Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 30:

To close this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month cycle, I'm using a quote from the Tropics of Meta blog, Jeff Davis’s Ghost: The Long Battle over the Memory of the Civil War by Steve Bare 05/18/2015 summarizing the framework historian David Blight uses to understand the major streams of public memory formation that initially emerged from the Civil War:

Blight probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and society from 1863 to 1915. Blight is primarily concerned with the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory. Blight’s Race and Reunion is considered the opening salvo in memory studies related to the Civil War.

Blight posits three overall visions of Civil War memory that collided and combined over time. One, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than Reconstruction. The second vision, the white supremacist articulation embodied in the Lost Cause, took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn-of-the-century delivered the country a segregated memory of the Civil War on Southern terms. The third vision Blight articulates, the emancipationist vision, was embodied in African American’s complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. For many Americans, the Civil War is a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.

Bare summarizes several other books that have contributed to understanding the processes by which what we could call hegemonic memories of the Civil War and its aftermath formed. And he writes:

Scholarship regarding southern memory of the Civil War saw the greatest paradigm shift in its historiography. Recent scholarship from the late 1980s on focuses on the Lost Cause as a catalyst for the acceptance of southern nostalgia and mythology regarding the war. Uniquely, gender appears more frequently in this scholarship than it does with the historiography of the North. Women in the South played a leading role in fostering the Lost Cause at an ideological level and in popularizing the pathos through print media. We also see how spatial arrangements of landscapes of the dead added weight to the enunciation of the Lost Cause. Finally, scholarship regarding the civil religion aspect of the Lost Cause foregrounded the South’s racist hierarchy. Memory in the South closely aligns with Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. In the South, the mythos of the Lost Cause bound southerners to a shared heritage with rituals that only those from the South could understand.

I assume in that last sentence, he means that it bound white Southerners together. But it could also mean that the dominant Lost Cause narrative among white Southerners - a narrative that also dominated the national historical conventional wisdom during much of the 20th century - provided the basis for dissenting counter-narratives by African-American and other dissenters.

David Brion Davis writes of Blight's 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation New York Review of Books 07/18/2002):

More convincingly than any other historian I know of, Blight explains one of the most troubling questions for the understanding of American history: why it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the 1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade school through college, that states’ rights, not slavery, was the cause of the Civil War or, as many Southerners have long insisted on our calling it, “the War Between the States.” As late as 1947, as I can clearly remember when I was a GI Bill veteran in an Ivy League college, an aging professor of history could teach us that slavery in the American South was a benign and civilizing institution, but uneconomical and thus of minor importance in American history; that the Civil War was a preventable but heroic tragedy, fomented by a few extremists in both North and South; that the war led to the “emancipation” of a people wholly unprepared for such sudden freedom and thus easily manipulated and corrupted by opportunistic “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”; and that only such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, who played upon the superstitious fears of the “half-savage, half-childish Darkies,” could begin to restore order.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 20: The slave trade

This post concerns another New York Review article by historian David Brion Davis: A Big Business 06/11/1998 (link behind subscription), reviewing The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 by Hugh Thomas and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn.

The Robin Blackburn book he reviews stresses the role of slavery in the development of the modern capitalist economy, or "the market system" as business writers blandly call it these days:

Blackburn succeeds in conveying a deep sense of the "superexploitation" of millions of black slaves working millions of uncompensated hours to produce wealth that flowed into white industrial investment and conspicuous display. He shows no hesitation in identifying the historical villains: not the Baroque governments and popes that first authorized the African slave trade so much as the "civil society" that broke with the traditional "moral economy" and unleashed "rampant capitalism and the free market." While Blackburn's arguments regarding civil society and the transition "from baroque to modern" are difficult to follow, he reinforces the often forgotten point made by Robert William Fogel (and many others) that market forces and economic self-interest can produce the most immoral and humanly destructive institutions, epitomized historically by racial slavery in the New World.[7] I should emphasize that Blackburn does not see the New World slave system as the necessary or optimum path to a modern society. But once chosen, because of its absolute centrality to the history of the past four hundred years it left a profound taint on the Western world we know.

... Blackburn carefully considers the diverse views of various economic historians and concludes that while New World slavery did not produce capitalism, profits from the New World slave system made a significant contribution to British economic growth and investment in manufacturing.

Davis reminds us that the severity of slavery is a topic which has been clouded by propaganda of various kinds:

British and American abolitionists initiated a tradition of sharply differentiating New World and especially Anglo-American slavery from all previous forms of servitude. They were particularly intent on showing that modern plantation slavery was more inhumane and oppressive than the bondage recognized and sanctioned in the Bible or the servitude found in contemporary Africa. This line of argument later appealed to Marxists and other critics who were eager to demonize capitalism and market forces as the sources of the world's worst example of human exploitation. Blackburn is surely right when he insists that "the novelty of New World slavery resided in the scale and intensity of the slave traffic and the plantation trades." But because Blackburn desperately wants to see New World slavery as a unique aberration, as a tragic choice dictated by capitalist greed when other choices were available, he tends to romanticize earlier forms of human bondage. He forgets that slaves in premodern societies have often been subject to cannibalism, torture, ritual sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary death at the whim of an owner.

When Blackburn asserts that "the slavery of the Ancient World had not denied the basic humanity of the slave," he also forgets the appalling descriptions of slaves in the mine shafts at Laurium in ancient Attica and in Ptolemaic Egypt. One need not dwell on the laws that sanctioned the Romans' pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves convicted of raping a virgin or crucifying four hundred household slaves after the murder of Pedanius Secundas, in 61 CE, in order to agree with the Quaker John Woolman that no human being is saintly enough to be entrusted with the power of owning a slave as a piece of property, a power which has always involved some degree of dehumanization.[11] As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have demonstrated, while small numbers of highly privileged slaves can be found throughout history, even in nineteenth-century Mississippi, the institution of slavery has always depended on violent domination, dishonor, and a kind of "social death." (my emphasis)

Davis also addresses an issue which comes up in rightwing polemics over slavery:

Perhaps the most startling point that Hugh Thomas makes about the early Portuguese slave trade is the way it became dominated by New Christian or converso merchants. Fernão de Loronha, for example, an associate and successor of Marchionni, gained a temporary monopoly of trade in the Bight of Benin and supplied slaves and wine to Elmina (Africans in the Gold Coast region continued to buy slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for gold). José Rodrigues Mascarenhas and Fernando Jiménez were other sixteenth-century merchants of Jewish ancestry who gained control over large segments of the slave trade to the Americas. King Philip II of Spain awarded Portuguese New Christians with asiento contracts to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. Some of these merchants had relatives or close friends in Italy, Brazil, or Antwerp, long the major center for refining and marketing sugar.

Thomas, unlike Blackburn, avoids the error of thinking of these converso merchants as Jews. Since there has been recent controversy over the Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade, it is important to be on guard against the Inquisition's or the Nazis' definition of Jewishness: that is, having the taint of Jewish ancestry. In 1492 many of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in Portugal, and in 1497 the Portuguese king banished all the Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Given the frequency of intermarriage between New Christians and Old Christians, many of these New Christian families would have lost their converso identity and been assimilated if there had been no doctrine of "purity of blood" and if the Inquisition had not become obsessed with secret "judaizing" practices. Even so, with the passage of time, the great majority of New Christians became absorbed in the Iberian Catholic culture. As Seymour Drescher has pointed out, most of the New Christians who made their fortunes in Africa, Asia, or the Americas returned to Iberia and "were disinclined to resettle where they could openly practice Judaism or even syncretic brands of family religiosity."

But with respect to their participation in the slave trade, the genuineness of the conversos' Christian faith should be irrelevant. Neither Blackburn nor Thomas fully grasps the central point. The Church and the Catholic crowns prohibited Jews from owning baptized slaves or even traveling to the New World. What qualified men like Antônio Fernandes Elvas and Manuel Rodrigues Lamego to transport thousands of African slaves to the Spanish New World was their convincing Christian identity. According to Thomas, Pope Sixtus V thought so highly of Fernando Jiménez, despite his Jewish ancestry, that "he gave him the right to use his own surname, Peretti." When doubts arose that a converso merchant or planter was not a genuine Christian, he was often burned at the stake. (my emphasis)

Present-day historians seem to put too much credibility in the claims of the Spanish Inquisition which accused so many "conversos" of being secret Jews or "Judaizers" of the Christian religion. There is strong evidence that, for the most part, the Spanish "conversos" largely abandoned Judaism and practiced Christianity. The Inquisition's persecutions of them was unjust on a number of levels. And their confessions to secret Jewish practices were largely exacted by torture or the fear of torture.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: the plague of Lost Cause pseudohistory

Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad

Continuing the discussion of David Brion Davis' article The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight, he also has some important things to say about the nature of American historical memory about the Civil War.

As Davis writes, "it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the 1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade school through college, that states' rights, not slavery, was the cause of the Civil War". A false historical narrative, the Lost Cause narrative.

He refers to David Blight's book in discussing one of the reasons:

Blight quotes William Dean Howells's famous words that "what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Despite the extraordinarily voluminous literature on the Civil War, few accounts convey the fear, panic, carnage, brutal violence, and suffering that continued to infect the nightmares of veterans,[6] to say nothing of the rubble, ruins, desolate landscape, and crowds of black and white refugees seen throughout the South by 1865. As Blight points out, however, both Northern and Southern whites found it much easier to honor the dead and hold ceremonies amid forests of white gravestones on "Decoration Day," later called Memorial Day, than to confront what Blight terms "the logic of emancipation" and "the stirrings of racial equality." It was easier to commemorate and sometimes sentimentalize the death of 620,000 American soldiers than to remember that the Union victory depended, to a considerable degree, on the enlistment of nearly 200,000 African-Americans, who, like Henry C. Hoyle, could write home about their "struggle for freedom, liberty and equal rights."

In popular memory among whites and to a large extent even in textbooks and in the work of historians, the Civil War came to be seen in terms of its significance as a conflict among white Americans:

Blight's major theme, as he describes the frequent "reunions" of white Union and Confederate veterans, is that the yearning for a "redemptive" sectional reconciliation required a "harmonious forgetfulness" of slavery, emancipation, and even minimal African-American rights. "In this vision of the terms of Blue-Gray reunion," he writes, "slavery was everyone's and no one's responsibility. America's bloody racial history was to be banished from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were soldiers' heroism and the exchange of the business deal."

But it's important to remember that the central role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War was not forgotten by everyone. It certainly wasn't an invention of "politically correct" recent historians, as the neo-Confederates might like to claim. As Davis explains:

Blight emphasizes the importance of "the emancipationist vision," tracing how it originated with black and white abolitionists and was reflected in Lincoln's revolutionary call for a new birth of freedom. It was a view that was always centered on the "proposition" that all men are created equal. One of the first major events celebrating this tradition occurred when over one hundred black leaders assembled in Louisville, Kentucky, in September 1883. While expressing their gratitude for "the miraculous emancipation" that had brought such seeming promise twenty years earlier, the resolutions of these blacks "threw a bleak picture of African American conditions," in Blight's words, "at the feet of the nation."

In his keynote address at this meeting, Frederick Douglass referred to the "feeling of color madness" and the "atmosphere of color hate" that pervaded "churches, courts, and schools, and worse, the deepest 'sentiment' of ordinary people." "In all relations of life and death," Douglass testified, "we are met by the color line.... It hunts us at midnight, it denies us accommodation...excludes our children from schools...compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring the least reward."

Speaking only days before the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, opening the way for later Jim Crow laws throughout the South, Douglass made the telling point that the revolutionary measure of slave emancipation had come "from the hell of war," including "fields of smoke and fire strewn with...bleeding and dying men." It was therefore linked with "deadly hate and a spirit of revenge," which had engendered a Southern determination to reverse the racial revolution by reconstructing the very meaning of the Civil War. (my emphasis)

Davis also deals with another bogus claim of Lost Cause pseudohistory:

It is now clear that American slavery was not doomed to some kind of inevitable economic death ("econocide," to use the term coined by the brilliant historian Seymour Drescher). Nor was the white American public prepared in the mid-1860s for immediate and total slave emancipation. In 1858, in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln predicted, after affirming the total wrongness of slavery, that "I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least." In other words, he was thinking of 1958 at the earliest, but four years later, in 1862, concluded that the South's "rebellion" could not be overcome unless the primary cause of the conflict was eliminated.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, lost cause, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Slavery and Confederate foreign relations

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy: his rebellion gave hope to reactionaries far beyond the United States

David Brion Davis is a leading historian of slavery. He wrote on The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight.

Slavery as such was very much an issue in the foreign relations of both the Union and the Confederacy. Davis writes:

The American South had supplied three quarters of the raw cotton for Britain's textile industry, the very heart of the British industrial economy, and by the summer of 1862 such cotton imports had fallen to one third of their 1860 level. This led to a "Cotton Famine" and widespread unemployment. Yet Britain's prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, remained cautious in the face of French pressure and reluctant to give formal recognition to the Confederacy until he could be certain of the latter's impending military victory. After a summer of Union defeats in 1862 and growing pressure from his cabinet for some kind of intervention, Palmerston and the Union were saved, at least temporarily, by Robert E. Lee's defeat in Maryland, on September 17, 1862, at the extremely bloody Battle of Antietam. It was this longed-for if marginal Union victory that opened the way a few days later for Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The central question, for both Palmerston and later historians, was the issue of British public opinion.

British public opinion was not uniformly anti-slavery. Many Britons were anti-Union. And even the important British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was passive during the debate over the Confederacy. Davis explains:

The initial caution and passivity of British abolitionists may well have been related to a subject that has been neglected or underestimated by historians: the drastic "failure" of West Indian slave emancipation. I use quotation marks to suggest that the disappointment and embarrassment did not concern the happiness and well-being of blacks but rather the expectations of whites, including many abolitionists, who often assumed that freed slaves would work harder and more efficiently on colonial plantations. However, wherever freedpeople could find plots of land for subsistence agriculture, they fled the plantations or worked as little as possible. After the end of so-called apprenticeship in 1838, both Britain and the Southern states absorbed a stream of evidence showing that freed blacks did everything they could to escape slave-like gang labor, and that plantation production and land values had plummeted. The evidence showed moreover that Britain had desperately turned to India and other poverty-stricken regions to find thousands of indentured laborers who could be transported to the West Indies, and that Cuba and Brazil, which still imported large numbers of slaves from Africa, had greatly prospered, especially in producing sugar and coffee for the world's expanding markets.

He also notes that his was a situation that added to the slaveowners' overheated fears of abolitionist politics:

... American diplomats had deluged Southern leaders with similar tales of West Indian catastrophe, which reinforced the older horrors associated with the Haitian Revolution that took place between 1791 and 1804. Interpreting these disasters as the inevitable results of French and British abolitionism, Southerners greatly overestimated the power of Northern abolitionists and thus escalated their demands in a self-defeating way. This finally antagonized many moderate Northerners and thus contributed to secession and civil war, despite Southern dominance of the federal government from Washington's time to that of President Buchanan (1789–1861). (my emphasis)

Eventually, anti-slavery sentiment carried the day on British recognition of the Confederacy:

Rumors that the government was seriously considering recognition of the Confederacy alarmed large numbers of Britons who equated a Union victory with furthering social and political reforms in their own land. It was no secret that the strongest supporters of the Confederacy were precisely those privileged minorities who opposed labor unions and the extension of suffrage in Britain. No less important, Lincoln's commitment to slave emancipation gave a moral objective to the preservation of the Union, a goal that coincided with an abstract and residual British pride in having led the global struggle for the liberty of slaves. (my emphasis)

He also notes that a namesake of Andrew Jackson played an important role in pro-Union politics in Britain:

... a large cadre of African-American speakers, including J. Sella Martin, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry "Box" Brown, challenged racist stereotypes and kept reminding Britons that slavery stood at the center of the American war. Nothing could embody this point more forcefully than the speeches of William Andrew Jackson, the escaped slave and former coachman of the Confederacy's President Jefferson Davis. (my emphasis)

Davis argues that the anti-slavery public's political perspective connecting reform in Britain to the defeat of the Confederacy and its slave system was accurate:

Though Blackett fails to recognize the importance of free-labor ideology, he makes it clear that a Confederate victory would have created an enormous impediment to the growth of democracy in Britain. This conclusion, underscored by the political and class alignments in Britain, conforms with the grim speculations of the economic historian and Nobel Laureate Robert William Fogel. After briefly surveying the plight of most workers in Europe and even England in the 1850s and 1860s, Fogel suggests that a Confederate victory would have delivered a devastating blow to antislavery and progressive politics, replacing democracy and liberal reform with "a drive for aristocratic privilege under the flags of paternalism and the preservation of order."

Given the high productivity of slave labor, an independent Confederacy could have exploited its monopoly on cotton by passing on a small sales tax to consumers, a tax that would have financed a huge standing army, along with expansionist, proslavery policies that might well have led to Confederate domination of Latin America and a reversal of Britain's antislavery pressures on Cuba and Brazil. While Fogel is fully aware that the abolition of American slavery brought "no heaven on earth," there is much to be said for his argument that Confederate independence would have greatly increased the power of the most conservative movements in much of the world. (my emphasis)

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, slavery, us civil war

The Illuminati, or, Wingnuts of the world, unite!

Graphic from the John Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion - notice the hammer-and-sickle in the left eye and what seems to be Congress in the right

Continuing the theme of historical background on current rightwing trends, I've been looking at a collection edited by historian David Brion Davis published in 1971 called, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. It thought of this theme today when I saw Atrios post, They're All Birchers Now 04/21/07, which references this Glenn Greenwald post about the amazing capacity of our Republicans to swallow preposterous conspiracy theories, Right-wing blogs discover massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq Salon 04/21/07.

One of the longest-running conspiracy theories on which Davis gives some background is that of the Illuminati. Pat Robertson, whose Regent University alumni we've learned in the current US Attorneys scandal apparently now has a decisive say over who gets appointed to be the chief federal prosecutors, used this concept as part of his grand conspiratorial theory of history espoused in books like The New World Order (1991) and The Turning Tide (1993).

Davis traces the Illuminati conspiracy theory to a book by one John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, published in Scotland in 1797. He was inspired in turn by a Frenchman name Abbé Barruel who, Davis writes, "helped to popularize the view that every stage of the [French] Revolution had been planned and implemented by secret societies, largely Freemasonic in origin, as part of a master conspiracy to overthrow Christianity and legitimate government." But he thinks that Robinson's book was probably more responsibible for popularizing the notion.

This conspiracy theory was deeply reactionary in its origins and intent. It opposed not only the bloody excesses of the French Revolution but the very notion of democracy and the Enlightenment, a reactionary viewpoint that is at the heart of the Christian dominionist viewpoint of which Pat Robertson is one of the best-known advocates today (though most of them don't describe themselves as "dominionists").

Davis describes the background of Robison's tract this way:

Robison had become alarmed by Masonic "innovations" and by supposed evidence that many lodges had been infiltrated by Jesuits, deists, and heretical sectarians. After a close study of various obscure documents, he concluded in 1797 that Freemasonry had finally been taken over and exploited by the secret Order of Illuminati who sought to destroy Christianity and overturn all the governments of Europe, and who had in fact engineered the French Revolution. In Robison's inflamed mind, the Illuminati appeared as the most dangerous conceivable enemy to British Protestantism: they combined the secular rationalism of the left-wing Enlightenment with all the diabolical traits once ascribed to the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

He summarizes the book and its impact this way:

Although John Robison was not an American, he served as a bridge between English and American concepts of conspiracy, and had an enormous influence on Federalist writers and on the later anti-Masonic movement. Robison was anything but an ignorant fanatic. He was a professor of science (natural philosophy) at the University of Edinburg and secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His book exhibits the careful massing of evidence, the plausible scholarship, and the quick jump to breathtaking conclusions which Richard Hofstadter has described as among the hallmarks of the paranoid style. There is a note of modernity to Robison's protest against a movement governed by the belief that a noble end justifies any means. He also anticipated later patterns of thought when he sensed that systems of ethics could become ideological weapons, and that tests of loyalty should concern one's commitment to "approved principles" rather than to specific leaders or groups.

There is actually no evidence that the Order of the Illuminati was anything more than a short-lived organization dedicated to the humanitarian and rationalistic principles of the Enlightenment. It was certainly not responsible for the French Revolution. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in the years preceding Robison's book, the repressive measures of the British government had provoked conspiratorial movements among pro-French radicals and oppressed English workers. By defining all social protest as subversive, the Pitt administration drove protest under ground. Pitt's spies and informers gathered extensive evidence on some of the "Secret Assemblies" that worried John Robison. Robison's theories must therefore be understood as a somewhat hysterical and reactionary response to genuine social unrest. It is significant that Robison, as a defender of the existing order, was especially fearful that revolutionary ideas were contaminating the young. The same apprehension would later be shared by American anti-abolitionists and anti-Communists. (my emphasis)

Davis includes a selection from a speech of 06/04/1964 by Robert Welch, the head of the far-right John Birch Society. Welch wasn't satisfied with going back to the 18th-century Enlightenment to find the root of all social evil. He took it back to the dawn of Western civilization in ancient Greece. But he works the Illuminati into his grand theory of an immense conspiracy against good Christian white folks:

The precedent had been set, however [by the collectivism of Sparta], and the vision obviously reoccurred to many evil men during those two thousand years. There were many small sects and heresies and societies and associations of which we catch fleeting glimpses now and then from the early centuries of the Christian era until they proliferated into numerous clumps of unsightly or even poisonous intellectual weeds after 1700. How many of them there were, each of which intended to be the embryo of an organization that would grow in power until it ruled the world, we do not know. How many revolutionary coups or insurrections, or how many more gradual and more peaceful impositions of tyrannical power by ambitious criminals mouthing the hypocrisies of collectivism, may have been "masterminded" by such esoteric groups, we do not know. How extensive or long lasting was the once well-established cult of Satanism, which incorporated into its beliefs, methods, and purposes practically all of the foulness now associated with our contemporary tyranny, Communism, we do not know. For a high degree of secrecy was not only essential to any even temporary success on the part of any of these nefarious collections of criminal con men, but the thrill of belonging to some mysterious and powerful inner circle was one of the strongest appeals any such group could offer to prospective recruits.

We do know, however, from hundreds of small leaks and published accounts that the doctrines which gave many of these secret groups their cohesiveness and continuity would fall clearly, and bv the most tolerant classification, into the category of evil. Also, that by the eighteenth century A.D. these various doctrines had pretty much coalesced into a uniformly Satanic creed and program, which was to establish the power of the sect through the destruction of all governments, all religion, all morality, all economic systems; and to substitute the sheer physical force of the lash and the bayonet for all other means by which previous governments, good or bad, had contrived to rule mankind. And a most important one of these groups, which is now generally meant when we use the term Illuminati - although many others had called themselves by that same name - was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt.

Despite the extreme secrecy with which this group cloaked itself from the very beginning, one early raid by the Bavarian government, another raid about three years later, the partial confessions at one arraignment of four men fairly high up in the conspiracy-all of whom, incidentally, were professors - and a few more or less accidental discoveries or disclosures from other sources have made the original nature, purposes, and methods of the Illuminati quite well known. Since by 1800 they were able to pull the veil of secrecy over themselves almost completely and permanently, we do not know to what extent Weishaupt's group became the central core or even one of the main components of a continuing organization with increasing reach and control over all collectivist activities after 1776. But that there have been one or more such organizations, which have now been absorbed into the top echelons of the Communist conspiracy - or vice versa - is supported by too much evidence of too many kinds to permit much doubt. (my emphasis)

One thing to keep in mind about this, although conservative hero Barry Goldwater famously repudiated the John Birch Society in 1964 during his Presidential run, the Birchers' ideas play more than a small part in the thinking of today's Republican Party, especially among the activists of the Christian Right.

Also, where John Robison in 1797 may have really feared the Freemasons and the Illuminati, those are terms which among the far right today are commonly used as synomyms for "the Jews". In Germany and Austria, where overt expressions of support for Nazism or anti-Semitism carry legal jeopardy, it is common for the extreme right to complain about the evildoings of the "Freemasons".

The John Birch Society in its official publications has always tried to avoid overt anti-Semitism, though that was clearly part of their schtick. A closely affiliated organization, the Liberty Lobby, wasn't nearly so discreet about its attitude toward Jews. It's easy to guess that one of the Birchers' main objections to Barry Goldwater, maybe even the main one, is that he parents had been Jewish before they converted to Protestant Christianity.

Welch goes on at length about the sinister designs and actions of the Illuminati-Satanist-Communist-Spartan conspiracy. He traced this evil thread from the French Revolution to the civil right March on Washington of 1963, the one that is remembered today for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

The further truth is that the French people under Louis XVI had as little cause to let themselves be led by conspiratorial destructiv-ists into insane horrors and a murderous clamor for "liberty" as the Negroes in America have today in a demand for "freedom." Both are being stirred and led into the same kind
of cruel idiocy by exactly the same kind of revolutionary criminals, for exactly the same megalomaniacal purposes on the part of the real instigators of these monstrous crimes against God and country. If the march on Washington had been more successful from the point of view of the Communists; if the common sense and basic morality of the American people - white and black - had already been sufficiently eroded by Communist "wiles and propaganda so that the marchers could have been whipped up into the same kind of frenzy as were a smaller contingent of three hundred such marchers recently in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania; and if carefully planted armed goons of the Communists within the ranks of the marchers on Washington could have arranged for the burning of the city, and for murders and atrocities to be perpetuated on a number of loyal congressmen and senators, all to look like the spontaneous actions of an infuriated, resentful mob seeking freedom, then you might easily have seen the date of that great lie established in due course as the new national holiday of a "liberated" United States. And at least you would have seen an almost exact parallel to the sack of the Bastille. The French Revolution turned out to be, in fact, a rehearsal in almost every particular of what the whole world is facing today. Compressed into one city and a period of six years, 1789 through 1794, were all of the lies and crimes and horror and propaganda and destructiveness which are now being applied to the whole world over a period of about six decades. (my emphasis in bold)

The Birchers were never as influential among Southern segregationists as were other extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or (especially in Mississippi) the White Citizens Council. The Birchers were more literate, though hardly more enlightened. But this kind of thinking was considered within the respectable range of opinion about Southern whites in the segregation days, and much of that thinking has carried into today's Republican Party and the Christian Right, especially the radical clerics.

Tags: conspiracy theories, david brion davis, illuminati, john birch society, paranoid style, robert welch

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: the "Slave Power"

The historian Richard Hofstadter is probably best known for his writing on the history of what we might call organized intolerance in America, of movements and parties like the Anti-Masonic Party of pre-Civil War days that practiced what he called "the paranoid style", a phrase which has long since become a normal part of the American political vocabulary.

Unfortunately, Hofstadter used the notion of the "Slave Power", a phrase that became increasingly common in Northern politics leading up to the Civil War, as an example of the "paranoid style", thus implying that it was creating an imaginary conspiracy.

But that's not how the concept of the Slave Power was used in politics. It referred to the organized block of Southern states and their representatives in Congress, as well as to the larger and undoubtedly real power of the slaveowners. A power which icnreasingly infringed on the freedom of white Americans, particularly in the South but increasingly all over the country.

The historian David Brion Davis, who is one of the leading historians of slavery, edited a collection published in 1971 called, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. In his commentary, Davis puts the notion of the Slave Power into a more realistic context than simply regarding it as an example of the paranoid style in politics:

As we have already suggested, the tangible conflict over slavery in the territories, which led to an escalation in southern demands and expectations, gave increasing substance to the northern view of a Slave Power conspiracy. It is significant that a northern newspaper editor like James Watson Webb, who in the 1830's denounced abolitionism as a subversive plot to amalgamate the races, eventually became a Free-Soiler and an avowed enemy of the Slave Power. Resistance to southern expansionism, especially if the expansionism resulted from a carefully conceived plot, had far more popular appeal than did social justice or racial equality. Yet in a deeper sense, the threat of a Slave Power may have been the only way to overcome the traditional conviction that Negro slavery was an "unfortunate necessity" which would hopefully disappear some day but which could never be openly discussed or tampered with. It can at least be argued that the conspiratorial mode of thought helped counteract public inertia and focus attention on the anomaly of slavery in a democratic society. In this respect the paranoid style was at least as "realistic" as were the earlier rationalizations which disguised a fundamental conflict in values. The image of the Slave Power was a hypothetical construct that provided a way of conceptualizing and responding to a genuine problem.

Davis' description clarifies the concept. But it's an inadequate description unless we understand "hypothetical construct" to mean the use of a collective concept, like "big business" or "aristocracy" or "farmers" or "abolitionists", that describe a social reality. It's hard to see how we could discuss the history of slavery meaningfully without using some such descriptions. The fact that the democratic antislavery voters and leaders referred to the Slave Power as a collective entity makes it a useful phrase even now, which is why it's not unusual to see historians employing it. "Slaveocracy" or slaveowners or the planter class are similar concepts that are used in valid ways to describe the era of slavery.

Maybe this is a case where the saying applies, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."

Tags: civil war, david brion davis, richard hofstadter, slave power, us civil war