times 04/04/08:

Progress has been slow. Nearly a third of American high school students don’t graduate (half in the cities). Seventy percent of African-American kids are born out of wedlock. Poverty rates in Memphis have scarcely dropped.

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public. If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-60s style. King was in crisis when he was gunned down. But his inspiration is outlasting his critics. (my emphasis)

Martin was one of those good Negroes, you see, not one of the bad scary ones. At least in Bobo's World, where Dick Cheney and George Bush count as responsible statesmen, though perhaps misled on those WMDs by the CIA and Hillary Clinton. How happy Bobo must be to have encountered, at least in the history books, an example of a black person who's "meticulously self-controlled in public". Unlike the funky brothers Bobo normally hangs with, I'm sure.

Good Lord! Have we really sunk to the level that crap like this from Bobo is taken seriously by literate human beings?

What do Republican "culture warriors" picture when they think of the "bad" kind? Before giving an example, I should mention that the Bobos of 1968 thought King was a kind of cross between Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Patrice Lumumba. They hated and feared him. Really, really hated and feared him.

The truth is that many white Americans, both conservative and liberal, failed to understand the depth of anger and alienation (a popular word in those days) among so many African-Americans in those days. David Brooks won't tell it like this. But it's worth it for the reality-based community to recall the immediate aftermath of King's assassination 40 years ago.

The Vietnam War had reached a major crisis point in 1968, when the Tet Offensive ripped the mask off the happy-talk from the Johnson administration and the infallible generals of the day about how great the war in Vietnam was going for the US and its allies. King himself had come out forcefully in opposition to the Vietnam War, and didn't draw back from pointing to the racial elements in American behavior toward Vietnam. Many Americans saw a very close connection between racial injustice in the US and the Vietnam War, more so than most accounts today give any hint of it having been.

In Vietnam and America: A Documented History (1985), Marvin Gettleman and his fellow editors give the following account of the period following King's murder on April 4, 1968:

The nationawide reaction to the murder of Dr. King in some ways rivaled the Tet Offensive, to which it bore similarities by no means purely conincidental. Between April 4 and April 11, 1968, rebellions broke out in 125 US cities and towns.

A month prior to the uprisings, worried decision-makers in the Pentagon and the White House had contemplated the possibile effects of their giving in to [Vietnam commanding general William] Westmoreland's demand for 206,000 additional troops: "We will have to mobilize reserves, increase our budget by billions. ... Our balance of payments will be worsened considerably, and we will need a larger tax increase. ..." They saw the consequent "growing unrest in the cities" posing "greate risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions." (The Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, vol. 4, p. 564) They expressed their anxiety about retaining both the financial and military "resources for the ghetto fight." (Ibid., p. 583)

The uprisings of early April realized their worst fears. In that cataclysmic week, 55,000 troops had to be mobilized alongside tens of thousands of police. Television viewers around the world saw Washington itself defended by federal combat troops, while columns of smoke from burning buildings towered above the Capitol. On April 11 came the biggest call-up of the reserves during the Vietnam War. (my emphasis)

Lyndon Johnson had resisted calling up the reserves for the Vietnam War because he didn't want to set off intense war fever in the country. (A very, very different approach than the Cheney-Rove-Bush-Ashcroft approach of all fear, all the time, as a conscious political strategy.) But the reserves had to be called up for this unprecedented wave of urban disorders, the likes of which have not been seen in the United States before or since. It's also important to remember that the generals were very upset about Johnson's refusal to call up the reserves because it forced them to rely on unwilling draftees much more than they would have preferred.

The account continues:

No sooner had the black rebellions been put down than the campuses eruptped. Between April 23 and May 6, militant protest demonstrations swept public and private universities and colleges across the country. Large numbers of police battled students even at such elite universities as Stanford and Columbia, while campus activists incresinly linked the antiwar movement to the struggles of black people, GIs, and those parts of the working class suffering the gravest economic consequences of the war.

Bruce Franklin, who was also one of the editors of Vietnam and America, wrote in his book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000) about the effect of King's assassination and its aftermath on the most militant activists:

Even before the Tet offensive, much of the African American movement and parts of the antiwar movement had understood that the domestic conflagrations were fueled by the war and that they consumed the foundations of the government's ability to wage the war. As early as 1965 and 1966, key organizations in the African American movement were equating the war against the Vietnamese with the oppression of African Americans, and King's April 1967 speech at a huge antiwar rally in New York explained the inseparable fates of the two struggles. The Tet offensive then served as an inspiration to the most militant sectors of the African American movement, showing that revolutionary people of color could defeat the common enemy. For example, the March 16, 1968, issue of The Black Panther sandwiched a long article on the Tet offensive, titled "Ocean of People's War Engulfs South Viet Nam Cities and Villages Alike," between calls for armed black self-defense and this quotation from Huey Newton: "20,000,000 unarmed black people is one thing; but 20,000,000 black people armed to the gills cannot be denied." The next month brought those huge rebellions that followed King's assassination.

I'm not quoting things like this to give credence to the paranoia of the "culture warriors", which was extreme as it was in 1968 and has festered now for 40 years. The point is that stuff like this really happened. Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party never put 20 million together into a partisan militia, of course. But the anger and frustration to which he spoke were real.

And while Martin Luther King wasn't at all interested in helping Huey Newton to become the Muqtada al-Sadr of urban America in 1968, he was very much aware of the feelings in the black community across the country. And he was on the side of angry and alienated black people. David Brooks' toothless version of King as a mythical character who wouldn't ruffle the feathers of a Rush Limbaugh is about as ahistorical as any other piece of bogus history today's Republicans peddle. When the Bobos of our day try to make King sound like a Clarence Thomas, they're lying in your faces.

But I'm sure Bobo would just as soon we forget about the effects of the 1968 domestic movements on the culture warriors iconic conflict, the Vietnam War. As Franklin relates:

In late 1967 and early 1968, while the predominantly white organized antiwar movement saw itself moving from protest to resistance, its press was already seeking paths that would unite it in practical actions with the African American rebellions. Liberation News Service gave national circulation to an article from the East Village Other that lambasted the "middle class peace movement" for failing to recognize "its obligation to linkup" with "the black revolution." Ridiculing the common complaint among organizers of mass marches that "the blacks refuse to come into the peace movement," the article argued that the rioters had been doing "more all along to stop the war than the whole white middle class antiwar movement put together," that, in fact, "they are the antiwar movement."

Yes, there were enormous amounts of wishful thinking, foolishness and hustling going on in the name of "revolutionary" politics in those days.

But in 1968, with actual violent rebellion in 125 cities following by pitched battles on university campuses, you didn't have to be a romantic radical or a frightened conservative to wonder if "revolution" might be an appropriate word to describe what was beginning to happen.

By the end of 1968, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew had been elected and they were carry forward the process of transforming the Party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass into the Party of Tom DeLay and Strom Thurmond.

But that wasn't be any means the whole story of politics that year. Not even close.

Getting back to Bobo, his comment, "Progress has been slow", is perfect stodgy conservatism. Yes, "progress has been slow". Because those seeking the kinds of progress Martin Luther King was seeking have had to fight the Republican Party for which Bobo is a loyal mouthpiece ever since 1968! Yes, it's true. "Progress has been slow."

Bobo pretends not to notice who has been fighting that kind of progress. Instead, it was those bad people from the dreadful 60s who are to blame:

In both the white and black communities, the forces of order and reform vied with the forces of hatred and anarchy. The latter grabbed the upper hand. ...

... King walked out onto the balcony and the forces that were swirling outside intervened. James Earl Ray’s bullet sliced the knot of his tie. Riots commenced, and in the ensuing years, crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder. (my emphasis)

You see, it was those bad Negroes who are to blame for the slow progress. If they had just been nice and pleasant like Clarence Thomas and asked respectfully for their betters to help them out, we wouldn't have had all these problems we've had for years, as Trent Lott famously observed at Republican Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party.

No, it hasn't been characters like Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove, or Newt Gingrich who have caused that progress to be so slow. Oh, no, they didn't have anything to do with it. And, anyway, if black people aren't burning their neighborhoods down, they must be pretty happy with how things are, huh? It was the "antinomian passions" (whatever the heck those are) of disorderly black folks and scruffy white hippie dope-smokers who were the problem.

See how that works?

But just remember, Bobo is one of the nice, respectable, urbane, clean-shaven Republicans. We'll be hearing a lot from the other types between now and the November election.

Tags: bruce franklin, david brooks, racism

Rehash the Vietnam War? Bring It On!

The Republicans want to revisit the days of the Vietnam War and antiwar protests? John Kerry isn't the only one who's looking forward to that fight.

Tom Hayden - civil-rights and antiwar activist, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), former California state senator, ex-husband of Jane Fonda (who the hardcore rightwingers still hate worse than Osama bin Laden or Bill Clinton) - thinks it's a great idea: You Gotta Love Her Nation 04/04/04.

Unlike the Republicans who are opposed to recognizing gay families, Hayden values family enough to defend his controversial ex-wife from the macho blowhards who still trash her for her trip to North Vietnam in 1972. His brief discussion of that trip is very much worth reading, because he puts it in a context one is unlikely to ever hear on Fox News.

It includes some telling quotes of then-President Richard Nixon discussing with his National Security Adviser Kissinger what should be done about "this shit-ass little country" (Vietnam). It's a reminder that Bush and Rummy and Chaney are in many ways very much the political spawn of Richard Nixon.

Hayden is more than willing to see a discussion of Vietnam that many Democrats have preferred to avoid and for which "the Republicans substitute the politics of scapegoating and sheer fantasy." He's literally correct about the "fantasy" part. And Hayden realizes what doesn't seem to have occurred to a lot of Republican attack dogs yet:

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad. Young John Kerry's 1971 question--"How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?"--is more relevant than ever.

As an illustration of how the right wing has built elaborate stab-in-the-back fantasies about the Vietnam War, Hayden mentions one of the most famous postwar legends. Let's hear it from that man of the people, Chuckie, aka, CHARLIE DANIELS, country singer and Regnery Press political hack (my emphasis):

When I think about brave men and women being spit on by dirty, stoned-out, jobless, pseudo-intellectual hippies whose only contribution to this nation had been to burn their draft cards, it makes my collar get about two sizes too small.

Hayden says of this spitting-on-the-veterans folklore:

The popular delusions about Fonda are a window into many other dangerous hallucinations that pass for historical memory in this country. Among the most difficult to contest are claims that antiwar activists persistently spit on returning Vietnam veterans. So universal is the consensus on "spitting" that I once gave up trying to refute it, although I had never heard of a single episode in a decade of antiwar experiences. Then came the startling historical research of a Vietnam veteran named Jerry Lembcke, who demonstrated in The Spitting Image (1998) that not a single case of such abuse had ever been convincingly documented. In fact, Lembcke's search of the local press throughout the Vietnam decade revealed no reports of spitting at all. It was a mythical projection by those who felt "spat-upon," Lembcke concluded, and meant politically to discredit future antiwar activism.

Also citing Lembcke's book, Bruce Franklin in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000) talks about the spitting story:

The first allegations of such behavior did not appear until the late 1970s. The spat-upon veteran then became a mythic figure used to build support for military fervor ...

Of course it is possible that isolated instances may have occurred. But if antiwar activists were frequently spitting on veterans or otherwise abusing them, why has nobody ever produced even the tiniest scrap of contemporaneous evidence? According to the myth, spitting on veterans was a regular custom as they arrived from Vietnam at the San Francisco and Los Angeles airports. We are supposed to believe that these men just back from combat then meekly walked away without attacking or even reporting their persecutors, and that nobody else, including airport security officers, ever noticed what was going on. For there is not one press report, airport security report, police report, court record, diary, video shot, or photograph of a single incident at these airports or anywhere else.

As Franklin goes on to point out, that popular version of the folklore about the specific airports is easily debunked, because soldiers returning from Vietnam did not come to those civilian airports, but to military airports not open to the public.

But this story isn't just interesting because it's a case study in urban folklore. It's become a politically useful myth, not least in demonizing the antiwar movement against Vietnam. As Franklin notes, "Before the myth arose, years after the war, the only veterans who ever reported or who were observed being spat on were antiwar veterans - by prowar partisans." (my emphasis) And he adds, "a 1975 survey revealed that 75 percent of Vietnam veterans were opposed to the war."

In other words, John Kerry and antiwar veterans like him were prominent leaders and activists in the movement against the war. Compare the newsclips of Kerry testifying before Congress, read some of the accounts of the veterans protesting against the Vietnam War, and see if they bear any resemblance to the drug-crazed derelicts described in the Chuckie quote above.

Hayden is right in his closing paragraph:

If I were George W. Bush, I would be terorrized by the eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry campaign. They look like men with scores to settle, with a palpable intolerance toward the types who sent them to war for a lie ... and who are determined that this generation hear their story anew.

Tags: bruce franklin, jerry lembcke, tom hayden, spitting image, vietnam war