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I personally salute you from the desktop from my own classroom in Guided Studies.
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CHAPTER XV: A NEW REPUBLIC
“The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.” – Herbert Croly
“The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.” – Herbert Croly
American History and Development as Episodic
The story of the United States is sometimes said to be a conflict of republics. In this respect the United States is thoroughly Machiavellian. Those who preach bipartisanship, compromise, and togetherness fail to see the benefits that come from conflict—though conflict does sometimes bring losers. The paradox of America is this dialectic between lower class and upper class, unique to the American experience and condition because America never had, at least de jure, an official aristocratic class. While Hamilton believed industrious merit would lead to the creation of a de facto aristocratic class to lead the country, Machiavelli’s observations on political conflict leading to the best and most flexible state was turned on its head in the United States.
For Machiavelli, part of what made the Roman Republic great was the tension between the plebeians and patricians. But it was a bottom up greatness; Machiavelli, as more notable scholars have asserted, was something of a populist-nationalist. He believed the Italian people, long suffering under the incompetence of the Papal Court, the divisions of Italian society among the city-states, and subjection under German, French, and Spanish rule, needed a strong authority to emerge from the discontent of the Italian masses to throw off the shackles of their oppressors and reemerge on the European stage as a major power. But in this, and his reflections on Rome, the good state of the Romans was because the plebeians managed to achieve greater interest representation by receiving concessions from the patrician class.
Here the story of the United States runs the opposite. The first republic, in many ways, lasted only for a short period of time: 1789-1801. The second republic achieved what Machiavelli observed happened in Rome. The period of the second republic, roughly beginning with “Jefferson’s Revolution” and running through until the crisis of the Civil War, saw a period of commoner flourishing in politics. Granted, the vote was only proscribed to White men, the expansion of suffrage in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian era saw the de facto aristocracy of the old English turned American establishment broken. The future of the republic was in the hands of the yeomanry.
Thomas Jefferson remained the favored politician and Founding Father of the old agrarian populists. William Jennings Bryan, for one, left no confusion as to whom he loved most among the American Founding Fathers.
The third republic coincides with the transformation—as we’ve been discussing—of America as a continental agrarian civilization into an urban, commercial, and marine civilization. The transfer of political power from the interior inlands to the coasts was the most important development during this era—as was the rise of what is remembered as “progressivism.” Sadly, the term “progressivism” is often misused and abused by those with the faintest of knowledge of what this movement entailed. Richard Hofstadter, the eminent progressive historian, carefully noted the difference between populism and progressivism. Populism was defined by regional resentment, suspicion, and agrarianism. Progressivism was defined by parochial elitism, industrialism, and capitalism.
The idea of the history of progress only makes sense teleologically. That is, for something to “progress” it needs to be moving toward its destined end. Thus, movement toward that end can be called “progress.” Movement away from that end can be called “regress” or “reaction.”
Originally, progressivism was a materialistic, scientistic, urban, industrial, and capitalist outlook which saw the movement of history as culminated in urban, industrialized capitalism. The task of the policy-makers of government was to speed up this process and aid in the relocation of peoples to urban centers to partake in this glorious new revelation of history. It was thoroughly Whiggish, utilitarian, and materialistic in outlook. The critics of progressivism at the time, notably the “Southern Agrarians,” did not so much defend the agrarian economy per se, as much they did the old humanism of a life of rootedness, sociality, and relationships which was being destroyed by the new industries of progress. For these “reactionaries,” the question that humans should concern themselves with was what would be the cost to human life and the human condition if one embraced, wholesale, as John Dewey advocated, this technocratic, industrial, and mathematical outlook on life? That is, they saw the transformation of the human being into a utilitarian factory cog—a literal robot—something that the Enlightenment mechanicalist philosophers argued that man was—as detrimental to the human person that would depersonalize him and de-socialize him.
But the battles that would be fought in the formation of the new nation would have profound consequences and include success of those reactionaries who, for a brief moment, blunted the dream of progress with the election of William Jennings Bryan. The few successes of the reactionaries even managed to infect the new progressivism—especially with regard to the emergence of the Wilderness movement which I will discuss later. In many ways, however, the contest between the forces of progress and reaction which typified the 40 years after the Civil War was a reincarnation of the Transcendental-Urbanist conflict of the 1820s-1840s.
The American Transcendentalists, the American equivalent of European Romanticism and conservatism, were already critical of the bourgeoning industry and capitalism of New England and the ramifications it was having on the New England countryside and New England peoples. That region and intellectual conflict soon erupted across the country as the new political lines were drawn between defenders of the old agrarian and populist order and the sages of the new industrial and progressive order. In other ways, it was still the continuation of the two antithetical and competing dreams of the two most important American Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton was the hero of the progressives. Herbert Croly, the intellectual godfather of the American progressive movement, described Hamilton with nothing but unflattering praise. Croly founded his magazine The New Republic, with the emphasis on “new,” to invoke the idea of creating a new American republic with the power of the federal government just as Hamilton had envisioned in the 1780s and 1790s.
It was no surprise that the reactionaries came to embrace the Transcendentalists and Thomas Jefferson while the progressives came to embrace the urbanists and Alexander Hamilton. Though there was a certain slight of hand on the part of the progressives that would make Machiavelli blush. Where the populists had nothing but contempt for Hamilton, the progressives gave periodic endorsements of Jefferson. As Machiavelli said in the Discourses, when a new regime and state emerges and seeks to reform an existing country, it must give the illusion of continuity and present itself as honoring ancient customs and ways. In this respect the progressive incorporation of the “ideals of Jeffersonian democracy and the hard work of the American farmer” established the veil of continuity to allow them to transform the United States away from its continental and agrarian identity and roots into a new, marine, and commercial corporation.
The creation of the third republic was a reversal of the second republic. The new elites, the new aristocrats, the new leaders, of this republic would have to transcend the yeomanry and brake the back of the laboring and agrarian classes that had come to control the power and politics of the United States following Mr. Jefferson’s election. Thus, the political conflict that would come define the post-war period was between the new capitalist class of progressives and the old agrarian and laboring classes of farmers and craftsmen. One would be left behind and the other ascendant.
SUGGESTED READING:
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation & Land of Promise
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress
Albert Jay Nock, Mr. Jefferson
The Southern Agrarians, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and Agrarian Tradition
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation & Land of Promise
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress
Albert Jay Nock, Mr. Jefferson
The Southern Agrarians, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and Agrarian Tradition
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It's fascinating to me that, even at this early stage of the development of the industrialized world, some people were able to recognize the alienating effects that such an atomistic worldview would create, and which remain a perennial source of concern now (though most people blame it on "technology" rather than the ideas driving those who promote said technologies).
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Cycles. Cycles. Cycles. Endless cycles! The real wisdom of Kohelet and the conservative disposition. Nothing new under the sun after all. I believe a famous band and song captured this reality, "Turn, turn, turn!"
John Crowe Ransom forever! Born in your own Tennessee, but died in my own Ohio (because he taught in Ohio)! So we'll claim him. Of course, when he and many other literary humanists (in the proper sense of both of those terms) published their anthology they were immediately assailed by those who worshiped on the altar of progress. It is interesting, you know, to actually read primary works instead of depending on the media which peddles distraction - "if you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed, if you read the newspaper you're misinformed." In reading you see an odd divide between traditionalist and conservative criticism of progress and capitalism with that of Marxist and socialist "critiques." And it is rooted in the fact that the old conservatives were all humanists. Being influenced by the biological and relational understanding of man, these right-wing critics were terrified of the social engineering impetus and implications of the materialist conception of man and society being pushed by the progressives. They criticized progressivism from a humanist perspective. The Marxists, by contrast, while having moments of humane reflection, were equally wrapped up in the utilitarian, mathematical, and material disposition and therefore were great analysts of the inner machinations of progressive capitalism but never saw the human consequence - the interior distortions of the person - as did the literary humanists. Which is why socialism is just the dialectic opposite of liberalism only differing in means to the same end.
Of course, the issue of technology is a tricky subject: Tolkien and Heidegger certainly feared it. Not for what it was in of itself, but what it would do to us. I've spoken on the "biological hero" and "mechanical monster" issue at conferences and seminars before - I'll probably be crafting an essay for my column on this subject. It's all very fascinating -- and deeply rooted in early criticism and history. Though I admit that my own romanticism, as I've stated elsewhere and before - naturally moves me to this crowd, which includes Wagner. (The Ring of the Nibelung a perfect example of this conflict mixed with Christian anthropology and pagan myth.) An essay of mine just published a few days ago addressed atomization and eating habits!
But I would feel bad if I didn't give a shout out to the Southern Agrarians here. It is fascinating to read the early criticisms of technological progressivism from the turn of the century to Wendell Berry. Most of what they said has come true!
CHAPTER XV: A NEW REPUBLIC
The Roots of American Progressivism and Urbanism
The Roots of American Progressivism and Urbanism
The manner by which the agrarian revolt, the antithesis to the thesis of American urbanization and industrialization, which produced the synthesis known as progressivism, has its origins is in a series of defeats—a long rearguard action—against the forces of urban economism that stretch back to the adoption of the American Constitution. In this regard moments of triumph for democratic forces, principally Jefferson’s revolution, Jackson’s revolution, the election of Bryan, to name three, were all, from this perspective, shocking defeats. For what propelled Jefferson’s agrarian democratic revolution was not the march to greater equality and democracy, as the progressives tried to (re)cast it, but the reaction against the inevitability of the technocratic, managerial, economic triumph. Likewise, what propelled Jackson’s victory was the same reaction against the forces of urban economism, the national bank, and the want—ironically—to be included in the economic distributions of the gains being made during the final years of the Era of Good Feelings. Bryan’s infamous Cross of Gold Speech and reactionary presidency, including his adamant isolationism, were nothing more than blowbacks against the imperialism and industrialism sweeping America which the agrarian heartlands of the country suffered disproportionately from.
Thus, the manner by which the progressive movement has its origins lay in three major events—or constructions—which laid into the fabric of the new nation the pulsating heart that would, despite the setbacks in 1800, 1832, and 1896, ensure victory over the masses and the stifling of any sort of genuine popular democracy (though the progressive technocratic media would have you believe otherwise). The adoption of the Constitution is the first. The immigration waves, particularly after the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the Irish Potato Famine, and again in the 1880s, another. Finally was the Railroad revolution which linked cities with cities and thus enabled metropolitan, urban, cross-continental logistical lines to be opened from San Francisco to Chicago to New York—thus paving the way for, much like with modern airline travel today—a sort of conglomerating city stretching coast to coast, for what separates New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles is geography; their politics, worldview, and culture unite them all the same.
The adoption of the Constitution was the first event to lay the groundworks for the urban new republicanism, or new patricianism as its detractors derided it, because of what the Constitution truly is and is not. It is often the cause of some in America, and elsewhere, to read the Constitution as a document that limited the power of government and defined specific boundaries of political power. This reading of the Constitution is implausible on several accounts. First: The Constitution was adopted to create a stronger federal government not a weak federal government which the Articles of Confederation had done. Second: The Constitution was deliberately constructed in vagueness precisely to allow implied powers and “living growth” as time went on—Hamilton and the various Federalist Founding Fathers admitted to as much. The deliberate vagueness of the Constitution was to allow new readings as change would deem necessary, which would also ensure the strength and vitality of the American Constitution unlike the ephemeral and constantly rewritten constitutions of modern France. Third: What powers are explicitly stated in the Constitution are all economically oriented.
The American Constitution, a document wildly misunderstood and mythologized in the United States.
Here the Constitution’s preamble lays out the deliberately economic mindset of the Constitutional framers. It also testifies to vagueness. The claim to “promote the general welfare” is as vague as vague can be, but the power to promote the general welfare is, by even by “constitutional originalism”, granted to the federal government. The interstate commerce clause, the right to collect taxes, establish a single federal currency, and marshal a standing army—all Constitutional powers given to the federal government, and all the explicit and undeniably clear powers given to the federal government—are economic in orientation. The progressives, unlike the claims of certain media stooges on Fox News, never abandoned the Constitution—they fulfilled its implications.
The centralization, implied vagueness, and economistic orientation of the Constitution was one of the reasons why Thomas Jefferson opposed it. Jackson’s crusade against the illegality of the National Bank showed the power of the Constitution. In order to confront the fear of a technocratic and managerial economistic class which is the greatest threat to public liberty—as known even to the ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and especially Cicero, all of whom were heroes to Jefferson—was to accept the Constitution in order to argue against the Constitution. This is the real origin of the idea of “originalism” so promoted today. It is a constitutional idolatry that accepts the foundations of the Constitution in order to argue against the obviousness of the Constitution. The implied powers and interstate commerce clause, all of which gave constitutional legality to the National Bank and later the Federal Reserve, were confronted by Jackson and his partisans as “unconstitutional.” Where Jefferson gave rational, political, and extraconstitutional arguments as to why this would be a disaster, Jackson and the opponents of constitutional centralization, by accepting the foundationalism of the Constitution, doomed themselves to failure. The Constitutional Order wished for by Hamilton, that de facto aristocracy of bankers, merchants, entrepreneurs, media-men, and industrialists, could not be overthrown within the legality of the Constitution—it would take the overturning of the Constitution itself to dethrone this cabal, precisely why the Constitution’s most explicit features are, as hitherto highlighted, economistic. As Jackson failed so too did the inheritors of Jackson, those democratic crusaders who argued democracy—which was the other attempt to overcome the economic order imposed onto America by the Constitution—was itself constitutional. But any honest reader of the Constitution would know that democracy is not contained in the Constitution; another reason for Jefferson’s opposition to it. The irony, of course, is that America’s democratization, beginning with Jefferson and Jackson, and causing alarm among the progressives, is what caused the progressives to promote “populism” so as to control it. Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy, so fondly remembered in the U.S., is remembered and cherished so dearly by those enemies of the Constitution because it was the reaction to the Constitution to break said economic constitutional order.
The second event, or series of events, which gave rise to America’s urban and technocratic “new republic,” was the various waves of immigration from Europe in the 1840s and 1880s. The arrival of underclass, uprooted, and unsettled migrants into the U.S., the majority of whom settled in cities, provided the urban elite, the capitalists, and industrialists, with the supply of cheap labor needed to fill the factories. Good and natural stock Americans, mostly farmers, and earlier waves of Germanic-Scandinavian immigrants, who never came in the same concentrated droves as those in the 1840s-1850s and 1880s-1890s did, settled the interior part of the continent, the brave and heroic pioneers who brought civilization to the rolling hills and forests.
It was the progressives, beginning in the early 1900s, who began to peddle the myth of America as an immigrant nation, renewed in the 1960s, precisely because of the need for cheap immigrant labor to fuel their political and economic designs. The original European settlers, which accounted for 82% of the American population in 1790, of which 71% of the American population was Anglo-Scottish—an enduring testament to America’s Anglo-Protestant heritage—were never going to be the factory fodder needed for the industrialists and the new progressive capitalists who dreamed of their technocratic, urban, and managerial Fordist-Taylorite utopia. These good stock Americans were pious farmers, craftsman, and skilled laborers, as we have already covered in previous chapters. Unable to draw from the native population of Americans, the factory and railroad barons turned to immigrants for their labor supply: Thus the facticity etched into American memory of Irish and Chinese working the railroads, and freed Afro-Americans too, who found themselves in a whole new type of slavery as a result. The Old America, built by the original European settlers and Angl0-Scottish, particular Scotch-Irish expansionism westward, was thus supplanted by the creation of a “new America” built off the backbone of cheap immigrant labor—thus interweaving the idea of modern America as an immigrant construction because, in many ways, it was: The sprawling cities, factories, industrial prowess, and continental tying of the nation was forged by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.
A photo of workers constructing the western railroad lines. It is impossible to document, but estimates range from the low hundreds to several thousands of workers died in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad project. The majority of those killed were Chinese.
Lastly, the construction of the railroads achieved the integration of this “new nation.” Off the backs of immigrants, as stated, the linking of west and east by rail was indispensable for the economic designs of the east coast elites, which subsequently planted the seeds for the west coast elite too. As stated in the chapter on the rise and fall of labor, the intent of linking coast to coast was not to benefit the interior country—though places like Chicago and St. Louis certainly grew to benefit from this linkage—but to benefit the east coast. Industrialists from Boston, New York, and Washington D.C., in transforming the new nation into the economic construction envisioned by Hamilton, needed to exploit the vast richness of the American country west of the Appalachian Mountains. Thus came the real plunder of American wealth. The unintentional consequence of this robbing of the American heartlands was the construction of industrial cities in the Upper Midwest, and the foundation of a western elite, like their eastern brethren, largely of Yankee Puritan stock, who became the economic stewards of economic exploitation along the coast of California. The railways, after all, did not just run in one direction.
SUGGESTED READING
Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
*The one book every American should read about the Constitution
Albert Jay Nock, Mr. Jefferson & Our Enemy: The State
Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
*The one book every American should read about the Constitution
Albert Jay Nock, Mr. Jefferson & Our Enemy: The State
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Oh railways are always, ultimately, about economic exploitation.
It is one of the criticisms of the British in India I always find a bit odd - that the railways weren't for the benefit of ordinary Indians but for the economic elite (ie, the British). To which I always want to reply: and that is different from railways in Great Britain how exactly? But I usually hold my tongue because experience has taught me proponents of certain intellectual movements tend to be incredibly hostile to a contrary view.
It is one of the criticisms of the British in India I always find a bit odd - that the railways weren't for the benefit of ordinary Indians but for the economic elite (ie, the British). To which I always want to reply: and that is different from railways in Great Britain how exactly? But I usually hold my tongue because experience has taught me proponents of certain intellectual movements tend to be incredibly hostile to a contrary view.
I think anyone should be able to see that just by looking at the cartoons of the day. The RRs are already beating up on the poor little guy with the rich and wealthy elite cheering on the slaughter!
One doesn't even need to read a history book to figure that out. Of course, we like to indulge in hero worship so they got off the hook and we blame the dispossessed.One tends to forget that RRs were high class back in the day, and generally were employed for economic reasons. It wasn't like thousands of farmers just got to hop on trains and go wherever they wanted to!
The past really is a foreign country. It's interesting how much of what happened in the 19th century is both applicable and strangely inapplicable to the 21st. In some ways you have to study it to know what's going on, but in other ways it seems almost foolish to go back before the post-war boom years and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. (I say almost).
The Jeffersonian agrarian class is dead, with no forseeable hope of revival - agriculture is now a large-scale industrial activity dominated by companies you can count on one hand. (Racism has endured just fine, though). The factory worker still clings to a precarious existence, but they're on their way out, and have been poorly represented in national politics in the past several decades. The New Deal flavor of managerial progressivism was at least predicated on the existence of a working class of miners and manufacturers to work their professional administrative magic with, so that particular strain of it has lain dormant, too. What's left are financial and office professionals on one hand and poorly-paid service and ag workers on the other. Joining the former class is now the expected goal of every American, and enabling people to do so is the stated goal of most economic policy. A stable job at a steel mill until retiring to a pension and a gold watch are right out. Now we have managerialism for the managers as well as by them.
The backbone of the Republican Party has been the white suburban homeowner since well before Reagan took office, and 2016 didn't change that. They aren't their only constituency, but they are by far the most important one. The Democrats, meanwhile, mostly attempt to play to the exact same demographic, with lip service paid to social issues for the benefit of the educated and genteel professional class. It is therefore no surprise that the Republicans are framed by the media as heirs to a rural populist tradition, even though they're nothing of the sort. The liberal elite want to believe that their neighbors are good, polite, educated people. Racism is for the Poors. Given this, it isn't surprising that the white and well-off seem to be the only cohort that participates consistently in politics at either the national or local level.
Given the economic, social, and ecological transformation that the rest of this century is likely to bring, the institutions of the United States as it exists now are woefully unprepared to deal with it. They are built around a way of life that is unlikely to survive them. So yeah, America is headed either toward transformation or catastrophe, or both. In that regard, the 21st century is not entirely unlike the 19th.
The Jeffersonian agrarian class is dead, with no forseeable hope of revival - agriculture is now a large-scale industrial activity dominated by companies you can count on one hand. (Racism has endured just fine, though). The factory worker still clings to a precarious existence, but they're on their way out, and have been poorly represented in national politics in the past several decades. The New Deal flavor of managerial progressivism was at least predicated on the existence of a working class of miners and manufacturers to work their professional administrative magic with, so that particular strain of it has lain dormant, too. What's left are financial and office professionals on one hand and poorly-paid service and ag workers on the other. Joining the former class is now the expected goal of every American, and enabling people to do so is the stated goal of most economic policy. A stable job at a steel mill until retiring to a pension and a gold watch are right out. Now we have managerialism for the managers as well as by them.
The backbone of the Republican Party has been the white suburban homeowner since well before Reagan took office, and 2016 didn't change that. They aren't their only constituency, but they are by far the most important one. The Democrats, meanwhile, mostly attempt to play to the exact same demographic, with lip service paid to social issues for the benefit of the educated and genteel professional class. It is therefore no surprise that the Republicans are framed by the media as heirs to a rural populist tradition, even though they're nothing of the sort. The liberal elite want to believe that their neighbors are good, polite, educated people. Racism is for the Poors. Given this, it isn't surprising that the white and well-off seem to be the only cohort that participates consistently in politics at either the national or local level.
Given the economic, social, and ecological transformation that the rest of this century is likely to bring, the institutions of the United States as it exists now are woefully unprepared to deal with it. They are built around a way of life that is unlikely to survive them. So yeah, America is headed either toward transformation or catastrophe, or both. In that regard, the 21st century is not entirely unlike the 19th.
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Hey maruhkati, great for you to join in and leave a great comment/reflection! I hope you've been finding the AAR pleasurable on enjoyable on the many multifaceted levels that this AAR embodies: being part game, part historiographical dive into the 19th century, part esoteric commentary for people to understand why we are where we are in present real life!
It's interesting to read, at least for me, that a myriad of writers back in the early 20th century saw what you just put your finger on: Managerialism for the managers as well as by them! It's fascinating. And what you note about the New Deal is spot on - I have written on how "reactionary" elements of the Democratic Party (Bernie Sanders) are woefully beyond stupid seeking some sort of New Deal 2.0 based on an outdated model that has no applicability to the realities of the current socio-economic condition. (And we really need to stop the whole "socialist" thing as him, nor even the likes of Ocasio Cortez or even most of the "democratic socialists" are socialists but revived managerialists who still accept the primacy of capital in economic exchange and engagement who want to use the power of government to help more people into that financial and office professional managerial class.)
As I stated at the beginning of the AAR, the 19th century is so important to American history, culture, and the like, which is why I've, in part, engaged in this AAR project. Of course, as you well know, despite the fanciful thinking of many, and the ignorant screeds of media writers and commentators, both parties - particularly the "establishment" - are managerial liberal parties. With the Democrats being progressive on social causes and the Republicans, at least the establishment, accepting social changes once they occur but never taking the lead on these issues. What's more interesting is the ongoing cultural-intellectual shifts going on: Primarily with "secular" Americans (despite the moniker secular and professed religious unaffiliation) really becoming the heirs of the liberal Protestant and Puritan tradition of egalitarian humanitarianism and progressivist consciousness; Catholics engaged in a tripartite civil war between heretical Americanists, traditionalists, and heretical modernists; and Evangelicals increasingly becoming strangers in their former lands. We'll get to this by the end of the AAR, or at least the origins of it.
Catastrophe vs. Transformation is a false dichotomy. Transformation is the necessary dialectical outcome of catastrophe. Every catastrophe is followed by transformation.
The difference between the serious "deep thinker" with the shallow heirs of Whiggism is that they may not necessarily consider the transformation "good." And this is why we live in quite exciting times, a new world historical moment, what comes next is the million dollar question. In that respect, this AAR will end with the beginning of the age we're seeing come to an end! Fitting. Very, fitting! Thanks for making your voice and presence known to us maruhkati. I hope you continue to find the AAR as we progress an enjoyable read! And many thanks for your great comment.
Cheers!
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The 21st century's entwined crises of global climate breakdown and the end of cheap, abundant petroleum do entail higher stakes than most earlier problems of the modern era. The "bad" scenarios in this case range somewhere between the Second World War and the Bronze Age Collapse, so I think it's worth distinguishing the two in this case.
Given that the 19th century lasted about 130 years, it's pretty unsurprising that so many things essential to political understanding happened in it. We're in the middle of a pretty long century now, I think. There's a case to be made that the 20th century is even shorter than it's commonly argued to be; that it ended (or at least began to end) not in 1991 but in the mid-70s, when the failure of the immediate Keynesian response to the oil embargo brought the advent of neoliberalism and shifted Western foreign policy focus toward the Middle East. Since then most of the economic assets that previously kept the industrial labor class afloat, whether previously state-owned or privately-owned, have been stripped for parts on behalf of capital, which doesn't need them anymore. The whole country is Sears, basically. The shift has been dramatic in the United States but even more so in Britain, where labor had more ties to the state and there were more nationalized assets to privatize. This makes the socdems the best of a bad lot, since they basically stand alone among parties viably engaged in electoral politics in acknowledging that this has been a bad thing for almost everyone. If the state is going to break your legs and there's nothing else you can do about it, the least they can do is pay for the damn cast.
Still, their fundamental prescription is flawed. The 20th century is over, it's not coming back, and it's not like it was that great to begin with. On my optimistic days when I remember to be a good anarchist I like to think the future will be bigger and smaller; the atomistic 20th century lifestyle backed by a powerful coercive capitalist state gives way to something decentralized and community based. When I'm more cynical I tend to think the best case scenario is "same shit we've got now, only with solar panels and UBI, also now we're actively sinking the refugee boats with destroyers."
Given that the 19th century lasted about 130 years, it's pretty unsurprising that so many things essential to political understanding happened in it. We're in the middle of a pretty long century now, I think. There's a case to be made that the 20th century is even shorter than it's commonly argued to be; that it ended (or at least began to end) not in 1991 but in the mid-70s, when the failure of the immediate Keynesian response to the oil embargo brought the advent of neoliberalism and shifted Western foreign policy focus toward the Middle East. Since then most of the economic assets that previously kept the industrial labor class afloat, whether previously state-owned or privately-owned, have been stripped for parts on behalf of capital, which doesn't need them anymore. The whole country is Sears, basically. The shift has been dramatic in the United States but even more so in Britain, where labor had more ties to the state and there were more nationalized assets to privatize. This makes the socdems the best of a bad lot, since they basically stand alone among parties viably engaged in electoral politics in acknowledging that this has been a bad thing for almost everyone. If the state is going to break your legs and there's nothing else you can do about it, the least they can do is pay for the damn cast.
Still, their fundamental prescription is flawed. The 20th century is over, it's not coming back, and it's not like it was that great to begin with. On my optimistic days when I remember to be a good anarchist I like to think the future will be bigger and smaller; the atomistic 20th century lifestyle backed by a powerful coercive capitalist state gives way to something decentralized and community based. When I'm more cynical I tend to think the best case scenario is "same shit we've got now, only with solar panels and UBI, also now we're actively sinking the refugee boats with destroyers."
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CHAPTER XV: A NEW REPUBLIC
The Agrarian Revolt as a Revolt Against the Constitution
The Agrarian Revolt as a Revolt Against the Constitution
As hitherto mentioned, the progressives and their economistic and technocratic vision of the new America was the implicative deduction of the Constitution’s economic orientation and implied powers. The great historian, Charles A. Beard, before falling out of favor with the American establishment for his criticism of a revered president,* noted that the strongest opposition to the Constitution came from debtors, farmers, and the craft guilds. The Constitution was supported by bankers, merchants, slave-owners, creditors and money-lenders, and the plantation elite. In fact, as mentioned in the chapters leading up to the Civil War, part of the constitutional crisis leading to the Civil War was that the constitutional constituents of slave owners and plantation barons felt that the federal government was no longer upholding their interests, thus they broke away to form a new government that would preserve those interests. The common farmer bound up in the north and south, who had no dog in this constitutional struggle, which was a struggle over the proper use of federal power and directive, was the primary loser.
The establishment of the economic order through the Constitutional Order continued to meet opposition from farmers and debtors, the primary demographic constituency of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party and then Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. As such it is unsurprising that farmers, debtors, and low-level craftsmen, along with exploited laborers, became the backbone of the populist uprising that would sweep Bryan to power. Though there is no way to overturn to the Constitutional Order without a new constitution, the agrarian revolt, its populism, its democratic impulses, and its anti-establishment character aimed primarily at those economic elites on the east coast, was nothing but a revolt against that constitutional order being constructed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The revival of the national bank, crediting loans, industrialization, commercialization, all promoted by the Republican Party beginning with Abraham Lincoln, was the target of populist discontents.
In fact, the series of uprisings and labor revolts that caused the Wheeler Administration to collapse and ushered in the Sherman Administration “to save the republic,” was equally part of this revolt against the economic class entrenching itself across the continent. As mentioned already in this chapter, the railroads were not to the benefit of those whom the tracks crossed; the railroads were to the benefit of a wealthy cabal of mostly New York, Boston, and Philadelphia families, and a few emerging industrialists in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. But these great riots of the preceding decade failed because they failed to address the issue of their submission—the constitutional order enshrined by economic privilege and centralization.
The much-discussed dialectic between populists and progressives is generally and terribly misconstrued, particularly by the progressives and their heirs who liked to cast themselves—in their uppity and well-to-do character—as the saviors of the disposed and downtrodden. In reality, the few concessions made to the populist movement between 1892-1920, sans the Bryan Administration, was nothing less than an attempt to curb and control the disposed masses who were being displaced by industrialization and urbanization. The hollowing out of the interior parts of the country, a very real phenomenon as the railroad barons and industrialists intentionally bankrupted many farms, which led to mass movements of people to the cities to man the factories, meant that those left behind were, in all actuality, left behind.
The help that the progressives offered was to drive families, men and women, from their ancestral homes, settle them in cheap housing in urban centers, give them petty and low-paid jobs, and told them how important they were in creating the new country. The eventual emergence of minimum wage, lower working hours, and minor social benefits, and welfare campaigns, were all aimed to keep the populist base: farmers, union workers, and low-skilled factory workers, under the thumb of the progressives. The progressives at the turn of the century, as today, remained largely wealthy, Anglo, Saxon, and Protestant—if not Protestant today they come from Protestant lineage.
This dynamic was very much at the heart of Western folklore and mythology. Many former Democrats and Confederates, who had been farmers prior to the Civil War, moved westward to start the farming life over again. The established local law enforcement, manned by many former junior officers of the Confederacy, became their natural allies. When northerly easterners came pushing into the West, like the Earps, the collision was understood as that between the agrarian establishment and the new Yankee carpetbaggers who were intending to push out those who were already here and trying to make a new living given the impossibilities of doing so in the war-torn south which was industrializing rapidly too in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Wyatt Earp, like many eastern and northern lawmen, were condemned by the southern-western population as carpetbaggers and enemies of the “traditional way of life.”
That rough and tumble order of justice that characterized the “old west” was the agrarian “law of the desert,” so to speak, or “law of the jungle.” It was necessary for men to take matters into their own hands to defend what property they had staked out for themselves and their families. Family, or clan, rivalries only exacerbated local law enforcement efforts to keep the peace.
The attacks on railroads and other wealthy shipments, the first embodiment of organized criminality in the American west, was also motivated from this dynamic. Bandits and robbers saw themselves as Robin Hood—though they obviously had their own selfish interests involved to any neutral observer—taking from the wealthy demons who had no business destroying the plentiful lands of the American West and extracting all the material goods back to New York or Boston. The hand of the federal government, not to help the farmers and toiling and exploited laborers of the west, but to aid in the completion of the railroads and the “bringing of law and order” was necessarily to the benefit of the industrialists who couldn’t manage to keep their belongings secure as they passed through the unguarded railroads.
The crisis that was besetting the United States in the post-Civil War era was a crisis of transformation. The old agrarian, agricultural, and farming commune systems, which had been the predominate way of American life and political and social organization since the settling of Jamestown and the arrival of the Pilgrim and Puritan fathers, was now being swept away. Jefferson’s revolution in 1800 simply stemmed the tide of industrialization and commercialization that was envisioned by Hamilton and instantiated into the Constitution if one reads the Constitution closely. Thus, we can say that the populist revolt was really a revolt—unknowingly so—against the Constitution of the United States of America which had in its own DNA the very roots of the emerging industrial and commercial class order that was now the cause of so much consternation among the agrarian and populist demography.
To this end the Democratic Party had been established, in tracing its roots back to Jefferson and Jackson, as the reactionary, anti-capitalist, pro-agrarian, populist, and commoner party that defended the life of the American farmer and laborer against the encroachment of the banking and commercialist elite. The Republican Party, notwithstanding its populist and agrarian element that always existed—especially in the Upper Midwest—in tracing its history back to the Federalist Party to Whig Party, was the party of modernization, industrialization, and capitalization that had to keep its more radical, populist, and agrarian constituency happy with certain concessions from time to time. That the Republican Party was the party of the wealthy elite explains why the Republican Party, more than the disparate and internally conflictual Democratic Party, was the original vehicle for American progressivism until the equally reactionary “old money” class of wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the Republican Party secured victory after the First World War and allied itself with the populist cause of immigration restriction, isolationism, and anti-militancy.
William Jennings Bryan, the “Prairie Preacher,” was the hope of the populists. A Democratic congressman from Nebraska, Bryan cast himself as the new Cicero, Jefferson, and Jackson—all the same. While cast as an ignoramus, particularly after the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” Bryan’s own collections of letters and books showed him to be an extensively read and educated man with an Evangelical zeal. He was exceptionally well-read in Western history and constantly drew parallels with the downfall of the Roman Republic with that of America in his own lifetime.
Regardless, the populist revolt had in its sights set against that banking class so praised by Hamilton. In the words of William Jennings Bryan, which captures the populist animosity to this economic class:
They say that we are opposing national bank currency; it is true. If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find he said that, in searching history, he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson; that was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracy of Cataline and saved Rome. Benton said that Cicero only did for Rome what Jackson did for us when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America. We say in our platform we believe that the right to coin and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe that it is a part of sovereignty, and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than we could afford to delegate to private individuals the power to make penal statutes or levy taxes. Mr. Jefferson, who was once regarded as good Democratic authority, seems to have differed in opinion from the gentleman who has addressed us on the part of the minority. Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank, and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of government, and that the banks ought to go out of the governing business.**
Notes:
*Franklin Roosevelt.
** Excerpt from his famous speech, "Cross of Gold."
One can argue one of the truly amazing things about the United States is that they have indeed remain united at all (excusing the brief break of the rebellion).
The remains of my teenage self are celebrating the attacks on the banks, but groaning that it's Bryan that was making them.
Maybe it's because the writings of H.L. Mencken helped me get through high school in Florida...
Maybe it's because the writings of H.L. Mencken helped me get through high school in Florida...
For all our faults, I find the number of peaceable transfers of power that we've had to be an amazing thing.
One can also argue that the United States is a bunch of different countries tied together federal union and that her political history has been moved by the attempts of rascally puritanical Yankee universalists attempting to homogenize dominance over the rest of the country.
In less polemical terms, America has always been engaged in culture war between regions and provinces -- a truly wonderful book that explores much of what I've been dealing with in this AAR is Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the 11 Rival Regional Cultures of North America.Despite their theological fundamentalism, the Puritans have always been seen as the enemy of the pluralists and conservative strands in the U.S. and have always been the inspiration of the progressive dream of utopianism.
It's interesting you bring up Mencken. Several forumites have asked me about Mencken in the past few months. Mencken is esoterically mentioned in the caption under Bryan!
1800. Set the precedent.