Empire for Liberty: America in the Long Nineteenth Century

[volksmarschall]

CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION


The Southern Reaction​

The effects of Sherman’s Holy War were longstanding, and southern states had to deal with the reality of Reconstruction and the re-appropriation of land to freed Blacks. With many of the southern states, now, readmitted into the Union, with full political rights granted back to them, those more sternly in the pocket of the Old Confederacy and a vengeful Democratic Party sought to extract revenge for the war, Reconstruction, and Sherman’s enactment of Reconstruction policies. One of the great misnomers of the Southern reaction was that it was instantaneous and occurring in rapid succession. In reality, the Southern reaction was a slow war of attrition that came about over the course of decades; slow moving in the 1860s and 1870s as “Yankee” soldiers still dotted the southern countryside and picking up steam in the late 1870s through the 1890s, slowing down in the early 1900s when holdout states like Texas were the last to pass some of the most infamous of “Jim Crow” laws.

One of the most famous Jim Crow laws was the Poll Tax. In particular, states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and South Carolina were among the earliest to pass such laws, followed by the rest of the southern and former Confederate states by the early 1900s – again, Texas being the last to do so. While one sees the Poll Tax as designed to cut off the freed Black vote, the poll tax was not uncommon in the United States. Northern states had poll taxes as well. While it is true that southern states deliberately passed such laws to circumvent Reconstruction policies, seeing that most former slaves, now freed, were poor, the policies equally harmed poor whites as well. In New England, where the poll tax was prominent in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine, the main target was poor Irish Catholic immigrants to ensure the continued cultural and political dominance of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy; thus the creation of political machines and labor unions in the north was, in part, a reaction against the poll tax wherein Irish Catholics, in particular, could exert political muscle. But the southern poll taxes, while harming poor whites, simply entrenched the new aristocracy, which was the same as the old aristocracy, while circumventing the Reconstruction amendments and keeping upwards of 98% of Afro-Americans from voting in elections.

Other laws, like the “Grandfather Clauses,” were passed with equal intent to legally maneuver around Reconstruction. The Grandfather clauses were deliberately targeting freed Blacks, but the importance of “Grandfather” rather than “Father” was the reality that Father Clauses would be insufficient to circumvent Reconstruction policies. By attempting to establish a lineage of rights back to one’s grandfather, the various Grandfather clauses that propped up across the south ensured the destruction of Afro-American rights that were won in Reconstruction and, more importantly, the means by which southerners and their aristocratic backers were able to re-seize what land had been re-apportioned to Afro-Americans during the episode of Sherman’s Holy War.

Once federal forces began withdrawing from the south, southern states pushed Grandfather clauses to deal with the “Black Aristocracy” which had formed in some regions of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the states which saw the most – though still minimal – land reparations between 1865-1867. The Grandfather clauses swept into action saw the re-seizure of lands that were once owned by prominent white families from the Afro-American families and communes that had arisen in their replacement for a decade and a half. While a few mansions and land plots managed to escape the wrath of the Grandfather clauses by timing of births and some northern lawyers and Reconstruction advocates transferring inheritance and ownership right to grandparents – which were, in turn, counteracted by southern legislatures – the Grandfather clauses devastated what changes had occurred during Reconstruction. Some 25,000 of 30,000 Afro-American families and communes which sprung up from the enactment of land reparations were suddenly harmed and evicted from the land paid to them as restitution for slavery and Union victory.

Mansions such as this one were the target of White land seizures. This mansion and its land had been handed over to Afro-Americans during Reconstruction, only to be seized by white southerners during the southern reaction against Reconstruction.​

The changing dynamic of land politics in the south did not lead to a mass exodus of Afro-Americans north. While some packed up and sought refuge north of the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio River, what many found were an equally prejudiced northern white community that sought de facto and de jure segregation of the races just like in the south. The many Afro-Americans who remained in the south, that is, the majority of them, and unable to sojourn elsewhere, simply remained attached to the land that they were once owners of and forced to work for the incoming whites who retook the land and turned the Afro-American populations into, essentially, indentured servants. As many historians have argued, it was slavery by any other name.

***​

Where southern policies were ineffective, a few plots of land become thriving Afro-American communes. But the communes were not some Marxist-inspired utopia; they were harsh, rough, and isolated. The work was difficult. Helped by Reconstruction lawyers, southerners worked to isolate, subvert, and undermine these few communes which dotted the rural landscapes. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, was among the most utilized weapons against these communes.

KKK members were known to torch these communes and put to flight the Afro-American families and laborers who, in their plight, had to enter indentured servitude on white plantations all over again. With the force of law and political protection behind the KKK, the crimes went “unsolved” with “insufficient evidence.” The courts mocked what evidence and testimony the Afro-Americans presented. “There are no such thing as ghosts or apparitions.” Donned in white hoods, dress, and regalia, such evidentiary testimony was mocked as rank superstition – which fed into the younger white generation’s consciousness of Afro-Americans being “stupid.”

By 1890, less than 100 small communes remained. Growing isolationism meant that these communes were unable to sustain themselves and, without the help of neighboring white communities, had to sell off what land was left and migrate. Knowing the stories of indentured servitude, by the late 1890s a migration north of around 20,000 Afro-Americans occurred in what began a sporadic but continual migration of Afro-Americans out of the south to the north – at least those who had the ability to do so.

Above, A photo of an Afro-American commune in the American South, ca. 1880. A few such communes survived the Grandfather Clauses and KKK raids. But before one sings praise and gives thanks, the lives on such communes were just as rough as during the age of legal slavery. Land ownership changed the concrete reality very little.​

Thus, by the turn of the century, the gains of Reconstruction were all but overturned in the Reconstruction Wars. The withdrawal of federal military power harmed the gains that had been made and ensured easy counteraction by southern legislatures. Federal laws, which were still “on the books” in the southern states, had been otherwise neutered by the many Jim Crow laws. Slavery may have ended, but the “new slavery” was every bit as harsh as the old. New animosities arose which brought forth de jure segregation on the principle of “separate but equal” which was upheld in the famous Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson. But, as already mentioned, the material reality was not separate but equal but separate and unequal.

But the wounds of the Civil War and Reconstruction ran deep. By 1880, the Democratic Party had all but erased the temporary Republican Party from the south – hence forming the so-called “Solid South” which backed the Democratic Party under any and all circumstances. Southern rights were restored and the Confederacy existed in all but name by 1890. Any astute and honest reader would have to ask the question: Who really won the Civil War?

 

[RossN]

Looks like history repeats, sadly.

 

[stnylan]

How very ... human.

And I mean that in many senses of the word.

 

[volksmarschall]

Looks like history repeats, sadly.

How very ... human.

And I mean that in many senses of the word.

History repeats! History is cyclical. We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Ah well, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. What I hope can be gleaned from these posts is the disparate nature of Reconstruction and other factors playing into the drama. I mean, it's not like -- as written and implied -- New England carpetbagging capitalists wanted land redistribution for agrarian communes either. And the federal government, by and large, was weak-kneed where it really mattered.

Americans think winning the Presidency, or Congress, or the Supreme Court is the ticket to change. Federalism is still prominent even today. Always has been. While the U.S. moves more and more toward federal statism, the real power, back in the 19th century, and today, remains at the local level. And that's where Reconstruction failed. At least in this timeline, we spiced it up a little.

 

[Director]

The North won the Civil War. I assert that upon these points:

1) Secession was effectively rendered moot as a practical political tactic
2) A competing polity, the Confederacy, was destroyed and re-absorbed, enabling the North to continue to operate without large military expenditures
2) Slavery was abolished de jure, if not de facto, opening a door to future improvement that would have remained locked and barred otherwise
3) The South was devastated and impoverished, rendered from the dominant political section of the country into a dependent colony of the North for nearly a century
4) The passage of acts permitting homesteading, land-grant universities and a transcontinental railway would have been blocked or subverted had the South not been destroyed. These were of extreme importance to the development and enrichment of the North

A failure to fully protect the rights of African-American civilians in the South post-war was tragic - and avoidable - but that does not mean the war itself was a failure, or that the sacrifices made to win it were in vain.

 

[volksmarschall]

The North won the Civil War. I assert that upon these points:

1) Secession was effectively rendered moot as a practical political tactic
2) A competing polity, the Confederacy, was destroyed and re-absorbed, enabling the North to continue to operate without large military expenditures.

Undoubtedly the most important ramifications of the Civil War and why, despite all of the post-war and Reconstruction problems, the Union was, in fact, victorious. Not to mention, as I highlighted in the chapters leading up to the Civil War, the war was, in fact, fought over the issue of secession and competitive political polities, slavery, of course, was associated with these issues but more of an add-on. The destruction of the peculiar institution was a good thing, but also opened up new problems due to the failures of Reconstruction and the still strong racist and racialist bent of the American North.

3) The South was devastated and impoverished, rendered from the dominant political section of the country into a dependent colony of the North for nearly a century

So much for federalism, though, aye? The march to supra statism continues. Hamilton's dream, realized!

On a more serious note, though, this is a major problem that has always plagued American politics and conceptions of itself. Striking the balance between federalism and unitary statism, between localism and regionalism, and supra-national statism. Dependency is not necessarily a good thing. Though there is, of course, the issue of the Ds and Rs embracing or rejecting federalism or unitary statism whenever it suits them. Which pisses off a lot of people.

Was talking with my Dad a week or so ago, seeing they were up and we're cleaning non-essentials out of my apartment in anticipation for graduation. Labor, unionism, and local Democratic ideology - especially in places like the Midwest, my home of Ohio - are being clocked cleaned by national Dems and then squeezed by Republican legislatures and governors. The tension is very real, and, well, as someone who studies political philosophy, very pertinent to me. It's all very sad in another sense. 4.5% of all union households in the USA reside in Ohio.

 

[Director]

So much for federalism, though, aye?

Let's remember that the north didn't start the war, the Confederacy did - in order to bring in the border states. The southern states had, in conjunction with some northern democrats, had dominated national politics basically since the founding. That control was slipping away because of demographics, which drove the South to extremes in order to remain in charge. Finally, they acted like schoolchildren: "If you won't let me have my way, I'll take my toys and go home. And then I'll come back and take all of yours!" I know that you know this - just pointing out that while secession has many fathers, the firing on Fort Sumter really only has one.


After the legalization of unions, they did a lot of good. If you have a job paying minimum wage or above, unemployment benefits, health care and paid sick and vacation days, if you aren't asked to work alongside children in basements or sooty fire-prone buildings, then you owe a lot to unions. They were allowed to go too far (as pendulums will swing), but the corrective - to destroy them entirely - is driven by employers who don't want to pay workers a fair wage. It's as though, once woken up by a screaming baby, one attempted to kill all babies everywhere. It's as though American employers have decided that the sweatshop model is better than the old American middle class...

In the last twenty years or so, Americans have achieved increases in productivity per labor hour that are the highest in the world. Every bit of that increased income went to the business owners, while real wages are stagnant or have declined. Had that money been applied to wages, the minimum wage would now be some thing like $25 per hour. I'm not arguing for that... but, really, shouldn't something have gone to the employees? Where employees have no ability to bargain collectively, they have no leverage.

My apologies for the rant. I'm enjoying your work, as always.

 

[volksmarschall]

Let's remember that the north didn't start the war, the Confederacy did - in order to bring in the border states. The southern states had, in conjunction with some northern democrats, had dominated national politics basically since the founding. That control was slipping away because of demographics, which drove the South to extremes in order to remain in charge. Finally, they acted like schoolchildren: "If you won't let me have my way, I'll take my toys and go home. And then I'll come back and take all of yours!" I know that you know this - just pointing out that while secession has many fathers, the firing on Fort Sumter really only has one.


After the legalization of unions, they did a lot of good. If you have a job paying minimum wage or above, unemployment benefits, health care and paid sick and vacation days, if you aren't asked to work alongside children in basements or sooty fire-prone buildings, then you owe a lot to unions. They were allowed to go too far (as pendulums will swing), but the corrective - to destroy them entirely - is driven by employers who don't want to pay workers a fair wage. It's as though, once woken up by a screaming baby, one attempted to kill all babies everywhere. It's as though American employers have decided that the sweatshop model is better than the old American middle class...

In the last twenty years or so, Americans have achieved increases in productivity per labor hour that are the highest in the world. Every bit of that increased income went to the business owners, while real wages are stagnant or have declined. Had that money been applied to wages, the minimum wage would now be some thing like $25 per hour. I'm not arguing for that... but, really, shouldn't something have gone to the employees? Where employees have no ability to bargain collectively, they have no leverage.

My apologies for the rant. I'm enjoying your work, as always.

I believe I tried to make that clear to the readers that the war was started by the Confederacy. From the shelling of Fort Sumter, to the seizing of federal property through illegal secession -- what was the federal government to do?

Having had wonderful discussions and dinners in person, I do think you may have taken the rhetorical question to the ending of the last post a bit, too literally! I was more or less sprinkling that for our readers to keep thinking. For, as this is a "history AAR" that is more than a dry re-stating of in-game events, but a reporting of in-game events with flare and certain tie to American historicity, I hope the readers will also reflect and take interest in U.S. history more than often is the case.

My little spiel on labor is something that touches me deeply, as one who worked in a factory and knew/know many union members and workers more committed to their trade than I, obviously as a graduate student focusing on academia. But one of the things about their demise, which I've experienced and lived through, is how labor is getting pinched by state politics (with GOP control) and often thrown under the base by the Dems at the national level despite their public rhetorical support which hardly match up to their national policies; and so we get the worse of both worlds! It's a touchy subject, especially here at Yale where people feign support for unions but really hate working-class Midwesterners (or working-class people more generally), and whose lifestyles are won on the back of labor domestically and internationally.

Though, speaking of labor, railroads, sweatshops, robber barons -- we're fast approaching the real heart of what I've wanted to get to in this AAR. The "Populist Revolt" and finally giving WJB his due! Though this has already been alluded to at several points in the AAR.

On a side note, if you had gotten the time to read Mark Noll's Civil War as Theological Crisis I gave you, I hope you can see that certain perspective coming through at various levels in this AAR, especially the preceding chapters. If not, when you find the time to get to it, I think if you ever want to reread some things will fall into place better.

I hope all is well and that you're in good health and spirit! You've had a hand in pleasing several friends and colleagues here at Yale with those movie passes you'd once provided some time ago. Many thanks again.

 

[volksmarschall]

CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
~ Genesis 3:19

The Re-Emergence of America’s Political Dialectic​

The era immediately following Reconstruction, between 1880-1900, which culminated in the election of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the “boy preacher” from Nebraska, has been described as the “largest democratic mass movement in American history.”[1] In many ways, the agrarian, labor, and populist uprising which characterized this moment of American history was destroyed by the Progressive movement at the turn of the century. It is here that I wish to dwell on properly explaining the populist-progressive relationship in American history which is thoroughly and deliberately distorted by many and virtually unknown to those contemporary progressives who like to see themselves as the heirs of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy (minus Jefferson and Jackson) but who, in reality, are the heirs of Hamiltonian technocratic manipulation and managerialism.

In fact, the dialectic between Jefferson’s vision and Hamilton’s vision has been longstanding in American historiography with polarizing swings for and against each. In Jefferson’s camp has stood the populists, democrats, agrarians, anti-capitalists, socialists, laborites, and isolationists (ironically) who have argued that Jefferson’s vision of a self-sufficient, communal, laboring democracy – that wisdom of the common folk and the laboring classes, “the chosen people of God if he ever had one” – should be the vision of America. The Jeffersonian element of American politics, found in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, was anti-elitist, pro-working class, anti-imperialist, and pro-Manifest Destiny. These were the essential characteristics which united the so-called “populists” who saw themselves as the heirs of Jefferson’s ideal of a self-sufficient and self-contained democratic nation. “An empire of liberty,” as Jefferson described.

There was, of course, a certain irony in this given Jefferson’s own internationalism which led him to support the French Revolution and vocally advocate for the annexation of Canada (at the time of his life Quebec and Ontario). Despite Jefferson’s own grandstanding internationalism, and his support for historic free trade, his self-proclaimed heirs were generally ardent isolationists and protectionists; their real connection was their anti-elitism (despite Jefferson being an elite gentry), anti-capitalism, closet socialism and laborism, agrarianism, and democratic spirit was they all saw as emanating from Jefferson’s creed. This is not to mention that Jefferson, despite his internationalism, took a rosy picture of internationalism as supportive rather than embodying conquest, for Jefferson himself noted that conquest was not part of the American creed. But one must wonder whether the spreading of “democracy” over non-democratic regimes is some form of conquest?

Jefferson, for his part, was undoubtedly the most democratic of the Founding Fathers, though he was nowhere close to endorsing universal suffrage (nor any of the Founding Fathers). For better or worse, either through genius or general naïveté, Jefferson believed the people could govern themselves without the need for a landed aristocracy (men such as himself) or from, his real fear, international bankers and commercialists who would sap the power, energy, and resources of the country and concentrate them on the East Coast, especially around New York City and Boston. Jefferson’s vision and image loomed large for the (Democratic-)Republicans turned Democrats who, behind the banner of Andrew Jackson, did see themselves and missionizing the American people with Jefferson’s gospel of democracy. Moreover, Jefferson’s anti-capitalism has been long noted; for Jefferson felt that industrialized capitalism would destroy any true democracy as power and politics would be controlled by those who wielded the power of mammon.

Thomas Jefferson, the favored Founding Father among the populists. He was secretly loathed by most progressives, like Herbert Croly, though many progressives were attracted to the Jeffersonian ideals of self-rule and faith in democracy. This began the slippery slope of Jefferson worship and hatred in America. Agrarians, populists, communitarians, individualists, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and progressives all had their love-hate relationship with the man who has often been described as the “Author of America.”​

Jefferson’s great rival, Alexander Hamilton, had a different vision for America. As I described back in the first chapter, their rivalry and competing visions served as the dialectic force that propelled American history forward. Hamilton thought America needed to be strong, guided by the rule of the true aristocracy in a country of no inherited aristocrats – the “natural aristocracy” as he called them – who would be the financially and economically well-off. These economic “winners” would be those who had true merit. The government, in Hamilton’s mind, ought to support these people more than any other segment of the American population.

Hamilton was also an internationalist, like Jefferson, but their internationalisms clashed with each other. Jefferson was a friend of revolution, Hamilton a friend of commercial order. Jefferson had sympathy for the Jacobins. Hamilton wanted America to be more like Britain. Jefferson saw the Latin-American revolutions as a blessing and the realization that the American Dream was, in fact, the dream of all humans. Hamilton, though dead, would have seen the Latin-American revolutions as horrible and frightening. Whereas Jefferson saw the future of American democracy spread out from coast to coast, but principally resting in the hand of laboring craftsmen and farmers, Hamilton saw the future of American democracy – if you could call Hamilton a democrat – resting in the hands of the emergent meritorious economic aristocracy.

Despite anti-Hamiltonian propaganda, which erroneously cast him as a monarchist (he never was), it is true that Hamilton saw political power as being vested in the presidency. Jefferson, ever his opposite, saw political power as being held by local communities and states, with the Congress being the principal political power at the federal level. In the end, Jefferson was the democrat; Hamilton the managerial-technocrat. Hamilton was the great prophet of the 20th century progressive movement who correctly had foreseen the rise of urban, industrial, and capitalist society as the next wave of progressive history. Jefferson, the god of the populists, was the defender of commoner virtue and self-determination.

Alexander Hamilton, the favored Founding Father among the progressives. An industrialist, capitalist, and proponent of industrializing the American economy, Hamilton envisioned a strong centralized government that would primarily be the helpful agent to what populists would deride as the economic elites in America. One should not confuse Hamilton’s energetic and helping government ideology as a precursor to New Deal politics. Hamilton’s vision was to use government aid and power only to the benefit of merchants, business owners, and bankers.​

The reality about the coming battle over the future of American politics and culture in the late 19th and early 20th century is not the rosy picture that progressive elites and their media allies at MSNBC, New Yorker, and the New York Times like to promote. The progressives were democrats in name-only; believing the newly enfranchised masses (such as women) could be managed and controlled to fit progressive, urban, technocratic, and managerial capitalist interests. The progressives were not the heirs of the populist democratic movement that preceded them. They were the executioners of that movement. Even the great progressive historian and historiographer, Richard Hofstadter, noted that the progressive movement was the antithesis to the agrarian, populist, and democratic thesis.[2]

The contest of turn of the century politics was between rural, democratic, self-federating and communing, and agrarian populism against urban, technocratic, industrializing, capitalist, and managerial “progressivism.” The progressives, after all, were generally upperclass. Many were the children of the Pilgrim Fathers and Boston Brahmin. Many of the leading progressives were capitalists and industrialists. The populists, by contrasts, were commoners, immigrants, and migratory peoples (from within America and from outside of America). This is not to say, however, that the populists were welcoming of immigrants despite some immigrant communities having economic affinities with the populist program. Many populists, through their commitment to isolationism, were xenophobic to the core. They felt that the center of America should be preserved for real Americans, or those immigrants from a generation or two ago that had settled down in the American Midwest and Great Plains.

The dynamics of this great democratic mass movement was complex and complicated; and one that, when studied properly, doesn’t fit the rosy picture told by the Beltway media or the ahistorical Broadway play “Hamilton” (who, among things, was actually very much opposed to open immigration in real life). The populist and democratic ethos that propelled Bryan to the White House was one that was dominated by an ethos of labor, agrarianism, and an economic vision that Fox News would describe as socialist and “un-American.” But by whose standard of “Americanism”? That same populist and democratic ethos that propelled Bryan to the presidency would be described as anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, xenophobic, and Christian nationalist by contemporary progressives on MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post as equally “un-American.” But again, by whose standard of “Americanism”? The progressives who arose to silence the populists, but enact cake and tea reforms to pacify the working class, can only be described as managerial, technocratic, internationalist, and elitist with the smile and language of “democracy” and “working-class support” but who really only ever had their upper middle-class and upperclass interests at heart. Progressivism was the finest expression of class warfare ever unleashed in American history; American progressivism the true opiate of the working masses.

A Puck Magazine cartoon, “The Protector of Our Industries.” The Progressive Era is one of the most mythologized eras of American history, often cast as a this era of leftwing or liberal triumph, democratic advancement, and a victory for the common worker and women (women’s suffrage). In reality, most historians of the progressive era note that progressivism entrenched the economic elite and gentry against the common workers, brought forth the rise of “high society” and the fetishistic and hallow culture of materialism so poignantly described in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and that most progressive reforms were only supported when the powers of corporate America finally gave consent to minor (albeit needed) social and economic reforms. Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko has described the progressive era as the triumph of “political capitalism” and imperialism against those forces that stood against capitalism and expansionist overseas imperialism (traditionalism, socialism, populism, and unionism) and numerous other historians have explained that the dream of the progressives was a technocratic, capitalist, urban and utilitarian society of management in the guise of democracy – something akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Historian George Mowry began the re-appraisal of the progressive era in his 1951 classic, The California Progressives, describing the progressive agenda as one of regulation and control in the name of big business; that the emphasis of incremental reform, adjustment, and growing regulation was meant to reign in the chaos unleashed by both expansionist capitalism and labor’s militant reaction to it. The goal, however, was pushed by privileged and powerful elites who saw regulation and accommodation as a means of their own self-advancement and entrenchment with government support. Richard Hofstadter expanded on Mowry’s analysis in his 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner The Age of Reform.​

“Woman’s Holy War,” a typical progressive era historiographical propaganda print. The Temperance movement, often depicted by progressive propagandists as a triumph for women, and the beginning of the emergence of women political power in power, really highlighted progressive hatred for the common worker as a drunkard and lazy alcoholic. Progressives did little to address to causes for why many American farmers and workers "turned to the bottle" to assuage their pains.​

In many ways, the current dynamics of America are still playing out this ancient political dialectic but without the party loyalty that characterized much of American history. Yet, in another way, one should not be surprised by such occurrences seeing that the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party, in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West, had always been staunchly isolationist, nationalistic, anti-capitalist and anti-elitist throughout its history; with the politics of isolationist-nationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-elitism oscillating between whichever party was in power. The real difference between Democrats and Republicans in the Midwest and Great Plains was where political-economic interests lay: Democrats were generally supportive of the farmsteads (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is the proper name of the Democratic affiliate in Minnesota) and labor unions, while the Republicans were supportive of small family shops and business owners, though still strongly anti-corporatist and anti-Wall Street well-knowing corporate interests did not coincide with small business interests. Democrats were generally supportive of the Catholic immigrant community from Ireland and Germany in these regions, while Republicans generally associated with Protestantism; and since Catholics tended to dominate the labor unions the anti-unionism of the Republicans in the heartland was equally perceived as a bigoted anti-Catholicism from Catholic laborers and union leaders.

But in the early 1880s and 1890s, the rise of labor and labor unions coincided with the rise of populism and gave populism a political muscle like never before. The demise of the labor unions, or, perhaps better understood, the pacification of labor “radicalism,” would occur thanks to the progressive movement which neutered labor unions in order to gain their loyalty with the promises of periodic reforms to the benefit of labor unions. After all, the urban progressive elite, even in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, home to many thousands of millionaires in the early 20th century, couldn’t have workers protesting in the streets and throwing bombs at factory shops.

The stage was set for the populist uprising. Was the American Midwest, Great Plains, and Western Mountain regions to be the home of the untapped virgin lands of agrarian farmers, local craftsmen and laborers, and the communitarian spirit? Or was it to be transformed into a sprawling network of metropolises, or worst, exploited for the benefit of those living across the Appalachian Mountains? In some ways that coming storm was a battle over the soul of Manifest Destiny and what America’s westward expansion was meant to consummate. Unbeknownst to Jefferson, the spirit of Hegel and Marx flowed through the Jeffersonian conduit of populism.


[1] Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, vii.

[2] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform.

SUGGESTED READING

Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform

David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor

George Mowry, The California Progressives

Charles Postel, The Populist Vision​

 

[stnylan]

With the War and Reconstruction out of the way, it is time to gear up for the next great domestic struggle.

Nations need domestic struggles. It give them something for the politicians to do to pretend to earn their keep.

 

[Idhrendur]

This is gonna be good. If nothing else, the last time I learned about the progressives was during a community college US history class, so I' bound to see a much deeper analysis here.

 

[RossN]

Fascinating as always.

I know it's come up before I'm still bewildered that people could see no contradiction between being anti-imperialist and being pro-Manifest Destiny.

 

[volksmarschall]

With the War and Reconstruction out of the way, it is time to gear up for the next great domestic struggle.

Nations need domestic struggles. It give them something for the politicians to do to pretend to earn their keep.

Bureaucrats. The bane of human existence!

This is gonna be good. If nothing else, the last time I learned about the progressives was during a community college US history class, so I' bound to see a much deeper analysis here.

Propaganda. Propaganda. Propaganda! You, know, one of my first published papers was a major condensed version of my U.S. undergrad work examining the progressives. So, you can say I have deep familiarity with the actual historical literature and primary sources rather than the rosy picture painted by most textbooks or the invocation of the term "progressive" by illiterate and ignorant pundits, politicians, and their mass herd, er, horde, scattered across the country. "Oh, 'progressive,' good. Enlightened. Democratic." Oh really? Tell me, oh sage of progress, what did the progressives actually believe and want to create? And tell me, this project of neoliberalism you probably despise, how is this any different than what they wanted to achieve?

Fascinating as always.

I know it's come up before I'm still bewildered that people could see no contradiction between being anti-imperialist and being pro-Manifest Destiny.

I think part of it has to do with the circumstances of late 19th century and early 20th century imperialism and progressivism, with what Manifest Destiny entailed in concrete reality in the early and mid-19th century, even earlier in the 18th century.

If you're willing to overlook the America as colony, part of Manifest Destiny from the view of Americans was that it was, in of itself, anti-imperialist and a de-colonial/anti-colonial movement. The American West was nominally under the rule of European countries. North America should be for Americans and not Europeans!

You also have the fact that histories of Native American-American relationships, bad as they got at times, are over mythologized. The natives were brutal to each other long before the arrival of Europeans and the eventual westward movement of Americans. A lot of westward settlement didn't interfere with native tribes and federations. Moreover, the image of the Native Americans is equally mythologized. Many were settled communes and practiced agrarian economy: growing maize, etc. The interactions between Natives and pioneers and settlers were scarce; only in places where towns propped up along rivers where Native Americans were also located did conflict occur. Much of Manifest Destiny settlement was encounter with the land and only the land, not with other people. The emphasis of Manifest Destiny as contest and struggle is, simply, a-historical. Yes, America went to war with Mexico and the Natives at various times, most of westward expansion was people settling their own villages and towns creating American outposts in the western lands with Native tribes at a distance and established European or Mexican settlements also at a distant. This led to contests later as more people trekked in. The systematic oppression of Native Americans occurs in this time frame too; the Indian Wars. Which I'll get to too. Propagated, often, by the railroad companies!

Contrast this with Cuba, Philippines, Hawaii, etc. People were there in a more concrete way than the American western landscape. And many of the pro-Manifest Destiny crowd; now settled in the American Midwest, West, and Great Plains, saw no reason for American involvement in these regions. Many saw the clear imperialist aspirations as those of the bankers, capitalists, and Northeast elite crowd. We often forget many politicians in the Midwest prior to 1950, were ardent isolationists and populists whether they were Democrats or Republicans. (How's that for a change!)

This chapter, and this Part IV, is going to go into much more detail with all this. There are complex socio-economic, cultural, religious, and political reasons and factors that contribute to the populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s. Before being stamped out by the progressive movement. Which, as mentioned, isn't all rosy and 'progressive' as people popular conceive and imagine. I've always intended this section of the AAR to be the high water mark, to dispel all the myths that most Americans, and non-Americans, have about this period of American history and culture.

This is probably the most complex, nuanced, and confusing moment in American history. And it's time to jump deep into it! Even the progressive historians who identified with progressivism, for instance, never shied away from stating their anti-democratic prejudices. Real democracy, true rule of the people, is chaotic and disorderly. Xenophobic and unenlightened. Management, regulation, and control, is what is needed. Hmmm, come to think of it, don't we experience the same sophistry going on today by the heirs of the progressives in America and Europe?

 

[volksmarschall]

CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR​

America’s Long History of Labor Radicalism​

It was customary, and often meant in a derogatory manner, for European Marxists to deride the American working-class as slumbering under the yoke of capitalism and less enlightened and radical than the European working-class in the mid twentieth century. The reality was different, but should be unsurprising since middle-class bourgeois Frenchmen and Frenchwomen had no experience of America herself, or the fact that the radicalism of Europe was more often than not perpetrated from the disaffected bourgeois children whereas the radicalism of America was, actually, sourced within the working and laboring classes of the United States.

The experience of radicalism in Europe and America went in two different directions. European radicalism was housed in the disaffected and Marxist leaning bourgeois middleclass. The real Marxist revolution, if there ever was one, was not the product of the movement of an enlightened vanguard as in Europe, but the agrarian and populist uprising that characterized American populism and history in the final decades of the nineteenth century. While a segment of the European bourgeois elite theorized about the practical applications of Marx in their society, the American “vanguard” moved in a decisively liberal and “progressive” direction – seeing itself as the vanguard of the commercial, enlightened, Enlightenment, and liberal ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries – frightened that the project of Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Montesquieu, and others, was threatened by the bourgeoning animosity from among farmers, laborers, coal miners, and the factory workers who were growing in their agitation and militancy. If Marx found a home in America, and he did, it wasn’t in the scheming and plans of that enlightened vanguard, but the laboring classes themselves. His home wasn’t New York, Boston, or nascent San Francisco, but in the American heartlands.

If there ever was such an enlightened radical of the upperclass, the closest embodiment to the vanguard in America, it was undoubtedly Jefferson himself. The push to dethrone the prominence of Jefferson in American culture and consciousness, ironically, does begin with the progressive movement. While claiming him, in the way a sophist uses words to manipulate the masses in the service of falsity rather than truth, the progressives extolled Jefferson’s ideals about self-rule, federative government, and democratic ethos. At the same time, whispering behind the back of Jefferson and those who idolized him, praising the technocratic, capitalist, and urban managerialism of Hamilton, Taylor, Ford, and the enemies of Jefferson and the spirit of American small town democracy which Alexis de Tocqueville – like Jefferson – saw as the salvation of this American democratic experiment. Tocqueville, like Jefferson, believed from his travels and encounters, that while Americans loved liberty, they had an insatiable appetite for equality. The progressives, while feigning their support for “equality,” were really only interested in entrenching their privileged positions. To secure their standing, some concessions, admittedly, would have to be made. But those “progressive reforms” were more a matter and means of regulatory control than true liberation for those the reforms were aimed at benefitting.

Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for authoring Democracy in America, a book many people have never read and make up quotes from. Tocqueville lauded America’s communitarian, democratic, and egalitarian ethos; but also warned that American “individualism” threatened to atomize and destroy itself and would mark the end of America’s communitarian-democratic spirit and crush the spirit of equality in the name of “individual liberty.” Tocqueville, in many ways, was a prophet in seeing what was to come in America: the breakdown of the communitarian, democratic, rural township spirit and the transformation of America into a mass conglomerate of atomized individuals with power residing in large cities which threatened the spirit of democracy in the United States.​

In other words, giving a starving man some bread, and he probably won’t steal from your mansion. Give the labor unions a few rights, and they may stop chucking bombs at factories and going on strikes. Give women the right to vote, and upperclass women, in particular, would vote with the same interests in mind as their upperclass husbands.

***​

Revolution, it is known, is often inaugurated by a small and wealthy minority attempting to break the powers over them so as to advance their interests. The mythology of revolution of the small and majority against the tyrannical minority is almost never the case with revolution. Revolution is a small and wealthy, agitated and aspirant, minority, against whatever “establishment” sitting over them. Hence why revolutionaries mask their intentions with the “will of the people.”

The case of the Agrarian Revolt, and the “Populist Moment” in American history, was actually the rarity – the outlier to the real nature of revolutionary movements throughout human history. In this rare, one-off moment, a majority of an underclass and despondent population did, in fact, rise up against the minority plowing into their lands, cultures, and homesteads.

The birth of the American labor movement emanated from the yeoman spirit that had entrenched itself in the American Midwest after Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. Ohio became the central seat of the labor movement. And not a bustling city of industry, but a young city: Columbus. The birth of the American Federation of Labor was the creation of a longstanding root of laborite consciousness and ideals that went as far back to the founding of America itself.

A handful for the founding Pilgrims were craftsmen back in Europe. Captain John Smith, founder of the Jamestown Colony, pleaded for England to send to the young colony more laborers and craftsmen. This was denied, of course, because English trading companies had different intentions in their mind. But from these first settlers and settlements emerged a bustling network of guild unions and craftsmen associations and farming associations and guilds that networked through all the major cities at the time of the American Revolution. While not “organized” in the sense of formal labor unions by the 1880s and 1890s, the spirit of labor was well grounded and founded in the American soil. In fact, the first organized strike of workers happened in Jamestown colony.

The Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock. The roots of the American labor movement go all the way back to the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth Colony.​

This history of workers' strikes continued, even into the early decades of America's formal independence. Printers went on strike, citing Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness,” in 1794 in New York. Cabinet makers, and their associated guilds, also struck in 1796. Carpenters and craftsmen in Philadelphia struck in 1797. By the 1820s, this loose network of laboring and craftsmen associations were striking to lower the working days from 12 to 10 hours. As America expanded westward, and the need for skilled labor grew in order to construct the towns, frontier settlements, and also labor hoping to escape the chains of coastal cities that were hesitant to accommodate working concerns, flocked to the American Midwest.

The flight of skilled and primitively organized labor from cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia transformed the socio-economic landscape of America. Organized and skilled labor and craftsmen settled the new frontier. Their exodus was to be replaced by cheap immigrant labor in the coastal cities, many of whom were of Irish-Catholic lineage. The Knights of Labor, founded by tailors in Philadelphia, became prominent through the leadership of Terrence Powerdly, the son of Irish-Catholic immigrants. Part of the animosity and war against labor in American history, at least in the eastern cities, was part of the old sectarianism between Brahmin Protestants and laboring Catholics. The labor unions were predominately stocked by Catholics – meaning that labor power was synonymous with Catholic political power. Something nativistic Protestants were not willing to grant in the 1880s and 1890s.

But the entrenchment of skilled and organized laborers, craftsmen, and their sons to the American Midwest, meant that the Midwest was always going to be birthplace and center of the labor movement. When the American Federation of Labor was formed by disparate labor unions and groups, their formation in Columbus Ohio sent reverberating effects across other Midwestern states. Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois all followed Ohio and became centers of organized labor. And one should not necessarily see organized labor as purely industrial. Organized farming unions also arose across the Midwest and Great Plains.

Part of the division between Republicans and Democrats in the American Midwest was based on economic and religious lines. Catholic immigrants tended to coalesce around the labor unions. Protestant nativists and immigrants tended to form the backbone of small family shops and farming communes and organizations. Democrats tended to identify themselves with the politics of Catholic labor and Protestant descendants of those skilled laborers, craftsmen, and workers who moved westward in the 1820s and 1830s. Republicans came to be identified with poor Protestant farmers and small family shop Protestant families. Ergo, the Democrats in the American Midwest were pluralistic while the Republicans were strongly identified and attached with Protestantism. Democrats were seen as friendly to immigrants who were trying to escape the hell holes of coastal cities. Republicans the party of the laboring and farming Protestant majority.

A fraternal union ribbon, Federal Labor Union 9572 in Galion Ohio. Ohio was a central state in the formation of the modern labor movement in America.​

Despite these political divisions and markers, both Democrats and Republicans struck – pardon the pun – a populist, laboring, agrarian, “nationalistic” and isolationist tone. Due to the association of Republicans with poor Protestant farmers and poor Protestant business owners, the Republicans never were identified – save for Republicans in Wisconsin – with labor unions. And, of course, the labor unions weren’t exactly conducive to small family businesses either. Due to the association of Democrats with skilled labor unions, as well as immigrants coming to the Midwest and joining labor unions, they were more closely identified with the labor unions themselves. But the unions were predominately fighting the factory and coal mining barons and not the small family shops and farmsteads that Republicans were defending. But Democrats and Republicans in the Midwest, faced the same enemy: coastal elites, bankers, and corporate barons and titans; those mythical groups and “men who made America.”

It wouldn’t be long until the Midwest was the battleground between emerging capitalists and industrialists and the laboring networks. And it was precisely because the Republican Party was associated with farmers and small family business politics that it naturally became the ally of the industrialist capitalist class in these regions; effectively splitting the Republican Party in two between its populist, agrarian, and poor working isolationist wing and the more “moderate” and “international” and “cosmopolitan” wing more indicative of New England Republican politics. And it was precisely because the Democratic Party had fallen into the control of the labor unions that the Democrats had an easier time – as Midwestern states such as Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois developed industrialized cities – to grow in power.

But this isn’t necessarily a perfect understanding of the development of partisan politics and socio-economic realities either. Democrats, from the time of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian politics in the Midwest, were also identified with low labor and farmers too. After all, the Minnesota Democratic Party affiliate is called the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. The exodus of southern farmers to the Great Plains after the Civil War, also entrenched a farmer vs. farmer divide in Great Plain states; with the new southern arrivals being Democratic and the already present farmers being Republicans.

And yet, just as labor organized, as already mentioned, so too did the farmers. The Farmers’ Alliances propped up in the north and south in the 1870s to prevent the seizure of land and their destruction by the railroad companies. Rooted in the Grange movements, the Farmers’ Alliances and other organizations were the epitome of that Jeffersonian ideal: small, rural, self-federating, agrarian, and democratic; and the grange movement was also the organized association of farmers against the railroads and railroad barons who had swept in and brought transformation, destruction, and oppression to the farmers in the Midwest and Great Plains.

A romantic poster depicting the Granger movement. The Grange movement was, in many ways, the successor of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideal of communitarian democracy. Though strongly associated with the Democratic Party, it also had inroads with Republicans, especially in the Great Plains states.​

The National Farmers’ Alliance, at least in the north and Midwest, was also organized with the inclusion of White and Afro-American farmers. No discrimination on the basis of race was necessary when the livelihood of all farmers, White or Black, was threatened by the unrelenting wheel of industrial progress. So contrary the ignorant European Marxists, labor radicalism in America was far more radical than the working-class movements in Europe ever were. America need not have an enlightened bourgeois proletariat sympathizing vanguard to advocate their politics. The poor and oppressed American workers and farmers did that themselves. And they had been doing that long before Marx or Engels ever published their tracts. In fact, one might say that the European vanguard was also anti-democratic anyways; that small minority ready to fight the small minority above them “in the name of the people” while the American populist movement was a truly democratic mass movement which did not need to lie and claim to be “in the name of the people” since it was an authentic peoples’ movement.

SUGGESTED READING:

Richard Boyer, Labor's Untold Story

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism​

 

[stnylan]

One of the interesting divergences between the USA and Europe (or certainly the UK, about which I can actually claim some knowledge) is one of geography when it comes to this. The pressure of space was much more acute in Britain and elsewhere than in the States. Indeed, I have long held that the expansive geography of the USA (or the more constricted geography of Britain or continental Europe) is an much under-appreciated reason for some of the transatlantic differences.

 

[KingJerkera]

That was very interesting I've never heard of these struggles before, but to be fair, this dynamic has been for all intents and purposes cast by the wayside by modernity. There is the possibility that these forgotten moments will make the modern world pay more heed to history but it is unfortunately unlikely.

 

[volksmarschall]

That was very interesting I've never heard of these struggles before, but to be fair, this dynamic has been for all intents and purposes cast by the wayside by modernity. There is the possibility that these forgotten moments will make the modern world pay more heed to history but it is unfortunately unlikely.

That might depend on where you're from. As a native Midwesterner, Ohioan, who grew up in a printing factory family, deeply intertwined with the Teamsters, and have worked 12 hour days myself (granted, with the overtime pay), it's still fairly prominent in some corners of the world and the United States. But a lot of it is not so much cast by the wayside as it is being completely eviscerated at present and causing a lot of ramifications that coastal elites don't care about.

Grew up singing this song at night under the Milky Way sky and next to a bond fire:

And I shall not speak of my experiences here at Yale with all those "pro-working class" chardonnay liberals and "compassionate Republicans" and what they actually say about us behind closed doors and in their classrooms.

While we seek mirth and beauty, and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more!

There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more!

We'll be rectifying a lot of things in these coming chapters few people have heard of, or are familiar with!

Some of the best American songs, are folk songs. Or anything by Stephen Foster.

 

[germandjinn]

American radicalism has always been fascinating to me, I hope you get to talk about the mine wars in West Virginia in the future.

Some of the best American songs, are folk songs.

I'll drink to that

 

[volksmarschall]

American radicalism has always been fascinating to me, I hope you get to talk about the mine wars in West Virginia in the future.

Not just WV, but Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky and other such states as well. More going to focus on the transformation of towns and local ways of life with the emergence of company coal mining and such however as fitting with the AAR's style of intellectual, socio-cultural, and religious themes more than focus on grand events. Will also tie some "rebel uprisings" in game as the catalyst for those commentaries. But yes, people should know the armed uprisings of coal miners against their company bosses! Probably another reason why the federal government should take guns away from people! Never forget the hundreds of coal workers gunned down by those "men who made America" and their strike breaking "detective agencies."

Oh the many ironies of American history...

But I can't recommend Noam Maggor's Brahmin Capitalism enough. Great book highlighting how the moneyed elite in Boston (and lesser extent NYC) utilized their capital, power, and political clout in New England, to gain control of the coal companies, railroads, and all the engines of "progress" and thrust them onto Midwestern and Western towns and villas, thus sucking dry the material wealth of the heartlands and slowly accruing political favoritism and tying local politics to them. Will be discussing this too in this Part IV of the AAR, but for those who are seeking a little more history qua history, rather than history rewritten to conform to game events - well, this is why I include the Suggested Reading list.

 

[volksmarschall]

As we're about to proceed into the great epoch of American populism, a message from the King to warm and melt your hearts about what we're going to jump headlong into! The spirit of "An American Trilogy" by Mickey Newbury - who synthesized three great songs of the American tradition - all capture the ethos of what we're going to explore. Though Elvis's version is definitely the best. For those who know the lyrics well, and haven't swallowed progressive propaganda of this era, will know why I've chosen to prep you with this song.

But for audience edification. Mickey's rendition is also beautiful with its pastoral tone; much more simple than the bravado of Elvis.