Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 30: Once more with John Calhoun and "Calhounery"

We'll end up the Confederate "Heritage" Month series for this year on a somewhat lighter note.

I've posted more than once this month about John Calhoun, his life, his political theory, his reactionary political heritage. As it happens while deciding what to use as the final post, I came across an article by the humorist Roy Blunt Jr. with the title, "Where's the Big Idea?" and the eye-catching subtitle, "Communism didn't originate in South Carolina for a very good reason" The Oxford American Winter 2005.

Blount relates how an interviewer "took me severely to task for having written ... that Southern culture had not produced much in the way of abstract thinking." The interviewer offered John Calhoun as a prime example of the contrary.

Blount was suprised, because he mainly knew Calhoun from his theory of nullification. "That seemed to me a strategem, rather than an idea in the large, ethereal egghead sense," he says. But he started doing come research on the old traitor.

He came across some of the same things that came up here this month, including Calhoun's class theories that led Richard Hofstadter to label him "the Karl Marx of the master class."

But I read up on Calhoun, and learned that he was regarded widely - not just in the South - as the most brilliant political philosopher of his day. Personally, he struck people as a thinking machine. Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, called him "a mental and moral abstraction." He was haggard and unhealthy-looking, too, so who am I to question his bona fides? A century later, some political historians argued that Calhoun's critique of Northem capitalism anticipated the thinking of Karl Marx. Maybe that's why Southem intellectualism ground to a halt: the twentieth century would have made even less sense if communism had been from South Carolina, for the wealthy, and called Calhounery.

He definitely has a point. In fact, instead of using the phrase "the theology of the Great God Free Market", I may shorten it to just "Calhounery". That's a word that should be an active part of the American political vocabulary.

Blount still wasn't convinced about abstract thinking in the South, though:

Eurocentric philosophy has come to realize only fairly recently, and with great aha's and alarums, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. In the South, nobody ever thought it was. The South doesn't produce ideas, it produces rhetoricians, yarn-spinners, visionaries, musicians, demagogues ... all sorts of people Plato would have expelled from his Republic.

Blount comes up with an angle on one of the few things I liked about Robert E. Lee:

Consider Robert E. Lee's most famous remark, as he watched his troops win overwhelmingly at Fredericksburg, slaughtering bluecoats by the thousands: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."

A great utterance. But when you think about it, what does it mean? Was General Lee saying that if war were less terrible it would be worse, because we'd get too attached to it? A more logical, proactive utterance would have been, "Boys, war doesn't get any better than this, and it's still too terrible. Let's quit." But of course that wouldn't have done. (How often, in real-life situations, has sweet reason done?) The only thing I can figure is that Lee was warning us against big-time college football.

Again, he has a point!

But in the end, he decided John Calhoun was what blogger Charlie Pierce might call a colossal dick (though Pierce reserves that label for Rick Santorum):

In Virginia a while ago, I came upon a many-volumed encyclopedia of Southern
history printed in 1909. It said that John C. Calhoun "was upholding the rights of the Southern people against the assaults of the abolitionists. The charges made by the latter against the system of slavery he denounced as false. On the other hand, he never grew weary in the work of telling how the Southern people were generously lifting upward the entire body of negro slaves to a higher and nobler plane of life."

On the other hand? What's "on the other hand" about that? Sounds like two sides of the same hand to me. But then "the one hand, the other hand" doesn't make any sense unless the hands are connected by a particular body, and particular bodies tend to be partial to themselves. The body in this case was that of "the Southern people," slaves not being considered, even after forty-four years of retrospect, to be part of that category. We know better than that, now; and heaven help us for what we don't know better than, yet.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, robert e lee, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 29: James Kilpatrick and the rebranding of white racist conservatism

James Kilpatrick (1920–2010) was an influential Southern columnist whose late columns and a biographical sketch can still be found at Townhall, the hardline conservative website not known for high journalistic integrity, to put it politely. He had a nationally syndicated column for years beginning in 1964. His work appeared in such conservative venues Human Events, National Review, and the reliably stodgy US News and World Report.

William Hustwit looks at how Kilpatrick changed his framing of issues from that of hardline Southern resistance to segregation to a more clean-shaven conservatism in "From Caste to Color Blindness: James J. Kilpatrick's Segregationist Semantics" The Journal of Southern History 77/3 (Aug 2011). As the title implies, Kilpatrick's changes in the way he framed issues didn't imply a change in his basic thinking about race or other issues. It did imply a recognition that de jure segregation, aka Jim Crow, could no longer be sustained. Kilpatrick began to present opposition to racial equality in terms more congenial to the Republican Party's Southern strategy than to the raw demagoguery of George Wallace.

Hustwit defines the redefined framework this way:

Not long after the heyday of the civil rights movement, Kilpatrick and other conservative leaders congratulated themselves for acquiescing in the end of the old racial order, for protecting average Americans from the excesses of the state, and for recognizing African American equality before the law. Seeming to accept the black freedom struggle, the political Right absorbed the language of the civil rights protesters. As a result, late-twentieth-century conservatism's attitudes about race appeared almost indistinguishable from liberalism.

That last sentence probably deserves some amplification. The idea of "color-blind" conservative language is "almost indistinguishable from liberalism" at the now-proverbial 30,000-foot level. It doesn't endorse overt white supremacy. And in its more sophisticated forms, it can be somewhat confusing. In practice, it's mainly the kind of double-reverse reasoning that for some reason is especially appealing to conservatives, e.g., taking the exact same position that an overt white supremacist would take only claiming to do so because you are opposed to racism.

In practice, it's a shtick that fools mainly people who want to be fooled. Unfortunately, there are quite a few white folks who want to be fooled in this way.

Hustwit gives a good description of the marketing posture involved:

Committed to a color-blind version of the law and to the end of racially discriminatory policies, both conservatives and liberals agreed that racism no longer
had a place in contemporary America. In the late 1960s, many conservative intellectuals and politicians disavowed racism, recognizing that it was becoming a disgraceful point of view. Turning away from the Right's opposition to or indifference toward black rights, these conservatives looked boldly toward the future.

What did change in a major way as a result of the civil rights movement and the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson is that de jure segregation was defeated and black citizens in the South won the right to vote, in reality and not just in theory. Even unrepentant segregationists recognized the need to frame their arguments differently. The last decade or so has convinced me that there were a lot more unrepentant segregationists than I had imagined or hoped. For a while, I used the term neosegregationist to talk about white racist political positions. But with vote suppression having become a major push of the Republican Party, the "neo" part no longer makes any sense, if it ever did. Voter suppression was the mainstay of "oldo" segregation.

Kilpatrick worked at the now-defunct Richmond News Leader, where neo-Confederate historian Douglas Southall Freeman was editor. Freeman is best known for his hagiography of Robert E. Lee, the Christ of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War. Kilpatrick became editor after Freeman's retirement in 1951 and remained editor until 1967. So his editorship coincided with the most intense period of the civil rights movement of that time.

Hustwit discusses Kilpatrick's segregationist views at length in the article. He tells the story of an article Kilpatrick composed for the Saturday Evening Post, whose homey Americanism also included a distinct political conservatism. In his article, that was solicited by the magazine for a Fall 1963 issue, said among other things:

[T]he Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race .... Within the frame of reference of a Negroid civilization, a mud hut may be a masterpiece; a tribal council may be a marvel of social organization; a carved image may have a primitive purity all its own. Well and good. But the mud hut ought not to be equated with Monticello, nor jungle rule with Periclean Athens, nor phallic dolls with Elgin marbles. When the Negro today proclaims or demands his "equality," he is talking of equality within the terms of Western civilization. And what, pray, has he contributed to it? Putting aside conjecture, wishful thinking and a puerile jazz worship, what has he in fact contributed to it? The blunt answer, may it please the court, is very damned little.

It didn't please Post editor Thomas Congdon Jr. very much. He rejected the article for publication, calling it, "Bad taste, in the extreme, and, in fact, inflammatory."

The times, they were a-changin', and blowhard honkie talk like that was becoming less and less acceptable nationally. Kilpatrick was already beginning to recognize this in 1961. Hustwit quotes from Kilpatrick's private correspondence that year:

For a long time, I followed a policy of not yielding anywhere at all on these questions of segregation, on the theory that if we gave an inch, they [blacks] would take a mile. That may still be the wiser course. I don't know. But the longer I have lived with this problem, and the more I have thought about it, the more persuaded I am that we have to get rid of a few of the old stereotypes we have lived by, and that we have to begin some gradual adaptation to a genuinely new order of things. Whether we like it or not is immaterial, but a new generation of Negroes is growing up that includes a great many decent, well education [sic], intelligent, and perfectly respectable men and women.

This wasn't a change of heart on Kilpatrick's part, though, as his unpublished Post article of two years later indicates dramatically. Kilpatrick quotes from his correspondence in 1960 to one of the most notorious white racist figures in the South:

Making a case for African American inequality, however, without the outright racist declarations that were no longer tolerated by a desegregating society challenged him. With Mississippi friend Robert Patterson of the White Citizens' Council, Kilpatrick planned a way to promote the segregationist South's position in a manner that stopped short of eugenics but demonstrated a gulf between the races. "I think your idea of emphasizing the 'difference' instead of the 'inferiority' of the Negro race is absolutely sound," he told Patterson. Sensing the danger of trumpeting blacks' anthropological or genetic inferiority, Kilpatrick experimented with a new rhetoric to present effective resistance. "Like yourself," he wrote his collaborator, "I believe the Negro race is inferior, and I don't see how any person who weighs the evidence objectively could come to any other conclusion. Be that as it may, the word 'inferior' is semantically bad. It goes with 'white supremacy,' which is another phrase difficult to manage in a public opinion struggle. By dwelling upon the 'difference' between the races, we can establish the case for inferiority without involving ourselves directly in a value judgment."

The evolution of Kilpatrick's rhetoric toward the Nixonian Southern Strategy perspective, was connected with the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, a landmark event in the long-term shift of Southern white conservatives to the Republican Party:

The opportunity to hamper civil rights through acceptable means came in 1964. Kilpatrick was susceptible to angry outbursts against desegregation, but as a professional journalist he normally had a reputation as a writer with a rational, unemotional approach to race problems. William F. Buckley asked him to outline for the National Review what position Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater should take on civil rights. Determined to bring Senator Goldwater's campaign and the white South's defense of its race relations under one umbrella, Kilpatrick geared his proposals toward the Right's common goals of freeing capital from regulation and defending private property, states' rights, and individual liberty. He framed his arguments in a way that placed his contempt for racial progress within a set of conservative values. Through emphasizing fiscal restraint and federalism, Goldwater could counteract reckless federal spending and the new civil rights legislation. Kilpatrick encouraged enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 only with "moral suasion" and "State [rather than federal] regulation," but never through force and arbitration. "The right to own, and possess, and manage property is vital" to the freedom of Americans, wrote Kilpatrick. He advised Goldwater, instead of talking about race explicitly, to focus on proper respect for state sovereignty to limit socialistic welfare and civil rights programs. Federal intervention in social problems had deprived states of their power and reduced them to "merely eunuchs" pitifully orbiting "a federal sun."

That is the general approach of today's Republican Party. Even if some of them are becoming more prone to letting the pretense of "color-blind" respectability slip, like Rick Santorum with his campaign comments about "blah people" and referring to President Obama as a "government nig-" before catching himself.

Hustwit describes how the Republican/conservative version of "color-blindness" is really focused only on opposing measures to prevent racial discrimination. Simple-minded as it sounds (and is), the argument is that to prevent racial discrimination, the government would have to recognize that it is occurring. But government should be "color-blind", so it can't recognize any racial factors in discrimination. And therefore any legislative or executive action against racial discrimination is invalid. This is the viewpoint of "libertarians" like Ron (Papa Doc) and Rand (Baby Doc) Paul, and of billionaire reactionaries like the Koch Brothers.

In other words, Kilpatrick adapted his language to the changing partisan politics of racial discrimination and to decreasing public tolerance of overt white racism. As Hustwit put it, about his syndicated column that began in Newsday in 1964:

Newsday elevated Kilpatrick's career to a national level by giving him a mandate "to present to a national audience the reasoned and calm point of view of a conservative white Southerner." What that meant in practice was that Kilpatrick should talk about racial problems without anthropological arguments about black inferiority.

Cynical though it may have been for Kilpatrick, this kind of opportunism wasn't entirely a bad thing. The civil rights movement had produced and unprecedented level of resistance to the post-Reconstruction structure of white supremacy that had been in place since the mid-1870s. The blunt brutality and often crass stupidity of the Southern segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s went a long way toward discrediting them and their cause nationally. And with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in Washington, there was a national government that was actually willing to enforce the law in the South when it came to racial matters. With changing national standards, people like Kilpatrick found themselves more limited in their advocacy for white racism, however little their personal perspectives may have changed.

Hustwit quotes from a 1966 litter to an new Saturday Evening Post editor who now wanted to publish his 1963 racist article quoted above. In that 1966 letter, Kilpatrick explained why he now declined to have the article published:

From my own professional point of view, the problem is quite simply that I do not want-and could not possibly afford-to be publicly associated with these views, phrased with such vigor. Since the piece was written, as you may know, I have launched into the writing of a nationally syndicated column. It is going tolerably well, with about 70 papers in the fold, but my whole pitch is a reasoned and good-humored conservatism, in which I shun these racial views almost completely. My syndicate tells me that the biggest single obstacle to further sale of the column is my reputation as a[n] old-fashioned Southern racist and segregationist. If the column is to make headway, and to provide me a platform for selling dozens of ideas more important to me than the anthropological differences, if any, of the Negro race, I must continue to treat the subject, if at all, with the greatest restraint, compassion, tact, and all that.

Blatant white racism didn't sell as well as it once did.

I'll close with a 1973 quote from Kilpatrick in which he applied his double-reverse pitch against "reverse racism" to accusing the advocates of affirmative action, which under the Nixon Administration became identified with the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, as being the real racism:

In these areas of race relations, I sometimes think I am getting to be like [the] Catholic convert who became more Catholic than the Pope. I spent years as a Southern editor, filled with old-fashioned Southern racial prejudices, fighting to preserve segregation in our schools. Then came the light. Today I am just as incensed as my Yankee critics were incensed 30 years ago at what seems to me the virulent evils of a pervasive racism throughout our society. That men and women must be hired, promoted, educated, transported, assigned or not assigned, solely because of the color of their skin strikes me as indefensible.

That cynical quote is a reminder that for white racists in America, it's always the fault of black people. Whether it's white racism or the mortgage bubble of the 2000s, they always find a way to blame it on African-Americans.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, james kilpatrick, segregationism, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 28: A surprising anti-slavery Jacksonian (2)

We looked in the last post at the antislavery politics of Roger Taney, infamous as the Chief Justice of the Dred Scott decision, in his younger days, relying on Timothy Huebner's "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond - and before - Dred Scott" The Journal of American History June 2010.

Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864): a Justice in the legal tradition of  Pontius Pilate and Antonin Scalia

Taney's most famous antislavery pronouncement came in 1819, when he was defending antislavery Methodist minister Jacob Gruber who was being charged in Maryland for inciting insurrection in an sermon which condemned slavery in colorful terms. Huebner explains that Taney's successful defense of Gruber was primarily based on Gruber's right to free speech.

But Taney did much more than defend Gruber’s legal right to speak freely. "I might ... safely rest the defence on this ground," Taney noted to the jury. Instead, he pressed further and attempted to justify the arguments that Gruber had outlined in the offending sermon. In doing so, Taney echoed Gruber’s sentiments but used his own words. "He [Gruber] did rebuke those masters, who, in the exercise of power, are deaf to calls of humanity; and he warned them of the evils they might bring upon themselves," Taney announced. "He did speak with abhorrence of those reptiles, who live by trading in human flesh, and enrich themselves by tearing the husband from the wife — the infant from the bosom of the mother." Taney continued: "Shall I content myself ... with saying he had a right to say this? that there is no law to punish him? So far is he from being the object of punishment in any form of proceeding, that we are prepared to maintain the same principles, and to use, if necessary, the same language here in the temple of justice." Taney was seeking not simply to win an acquittal for his client by defending him from the charges against him. He went a step further, reaffirming and validating the substance of Gruber's sermon. [my emphasis]

Why, lawyer Taney got downright "uncivil" in trashing the slavedowners and their traffic in human flesh!

The most famous passage in his speech was this:

A hard necessity, indeed, compels us to endure the evil of slavery for a time. It was imposed upon us by another nation, while we were yet in a state of colonial vassalage. It cannot be easily, or suddenly removed. Yet while it continues, it is a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom, confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away; and earnestly looks for the means, by which this necessary object may be best attained. And until it shall be accomplished: until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language held in the [D]eclaration of [I]ndependence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave. [my emphasis]

But Huebner explains that Taney's posthumous, post-Civil War defenders who tried to integrate him into the Lost Cause narrative as an antislavery figure who decided Dred Scott on pure Constitutional principles are just blowing smoke.

Huebner notes that Taney in subsequent years is not known to have made any such further explicit statement against the institution of slavery, though he did take antislavery stands in his terms as Maryland state senator from 1816 to 1821, as described in the previous post. Taney became a Jacksonian Democrat and served under President Jackson as Secretary of War, Attorney General and Treasury Secretary. During the Jackson Administration he achieved a reputation as a radical - of the left rather than the rightwing sort - based on his opposition to the Bank of the United States and the power of concentrated wealth it embodied and represented. It was President Jackson the slaveholder who appointed the formerly outspoken antislavery lawyer to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The immediate issue in the 1857 Dred Scott decision was whether a slaveowner could bring his human property into a free territory and still retain legal possession of them. Taney notoriously ruled on behalf of the Court majority that they could. This decision was consistent with the strategy of the Slave Power (as antislavery advocates referred to the Southern slaveowners) in the 1850s to use federal power to override any state or territorial laws that might interfere with the Peculiar Institution of slavery. In this case, they got Taney's Court to rule against the long-established federal power to regulate slavery in the territories. The conflict over slavery in "Bleeding Kansas" was one of the major political events of the 1850s for the United States. Dred Scott would have multiplied such conflicts in the territories had the Civil War not intervened with an even greater armed conflict. In more recent terms, we could say that Taney had decided that the country needed "two, three, many Kansases".

Huebner quotes in infamous racism in Taney's decision:

Reading the opinion of the Court with trembling hands and fading voice, Taney spoke the words for which he became known. "The legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words in that memorable instrument," he wrote. "They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. ... This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race." More significant in the context of the debate over the extension of slavery, Taney held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, thus putting the Court squarely on the side of slaveholders. Northern critics immediately raised their voices in a chorus of dissent, protesting the Court’s adoption of an extreme pro-southern interpretation of the Constitution. [my emphasis]

Huebner argues convincingly that the Lost Cause claim of Taney as an antislavery man who had ruled on pure Constitutional principles in Dred Scott doesn't hold water. He explains that that Taney had clearly rejected his earlier antislavery stance. During his time as Attorney General in the Jackson Administration:

As U.S. attorney general under President Andrew Jackson, Taney provided glimpses of the stance he would take in the Dred Scott decision, particularly regarding the question of whether African Americans had been included in the political community at the writing of the Constitution. In 1832, he authored an official opinion on the constitutionality of a South Carolina statute that provided that black seamen who arrived in Charleston were subject to arrest and confinement while their ship remained in port. Written for the secretary of state, Taney’s opinion referred to African Americans as members of a "degraded class." Whatever limited rights African Americans possessed, Taney argued, came from the states, who legitimately conferred or withdrew those privileges based on "the sufferance of the white population." Maintaining white control over black liberties also helped prevent "the evils of insurrection and rebellion."

This was still a long way away from his Dred Scott ruling that African-Americans, free or slave, "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". But he was clearly moving in that direction in that official opinion.

In a concurring Supreme Court opinion in 1842 (Prigg v. Pennsylvania), he argued, in Huebner's summary, "that the Constitution prohibited states only from interfering with a slaveholder’s right to recover his property, not from supporting or enforcing the rights of slaveholders. States could regulate slavery, he concluded, so long as they did not threaten the constitutional guarantees of slaveholders." By that time, he was clearly on the road to Dred Scott, taking an outlook in which the Constitution protected the rights of slaveowners to their human property above all other rights, even of white male citizens.

Huebner suggests that Taney's evolution - or degeneration - on the issue of slavery had heavy components of Party conformity and fear:

At this time [1828], Taney embraced the party of Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning Tennessean who built a southern-dominated political party that focused on the rights of slaveholders and the prerogative of states. Over the next several years the Democratic party supported slavery and white supremacy in a variety of ways—from its Indian removal policy to its eventual stance in favor of the annexation of Texas. As an official of the Jackson administration, Taney ceased to think of slavery solely from the perspective of a small-town Maryland lawyer and instead began to reason and act as a representative of the president and his party. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 gave Taney further cause to reconsider his views on slavery and black rights. The revolt prompted a nearly universal response of fear and dread on the part of white southerners, who became more mindful of the threat of uprising and increasingly vigilant about maintaining racial control. [my emphasis]

The Jacksonian Party, the Democratic Party, and the Jacksonian movement developed in two major directions: one a rigidly proslavery Party and sentiment, the other a more democratic one, the latter being more genuinely "Jacksonian" in my view. John Calhoun and other advocates for slavery became skilled at using the exaggerated but not completely unrealistic fear of slave revolts to scare even Northern whites into being more sympathetic to slavery.

Taney's thinking in Dred Scott wasn't some convoluted purist reasoning made in sorrow by a man who in his heart disliked and rejected slavery. He had become a true believer:

By the time of Dred Scott, Taney’s thinking had evolved into full-blown extremism. The best evidence that Taney’s notorious judicial opinion reflected his personal beliefs came in a rare private letter on slavery, penned in August 1857, just after he wrote the Dred Scott decision. In the letter, Taney affirmed his adamant disapproval of emancipation. "Every intelligent person whose life has been passed in a slaveholding State, and who has carefully observed the character and capacity of the African race, will see that a general and sudden emancipation would be absolute ruin to the negroes, as well as to the white population," he wrote. "In the greater number of cases that have come under my observation, freedom has been a serious misfortune to the manumitted slave; and he has most commonly brought upon himself privations and sufferings which he would not have been called on to endure in a state of slavery." Apart from the strictly legal holding in Dred Scott, moreover, the rhetoric of Taney’s opinion—the idea that an African American could "justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit" - reveals his acceptance of the claim of southern paternalists that slavery benefitted [sic] blacks. By the 1860 presidential election Taney had joined the vast majority of his fellow white southerners in conflating free soil and abolition, as well as in dreading the possibility of a Lincoln presidency and a massive insurrection. "I am old enough to remember the horrors of St. Domingo," he confided to a friend on the eve of the election, “and a few days will determine whether anything like it is to be visited upon any portion of our own southern countrymen. I can only pray that it may be averted and that my fears may prove to be nothing more than the timidity of an old man.”

The Roger Taney of the Dred Scott decision wasn't the tragic figure of Lost Cause pseudohistory. He was a 19th century Antonin Scalia. The author of an anonymous 1865 pamphlet called The Unjust Judge which Huebner quotes was on the right track saying that Taney was "next to Pontius Pilate, perhaps the worst that ever occupied the seat of judgment among men."

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, roger taney, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 27: A surprising anti-slavery Jacksonian (1)

One member of President Andrew Jackson's Cabinet had an antislavery background: Roger Taney. Yes, that Roger Taney, now infamous as the Chief Justice of the Dred Scott decision (1857) that opened the way to undermining even state restrictions on slavery and, by rendering legal resolution of the slavery controversy effectively impossible, made the Civil War inevitable.

Roger Taney (1777-1864)

Of course, things that look inevitable in retrospect often look very different while they are happening in real time. In the Dred Scott instance, it was clear at the time that it would dramatically escalated the slavery conflict by expanding the power of slaveholders over free states. But what looks like Taney's fate in retrospect to become the pro-slavery Chief Justice who stands as one of the great villains of American history must have seemed an unlikely destination to those who knew him in his younger days.

Timothy Huebner looks at Taney's changing relationship to slavery in "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond - and before - Dred Scott" The Journal of American History June 2010. Taney defended a white Methodist minister named Jacob Gruber who had been indicted on the charge that he "did feloniously consult, conspire, ... to raise and insurrection and rebellion in the state", based on a sermon he gave in Taney's home state of Maryland in 1818 to a mixed white and African-American crowd. Gruber had posed the rhetorical question, "Is it not a reproach to a man to hold articles of liberty and independence in one hand and a bloody whip in the other, while a negro stands and trembles before him, with his back cut and bleeding?"

After Taney's death, Taney's defense of Gruber became, oddly enough, integrated into the Lost Cause narrative that denied that slavery caused the Civil War. Pointing to the anti-slavery views that Taney had expressed in his defense of Gruber in particular, the neo-Confederate narrative produced an argument that Huebner summarizes as follows, "In this framework Taney became doubly virtuous; he personally held antislavery beliefs yet scrupulously exercised his judicial duties. The Dred Scott decision - rather than being an example of proslavery extremism, as Republicans had described it - thus became a reasonable, accurate interpretation of the Constitution."

Taney, in the Lost Cause portrayal, is re-imagined as an opponent of slavery who wrecked the Constitution and the Union out of pristine legal principle.

The reality was different. And part of the problem of just making up history to suit some ideology of the moment is that it can produce endless narrative tangles. The antiabortion movement today, which heavily overlaps with those attracted to neo-Confederate ideas and Lost Cause history, holds up the Dred Scott decision as an example of a terribly unjust Supreme Court decision, which they see as analogous to Roe v. Wade, which recognized women's Constitutionally protected right to abortion. In the sometimes genuinely weird world of extremist tribalism, "Dred Scott" becomes and over-determined substitute for legal abortion, calling for measures up to and including violence to prevent it. So defending the Lost Cause version of Taney's Dred Scott decision as Huebner describes it could be problematic for advocates of the Lost Cause today. Not that it would necessarily stop them from making the argument. Screaming contradictions in logical thought are less of a problem for the authoritarian-minded than for most other people.

But Huebner makes clear that Taney's early opposition to slavery wasn't isolated to the Gruber case. Taney in 1806 became the brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, who would later write what is now our national anthem; Taney married his sister, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key. "Both Taney and Francis Scott Key jointed an antikidnapping society and developed reputations for their willingness to argue cases for the benefit of slaves and free blacks."

Without fully describing how Taney came into possession of his own slaves, Huebner relates that Taney freed 11 of the 13 of which he had possession. The two exceptions were two elderly ones, who he said were "too old, when they became my property, to provide for themselves." This is notable in that one of the arguments of proslavery apologists was that masters often freed slaves who had served the faithfully all their lives as a reward for the loyal service. What that usually meant in practice was that once slaves became so old and decrepit that they couldn't work anymore, the masters would free them to fend for themselves in their remaining time on earth. Not that a lot of slaves became elderly. Between overwork, abuse, inadequate nutrition and poor medical care, many of them died before reaching their 50s. Taney took the opposite approach in those two cases, it seems.

Huebner also recounts Taney's early stands as a politician on slavery-related issues:

Consistent with his other actions at this time, Taney voted in favor of limiting the growth of slavery as a member of the Maryland Senate between 1816 and 1821. Restricting slavery emerged as a question of national importance in 1819 when New York congressman James Tallmadge proposed gradual abolition as a condition of admitting Missouri as a state. Tallmadge’s plan, a tentative move against slavery, would have freed slaves born after statehood when they reached the age of twenty-five. Such a plan partially conformed to Taney’s ideas and practices regarding liberating slaves — he freed his female slaves at age twenty-five and typically freed his male slaves at age thirty. Congress spent months debating the status of slavery in Missouri, and the matter aroused deep passions in Taney’s home state. William Pinkney, a U.S. senator from Maryland and the state’s leading lawyer, took a particularly vocal stance against any restrictions on slavery in Missouri. As in many states, legislators in Maryland extensively discussed the matter. In 1820 a resolution came before the state senate providing that Missouri should be allowed to enter the Union without any restrictions regarding slavery. Taney defied proslavery leaders — including a senior member of the bar — by voting against the resolution. (It passed 9–5, despite Taney’s efforts.) The following year, when a resolution to repeal all Maryland laws "as prohibit the importation of slaves into this state" came before senators, Taney again stood with the minority (7–5) in opposing it. As a state senator at a time of fervent debate on the subject, Taney thus supported federal and state restrictions on the expansion of slavery. [my emphasis]

(Continued in Part 2)

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, roger taney, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 26: a lesser-known story about Andrew Jackson and slavery

Reading about utopian theories and utopian experiments has a continuing fascination for me. John Egerton did a little book on three 19th-century utopian communities in Tennessee: Visions of Utopia: Nashoba, Rugby, Ruskin, and the "new Commmunities' in Tennessee's Past (1977).

The first community named in his subtitle, Nashoba, was founded in 1825 by a woman named Frances Wright (1795-1852). Born in Scotland and educated in England, she achieved fame in the United States:

Beginning in 1818, Fanny Wright had propelled herself to prominence in the United States and Europe, and for almost twenty years she was an outspoken advocate of democracy, abolition, women's rights, and the working class. She was a beautiful and charming individual, a radical reformer, a brilliant and controversial public fugre who alternately inspired and outraged a generation of Americans.

Someone very much in the best Jacksonian tradition, in other words.

Fanny met the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought on the rebels' side in the American Revolution, in 1821. She moved in to his house along with her friend Camilla. Egerton is a Southern gentlemen about the personal aspect of her relationship with Lafayette, noting that she was "in all likelihood his lover, though on that point her biographers - and his - are discreetly silent." In any case, it was an "extraordinary friendship" that "was to be the deepest emotional relationship of Fanny's life, more by far than a passing love affair."

Fanny and Camilla accompanied Lafayette on a famous tour his made in the United States. Egerton gives us a glimpse of American slavery at the time Fanny experienced it first hand:

On the estates of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia, she saw slavery practiced by otherwise liberal men, and heard them speak about it apologetically. They acknowledged that it was a dreadful calamity, but said they could find no way to end it. Fanny was disturbed by the chasm that divided the ideal of freedom from the reality of slavery, and by the general acceptance of it. The foreign slave trade had been outlawed in 1808, and slavery was unlawful in all but those states that were economically dependent upon it. It was in many respects an involuntary system, not only for the blacks who suffered under it but also for many farmer who owned them. Manumission was widely discused, and in several Southern state legislatures, including Tennessee's, laws calling for the freeing of all slaves had been introduced. But the counter argument always prevailed; the fear of economic and social disaster tightened the grip of the slavery advocates. [my emphasis]

This was the 1820s, just before Fanny established Nashoba, and open discussion over the desirability of the institution of slavery was still possible in the slave states of the future Confederacy. That situation or so would change drastically over the next 10-15 years.

Egerton writes that developing an alternative to slavery in the South was a primary aim of his new community:

Fanny's vision was to form a community in which whites and blacks, working together, could educate and elevate the former slaves to full equality and freedom, in the hope that their example would hasten the abolition of all slavery. The more radical of the abolitionists, she felt, had "much zeal but little knowledge." The reactionary defenders of slavery, on the other hand, were perpetuating "a sin against humanity" and threatening the survival of the new nation. Fanny sought a middle solution, a way to assure freedom and independence for blacks and to allow the agricultural South to find another base for its economy. If slaves could be freed without loss to their owners, she reasoned, it would be a double gain for society. Her plan was to buy land in a Southern tate, acquire a number of slaves by gift or purchase, charge each individual the amount of his purchase price, apply his work in the colony to the payment of his debt, and eventually resettle the former laves in a colony outside the United States. She estimated that the cycle would take five years to complete, and her plan included schooling and industrial training, special care for children, and a careful effort to keep families together. [my emphasis]

Fanny's Nashoba experiment endured only five years. Utopia often turns out to have a limited shelf life.

But I was struck by Egerton's description of the support she received in Tennessee:

Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and others also reviewed it [Fanny's proposal for Nashoba], and all of them gave their enthusiastic approval. Fanny asked Jefferson to take an active part in the venture; he declined, citing his age and his university duties, but he was warmly encouraging and wished her well. Lafayette, who was preparing to return to France, put her in touch with Andrew Jackson, the war hero who soon would be President, and at Jackson's invitation, she went to Tennessee to seek a site for her colony. ...

She went to visit the Rappite colonies in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and met Robert Owen, a fellow Scot, and was inspired by his new cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana. And then, with $12,000 of her own money, she rode on horseback from Virginia to Tennessee with George Flower, a young emancipationist and friend of Lafayette's, arriving in Nashville in September 1825. With the assistance of Andrew Jackson, they journeyed on to Memphis to meet John Overton, a friend and business associate of Jackson's, and there, in October, Fanny bought the first 300 acres of what was to become a 2,000-acre estate. The price was nine cents an acre. [my emphasis]

Overton leaves the reader to speculate about Old Hickory's reasons for assisting Fanny in this explicitly abolitionist project. Was it out of respect and gratitude to Gen. Lafayette? Did he have a particular attraction to this democratic-minded project? At the very least, we have to assume that Jackson knew the basic intentions and plans for her utopian community, including its abolitionist nature. And it didn't prevent him from supporting her in setting it up.

This is one incident in Old Hickory's life that I'm very curious to know more about.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, frances wright, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 25 (a day late!): Andrew Jackson and slavery

As I've stated on various occasions, I use the image of Andrew Jackson for this blog because he represents the second half of the "Jefferson-Jackson" duo that the Democratic Party considers its founders, and rightly so. Both genuinely represented the cutting-edge democratic tendencies of their time.

Jackson also faced two major issues as President in which his own personal and class interests, narrowly conceived, would seem to have dictated that he should take a different position. Jackson was a wealthy planter and slaveowner. But in his fight against the Bank of the United States, he waged a political war against the most prominent instrument and symbol of the power of concentrated wealth, the Money Power as the Jacksonians called it. In the case of the Nullification Controversy, even though it was nominally about tariffs, Jackson and his chief opponent in it, John Calhoun, new that the underlying issue was the power of slave states to nullify federal law in defense of slavery. And Jackson very clearly sided with the interests of democracy and national patriotism in successfully opposing nullification.

I've written here about Jackson's Indian policy, which was bad. The best one could say about it in a brief way is that it wasn't as bad as the approach some others took.

Jackson's flawed and contradictory aspects as a political figure are what make him a kind of epic figure for me. Rightwingers have no problem these days making up their own fanciful versions of history. I think it's important for liberals and progressives to keep the democratic traditions of American history in memory. Jackson is no plaster-saint model for 21st-century people. But he's not some 19th-century Ron Paul, either, though the goldbug sorts might want to see in Jackson's fight with the Bank some early version of anti-Federal Reserve sentiment. Jackson would have no problem seeing the legacy of John Calhoun in today's Republican Party, including the John Birch Society/Ron Paul portions.

Jackson's most important biographer to date, Robert Remini, deals with Jackson's position on slavery in his book The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essay on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery (1988). Remini discusses how the anti-slavery movement played out in the party context of the time. When Jackson and John Quincy Adams fought it out for the Presidency in 1824 and 1828, that was a fight within the Democratic Party. The Federalist Party still existed, but was fading away, reduced largely to a New England regional party whose most prominent figure was Daniel Webster, a supporter of the Bank. During the 1830s, the Whig Party grew as the main second-party competition to the Democrats.

During his Presidency, Jackson viewed the growing popular abolitionist activity with partisan suspicion. Remini writes:

The fact that the Jacksonians noted that some of Henry Clay's friends, like Redwood Fisher, had focused on the slavery question was not surprising. In view of the alliance between Calhoun and Clay during the Nullification Controversy and continuing thereafter during the removal of the government's deposits in the Bank War, the Jacksonians naturally suspected some kind of working conspiracy between the nullifiers of the South and Clay's Whig friends in the North. And whereas the nullifiers wished to disrupt the Union to create a southern confederacy, the Democrats reasoned, the Whigs hoped to discredit democracy and return the government to elitist rule. The "moneyed power" in the country hated the idea of majority rule, which had been ushered in by Jackson, and they sought any and all means by which to annihilate the concept of democratic rule in order to restore federalism with its aristocratic conceits. "The sole object of the agitators has been to make sectional parties north and south," argued the Globe, "to SEVER the democracy, and defeat that unity of action in support of the popular cause which can alone prevent the triumph of the coalition of federalism working for the cause of corruption-for the moneyed power seeking to command the Chief Magistracy and the Government through the election by States in the House against the will of the majority of the people."

It's easy now to see that abolitionism was very much a part of the popular democracy that Jacksonianism represented. (How politicians like Henry Clay or John Quincy Adams may have instrumentalized the issue is a related but different matter.) One could argue that John Brown became the ultimate Jacksonian. But, as Remini reminds us, slavery was very much an established institution recognized in the Constitution - though in embarrassed language. Jackson himself was not anti-slavery. As Remini explains (italics his):

Jackson's position on the question, and the position of the other leaders of the Democratic party, was quite clear and unambiguous. He held that the Constitution expressly recognized slavery in the South and made provisions about representation in Congress to accommodate that fact of life. "Has it ever been pretended," asked the Washington Globe, Jackson's mouthpiece after his break with Calhoun and Duff Green, "that Congress has any power to subvert the basis on which the Constitution itself was founded? Has any statesman ever suggested the idea that the general government has authority to subvert not only the rights guaranteed to individuals by the Constitution [namely their right to private property] but rights recognized as appurtenant to the state institutions, and on which their ratio of representation is made to depend?" The argument of the Iacksonians, therefore, was that the slave question had been closed by the Constitution: "There is no debatable ground left upon the subject," editorialized the Globe. ...

Simply put, slavery and racism were deeply embedded in Jacksonian society, as deeply as they were in the society that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 24: St. Reagan and segregation

These days a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan and his politics have settled in among the punditocracy. The latest variant has him being a much more responsible fellow than these wild Tea Partiers today.

So it's worth remember that Ronald Reagan built his political career on pandering to segregationists. The fact that the segregationist mentality is now fully triumphant within today's Republican Party is due in major part to Reagan, now regarded as more of the saint of the Republican Party than Abraham Lincoln.

Lou Cannon wrote in his excellent President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991):

But Reagan never supported the use of federal power to provide blacks with the civil rights systematically denied to them by southern states since the end of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century. He opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was overwhelmingly supported by congressional majorities of both parties. Reagan cited constitutional grounds for his position, but many suspected that his position also involved an element of political calculation. Reagan avidly courted the support of white southerners during the mid-1960s, and he consistently refused during his abortive campaign for the presidency in 1968 to criticize George Wallace's segregationist advocacies. This seemed to me like political pandering, although Reagan always denied any such motive. But Reagan told Laurence Barrett in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been "humiliating to the South." While he made political points with white southerners on this issue, Reagan was extremely sensitive to any suggestion that his stands on civil rights issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically reacted to such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity. [my emphasis]

Today we hear this constantly. Every time a Republican elected official or Party operative or professional propagandist is called out over some racially prejudiced or outright bigoted remark, they profess to be deeply offended at the slur on their personal integrity. It's part of the standard whiny-white-people repertoire. With his acting experience, Reagan became quite adapt at appealing to whiny white folks with this schtick.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, ronald reagan, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 23: John Calhoun and later reactionaries

Today we have another quote from Richard Nelson Current's "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943). This one connects the thinking of the godfather of secession to rightwing groups of more contemporary status in 1943. After noting that some defenders of slavery like Jefferson Davis and George Fitzhugh were more crass in their view that the master himself, Current writes:

But it is the spirit of Calhoun, not that of his more forthright followers, which lives on. It is a spirit that may be about to materialize in new and startling forms. Now, if ever, is the time for right-wing Republicans to join with Bourbon Democrats in the sort of reactionary alliance that Calhoun envisaged. The shibboleths of these allies will be not Nullification, indeed, but certainly State Rights; not the Four Freedoms exactly, but Liberty with the connotations it had for Calhoun and for the American Liberty League. The real objects of their attack will be the social controls which liberals will seek to maintain in the interests of world peace, and the democratic aspirations which have been let slip with the cry of havoc but which cannot be chained up again with the dogs of war. The leaders of the new movement will no doubt point with pride to Thomas Jefferson. But the Sage of Monticello is not their man. Let them look, instead, to the political metaphysician of South Carolina, John C. Calhoun.

Today, we see that alliance between what in 1943 were Southern Democrats and conservative Northern Republican fully realized in the Republican Party. It took a long time. But they have finally achieved it.

And, yes, when the Tea Partiers talk about the Founders, it's John Calhoun on whose thinking they draw, far more than that of actual Founders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Yes, Andrew Jackson actually fought in the Revolutionary War, so he counts as a Founder!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 22: John Calhoun on slavery and class struggle

"The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative." So said John Calhoun, leader and theoretician of the Southern slaveowners.

It was Calhoun's formulation of the nature of class conflict in the United States and his attempts to apply its lessons to the politics of defending slavery that led historian Richard Hofstadter to label Calhoun "the Marx of the Master Class" in his 1948 book, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.

Richard Nelson Current looked at Calhoun's theories of class conflict in "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943). He explains that Calhoun consistently saw his role as a defender of the wealthiest: the bankers and industrialists of the North, the slaveowners of the South. Especially the slaveowners of the South.

One of the arguments made by neo-Confederates in pursuit of their Holy Grail pseudohistorical point that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War is that there was a rivalry between the industrialists of the North and the planters of the South.

Which is true. Except it's thin sophistry as an argument that slavery was not involved in causing the war. The conflict was between a Northern capitalism based on free labor and a Southern capitalism based on a plantation economy operating on slave labor. As Lincoln said in the 1862 quote I used in the April 20 post, "without the institution of slavery ... the war could not have an existence."

Calhoun tried to get Northern capitalists to understand that they had a stake in supporting the slavery system in the South. And the core of his argument to them was that they had to fear a workers' revolt, while the South did not. And therefore they should make common cause with the slaveowners in supporting and extending the slavery system.

Current looks at some of the ways in which Calhoun as a political and social theorist seemed to share some of the assumptions that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were developing at the same time in Europe:

Historians have completely overlooked the key to Calhoun's political philosophy. That key is a concept of the class struggle. Before Calhoun, other Southern thinkers, notably James Madison and John Taylor of Caroline, had given expression to more or less well developed ideas of the conflict of social classes, for this was a notion familiar enough to a generation of Americans brought up largely on the history of ancient Greece and Rome. But these others took a liberal view, John Taylor, for one, favoring co-operation of farmers and artisans against their mutual enemy, the moneyed power. Calhoun was strictly the reactionary. Unlike the others, moreover, he used a terminology and treatment which in many respects anticipated the later "scientific" approach of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. [my emphasis]

Calhoun's class-solidarity argument was based on the planters' propaganda image of slavery as being a friendly paternalistic system with happy workers in the form of human chattel. The social forces producing a potential apocalyptic class struggle in the North simply did not operate in the South, according to his line of argument:

Presenting as he did a common ground for planter-capitalist collaboration against the class enemy, Calhoun intended his theory not merely as a bogey with which to frighten the manufacturers into yielding on the sectional issues of the day. Anyhow, he was not so naive as to suppose that his words, by themselves, could induce the capitalists to see the light. "That any force of argument can change public opinion ... ," he wrote in 1831, "I do not expect; but I feel assured that the coming confusion and danger, which I have long foreseen, will." Though the revolutionary movements then under way in Europe failed to have the repercussions which he anticipated for the United States, the time of confusion and danger finally seemed at hand when the financial crisis of 1834 beset the nation. Calhoun now persuaded himself that his doctrines were rapidly growing popular among the well-to-do in the North. Thousands were beginning to look to the South for protection not only against the "usurpation" of Andrew Jackson, but also against the "needy and corrupt" among their own population. "They begin to feel," Calhoun congratulated himself, "that they have more to fear from their own people, than we from our slaves." A year later, though the financial crisis had passed without fulfilling his expectations, he still nourished a hope that the capitalists would be converted sooner or later through fear of a mass uprising. [my emphasis]

Calhoun understood Andrew Jackson's brand of politics as representing the interests of those "needy and corrupt" grumblers in the North, despite Jackson's being a slaveowner and Southerner himself. And he was correct in that assumption.

Current also found other commonalities between the theories of John Calhoun and Karl Marx:

He started, as Marx and Engels were also to do, with John Locke's so-called labor theory of value. ...

Calhoun anticipated a number of the other Marxist doctrines. Among these were the following: (1) the eventual division of society into only two classes, capitalist and proletarian; (2) the gradual expropriation of the bulk of the population by the capitalists, so that the propertied would become fewer and fewer and the property-less more and more numerous; and (3) the ultimate impoverishment of the masses to a bare subsistence level.

My focus in this post is on describing Calhoun's framing of the class conflicts of his time in the US, not so much on the question of similarities between Calhoun's political theories and those of Marx. Current doesn't suggest that Marx' work directly influenced Calhoun. Calhoun died in 1950; The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels was published in 1848. Calhoun and other pro-slavery intellectuals were certainly aware of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. But, to put it very briefly, we're mostly talking here about Calhoun drawing conclusions from ideas that were "in the air" at the time. What we now know as economics today frames issues in market terms of prices and demands, following the "neo-classical" economics of the late nineteenth century. Economics, known as political economy is Calhoun's day, focused on production relations. So concepts like what Current describes as "John Locke's so-called labor theory of value" and David Ricardo's idea of an iron law of wages that would push the pay of industrial workers to subsistence levels were part of the general intellectual property of the "political economy" of the time.

There was also some general understanding of classes in the sense that Calhoun talked about them. In the United States, the concept of industrialists and planters as classes, or of laborers and farmers as classes, was not a exotic one. Nor is it strange in itself that Calhoun predicted a negative future for Northern capitalism. The Northern and Southern brands of capitalist business organization took very different forms in North and South, and they were in conflict. Calhoun had incentive to paint the dimmest possible picture of Northern capitalism and its fate. The few socialists and utopian thinkers of Calhoun's time didn't have to dig up their own criticisms of the existing capitalist system North or South. Northerners and Southerners were eagerly pointing out the evils of the existing system - in the other section of the country.

That an essentially reactionary thinker like Calhoun would point out the liklihood of a clash between Northern industrial workers and Northern business owners also has its parallels in Europe. According to Ernst Benz, the man responsible for introducing the word "proletariat" into German from French, a term that came to be heavily associated with the socialist movement, was one of Germany's most prominent reactionary philosophers, Franz von Baader. (Ernst Benz, "Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den 'Proletair'" Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 2/1948) Benedikt Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) was a religious-minded Catholic philosopher. Lenz calls him the first social theorist from the German lands who occupied himself with the "social problem" of the new industrial working class. His political activity largely consisted of advice to monarchist regimes and to the Churches to come up with ameliorative reforms based on Christian principles before the workers came to prefer a non-religious, materialist revolutionary approach. Benz treats Baader as a conservative, but he is also commonly classified as a counterrevolutionary thinker, i.e., a reactionary opponent to the democratic and human rights ideals of the French and American Revolutions.

Based on his observations of the French Revolution of 1830 and also of conditions among the workers of England, Baader also concluded that the new working class would produce not only a political but a social revolution if trends continued as they were. But he was terrified of the prospect and wanted urgently to head it off, similarly to John Calhoun's framing of the issue. Benz in that article discusses several ways in which Von Baader's analysis of the social situation in Europe also anticipated that of Marx in coming years, a reminder of how many of these ideas were "in the air" during that period.

Calhoun was not an academic, but a politician. His ideas about class struggle were ones he used in his political goal of defending slavery:

... Calhoun was interested less in composing a well rounded statement of the theory than in using it for the practical purpose of defending the property of the planters.

On behalf of the planter class he appealed again and again to fellow conservatives among the bankers and manufacturers of the North. As each great sectional issue came to a head between 1828 and 1850, he was ready with a new instalment of his class-struggle argument.

And his position was taken up by others:

After Calhoun's death some of the apologists for a solid, proslavery South went much farther than he had gone. Jefferson Davis, horrified at the spread of strikes throughout the free world, made more explicit the parallel between abolitionism and socialism as twin attacks upon property. George Fitzhugh took a very different but even more extreme stand. In his Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, published at Richmond in 1854, he admitted the accuracy and justice of the socialist case against capitalism but asserted that the socialists overlooked the need for a master at the head of each of their ideal communities - a need which the Southern plantation system, or something like it, alone could meet. Fitzhugh praised slavery as the only workable form of socialism and urged the whole world to adopt it, at once, as the sole cure for class conflict and the other ills of competitive society!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: John Calhoun, political theorist

John Calhoun of South Carolina was the godfather of secession and the patron saint of the post-Civil War violent overthrown of the democratic Reconstruction state government, Jim Crow laws and segregationism.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)
"I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession." (Harriet Martineau)

Richard Current in John C. Calhoun (1966) writes:

Wherever a White Citizens' Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

That is now the spirit that dominates today's Republican Party, from the state and local levels to the national scene.

Current quotes a passage from the travel memoirs of Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. 1 (1838), on her encounter with Calhoun in 1835:

Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings upon a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. ... His mind has long lost all power of communicating with any other. I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men, and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. ... Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced) will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession.

Today, he would do very well as a commentator on FOX News

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 20: Lincoln on slavery

Some quotes from Lincoln are always good in a Civil War series of posts.

Apologists for the Confederacy have since 1865 put themselves through verbal and mental contortions to argue that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. One piece of sophistry on which they rely is the fact that emancipation was not the official aim of the Union from the start of the war.

But that is a minor effort compared to the ones required to deny the many clear, explicit enthusiastic statements from the Confederacy that slavery was at the core of their cause.

Lincoln was an abolitionist, though prior to the Civil War and even some ways into it, he favored impractical schemes like colonization of African-Americans to Africa or some other location outside the US. He also favored compensated emancipation, though Southern slaveowners had vanishingly little interest in such a proposal.

Still, Lincoln was certainly clear that slavery was the central cause of the war. Addressing a black delegation in Washington on 08/14/1862 - addressing them on the issues of colonization - he said "without the institution of slavery ... the war could not have an existence."

A year later, a small eternity had passed in the war. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making emancipation an explicit issue in the conflict. In military terms of the time, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the Union strategy from one of conventional war to revolutionary war, revolutionary because it aimed not just at subduing the enemy but at overthrowing the social system of slavery on which the Confederate economy was based.

On 08/26/1863, he wrote a letter addressed to James Conkling intended to be read at a Union political meeting in Springfield, Illinois. He addressed criticisms he had received over the emancipation policy:

But to be plain. You are dissatisfied with me about the Negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not. Yet, I have neither adopted nor proposed any measure which is not consistent with even your view, provided you are for the Union. I suggested compensated emancipation, to which you replied you wished not to be taxed to buy Negroes. But I had not asked you to be taxed to buy Negroes, except in such way as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.

You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its Commander-in-Chief with the law of war in time of war. The most that can be said - if so much - is that slaves are property. Is there - has there ever been - any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it helps us, or hurts the enemy? Armies, the world over, destroy enemies' property when they cannot use it; and even destroy their own to keep it from the enemy. Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes and non-combatants, male and female.

But the proclamation, as law, either is valid or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it cannot be retracted any more than the dead can be brought to life. Some of you profess to think its retraction would operate favorably for the Union. Why better after the retraction than before the issue? There was more than a year and a half of trial to suppress the rebellion before the proclamation issued; the last one hundred days of which passed under an explicit notice that it was coming, unless averted by those in revolt returning to their allegiance. The war has certainly progressed as favorably for us since the issue of the proclamation as before.

I know, as fully as one can know the opinions of others, that some of the commanders of our armies in the field, who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy and the use of the colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion, and that at least one of these important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers. Among the commanders holding these views are some who have never had any affinity with what is called Abolitionism, or with Republican party politics, but who hold them purely as military opinions. I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections often urged that emancipation and arming the blacks are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted as such in good faith.

You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively, to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes.

I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever Negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept. [my emphasis]

The text of the Lincoln letter is from The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (1940), Philip Van Doren Stern, ed.

Tags: abraham lincoln, confederate heritage month 2012, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Week 2012, April 19: Secessionism then and now

Glenn LaFantasie takes a look at present-day neo-Confederate ideology in How the South rationalizes secession Salon 12/19/2010:

... if you think that all this secession bluster is only a symptom of some peculiar Texas Tea Party madness, you need only Google the word “secession” to find that the radical right believes, apparently in growing numbers, that the Constitution does not prohibit secession and that states can leave the federal union whenever they want. Worse, a Middlebury Institute/Zogby Poll taken in 2008 found that 22 percent of Americans believe that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” That’s an astounding statistic, one that means that nearly a quarter of Americans don’t know about the Civil War and its outcome. Sadly, it also means that for 1 out of every 4 Americans, the 620,000 of their countrymen who died during the Civil War gave their lives in vain.

He deals with the intriguing question of whether the Confederacy was a revolution or a counterrevolution, a question which I won't go into here. LaFantasie goes with the revolution description. But here he summarizes some of the major conceptual and historical background for the arguments over secession:

More to the point, Confederate Vice President Stephens plainly asserted in March 1861 that the “present revolution,” which had brought about the creation of the Confederate States of America, “is founded … on the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Other Confederates cringed at the persistent description of their revolution as a revolution (but not at the admission that the preservation of slavery was their primary motive for seceding) and turned instead to defending their actions by arguing that secession was, in fact, legal and not revolutionary at all. Harking back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in response to the Federalist Party’s enactment of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts, Southerners advanced the idea that the Union under the Constitution consisted of simply a compact among the states and that any state, by means of its retained sovereignty, could divorce itself from the Union if it ever desired to do so. Confederates also based their rationalization of secession on John C. Calhoun’s notion of nullification, which held that a state could declare a federal law null and void. But Calhoun — a South Carolinian who had served in Congress, as secretary of war under Monroe, as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and later as the South’s most famous (or infamous) senator — went further in his states’ rights arguments than Jefferson or Madison had ever done. In his view, states were not only sovereign, they were virtually independent; thus states were simultaneously in the Union and out of it. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson, a fellow Southerner, forced South Carolina to nullify its nullification of a federal tariff. Instead of reinforcing the idea of a perpetual Union, the nullification crisis simply laid the groundwork for the South’s later secession. [my emphasis]

It's nice that he gives Old Hickory credit for squelching South Carolina's treasonous effort in the nullification controversy. But I would disagree with his suggestion that Jackson's victory was a failure in "reinforcing the idea of a perpetual Union". On the contrary, it was very effective in doing so. But in the decade leading up to the Civil War, the South wasn't asserting "states rights". They were insisting on using the power of the federal government to override the rights of the free states and their citizens in the matter of slavery. Only after Lincoln's election didn't they revert to a "states rights" position. The Slave Power's goal and principle was defending slavery. All the rest of the Constitutional arguments this way or that way were window-dressing to them.


Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, lost cause, neo-confederate, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Week 2012, April 18: Barry Goldwater and segregation

It's a common tactic in political campaigns to taunt the other side with positions their party once took that they now seemed to have abandoned. We hear it in the 2012 Presidential race, when commentators suggest that Ronald Reagan would have been too liberal for today's Republican Party. Actually, Reagan generally pushed as conservative of policies as he could get away with. But it makes good politics.

Unfortunately, it also can make for bad history. Barry Goldwater was the leader of what came to be known as "movement conservatism" in 1964, when he won the Republican nomination for President. His brand of conservatism was crushed in the election of 1964, in which the two primary issues were the Vietnam War (Goldwater was for escalation, Lyndon Johnson against it) and desegregation in the South (Goldwater against, Johnson for). Goldwater's disgust for ministers in politics later found him trading insults with Christian Right leaders like Jerry Falwell. But the Goldwater brand of conservatism is what now dominates the Republican Party.

Jason Morgan Ward in Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (2011):

Goldwater churned out a manifesto in 1960, but with much more fanfare. Published and distributed by the senator's influential right-wing supporters, The Conscience of a Conservative shot up the summer bestseller charts. Ghostwritten by William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, the slim volume summed up Goldwater's stance on a variety of political issues, from government spending to "the Soviet Menace." But nothing encouraged southern conservatives more than the successive chapters on states' rights and civil rights.

The subjects required separate chapters, Goldwater argued, because the civil rights struggle had both obscured and dramatized a much broader issue. Blasting attempts "to disparage the principle of States' Rights by equating it with defense of the South's position on racial integration," Goldwater championed the concept as a bulwark against growing federal power. Goldwater, who had voted for civil rights measures as a sitting senator, reassured southern conservatives by criticizing Brown [v. Board of Education] and arguing for limits to racial reform. He criticized the "extravagant and shameless misuse" of civil rights, a blanket term he accused liberals of expanding to include "human" and "natural" rights not granted by the Constitution. So Goldwater could be for "civil" rights such as voting while still maintaining that "the federal Constitution does not require the States to maintain racially mixed schools." Whether or not Goldwater liked segregation did not matter. In a concise and carefully worded chapter, he declared white opposition to integration a perfectly legal and downright American stance. "It may be just or wise or expedient for negro children to attend the same schools as white children," Goldwater argued, "but they do not have a civil right to do so." [my emphasis in bold]

This is the same brand of conservatism and "libertarianism" that we hear today in different forms from the Ron "Papa Doc" and Rand "Baby Doc" Paul, from the Ludwig von Mises Institute and these days more and more often from the Republican Party generally. Though retroactively agreeing with Goldwater's opposition to the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 is still a little risky for Republican candidates to say out loud.

This is why it's worth listening carefully to Republican warnings about "tyranny" and so forth today. Ward also relates:

Barry Goldwater bucked his party leadership, and his own voting record, by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A week after the cloture vote ended the southern filibuster, the presumptive Republican nominee voiced his "constitutional" objections to the bill. Declaring his opposition to "discrimination of any sort," Goldwater warned that the bill authorized "the creation of a federal police force of mammoth proportions" and encouraged "an 'informer' psychology" among citizens. "These ... ," Goldwater declared, "are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society." If the public "misconstrued" his vote as a defense of segregation, Goldwater concluded, he would accept the fallout. [my emphasis]

When Papa Doc Paul and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney talk about their devotion to the Constitution and their opposition to federal oppression, they are speaking from the same segregationist perspective from which Barry Goldwater spoke in 1964. The segregationist ideology of 1964 is thriving today, alive and well in the Nixonized, Reaganized, Bushized Republican Party.

Tags: barry goldwater, confederate heritage month 2012, segregation, white racism

Confedederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 17: the Tulsa murder and racial terror

Even if it's largely a matter of more sophisticated PR, I've been struck by the contrast between the official handling of the Trayvon Martin case and the Tulsa serial-killing case from a couple of weeks ago. From this Tulsa World article, I take it that the Tulsa PD is going all-out to convey to the public that they were all over the case from the get-go: Jerry Wofford, Tension ruled Tulsa for two days 04/15/2012.

Now, parts of this article read like a police department PR release written by somebody trying to make it sound like the plot from a TV police "procedural". And I'm guessing that Tulsa cops and politicians were telling each other early on, "we can't let this become another Trayvon Martin deal."

It strikes me that if the Sanford FL police had been more diligent in their intial investigation with interviewing witnesses and so on, and had more clearly publicized what they had done (confiscating Zimmerman's clothes, taking him into custody for five hours, etc.), they might have at least mitigated the negative image they got from the case.

Just to be clear, based on the publicly available information I've seen in following the Martin case, it looks to me like this was a racially-motivated murder, at the very best a case where George Zimmerman provoked a confrontation with no good reason in which he wound up killing Trayvon with a bullet to the chest. And it certainly looks to me like the Sanford police department handled the initial investigation with considerable sloppiness. We can certainly hope that the legal proceedings will produce definitive information. Though the initial probable cause affidavit has given Emptywheel contributor Bmaz pause as to the competency of the prosecution in this case, as he explains in Zimmerman: Anatomy Of A Deficient Probable Cause Affidavit 04/14/2012.

What I want to focus on in this post is the description that Wofford gives of the effects in the African-American neighborhood of Tulsa where the murders to which Jake England and Alvin Watts have confessed were taking place. It's give a very contemporary image of how racial vigilante violence spreads a feeling of vulnerability and terror beyond the immediate victims and their families.

But there were immediate victims:

Police learned later they likely were. Dannaer Fields, 49, Bobby Clark, 54, and William Allen, 31, were dead. David Hall, 46, and Deon Tucker, 44, were in critical condition with gunshot wounds. All had been shot within a three-mile radius in the span of a few hours early April 6, Good Friday.

Here is Wofford's description of the atmosphere it created:

A white man shooting black victims seemingly at random in north Tulsa.

"So it doesn't take rocket science to say that it's a possible connection that somebody was targeting black (people)," Evans said.

City Councilor Jack Henderson represents the district where all the victims were found. He also was kept informed as the situation progressed and knew there was a possibility that black residents in his district were being targeted.

"At this point, fear had set in, and everyone is asking me what they should do," Henderson said. "We needed to start making sure people don't start taking things in their own hands."

Warren Blakney, president of Tulsa's NAACP chapter and the minister of the North Peoria Church of Christ, was headed back from a revival in Texarkana when he heard about the shootings. He and Henderson started working with the north Tulsa community to balance the anger about the situation with a call for safety and awareness.

"I decided to get some folks together and said let's meet Friday night and inform this community they could be in danger," Blakney said. "I didn't want anybody else hurt."

Henderson said he was telling people to stay indoors and not put themselves in dangerous situations.

Theo Ballard hadn't heard those calls from community leaders but heard enough from a neighbor. He lives about a block from where Clark was shot near Denver Avenue and 63rd Street North.

"He said I better watch it, sitting on the porch," Ballard said. "I stayed inside and secured the door real good."

Ballard, 84, and his wife, Ann Ballard, 75, both stayed inside. They liked sitting on their porch in the evening, enjoying the twilight, the weather, their flower garden and their neighbors. But the threat of a random shooter kept them inside Friday night.

"I was beginning to suspect anybody," Ann Ballard said. "I wasn't ruling anything out. ... I'd just shoot anybody that came up here."

Police were anxious, too. Extra patrols roamed the streets across the city, not just on the north side.

Also from the Tulsa World on the case: Zack Stoycoff, Jake England was shaped by tragedy, responsibility, desperation 04/15/2012; Bill Sherman, Jesse Jackson comes to Tulsa with message of healing 04/14/2012

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, lynching, tulsa murders 2012, white racism