May Day And The Immigrant Worker: Chris Mahin in Tribuno del Pueblo

From Pilsen to Pilsen:
May Day and the immigrant worker

BY CHRIS MAHIN

May Day began in the United States, and immigrants played a decisive role in creating it.

On May 1, 2006, more than 750,000 workers – most of them immigrants – took part in a demonstration for immigrant rights in Chicago. They marched past Haymarket Square, the very spot where immigrant workers had rallied in 1886. Many of the workers in the 2006 demonstration lived in Pilsen, a Chicago neighborhood named after a city in Central Europe where many of yesterday’s immigrants came from. The immigrant workers of Chicago had revived the celebration of May Day in the city where it had been created — by an earlier generation of immigrant workers.

On May 1, 1886, workers throughout the United States struck to demand the eight-hour day. Chicago was the strike’s center. At that time, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. Its factories were being filled by workers from England, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, Sweden and many other countries.

Three days later, a rally was held at Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest a police attack on a group of strikers. Speeches were given in several languages. As this protest was winding to a close, cops moved in. They ordered the last speaker – an English immigrant, Samuel Fielden – to stop. Then someone threw a bomb. It killed one police officer and wounded many. The police opened fire, killing many participants in the rally.

The police responded by breaking into homes, wrecking the printing presses of foreign-language newspapers, and beating and arresting union leaders. Immigrant workers were accused of being terrorists.

Eight union leaders were put on trial, charged with being accessories to murder at Haymarket Square. One – Samuel Fielden – was from Lancashire, England. Six had been raised in Germany: George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, and August Spies.

Despite worldwide protests, four of the defendants were hanged. (A fifth, Louis Lingg, died in his cell under suspicious circumstances.) Three were given long sentences.

In 1889, at the International Labor Congress in Paris, a delegate from the American Federation of Labor proposed that the Congress adopt May 1 as International Labor Day.

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This article was originally published in the May 2013 issue of the Tribuno del Pueblo newspaper. For more information, go to www.tribunodelpueblo.org.

150 Years Later — What Was Revolutionary About the Emancipation Proclamation

Chris Mahin wrote this article 10 years ago, on the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Much is being said to decry the significance of the deed.  The Proclamation was a product of the time in which it was written, and so its influence and importance needs to placed within that context.  What then are the implications for today?  Surely not that we need a great leader to follow.  That might be the lesson if we took from history the idea that Lincoln, with the stroke of the pen, freed the slaves.  That isn’t what happened, and the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation need not enshrine that myth.  The issue today, the 1% vs the 99% as Occupy phrases it, is similar to the issue then, when a handful of the richest people in the United States had the right to own, as their private property, 4 million slaves.  The Proclamation was a step across a nodal line of ending a form of private property.  It raises questions about how we treat the right of billionaires today to own what should be public property.

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  People’s Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo (Online Edition)
                  Vol. 30 No. 1/ January, 2003

                 P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL  60654
                     

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140TH ANNIVERSARY OF A REVOLUTIONARY DECREE

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION SET A PROFOUND PRECEDENT; LET’S
UTILIZE IT!

By Chris Mahin

The document makes dull reading — but it inspired millions. No music rings from its carefully constructed sentences — but it sounded the death knell of slavery. Deliberately understated in form, its content gave a bloody war a higher, more noble purpose.

Jan. 1, 2003 marks the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Much has changed in the United States since the Civil War, but the story of how the proclamation came to be issued, and what it wrought, contains important lessons for the
struggle for justice today.

Despite its dry, legalistic tone, the Emancipation Proclamation was a radical document. It declared that all persons held as slaves in states or parts of states in rebellion against the United States on Jan. 1, 1863 were free — forever. Because this step affected over 3 million people at a time when the selling price of a slave averaged $1000, the proclamation removed over $3 billion of legally obtained property from the slaveowners without any compensation whatsoever. Since slavery in the United States was an especially brutal form of capitalism, at its time the Emancipation Proclamation decreed the greatest single expropriation of capitalist private property in human history. (It retained that distinction until the Soviet Revolution).

The Emancipation Proclamation changed the course of the Civil War.In the beginning, the Lincoln government insisted that it was fighting the war because rebellious forces in most slave states had conspired to organize secession, not because those states permitted slavery within their borders. (Most supporters of the Union felt that secession was illegal, even treasonous. While many of them abhorred slavery, most felt that it was protected by the Constitution, and that as a result the federal government could not interfere with slavery in those states where it had always been legal.)

At first, the Lincoln government adhered to this policy so rigidly that it was official policy for the Union Army to return to their masters those slaves who fled to its battle lines and offered to help the Union cause. This callous obsession with the absolute letter of federal law meant that the war dragged on, casualties mounted, pro-Confederate traitors inside the Union wreaked havoc, and international support for the federal government could not be fully mobilized. Perhaps most dangerous of all, this policy prevented the Union from aiming at the secessionists’ Achilles Heel: the presence of more than 3 million slaves in Confederate territory who would act against the Confederacy if they could be sure that acting would help them win freedom.

As the bloodletting continued, and the Union suffered numerous defeats, the situation reached a crisis. Either the war could continue to be fought on the basis of the narrow legal technicalities it was begun on in April 1861 — without disturbing the property relations in the states where secession had taken place — or it could be fought in a revolutionary way. By late 1862, the Union had to face a stark fact: The only way to save the country, to stop the rebellion, would be to end slavery.

At this point, Northern society began to respond to the action of the slaves who ran away to the Union Army’s battle lines and to the heartfelt appeals of abolitionists who urged the government to adopt an openly anti-slavery policy. Slowly but surely, more and more people began to feel that if the only way to defeat the rebels was to abolish slavery, then slavery would have to go. After Union forces stopped an attempted invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the fall of 1862, Lincoln announced his plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

The proclamation had immediate effects. Racist whites were disgusted by it, and vowed to cease fighting for the Union. But opponents of slavery, black and white, were elated, and galvanized into action. Sympathy for the Union skyrocketed all over the world.

While the proclamation applied only to those states and parts of states in rebellion against the United States, and did not apply at all to the 800,000 slaves in those parts of the United States not in rebellion, it was a first step. Everyone understood that after Jan. 1, 1863, there was no turning back; the war was now a battle over whether slavery would exist in the United States or not. Through the telegraphic power of the grapevine, many slaves in the Confederacy soon learned that they would be free forever if they could reach Union lines.

There is a lesson in this for our time. Today — just as in late 1862 — the people of this country have to make a choice. At the beginning of the Civil War, the survival of the United States was threatened by about 475,000 slaveowners who possessed billions of dollars worth of wealth. Today, this country’s survival is threatened by a tiny class of exploiters who are also worth billions. A continuation of the rule of this class threatens America with economic disaster and moral ruin.

In fighting this tiny class of billionaires, we should build on the best in the past of this country. Exactly 140 years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation established the principle that when one section of society’s property rights destroy the human rights of millions of other people, when those property rights threaten the forward progress of society, humanity has a right to change the property relations. The Emancipation Proclamation was a public declaration that there is nothing sacred about the legally obtained private property of brutal exploiters. There are moments in history when society cannot move forward unless that property is taken away and new social relations established.

In the seven score years since Abraham Lincoln took a gold pen and signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the White House on New Year’s Day 1863, it has become fashionable in some political circles to stress what the Emancipation Proclamation did not do. But instead of disparaging the proclamation, real revolutionaries ought to squeeze every ounce of political energy possible out of the moral precedent it established. On this Emancipation Day 2003, we should honor the valiant abolitionist agitators, runaway slaves, and Union soldiers who made the Emancipation Proclamation possible — by declaring: If it was right to wrest the source of strength away from one kind of exploiter in 1863, it is right to take society away from all exploiters today!

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This article originated in the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE/TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO
Vol. 30 No. 1/ January, 2003; P.O. Box 3524,
Chicago, IL 60654

Liberation as Death Sentence: Health Care at the End of the Civil War

Liberation as Death Sentence

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER    Published: June 10, 2012   New York Times

When Civil War History published a paper this spring raising the conflict’s military death toll to 750,000 from 620,000, that journal’s editors called it one of the most important pieces of scholarship ever to appear in its pages.

Enlarge This Image

Richard Perry/The New York Times historian Jim Downs at Grant’s Tomb.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Library of Congress  Digging graves in Fredericksburg, Va.,in 1864. A million ex-slaves are said to have become sick or died after 1862.

But to Jim Downs, an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of the new book “Sick From Freedom,” issued last month by Oxford University Press, that accounting of what he calls “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” does not go nearly far enough.

To understand the war’s scale and impact truly, Professor Downs argues, historians have to look beyond military casualties and consider the public health crisis that faced the newly liberated slaves, who sickened and died in huge numbers in the years following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

“We’re getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,” he said in a recent interview at a cafe near his apartment in Chelsea. “But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.”

“Sick From Freedom,” at 178 pages (not counting 56 pages of tightly argued footnotes), may seem like a bantamweight in a field crowded with doorstops. But it’s already being greeted as an important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.

“The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading toward freedom,” said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. “But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.”

Professor Downs, 39, is part of a wave of scholars who are sketching out a new, darker history of emancipation, Professor Blight said, one that recognizes it as a moral watershed while acknowledging its often devastating immediate impact. And the statistics offered in “Sick from Freedom” are certainly sobering, if necessarily tentative.

At least one quarter of the four million former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870, Professor Downs writes, including at least 60,000 (the actual number is probably two or three times higher, he argues) who perished in a smallpox epidemic that began in Washington and spread through the South as former slaves traveled in search of work — an epidemic that Professor Downs says he is the first to reconstruct as a national event.

Historians of the Civil War have long acknowledged that two-thirds of all military casualties came from disease rather than heroic battle. But they have been more reluctant to dwell on the high number of newly emancipated slaves that fell prey to disease, dismissing earlier accounts as propaganda generated by racist 19th-century doctors and early-20th-century scholars bent on arguing that blacks were biologically inferior and unsuited to full political rights.

Instead, historians who came of age during the civil rights movement emphasized ways in which the former slaves asserted their agency, playing as important a role in their own liberation as Lincoln or the Union army.

“For so long, people were afraid to talk about freed people’s health,” Professor Downs said. “They wanted to talk about agency. But if you have smallpox, you don’t have agency. You can’t even get out of bed.”

Professor Downs first became interested in the health of newly liberated slaves when he was a graduate student at Columbia University with a job as a research assistant in the papers of Harriet Jacobs, the author of the 1861 autobiography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and a vivid chronicler of the often abysmal conditions in the “contraband camps” where escaped slaves congregated during the war and in settlements of freed people more generally after it. The papers were full of heart-wrenching encounters with sick and dying freed people — references that he noticed were strikingly absent in recent scholarship.

As he developed the topic into his dissertation, Professor Downs recalls sparring with his adviser, Eric Foner, the author of the classic book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Business, 1863-1877.”

“He would joke: ‘Look in my index. You don’t even see smallpox,’ ” Professor Downs said.

But as he sorted through the little-explored records of the medical division of the Freedmen’s Bureau and other archives, he found reams of statistical and anecdotal accounts of sick and dying freed people, whose suffering was seen by even some sympathetic Northern reformers as evidence that the race was doomed to extinction.

Meanwhile tallies of the smaller number of white smallpox victims were kept only lackadaisically and eventually crossed out all together — evidence, he argues, that officials were eager to see the outbreak as a “black epidemic” not worth bothering about. (By contrast a cholera outbreak in 1866 that mainly affected whites was vigorously combated, he notes.)

Professor Downs also found a medical system that was less concerned with healing the sick than with separating out healthy workers who could be sent back to the fields, and then closing the hospitals as quickly as possible.

In an e-mail Professor Foner praised “Sick From Freedom” as offering “a highly original perspective” that “deserves wide attention.” And Professor Downs makes no bones about wanting to place health issues at the center of multiple scholarly conversations about the war and its aftermath.

“I wanted to say, ‘You’re not allowed to do the history of labor or the history of the family or the history of citizenship unless you go through my book,’ ” he said. “I wanted to be able to tell a story about these people’s lives that wouldn’t get pushed aside as melodrama.”

He is also not shy about drawing out his work’s contemporary relevance. His dissertation included an epilogue about AIDS, another epidemic, he said, that broke out shortly after a moment of liberation (in this case of gay people), was blamed on the victims and was largely ignored by the federal government. (He dropped the point from the book, which instead ends with an epilogue showing how policies developed in the post-Civil War South were exported to the Western frontier, with similarly devastating health consequences for American Indians.)

Professor Downs also sees parallels with the current health care debate. “Freed slaves,” he writes in the book, were “the first advocates of federal health care” — a statement that could be read from the left as an example of early black political activism, or from the right as an instance of newly liberated people immediately asking for a government handout.

That second reading was one he initially worried about, Professor Downs said. But he ultimately just let the historical chips fall where they may.

“I’ve been alone with these people in the archives,” he said. “I have a responsibility to tell their stories.”

Barry Unsworth, Author of Sacred Hunger, Dies at 81 — NYT Obituary

Barry Unsworth, Writer of Historical Fiction, Dies at 81

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: June 7, 2012

Barry Unsworth, considered one of the foremost historical novelists in English, who was known for rich, densely textured fiction that conjured lost worlds — those of the Trojan War, medieval Europe and the Napoleonic age, among many others — died on June 4 in Perugia, Italy. He was 81 and had lived in the Umbria region of Italy for many years.

Jerry Bauer — The British novelist Barry Unsworth in 2003.

The cause was lung cancer, said Lois Wallace, his literary agent in the United States.

An Englishman, Mr. Unsworth won a Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger,” a story of avarice set amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century. The award, now known as the Man Booker Prize, is considered Britain’s loftiest literary honor. (Mr. Unsworth shared it that year with Michael Ondaatje, who won for “The English Patient.”)

Writing about “Sacred Hunger” in The New York Times Book Review this year, the novelist John Vernon said:

“The novel contains a vision of hell on earth unlike any in contemporary fiction, largely because its account of the unimaginable cruelties of the slave trade is told in the well-wrought prose of an old-fashioned 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator. The effect is uncanny: its intelligent, controlled and immensely readable sentences glow with a deathly pallor.”

Mr. Unsworth’s books, characterized by prodigious research and propulsive narrative force, have long been renowned in Britain and have gained a broad international following in the last few decades.

Among his best known — he wrote 17 novels in all — are “Stone Virgin” (1986), set in Renaissance Venice; “Losing Nelson” (1999), about a modern-day writer obsessed with the great British admiral; “The Songs of the Kings” (2003), which retells the story of the Trojan War; and, most recently, “The Quality of Mercy,” published last year, which continues the narrative of “Sacred Hunger.”

Mr. Unsworth’s work was a prolonged study of morality. To him, as he made plain in interviews, the historical novel offered a wide portal through which to observe human ethical behavior and its myriad failings as played out across any imaginable era.

His books teem with greed. Displaying visible sympathy for people oppressed by those who lust for power, Mr. Unsworth ranged — sometimes soberly, sometimes humorously — over a catalog of human depredation, which also included kidnapping (remember Helen of Troy) and murder.

Reviewers occasionally chided Mr. Unsworth for appearing to fall victim to his own exhaustive research. “Facts sometimes arrive rather awkwardly,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian, in an otherwise favorable review of his 2009 novel, “Land of Marvels,” about intrigue in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I.

Most critics, however, praised Mr. Unsworth’s stylish prose, rigorous fealty to detail and ability to evoke entire complex societies. As they also remarked, his books — with their evocation of mankind’s seemingly limitless capacity for immorality — were also brightly lighted windows onto our own age.

A coal miner’s son, Barry Forster Unsworth was born in Wingate, in the north of England, on Aug. 10, 1930. The first in his family to attend college, he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester, where he studied English, in 1951.

He decided soon afterward to write short stories, but there were difficulties.

“Eudora Welty’s ‘A Curtain of Green’ had an enormous effect on me,” Mr. Unsworth told The Globe and Mail of Canada in 1995, invoking the author’s first story collection, published in 1941. “But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.”

He turned to novels, and his first, “The Partnership,” was published in 1966. It told the story of two men whose business relationship is destroyed by the erotic attraction of one to the other. Another novel from this period, “The Hide” (1970), involved a peeping Tom. Though both novels are set in contemporary England, their fascination with obsession and ruin was a harbinger of Mr. Unsworth’s later work.

Over time, Mr. Unsworth fell into the past.

“I don’t think it has been so much a choice as a sort of gradual process determined by accidents of circumstance,” he said in an interview with the online journal Littoral. “I spent most of the ’60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.”

Mr. Unsworth’s first marriage, to Valerie Moor, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Aira; three daughters from his first marriage, Madeleine Reiss, Tania Unsworth and Thomasina Unsworth; a brother, Peter; and six grandchildren.

His other novels include two finalists for the Booker, “Morality Play” (1995), about a band of strolling actors in 14th-century Yorkshire; and “Pascali’s Island” (released in the United States in 1980 as “The Idol Hunter”), set in the early-20th-century Ottoman Empire.

Both books were made into feature films: “Pascali’s Island,” released in 1988, starred Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren; “The Reckoning” (as “Morality Play” was retitled for the screen) was released in 2003 and starred Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe.

If Mr. Unsworth’s novels about the past were veiled allegorical tales about the present, then the veil was largely ripped away, he said, during the Margaret Thatcher era.

In an interview with The Independent of London about “Sacred Hunger” in 1992 — two years after Prime Minister Thatcher left office — he made the connection explicit.

“As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies,” Mr. Unsworth said. “You couldn’t really live through the ’80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.”

John L. Dorman contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 13, 2012

An obituary on Friday about the British historical novelist Barry Unsworth, using information from his United States literary agent, misstated the day that he died. It was Monday, June 4 — not Tuesday, June 5.

Pedagogy of the Poor, the Poverty Scholars Initiative, and Lessons on Ending Poverty

Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty, by Willie Baptist and Jan Rehman

(This is a slightly expanded version of a review by Lew Rosenbaum to be published in the July issue of the People’s Tribune)

The final chapter of Pedagogy Of The Poor begins with these words: “This book has focused on poverty as the defining issue of our time and theoretical and practical educational methods to address the root causes of poverty and build a social movement to eliminate it.”  Published in June, 2011, this book sums up 40 years of activity within the housing and homelessness movement.  More than that, the book helps provide a theoretical framework for understanding a moment when suddenly the disparity between wealth and poverty in this country has been encapsulated in the phrase “99% vs. 1%.”

Poverty: a year ago, this discussion might even have been considered abstract or academic. References to Martin Luther King, Jr. that populate this book might have been considered obligatory but inapplicable bows to a fallen leader.  Not today.  Not any more.  The practical implications of the Occupy movement require that we must take this book seriously.

Teachers may want to skip to the last section, which has the elements that describe how the writers have engaged in the pedagogical activities they have.  While “Teach As We Fight, Learn As We Lead” is rich in detail and in implication, what leads into this chapter is the foundation upon which the scaffolding stands.    The central format of the book is a series of interviews with Willie Baptist, conducted by co-author Jan Rehman.  Baptist describes how he learned what he needed to become active in the anti-poverty movement, and relates that to the major political and economic developments of the last 50 years.  Growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the Civil Rights movement shaped Baptist’s outlook; studying the change from the industrial economy to an electronic/robotic economy showed him how the class and racial struggles he witnessed as a youth have entered a qualitatively new phase.

Interviews are interposed by more theoretical chapters by Rehman himself, for example on the causes of poverty and on the significance of Italian Marxist theorist Gramsci for the poor people’s movements.  Other sections are taken from conversations among the Poverty Scholars Initiative at Union Theological Seminary, the model which the book showcases.  Baptist relentlessly hammers home his theme, that study was necessary to put into perspective his activism — activism required by the disintegration of society. The dialectical relationship between action and theory is illustrated well by the remarkable section in which Baptist discusses Gramsci with John Wessel McCoy:  “Gramsci was dealing with fundamental relationships in society.  He was trying to consider, ‘How do you take power?’  This is what is often lost in discussions about Gramsci – the movement of the dispossessed was toward a common ownership of the means of production, and they needed power to accomplish that.”

This book is not another pedagogy aimed at training the elite to lead the poor. So it is important to recognize the allusion to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s seminal work, published first in 1968, has been widely circulated far beyond its Brazilian origins.

Baptist and Rehman translate Freire to the urban experience of 21st century North America while paying tribute to their important ancestor.  Ultimately what this book is about is how the dispossessed can get the theoretical and practical education necessary to take power;  what does a poor people’s movement led by poor people look like; what does leadership mean at a period of time qualitatively different from anything we have seen?  This is book is an indispensable tool for any collective grappling with these questions, when the only tools that revolutionaries have is influencing the ideas of the combatants.

Pedagogy of the Poor, by Willie Baptist and Jan Rehman, available from Teachers College Press ISBN 978-0-8077-5228-9 $28.95

 

Chris Mahin Writes On The Anniversary Of The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King

[Chris Mahin, whose writing appears on this blog often, contributes the following on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.]

April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Below you will find the text of an article I wrote in 2006 about the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 during the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It was written for the regional website of the union I worked for at the time. It describes what happened in the sanitation workers’ strike, the role played by AFSCME, and the attempts of the FBI to slander and isolate Dr. King. I thought it might be useful background material for anyone involved in events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination.
Thanks,
Chris
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April 1968:
Dr. King Is Killed Defending Labor’s Rights

Murder in Memphis: Life Magazine Cover

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

"I Am a Man" became emblematic of the strike

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Murder at the Lorraine Motel

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been
working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps

Carrying on Dr. King's Legacy

the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

# # #

Racism and the War Against the Poor

[On December 17,  1951 William Patterson, National Executive Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, delivered copies of an historic petition to the United Nations delegation in Paris. Meanwhile, renowned musician and activist  Paul Robeson presented the same petition, which documented the legacy of slavery in America, to a U.N. official in New York.  That document was entitled "We Charge Genocide."  Quoting the U.N. definition of what constitutes genocide (" Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide.") the Civil Rights Congress called on the U.N.  " for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People."  They concluded that "the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace."

Ruben Stacy lynched in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1935

After the Civil War’s military phase was over, the Reconstruction period established the rule of Wall Street over the South,  followed by the rapid and thorough establishment of sharecropping and peonage in the South.  The lynch law became the leading terroristic weapon to keep these social relations in place.  Thousands of documented cases of lynchings took place from the end of Reconstruction to the end of the second World War. This source notes that in the century after the end of the fighting in the Civil War more than 2,400 African-Americans were lynched, a number that considerably underestimates the deaths.  And while the preponderance of people lynched were African-American, more than a thousand non-African-Americans (“white,” Mexican, Asian) were lynched in the same period.

Ida B. Wells,born in Alabama and teaching in Memphis in 1892, had been writing articles in a Memphis paper pointing out the rising tide of lynching and the other practices which

Ida B. Wells

characterized the oppression of Black people. In 1884 she was ordered to give up her train seat and move to another (crowded) car so that her seat could be taken by a white.  She refused, was forcibly removed, and she sued to recover damages (the Supreme Court had, in 1883, struck down an 1875 Civil Rights Law banning discrimination in public accommodations).  A lower court ruled in her favor, but the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against her and ordered that she pay court costs.  She continued to write about inequities and, while away in Philadelphia, her newspaper was burned down.  She left Memphis, lecturing around the world about the condition of Blacks in America, arriving in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair.  Here she and Frederick Douglass campaigned to boycott the World’s Fair (1893) because Chicago had failed to work with the Black community in putting together its representation of African-American life.  20,000 copies of a pamphlet they wrote were distributed.  Wells decided to stay in Chicago and continued her campaign for an anti-lynch law, a campaign which she brought to the President of US (without significant effect).

In 1924 the young Vietnamese expatriate Ho Chi Minh, studying in France,  visited the United States and wrote an article on lynching for the French press (he also made some reports to the international Communist movement on the “national and colonial question”).  This source identifies 2,600 victims of lynching in just the 20 years from 1899 to 1919, and connects lynching to an economic question as well as a racial one.

In the last year, the issue of mass discrimination has entered public consciousness through the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.  Her arguments on how the proportion of Blacks incarcerated has mushroomed fits neatly into the UN definition of genocide.  Note her comments here on Democracy Now, which among other things shows that the election of a Black president has not mitigated the growing assault on “poor communities of color.”

The March/April issue of Rally Comrades has a different perspective on race and class.  While focusing on the history of the US, as indicated above, the article “New Form of Racism Emerging” locates a nodal point in the creation of a new class of poor, with Blacks at the center of this class.]

New Form of Racism Emerging

We are entering a vast social revolution. Every aspect of American life is being torn apart and something new is being created. America is not going to be recognizable in another 20 years.
Change in social motion is difficult to grasp because the content begins to change before the form. What revolutionaries must grasp is that a new form of racism is developing, directed against an emerging new class that includes the “ghetto blacks,” the “illegal immigrant” and the white, so-called “trailer trash.” In other words, the class and cultural differences with the ruling class, not color, is emerging as the ideological basis for the savage economic assault against the poor.

Everything changes as economy changes

An economy cannot stand alone. There must be a political structure that protects it, including laws, ideas and institutions.  The struggles that are taking place today are over how to guarantee that the economy can continue to develop. All kinds of ideas are created, reshaped or thrown out according to whether they politically facilitate the development of the economy.
The concept of race, like any other political concept, has always served the needs of the economy. It changes with every change in the economy, because the economy demands that change if it is to move forward.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two or three Blacks were lynched each week in the South. Lynching was seldom applied to Blacks until after the Civil War. Up to that time, almost all those who were lynched were white. There were changes in the economy and the Blacks had to be driven back into some kind of semi-slavery in order to maintain the profitability of the southern economy, which was absolutely indispensable to the northern textile industry and the U.S. economy overall.

Racism in America has been directed against the Irish, the Native Americans, the Latin Americans, and the Asians among others. Most of all it has centered on the African Americans because it is a political question. Politics is the art of the class struggle. Nothing could be more artful than to use a myth to convince literally millions of people to do harm to themselves in the interests of the people they are struggling against. Yet this is precisely what has happened in our history. It happened because the American people became convinced that they were dealing with a biological rather than a political question. We emphasize this point because the great economic and political changes taking place are having a profound effect on the politics of race and color.

There was a time when a person’s race depended on where they were born, not the color of their skin. Race became a color question when the African slave trade enslaved all kinds of different nationalities whose common characteristic was their color. This linking of color and race for capitalist exploitation was further consolidated and spread through the worldwide expansion of imperialism.
We also must never forget that the brutality of racism was not always directed solely by color differences. The racist nationalism of the fascist Japanese government against the peoples of Asia, or the slaughter and enslavement of the Slavic peoples by fascist Germany are only recent examples. In history we see racism in a religious garb as well. The thing that is clear is that racism, no matter its veneer, facilitates exploitation and is an integral part of capitalism. Therefore, as the needs of capitalism change, the forms of racism will change to accommodate it.

Not an underclass but a new class

A new social group is forming. They have been driven outside the  capitalist economy, but as human beings they must eat — they must consume. This new class is growing daily through the process of technological innovation. Like anything else, today’s new class developed over a period of time.

Robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. Part of the legacy of slavery was that after emancipation a huge section of the African American work force remained tied to the land. Tractored off the land after the development of the cotton-picking machine, they were the last section of the rural population to join the industrial work force. They were concentrated in that sector — the unskilled and semiskilled sector — that was first attacked by the robot.

The Black poor were hit first and hardest. The Black bourgeoisie fled their traditional sections of the city as soon as the ink was dry on the laws allowing them to do so. Holding stable jobs, a section of the African American workers also moved from the inner city into much more stable neighborhoods.

With the factories shutting down, the land around these factories quickly lost their value. Taxes fell, maintenance dwindled and the combination of the American form of apartheid, plus the liquidation of jobs, created a new type of slum: the black, permanently destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central working-class area of the city.

The economists, their social vision distorted by racist ideology, were unable to understand the difference between the reserve army of unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural, permanent joblessness created by robotics. They only saw a growing mass of African Americans outside the labor market. They eagerly embraced the term “underclass.”
Those who coined the term “underclass” perhaps thought here again was a group unable to keep up, and once falling behind and supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside the capitalist relations of worker and employer. They were presented as a subclass of Blacks, reliant on welfare, who had lost the work ethic. Worse, they were creating a subculture of immorality and criminality in the midst of a great national expansion of wealth and productivity.

A more concrete look showed something different. The new productive equipment has polarized wealth and poverty as never before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless and absolutely destitute were new to our country. The increase in production was accompanied by an increase in unemployment and joblessness.
Since that phrase “underclass” was coined, the process of social destruction has continued. We can see now that this new group of permanently unemployed is not the result of the welfare system or of some “racial inferiority”, but of the new means of production and the destruction of jobs.

The effects of robotics on the white unskilled and semiskilled workers were not so easily seen scattered as they were, and still are, throughout the general white population, especially in the rural areas and in the suburbs. The African Americans were highly visible, being concentrated in a relatively small urban area. Also, the percentage of Black laborers among the African American population was higher than white laborers among the white population.

Racism against Blacks provided the form, but the content was the beginnings of a social revolution. The first expression of that revolution was the wrecking of the economy of working-class Black America. That revolution is now wreaking its havoc against the formerly secure sections of the blue-collar, white-collar and lower management levels of the white workers.
Today, almost nine in ten Black youth ages 16 to 19 are unemployed. There is a steady increase in Black teens murdered. Black families on average hold one-tenth the wealth of white families. HIV, a disease of poverty, disproportionately affects Blacks. There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in prisons.

This dangerous situation facing the African American poor is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of a process that is pulling millions of all colors and nationalities into poverty. Today, the economy is losing millions of jobs. Nearly 50.7 million Americans, or one in six, are without healthcare. An estimated 50 million people struggled to put food on the table last year. The demand at food banks is up. One in four children is hungry. Growing numbers of Americans are going without other necessities such as water and heat in their homes.

But it is not simply the growth of poverty that is significant today. And the results of the process are broader than the social problems caused by racism. It is acknowledged now that, in fact, the so-called white underclass is larger and growing faster than the Black. What we are dealing with is not an “underclass,” but a new class. Today, this new class has already formed a new economic section of the working class and it is in the process of creating a new social and political entity.

Class-cultural division

The concept of race based on color has to go out the window, just like the concept of race based on geographic locale had to go out the window.  It is not possible to have a Black president and sustain the idea of color-based racism.

But we do have racism. But it’s more and more being shifted into economic status. More and more if you are part of the America where your parents didn’t have a job, you don’t have a job, you went to a school where you can barely read and write – you might have the same skin color, but you are not the same as others who are not in that situation.
The cultural divisions within Black society have been developing for some time and are almost complete. There has been a selective “cultural integration” taking place. If an African American will think, talk, act and have the same motivations as the members of the ruling class, the doors are open to them. The scores of Black generals, admirals and CEOs of big corporations, the Black politicians and government bureaucrats all testify to this. Today, there are literally hundreds of Black millionaires. Below them is a growing layer of Black professionals who have practically no connection to the strivings and aspirations of the mass of African Americans.

The tendencies of cultural division within white society, although always underground, are now becoming visible. Increasingly, lower-class whites have more in common with the lower-class Black cultural forms than they do with the white upper-class. Today, this history is being grafted on to the new class and the cultural divisions that are arising from the vast polarization of wealth and poverty.

Race, racism and the new class

The ruling class uses the particular weapons of history against the different sections of the new class, but the ruling class is aiming its fire at anyone — regardless of color — who presents a threat to the existing order. They are attempting to stigmatize and isolate the new class as a class.

We can see the outlines of this attack in Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart. He warns that the all-class white unity that once characterized America is “coming apart at the seams, not along seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.” The divergence of cultural behaviors and values between the classes he describes is so great, he writes, that they have so little in common that one can “barely recognize their underlying American kinship.”

Murray considers the “new lower-class” of “poor whites” he describes as depraved and ignorant as the poor Blacks he described in his infamous book The Bell Curve. For Murray, poor whites are lazy, prone to crime, addicted to government programs, irreligious, full of excuses, and morally bankrupt. They are inferior to, beneath, not anything like, the whites (and the wealthy of all colors) in the new upper class he lauds so highly.

This kind of racism against the white poor is nothing new, of course. Poor whites have always been considered naturally inferior, their poverty attributed to some deficiency in intellectual or physical capacity. Especially after the Civil War and all the way up to WWII the southern white was looked down upon by the northern white as being not really American. In the 1950s, a series of Chicago Tribune editorials, for example, viciously attacked Appalachian “migrants” for turning the streets of Chicago into “a lawless free-for-all with their primitive jungle tactics … [with] the lowest standard of living and moral code [if any] of all… No other group is so completely devoid of self-pride and responsibility… even worse than Negroes.”  The 1972 movie Deliverance made this point clearly to the American public – that these people were animals, that these were the kind of people that lived in Appalachia.

While Murray focuses on poor whites, he includes poverty stricken Latinos and Blacks in this new lower class. Regardless of color, the new class poses a threat to the very fabric of American society. “Individually, they are not much of a problem,” he writes. “Collectively, they can destroy the kind of civil society that America requires.”

Looking ahead

Two contradictory processes are developing simultaneously in America today. Under the pressure of economic privation there always will be a tendency for any oppressed or defenseless person to shift the blame to someone else, rather than attack the overwhelming power that is hurting him or her. We are going to see different sections of this new class fighting each other.
At the same time, the commonality of their economic situation is going to compel them to unite, if only at first on specific issues. As the foundation for color-racism is being destroyed there is a growing economic attack against the new class — on their education, their housing standards, their job benefits, an attack on the very infrastructure of their lives. There is no way for them to resist this kind of pressure unless they seek out and find a political expression for the objective reality of their changing lives.

We are dealing with a political question. The new class is already forming along the line of a unity based on what is practical and real and possible.  But ultimately, it cannot carry out its historic mission unless it becomes conscious of that mission, unless it understands itself as a class, unless it sees its common interests as a class. This is the revolutionaries’ role, to illuminate the meaning of the current struggles in order to develop the consciousness, the thinking, the sense of self the class must have to carry out its mission.  Strategy, direction, vision and the diverse ways in which the revolutionaries disseminate and share this message all turn on an accurate assessment of the race question as it is today in America..

March.2012.Vol22.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
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Occupy Wall Street and The American Revolution — by Chris Mahin

[The essay below was the basis of Part One of a two part presentation on the Constitution and its history for  Occupy Rogers Park.  Part One was presented February 19, 2012.  Part Two is on this blog as well, and is titled "When Corporations are People: A Grim Fairy Tale,"  and was presented February 26, 2012.]

Thursday, March 08, 2012

“Occupy Wall Street” and the American Revolution, posted in the New Worker (England)

Thomas Paine

by Chris Mahin

AS THE “Occupy Wall Street” movement continues, it may be helpful to look at history to see how those fighting for change have mobilised in earlier times. One such example is the American Revolution of the 1770s.The American Revolution of the 1700s shows the tremendous importance of introducing new ideas into the fight against the powerful.

In 1763 Britain took control of Canada after defeating France in the French and Indian War. The Parliament in London soon began taking steps that pushed the residents of Britain’s 13 American colonies toward rebellion.First the British government barred the colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains (this was the Proclamation Line of 1763).

Then the Parliament passed laws requiring the colonists to pay for the French and Indian War (the Stamp Act, Tea Tax, and other measures were designed to raise money to defray the cost of that war).

These steps enraged many colonists. No longer in need of British military protection against the French in Canada, they were much less willing to tolerate interference by the British government in their affairs. The colonists refused to pay the Stamp Tax and Tea Tax because their colonial legislatures had not been consulted before those measures became law. They cited a principle which the English Parliament had forced the English king to agree to in 1628 – “No taxation without representation”. However, at first, most colonists did not favor independence. The colonists considered themselves loyal subjects of the British king, George III, who they believed was being misled by his ministers. The colonists simply wanted to change their relationship with Britain’s central government personified by the Parliament in London.

Between 1765 and the end of 1775 many protests erupted in America against different aspects of British rule. These protests included instances of bitter street fighting (the Boston Massacre of 1770) and wholesale destruction of property (the Boston Tea Party of 1773). They culminated in full-scale, bloody battles in which hundreds died (Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill).

But despite all the militancy and violence of those 10 years of protest, as long as the colonists believed only that the British government’s policy was wrong while accepting the “right” of a king to rule them, they could not break with Britain. They didn’t even try.

This was a classic case of a revolution not being able to move forward because the fighters in the revolution, while militant, were being held back by their old ideas. The situation would not change until something happened to shake up the thinking of the American people. Fortunately, something did.

On 10^th January 1776, Thomas Paine, an English radical who had lived in America for only 14 months, published a pamphlet called Common Sense.

In simple, readable language, Paine tore apart all the arguments in favor of American loyalty to the British Crown. He insisted that one honest man is worth more than all the kings who ever lived. He painted an inspiring picture of what the world would be like with an independent America to serve as an example to everyone fighting for freedom in every part of the world.

Common Sense challenged some of the basic assumptions that people in the 13 colonies had lived by for their entire lives.

Paine gave the colonists a cause – independence for America and opposition to kings and aristocrats everywhere. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” he declared. Because Paine’s ideas were, for his time, qualitatively new, they sparked great debate. His small pamphlet was circulated widely. Some 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold in its first three months and 500,000 copies were sold in the first year after its publication.

As Common Sense was distributed throughout the 13 colonies, public opinion began to change. One by one the state delegations to the Second Continental Congress began to support the idea of proclaiming the independence of the 13 colonies from Britain. Finally in July 1776 the Second Continental Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. This vote was a direct result of the publication and widespread distribution of Common Sense.

Perhaps those involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement can learn lessons from the American Revolution of the 1770s.

Like the revolutionaries of 1776, we live at a time when people have been hard hit by the status quo, but don’t fully understand what it is that has hit them. This means that we have to act like Thomas Paine; we have to change people’s thinking. We have to convince the American people to give up their old ideas and accept some new ideas so they can win the fight that they are waging against hunger and misery in this country.

The fundamental idea that we have to get across to people can be stated fairly simply: We do not have to live like this. Today, no human being in the world “has” to be hungry. Today, the human race possesses the productive forces (computers and robots) and the scientific knowledge to guarantee that everyone could live a healthy and cultured existence. The only thing preventing that from happening is the strangle-hold that 445 billionaires have over the world’s economy and politics. Today, it is possible to unite our efforts against the billionaires and millionaires, end their control over society, and create a new society.

Like the people who made sure that copies of Common Sense reached every corner of the 13 colonies, we have to transmit our message far and wide. We have to ensure that there is as wide a debate as possible about the role of the corporations.

If we do that, we can begin to change the thinking of the American people – and help change history.

When Corporations Are People: A Grim Fairy Tale by Lew Rosenbaum

When Corporations Are People:  A Grim Constitutional Fairy Tale

Or

How I Learned To Live With an Iron Heel on My Neck

poster by Doug Minkler

By Way of Introduction

This is the second of a two part series on the Constitution in history and how it has evolved.  The first part, by independent scholar Chris Mahin,  reviewed the revolutionary period of American history and its roots in the European enlightenment.  This part will deal with the Constitution itself, the debates leading up to its ratification, and the evolution of the political apparatus in this country.  We will look closely at how slavery impacted the development of the State, and how corporations and the State have been intertwined since the inception of the United States.  In the final analysis we want to look at these three propositions that are fundamental to understanding history and the present.

• The Constitution is the legal framework upon which the State has been constructed. Within its content one can see the results of the debates that created it and can understand the class struggles that emerged from it. A general dictionary definition of “state” is: “ a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government”; a more specific definition, under which I am operating considers: “The State is a particular power of suppression”  (Friederich Engels).
• The Constitution is an evolving document.  Interpretations of it have changed, depending on the forces in society.  Therefore, to rely on the thinking of the founders both discredits the revolutionary period in which it was written and makes us hidebound to the reactionary conclusions of that same period.
• To analyze what is happening today requires that we understand history – but not be shackled by it.

Let’s restate some of the background of the years leading up to the revolution.

First, the revolutionary war was one phase of a century long struggle, in which European powers contested for global supremacy.  Viewed from our side of the Atlantic, it is often easy to ignore the monumental battles taking place between France, Spain, England and Portugal for control of the seas and hence the “right” to colonize the world.   Colonies provided the feudal nobility new sources of raw materials and other forms of wealth.  Some of the nobility who obtained the rights to colonize North America attempted to reproduce European feudal relations on the new landscape.  Every such extent failed within a few years of settling.  If nothing else, the opportunity for indentured servants, who formed the bulk of the early settlers, to escape (legally or otherwise) significantly altered their expectations.  The other feature that greatly influenced  development was the cash crop economy of the South, integrated into the emerging world economy by the production of sugar, tobacco and indigo.  What became known as the triangular trade– sugar and tobacco from the South and Caribbean shipped to England, where it would be sold and turned into rum and chewing and smoking products; money obtained from commerce or products thus manufactured then were shipped to West Africa where the profits would be used to purchase slaves; and the cargo of slaves made the return final leg of the triangle back to the South or Caribbean.  This was the beginning of a sophisticated capitalist process,

Triangular Trade

distinct from what was found in Europe, a process which shaped the history of America.

Second, this side of the Atlantic participated grudgingly in the revolutionary struggle, only coming late to the conclusion that this would need to be a war for separation of the colonies from England.  Even the idea of a “United States of America” was foreign to the colonists a short 20 years before the Declaration of Independence.  The revolutionaries themselves debated whether independence was necessary, up to the eve of the war and even after the victory.

Third, the American revolutionaries were by no means united on what kind of nation an independent America should be.  The reaction to the European conflict and the disagreements about how to relate to England can be found in the Constitution; but the main issues that writers of the Constitution fought over concerned what the new nation would look like.  And they made certain fundamental assumptions that were grounded in the theology and ideologies of the period.   The main, fundamental assumptions, codified in the Declaration of Independence, start out with this phrase: “We hold these truths to be self evident . . .

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is fair to say that none of the founders understood the radical implications of the statement that they had written in the Declaration and now were charged with carrying out in writing a Constitution.  We have discussed briefly in the first part of this presentation that  these words and the Constitution struck fear into the hearts of European monarchs in their palaces.  But the founders of the new, independent colonies deeply distrusted the implications.

They had, in the wake of their victory, written Articles of Confederation and effected a union that stumbled as it tried to stand.  The leaders of the new government could not raise taxes; could not pay their war debt; could not maintain an army; could not build the infrastructure to transport goods; could not protect the fledgling manufacturing and merchant interests from competition with the British Empire; and were everywhere confronted by former colonial administrations that resisted a centralized governmental structure.  Now 4 years after the Treaty of Paris certified the victory of the colonists,  many of the leaders saw the structure as a model of centrifugal force without a counterbalance.  The new nation was disintegrating and the cause was too much power dispersed.  Too much democracy.  In some ways, Shays Rebellion was the epitome of what was wrong.

Shays' Rebellion

Daniel Shays was a Western Massachusetts  farmer who served as a lightning rod among all the other poor farmers threatened with high taxation and then foreclosures when they could not pay.  Leaders everywhere looked on with horror as the former Boston radicals, none more radical than Sam Adams, called out the militia on the rebellion of the poor.  What if this happened elsewhere?  What if this turned into a general insurrection to “alter or to abolish” the new government? What if a general slave insurrection would threaten the Southern planters?

The 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia in May 1787 had Shays and all he represented on their minds.  They were men of wealth and means, and highly educated for the time  –  when 1% of  the Americans had a college education, half of these men had been to college.  George Washington, probably the wealthiest man in America, presided over the convention.  Many of the men were people who had loaned the colonial army money and had much to gain by a central government that could and would repay them. In fact, they suffered under the Articles, because the government could not even pay the interest on the money owed them.

But they had some disagreements as well.

They did not agree on the extent to which democracy should be limited.  Who should be entitled to vote?  What offices should they be entitled to vote for, either directly or indirectly (through electors)? How long should an office holder be entitled to hold office?  What kind of man should be allowed to hold office?

They agreed (mostly) that they did not want to re-institute a monarchy; but how could they institute in the form of the government some way in which one of differing interests could not become dominant?  How could the powers of the government be effectively separated?

They did not agree on the relation between states and the central government.  How could the states maintain their autonomy within a centrally supreme structure?  How can the powers of federal and state and local governments be effectively divided? How can the sectional interests of the states be protected against the controlling tendencies of the federal government?

They did not agree on slavery, which was a sectional and economic interest but more than a sectional interest.  How could the South establish and maintain an electoral parity with the North? How could the property rights of slaveholders be protected from Northerners harboring escaped slaves? How could the rights of the slave traders be protected? How could free labor in the manufacturing centers of the North protect themselves against slave labor?  And what about the moral question of slavery itself?  81 year old Benjamin Franklin, petitioned the Convention for abolition, which in the final analysis the Convention refused to take up.

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, Madison and Jay took up the cause of the Constitution in a series of polemics published in the newspapers of the day, ultimately collected as The Federalist Papers.  Their opponents became known as the Anti-Federalists, which of course gave them a disadvantage from the start.  They were the “anti faction.”  Madison, soon to be allied with Jefferson and against Hamilton in the first administration under the new Constitution, wrote in the Federalist Papers that “faction” was the great enemy of democratic government, and that the faction most to be feared was that of the rabble, the majority, the poor.  The poor would always predominate in numbers, and the nation would need to find a way to enforce a government of the “best people.”  Madison and Hamilton meant that in a large nation, such as the new United States, electoral districts could be large enough, encompassing enough people, so that only those who were known to so many could stand a chance of being elected.  Only the best people.  The Anti Federalists disagreed among themselves about the degree of democracy, but leaned more toward a more direct democracy.

Madison and Hamilton also argued vigorously against a Bill of Rights.  This was the major platform of the Anti Federalists. In fact,  Anti Federalists blocked ratification of the Constitution until the Federalist majority agreed to make writing a Bill of Rights the first item on the agenda of the first Congress convened under the new Constitution.  Madison and Hamilton objected because they thought the rights were already guaranteed under the Constitution, hence redundant.  Given all the furor over at least the First, Second and Fifth amendments in our own time, perhaps Madison and Hamilton (and the Federalists in general) may have thought these too much a concession to the rabble as well.

_________________________________________________________________________________

What The Constitution Says

A line by line careful reading of the Constitution will reward anyone who seeks to, well, read between the lines;  but we are only going to review a few of the most significant points here.

The Preamble of the Constitution starts out with the well known phrase: “We the People.”  It is of course easy to recognize that this group of 55 men were not representative of the breadth of “The People,” even if you consider “The People” white males.

John Adams described the convention as a gathering of men “ability, weight and experience.”  He might have added “and wealth.”    Few men of ordinary means attended. . . nearly all were quite prosperous by the standards of the day.

At a time when fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans attended college, more than half the delegates had college educations. (Foner, p. 235)

But it is easy to understand why this elite of the elite wanted to cast themselves as representing the interests of all.  Still, this deception is not the most significant meaning of the usage.

For another, “We the People” distinguishes it’s origin from the contemporary divine right of kings, or from god.  Further, “We the People” should be contrasted with “We the several states,” or “We the People of the several states.”  It is an attempt to relegate the states to a secondary position under “the People of the United States of America.”  From the outset of the Constitution, the writers are sending a message that the federal government, which represents the interests of all “the People,” is supreme to the states, which represent the interests of a section of “the People.”  From the outset, they make the “division of powers” clear.

Very quickly the Constitution gets into the meat of what it is about.  The document emphasizes the role of the Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate. Remembering that one of the chief concerns of the framers of the Constitution was  to limit democracy, they defined the office holders.  Representatives were to be elected directly for a 2 year term and were to be allocated proportionally within the states according to a census to be conducted every 10 years, from districts created within the states.  The South Carolina, however, threatened to block the Constitution unless some accommodation was made for the large number of slaves in the South (who could not vote or hold office, but whom the South wanted enumerated for the purposes of representation).  In other words, the South foresaw the potential of domination by the non-slaveholding North, and wanted to shift the center of gravity. The “compromise” was the “3/5 clause,” which enumerated the slaves at the rate of 3/5 of a person for the purpose of representation.  Let’s avoid any misunderstanding: Southern politicians were not admitting that slaves were even partly human or part of “the people.”  The 3/5 clause was strictly a matter of preventive book-keeping, certifying in fact that slaves were stock.

On the other hand, senators were to be elected only indirectly, through a system of electors, and from each state as a whole, for a period of 6 years. Each state, regardless of size or population, would be entitled to 2 senators.   The Senate was to be a much more stable gentleman’s club, viewed as a counter to what was expected to be a more raucous House with much greater turnover.  The men at the convention from the bigger states resented domination by the smaller ones, but this also foreshadowed the debates of the first half of the nineteenth century to balance slaveholding states in the South with free states in the North, as more states were brought into the Union.

The discussion about how long a President should serve started at the extreme end with a proposal from Hamilton:  the President should be elected for a life term (much as is true of a Supreme Court Justice, who is appointed by the President and must be confirmed by the Senate, for a term of “good behavior”).  This got  little traction among delegates who feared the restoration of the monarchy.  They compromised on a four year term, indirectly elected.  (While both the 3/5 clause for Representatives and indirect election for Senators has been amended, the electoral college still exists for the President and Vice President). The Presidency is the only office which has a limit of two terms (amended after Franklin Roosevelt was elected for four terms).

What each branch is responsible for is the crux of the “separation of powers.”  For example, only the House can initiate a revenue raising bill; but all legislation must be approved by both House and Senate and then must be submitted to the President for approval.  The President can veto legislation (this was originally conceived as an exceptional circumstance;  the first significant use of the veto was Jackson’s refusal to accept the renewal of the national bank charter in 1832), and Congress must obtain a 2/3 majority vote to override the veto.  It was not until the Supreme Court ruled in Marbury vs Madison (1803) that the doctrine of “judicial review” was established: the right of the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of Congressional legislation (extended a few years later to state legislation).

Fearful that the executive might accumulate too much power, the framers gave the Representatives the sole power to “impeach” the President, that is, to draw up articles accusing the President of a serious crime.  Under the Constitution, once the President is thus accused, the Senate has the sole power to try the case, and the Supreme Court Chief Justice presides.

Section 8 of Article 1 (The legislative branch) collects here the “enumerated” powers of Congress – those powers specifically assigned.   Here the legal framework for the State strides to the forefront.  Collecting taxes, coining and regulating the value of money, naturalization laws, bankruptcy law, declaring war, establishing and supporting armies, navies, a militia – all the necessary legislation to maintain the organs of force required by a national government.  While the power to “raise the armies” is given to Congress, the command is specifically given to the President.  Civilian control of the military is the principle here.  However, only rarely has the military been commanded directly by the President (e.g., Washington during the Whiskey Rebellion).   It is a legitimate question as to how much that separation of function really matters in a militarized society such as ours.

Sections 9 and 10 limit the powers of Congress and prohibit powers of the States respectively.  Generally these show the efforts of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists to compromise on the central authority of the federal government.  The power of the Southern representatives at the convention is seen by the first paragraph of Section 9:  the Congress is prohibited from abolishing the slave trade from overseas before 1808.  Even before the invention of the cotton gin made the South the source of the bulk of the world’s cotton, slave production of both sugar and tobacco were the source of great wealth in the South.  Many people including Southerners expected that slavery would ultimately fade away because of the tendency of tobacco production to deplete the soil.

It is worth while questioning, before going on to the amendments, who is entitled to benefit from the Constitution.  Who is entitled to political freedom or citizenship?  Who is entitled to hold office and vote?  Congress is given the power to establish “uniform rules of Naturalization,” but nowhere in the Constitution itself is a definition of citizenship given.  The document refers to “the People,” and “Indians” and “Indians not taxed” and “other persons.”    “Other persons” refers in all cases to slaves, who have no rights.  Even fugitive slaves, run away to free territory, must be returned to their owners just like any other property (Article IV, Section 2). The states can regulate how they want to treat free blacks.  Women are not mentioned in the Constitution and were subject to different regulations depending on the states.  Owning property was considered a measure of responsibility by the framers, and consequently became a measure of whether a person could vote or participate in society.  Limitation on democracy was evident everywhere, in conflict with the revolutionary proclamation “We the People” that starts this document out.

With Washington elected and the first Congress seated, the new government faced some significant questions that it had to resolve before it could find out, as we stated earlier, what kind of nation an independent America should be.

As indicated above, the first question they did address was writing a Bill of Rights.  The new Congress wrote 17 amendments, which were then consolidated to 12 amendments presented to the states for ratification.  Only 10 were ratified at first, and these have come down to us as the Bill of Rights.

The first amendment begins “Congress shall make no law . . .” and then goes on to enumerate what Congress is prohibited from infringing on:  religion, speech, press, public assembly.  For most of the nineteenth century, this was interpreted as a prohibition only against Congress.  States routinely promulgated laws that inhibited free speech.   The twentieth century saw the application of the first amendment to more peripheral cases, so that today it is generally applied to states as well.  But even after the Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams administration (1796-1800)  were rescinded in the succeeding Jefferson administration, states continued to pass legislation that limited first amendment rights.

Amendments 2, 3 and 4 are closely connected to experience in the immediately concluded revolutionary war.  The presence and behavior of British soldiers on colonial soil gave rise to the right to bear arms (2), the right to refuse to have soldiers stay in your home (3) and the right to refuse officials searching your home.  Of these, the second and fourth amendments continue to be a bone of contention.  Note that the FBI raids on anti war and labor activists over a year ago and the seizure of computers, printed files and art work are seen in violation of the fourth amendment as much as the first (targeting those who exercise rights of free speech and public assembly).

The Fifth Amendment figures prominently in our own day.  The prohibition against being tried twice for the same crime (double jeopardy); the requirement for due process of law; and that one may not be compelled to testify against oneself are all wrapped up in this amendment. “Taking the Fifth” has been the last resort of those politically prosecuted, often to keep from implicating others as in the McCarthy era witch hunts.  The grand jury system, originally conceived of as a protection against unjust indictments, now effectively eliminates protection against self-incrimination when it offers prosecutorial immunity in exchange for testimony.  Under these circumstances, pleading self-incrimination can invoke a contempt charge and jail.

Amendments 6, 7, and 8 all deal with the conduct of the justice system, trials, bail, and cruel and unusual punishment, all intended to ameliorate any excesses caused by a punitive central government.  The extent to which these amendments have been successful can be judged by the length of time people are in jail now before trials take place or before final adjudication of their cases.

Amendments 9 and 10 are the amendments which limit the control of the federal government by reserving rights to the people, so long as they are not enumerated nor prohibited by the Constitution.  This is the last defense of the advocates of states rights vs. national government rights.

In the next section, I want to discuss how these themes — slavery and democracy;  corporations, business and labor — have continued throughout our history, in the context of the Constitution.    Before we get there, I want to point out how some of what we discussed earlier was modified by the amendment process.  We will discuss the Civil War Amendments separately.  Note however that the language in the Constitution prohibiting a direct tax on the people was altered in 1913 by Amendment 16, which established the Constitutionality of the income tax and followed decades of attempts to resolve this question.

Also in 1913 the ratification of the 17th amendment changed made the election of Senators direct.  As a historical curiosity, the 27th amendment, which had been proposed in 1789 as one of the original Bill of Rights, was finally adopted in 1992.  This amendment requires that Congressional raises could not take effect until the session after they were approved by Congress.

Corporations and the Constitution

The period roughly from the first administration under the Constitution until perhaps 1830 is sometimes called the “Market Revolution.”   This term has a number of levels of meaning.  First and foremost, the former colonies that had been dependent on British imports (thus they were thoroughly integrated into the developing manufacturing system of Britain) now established their own manufacturing base.  Second, internally, within the former colonies, a market developed between city and surrounding countryside, between manufacturing areas and farming areas.  Third, the already distinct regional differences between North and South became exaggerated, as the slave economy actually inhibited the development of manufacture, and the bond between shipping, Southern cotton, and Northern manufactured products became strengthened. (The South did build some  textile mills in the large cities and ports.)

Immediately upon the completion of the Bill of Rights and its submission to the states, the Federalists put forward their program for what the new nation should look like.  Spearheaded by now Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, they proposed that the new nation needed to be credit worthy, therefore needed to pay off its debts (primarily to the investors who had bankrolled the revolutionary war) and needed to borrow more money (since it had none) and institute a system of taxation (to be able to pay off new debt and to pay for anticipated projects).  One such project was the establishment of a standing army (fear of invasion; need to put down rebellion).  Another was to subsidize new manufacturing initiatives and to erect protective tariffs against England.

Jefferson and Madison and others coalesced in opposition to this plan.  In their view, everything needed to be centered on developing an agricultural economy of “yeoman farmers,” that is people who owned their small farms and produced grain for export to the world.  Owning land guaranteed independence, in their view.  The factory system and wage labor simply reproduced dependence on the manufacturer. The banking system seemed to the Jeffersonians only an effort to produce a dependent population.

Where they mostly agreed was on the need to repay war debts and to protect both Southerners and Northerners against English tariff walls and other protective legislation.  American ship builders and Southern cotton planters had lost some of their best British customers.  The two sides reached a compromise, when the Republicans (as the Jefferson-Madison faction called themselves) agreed to all of the Federalists’ program except the manufacturing subsidy; and the Federalists agreed to establish the national capital in a Southern location, what became Washington, D.C.  By the mid nineties, what both Madison and Hamilton had argued against in the Federalist Papers and hoped to avoid had become commonplace, Not only had party factions developed within Congress and the states, but Madison and Hamilton had become leaders of the factions.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 changed the South and therefore the entire country.  The gin is a relatively simple machine that cleans seeds from the cotton boll.  This was a highly

The cotton gin

labor intensive job and therefore limited the amount of acreage that could be planted.  In 1790, the amount of cotton produced in the South amounted to perhaps 8.5 million tons.  By 1820, the amount had increased 20 times, the American South was the center of the world’s cotton production, and after 1833 when the British abolished slavery, the U.S. became the world center of a slave economy.  This had definite implications in regard to the slave trade, which we will go into later.  For now, however, it is important to emphasize that the concentration of the cotton kingdom further differentiated North from South, and integrated the slave system of cotton production into the world capitalist economy.

The first national bank, chartered in 1791 for 20 years, was an essential part of Hamilton’s plan.  Jefferson opposed the bank, a private institution, as undermining property rights and as a power not enumerated and delegated to Congress in the Constitution.   In contrast, Hamilton asserted that what Congress could do for a person it could do for an artificial person, namely, a business. You can trace the government arguments about banking, corporations and people back to this point.  The plot thickens, however, as the nation begins to develop.

The Jefferson presidency took advantage of a revolution that broke out in Haiti, along with the French engagement in a European war, to purchase the Louisiana territory, a land grab that doubled the size of the United States.  Note that Jefferson, who showed how conflicted he was about slavery in his writings,  took the opportunity to quarantine Haiti. His Federalist foes, whom he had defeated by branding them anti-democratic, welcomed the Haitian revolution. The Federalists were also quick to point out that such a purchase was not consistent with the enumerated powers either – not delegated to the President.  They argued that he spent money that the Federal government did not have to obtain land that it did not need.  But Jefferson foresaw an expanded frontier which would allow the yeoman farmer class, the backbone of the nation, to move West.  The purchase also gave the United States control of the port of New Orleans, which was the gateway from the Ohio and Mississippi river grain producing areas to Europe.    Jefferson was eager to achieve this.

In 1811, half way through Madison’s administration, which succeeded Jefferson’s in 1808, the charter on the first national bank expired and was not renewed.  The Republicans ran into trouble, however, in the War of 1812.  Unable to finance the war or to pay the debt that accrued from the war, Madison moved to re-establish the national bank.  This charter was passed in 1816 for another 20 year period, part of what became known as “The American System,” an economic package sponsored by the Federalists in 1812 to 1816 and then, as the Federalists fell apart, by the new party that emerged out of the wreck of the Federalists, the Whigs.

The “American System” was a continuation of the Federalist plan of Hamilton, focusing on the bank, high tariffs on imports, and federal subsidies for “internal improvements.”  The Whigs now aimed to finance the development of roads and canals to further the westward expansion and the trade that was necessary to support that expansion.  The opposition to this was led by Southern capital, which had no need for  federal subsidies for “internal improvements.” River waterways had always provided its primary internal traffic, and externally the oceans allowed for transport of the cotton crop around the world.  Southern capital did invest in railroads as the century progressed.  The purpose was to tie the cotton plantation areas with the ports and the newly built textile mills, constructed to compete with the more rapidly developing industry of the North.  Again the arguments raised were Constitutional.  Congress had no enumerated right to tax Southerners to pay for Northern improvements.  The arguments in favor went all the way back to the Preamble, to provide for the general welfare.  Monroe, who became president in 1816, relied on John Quincy Adams to prepare the legislative package;  Adams was thoroughly shocked when Republican Monroe had a change of heart and vetoed the internal improvements measure.

Chief Justice John Marshall

The Second National Bank, however, had been approved in 1816 and given a 20 year charter.  Three years later came the Dartmouth and McCulloch decisions of the Supreme Court.

In Dartmouth College vs. Woodward, the court decided that corporate charters are contracts that cannot be rescinded by future lawmakers.  The charter was a contract, and just because the members of the legislature changed did not mean they could unilaterally refuse to honor the previously negotiated contract.  Going even further, in McCulloch vs. Maryland the Supreme Court ruled that state laws could not be made in opposition to federal legislation that carried out Constitutional provisions.  In that particular case, Maryland attempted to tax the Baltimore branch of the National Bank, pursuant to a law that allowed the state to tax banks not chartered by the state.  The Court, in its ruling, indicated that the taxing power was being used not simply to raise funds, but to tax the bank to death.

John Marshall, presiding over the Supreme Court, here ruled first that the federal government has the power to establish corporations (e.g. banks) even though this is nowhere stated directly in the Constitution.  It is implied, he said, in that the creation of the bank was for the general welfare of the population, and it was not prohibited in the Constitution.

Further rulings in 1824 and 1837 clarified also that the states could not limit the right of corporations to compete.  And in 1830 to 1832, under the Andrew Jackson administration, a series of Court decisions relating to “Indian Removal” – expropriation of Indian land – asserted the primacy of contracts with the federal government. In general, the Supreme Court confirmed the “sacred rights” of private property.  The government, the Court repeatedly affirmed, is bound to protect property rights over personal rights.

By the time Jackson took office in 1828, the old Federalist Party had disintegrated.  Jackson’s own party, a reinvented version of the Republicans now called the Democratic-Republican Party or just the Democrats, was a states rights, pro slavery, Southern oriented party, with strength among Western and Northern farmers.  The Whig opposition based itself in the North, among artisans, manufacturers, workers and small farmers.  Jackson was opposed to the “American System” and especially the National Bank, which he saw as fraudulent.  Jackson was a “hard money” man.  He saw the banks as issuing worthless paper that depreciated the value of money and cut into the real income of wage earners and farmers.  In 1832, Nicholas Biddle, head of the National Bank, persuaded Congress to extend the life of the bank (even though it was not due to expire for 4 more years; he feared that after the upcoming elections Jackson would be able to organize to stop the bank renewal).

Jackson responded by vetoing the extension.  He was the first president to go over the heads of the Congress and to appeal to the whole people to “oppose the rich and powerful.” His message  called forth considerable criticism from Whigs, who denounced him for usurping the power of the legislature.  After the veto, and in spite of the Biddle campaign against him, Jackson won re-election by a sweeping margin as the defender of the “humble American.” In his second term of office, Jackson removed deposits from the National Bank and placed them in various state banks, often under the leadership of Jackson’s cronies (“pet banks”), where the unregulated issue of paper money was a factor bringing on the economic crisis of 1837.

It is worthwhile stopping here, for a moment, to see what the country looked like on the eve of the 1836 election.  48 years after the ratification of the Constitution, all but 8 years were under Southern administrations  (32 years were Virginia presidents).  The dominance of the South had played a significant role in limiting the development of what we have called “The American System.”  Still, objective forces pushed that forward.  Despite Southern objections, the National Bank was chartered for 40 of these years.  In part it was chartered because, despite the ideological convictions of the leadership of the Parties, wars had to be financed, the elite had to be repaid for financing the revolution, and taxes had to be raised.  Both sides were fundamentally agreed about this.  And underneath the political machinations, manufacturing advances were fueled by rapid technological discoveries.

We have already talked about the significance of the cotton gin, introduced in 1793.  The development of the steam engine from the early 1700’s to the introduction of the double acting steam engine in the early 1800’s rapidly accelerated the advance of industry.  Mills and factories that had depended on water power could now be located far from water power sources. Steam power was also fundamental to the commercial use of steamboats and railroads.  Steam also powered the printing press and the rapid expansion of newspaper publishing.  The Erie Canal, the Cumberland Road and other  canals, railroads and toll roads opened up the west to transportation of goods, and thus developed the market relationship between East and West.

Nation and commerce changed in this 48 year period.  We started with a loosely associated group of former colonies now called states that had two distinctly different regional economies. Northern farmers produced food crops, while merchant shipping served the triangular slave trade and as fishing vessels. The agrarian South depended on cash crops of  sugar, tobacco, indigo and cotton.  Politically the cash-crop South dominated the small farming and manufacturing North.  The goal of most families was land ownership, which conferred “independence”: that is the owner of land, like the owner of a business, is “his own man.”  This translates into the ideal of the Republicans, later the Democrats, as the “yeoman farmer.”  By the end of this period, the dominance of the South (politically) is on the wane.  The wealth in property is still concentrated in the South, but “internal improvements” have connected the separate states.  New England has become a manufacturing center, and the factory system has made huge inroads in the agrarian base of the North.  “Mill girls” flee the farms to find “independence” in the textile plants that crowd the landscape. The ideal of the yields to the practicality of the worker and the workplace, wages begins to replace land ownership. As the century proceeds, controlling the land becomes, for many, tied to the banks who own the land; while independence becomes identified with the workers’ freedom to move from one job to another. Farmers and industry in the North produce more than can be consumed in the region, and steam boats plying the Ohio and the Mississippi penetrate the heart of the South with food and finished and manufactured goods.

This market revolution of the early 19th century is, in a certain sense, being revisited in our own day.

The market has been redefined globally by a new form of production analogous to the steam engine. The technological revolution we have experienced in the last 40 years has introduced a new mode of production in the microchip and its spinoffs.  What was independence before (the promise of a good job and the freedom to find another better one) has become dependence once more; while electronics has created a class free from employment at all (i.e., no longer connected to the old production process, no longer likely to find work within the old environment).  Between the 1840s and the present lies a world of difference.  Now century old Supreme Court decisions on monopoly no longer seem to hold water, old rules no longer apply.   Corporations do what they want and government steps in to help out when they stumble.

In this context the Citizens United Supreme Court decision is consistent with the position of a large faction of those who wrote the Constitution. The decision is even more consistent with a global economy in which the microchip and robotics has ejected many wage earners into a permanently unemployed class. It is consistent with an era in which everything takes a back seat to privatization.

Slavery and the Constitution

James Madison

Let’s step back again, this time to examine how the Constitution laid the basis for the “irrepressible conflict” about slavery.  Madison, like Washington and many other framers of the Constitution, was a slaveholder. He recorded in his notes about the deliberations that color had become the basis for “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”  (Foner, p. 258).  Later he assured his fellow Virginians, questioning whether they should ratify the Constitution, that the document offered slavery better security that was available under the Articles of Confederation.

Madison had good reason for assuring the Virginia delegation.  One of the most significant pieces of legislation passed by the Congress under the old Articles (in 1787) was the Northwest Ordinance.  The effect that concerns us here is that it prohibited slavery in the first “territory” created by the federal government for the purpose of ultimately admitting new states to the Union.  By this prohibition the Ordinance made the Ohio River the boundary between free and slave states.  The Ordinance also established the precedent that the Federal government had a right to determine whether a territory could engage in slavery. South Carolina, one of the states with the greatest slave population, came to the Convention determined to defend the “peculiar institution,” and by their efforts greatly affected the document.

South Carolina was responsible for the fugitive slave clause and the 3/5 Clause. Their delegates proposed the Electoral College and pressured the Convention to limit Congressional ability to levy taxes for fear of federal taxation on slave property. While New England and slaveholding Virginia wanted the slave trade abolished (Virginia had a large number of native born slaves), South Carolina threatened disunion if the abolition were not delayed (70 years later South Carolina led the secession movement and the military attack on the North that opened the Civil War).

The fugitive slave clause not only attached “extraterritoriality” to slavery – i.e. that slaves were still in bondage no matter where they traveled – but also created a mechanism that required all states to police the institution of slavery.  Further, the 3/5 Clause greatly exaggerated the national power of the Southern states, giving them much more representation in the House than their voting population would have allowed them.  Through that representation, they also influenced the Electoral College.  Jefferson won the presidency from John Adams in large part because of the 3/5 Clause.  Of the first 16 presidential elections, all but four placed a Southern slaveholder in the white house.

Finally, Southern slaveholders were even partly responsible for the opposition to the Bill of Rights among the delegates to the Convention.  Again we call attention to South Carolina, whose delegate Charles Pinckney, argued: “such bills generally begin with declaring that all men are by nature born free,”  while “a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.”  The words “slave” and “slavery” appear nowhere in the document, and as Maryland delegate Luther Martin wrote, “[his colleagues] anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expression which might be odious to ears of Americans,” but were “willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified.” (Foner, 258, 259)

Finally, while the first Congress passed a Bill of Rights, it shrank from hearing petitions and bills to abolish slavery.   Writing for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Benjamin Franklin again sought to bring a petition before Congress.  Again he could not get a hearing.

Our inquiry purposefully focuses on the legal (Constitutional) expression of the “irrepressible conflict.”  But at the same time I want to emphasize that rebellion and abolitionism, both taking place in the “extra-legal” sphere, were extremely important elements leading up to the Civil War.  While large, organized rebellions were few and far between, they did occur and were extremely significant; few because of the close overseer and state suppression that isolated them early, and executed those who threatened the status quo.  But from Gabriel to John Brown, armed insurrection was a threat which the South was bound to fear and the North to take account of.  It is just not the subject of this discussion.

If we fast forward to 1820, we find ourselves in an America caught in the middle of the market revolution.  This is an America where New York surpassed Virginia as most populous. Cotton production had reached 170 million pounds, 20 times what it was when the cotton gin was invented.  Population was rapidly increasing and settlers moved westward.  Land speculators, often families of the elite framers of the Constitution,  bought huge tracts.   From 1791 through 1820 Ohio, Illinois and Indiana were admitted as states from the territory of the Northwest Ordinance, along with Maine and Vermont, as states without slavery.  However the following states were also admitted, all of which allowed slavery: Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.  Southern states regarded their Northern neighbors with great fear.

In the 12 years following Congressional abolition of the slave trade, the “Up-South” border states had stepped in to fill the gap by developing a specialty as a breeding reserve of the plantation states.  Of course illegal trading in African slaves continued, but the insatiable demand of the cotton kingdom created the division of labor to fulfill the supply.  The concept of being sold “down the river” was a death sentence from overwork in 7 years. Then Missouri applied for admission as a slave state.

In 1821 Congress reached a “compromise” which pushed the conflict into the background for the time being.  Congress agreed that Missouri could come in as a slave state, but that all other states admitted from the Louisiana Territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri would be free.  With that, the South eyed expansion into Texas and carving five states out of the Texas territory.  This required taking the territory from Mexico, a process which took another 25 years before it was accomplished. Again, the details are beyond the scope of this investigation.  However, in a style which would be repeated many times in our history, the Federal government manufactured a pretext for invasion of Mexico and captured a vast territory including Texas, California and the states in between.

In 1846 Representative Wilmot proposed to Congress that no slave state be admitted from the territory taken from Mexico.  This was unacceptable to Southerners, for whom the expansion of slave territory was now a matter of dominance in the government.  The balance in the House of Representatives was turning against the South;  the Presidency was no longer guaranteed to a Southerner; the Supreme Court was still in the hands of the South.  The battle was now for the Senate, and thus the electoral expansion here was crucial to the slave power.  The conflict was so great that a new political party emerged in 1848 taking elements of the Whigs and the Democrats with them.  These Free Soilers ran Martin Van Buren for President.  That a former President would run on a platform limiting slavery showed that abolition had achieved a popular respectability not seen before.

Still, in 1850 the legislature did what it had done before, covering the conflict over with a “compromise” that allowed the voters of a particular territory to determine if the territory should be admitted free or slave. California applied for admission as a free state. John Calhoun, representing South Carolina, was intransigent representing the slave power, but finally agreed to “popular sovereignty” as long as Congress would pass a strengthened fugitive slave law, and as long as Washington, D.C. would remain a slaveholding area (the slave trade would be abolished in the District).

Once again the conflict arose about the Kansas territory in 1854.  With Calhoun and Clay, the titanic compromisers of an earlier era now dead, Stephen Douglas, hoped to position himself for a run for the Presidency.  He proposed to apply the doctrine of popular sovereignty to the Kansas territory.  But this was part of the territory already decided in 1821, all the territory being north of the Missouri Compromise line.  The firestorm this set off shattered the Democratic Party, from which the Republican Party was born, led directly to bloody Kansas (the struggle between free and slave factions), and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Supreme Court set in place the legal capstone to the battle around slavery  with its Dred Scott decision of 1857.  Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Blacks, not being persons, “had no

Dred Scott

rights which the white man was bound to respect.”  From definite limits to slave states, little by little the South had enforced their dominance while they had it. In Dred Scott the Court established that slave property existed everywhere in the United States. This direct challenge to the North set the stage for the consolidation of the Republican Party and the 1858 election campaign.

1858 was not a year for Presidential elections, but the issue was national:  what to do about the slave power and its threats against the Union.  The Congressional and Court battles against the Market Revolution often took the form of the structure of government and “states rights.”  John Calhoun, who had at one time championed the cause of internal improvements, became the champion of the Southern doctrine called “nullification,” meaning that states had the right to oppose legislation that in their view went against the Constitution.  From South Carolina he had also championed the Southern states’ right to maintain and expand slavery.  In 1858 Calhoun’s legacy was carried on by Stephen A. Douglas, running for Senator against the Republican Abraham Lincoln.  The issue was the slave power and how to contain it. In a hotly contested election, after a series of legendary debates, Lincoln lost, most likely because the shift in population to the northern part of Illinois (Chicago) was not reflected yet in the electors who chose the Senators.

1860 was a Presidential election year, and the Republicans nominated Lincoln.  His Illinois Senate campaign brought him to the notice of the national party, when Republicans could not decide among more prominent figures vying for the candidacy.   The Democratic Party was fractured by the slavery question, and ran two candidates:  Douglas ran as the Northern Democrat candidate, while Breckinridge ran as the Southern Democrat.  A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, ran a candidate as well.  With 40% of the vote Lincoln polled more than any other candidate and won the election.  Before Lincoln even took office, South Carolina’s legislature passed articles of secession from the Union, followed first by six other Deep South states. Four more states seceded to comprise the Confederate States of America.

Election of 1860

The political result of the Republican victory, the subsequent secession of Southern states, and the consequent Civil War was a Congress dominated by Republicans, all hailing from the North. Within this group were “radicals” who went further than limiting the expansion of slavery and the slave power.  Sentiment for abolition now resided at the highest levels of government.  While Lincoln maneuvered to get support, civil rights legislation was passed that formed the basis for what became known as the Civil War amendments to the Constitution.

The 13th Amendment, to abolish slavery in all of the U.S., was proposed by Congress January 31, 1865, as the war drew to a close.  (Less than 3 months later, Lincoln had been murdered). It was quickly ratified by the Northern States;  all but Mississippi of the reconstituted Southern states ratified it by the end of the year.  (The North organized the re-establishment of the Southern legislatures).   Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, became President after Lincoln was assassinated.  A Southerner, Johnson hoped to re-admit the Southern states to the Union when they passed the 13th Amendment.  The “radical” Republicans thwarted this aim.  They wanted to maintain the power that the North exercised during the War,  not to return to the state of affairs before the War.  Further, when they saw the Southern states passing legislation to control the ex-slaves with violence, called “Black Codes,” they understood further action would be necessary.

Congress then passed the Reconstruction Acts, placing the former CSA states under military rule.  Congress prohibited Southern members of Congress from rejoining the legislature until their state passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  While aimed specifically at ensuring that the former slaves were granted citizenship and enjoyed equal rights, the 14th Amendment has been applied much more broadly.  All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens (this is the first mention of citizenship in the Constitution), and no state can abridge their rights, privileges, or deny equal protection of the law.  Further, the 14th Amendment struck down the infamous 3/5 Clause, simply stating that Representatives are apportioned according to population.  Proposed in June, 1866, the Amendment was finally ratified 2 years later.

In 1870, under the new presidential administration of Ulysses S Grant, the 15th Amendment was ratified, making it explicit that ex slaves have the right to vote.

Having politically broken the back of the slave power, the Republican “radicalism” receded until, in 1877, the contested election of 1876 was decided by a compromise that withdrew troops from the garrisons that still existed within the former “military districts” that had governed the South under the 14th Amendment.  Peonage, debt slavery and sharecropping became the order of the day in agricultural Southern states, but now under the control of Wall Street.  W.E.B. DuBois, writing in Black Reconstruction, describes the political result thus: “Wall Street Controls the South and the South Controls the Nation.”

Just as the Market Revolution reflected a change in the economic forces in society, so too the political developments leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction reflected a further development of those economic forces. The various compromises and Congressional battles and the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court all reflected attempts to shove under the rug an irrepressible conflict that forced its way out without regard to the wishes to ignore it.  Clausewitz’ famous dictum, “War is politics by other means,” certainly holds true here, as unsatisfying compromise after compromise yielded to armed conflict.  Reconstruction was a political continuation of the War and resulted in the political supremacy of the North along with the economic supremacy of industry and railroad capital.

Prior to the Civil War, the wealthiest individuals in the country were slaveholding Southerners;  the four million slaves, considered as property, were

Note how composition of capital changes over time, from primarily slaves to railroads to industrial capital to financial capital in our own day. Source: Power in America, John Keller, p. 58

collectively the largest percentage of capital.  The passage of the 13th Amendment legislated the largest expropriation of private property until that time – without payment to the owners.  It is not a coincidence that following this two sectors of society were immediately affected.  The elite of society, where the greatest accumulation of capital took place, was first (until the World War I) in the expansion of railroads (throughout the South and out to the West, an internal improvement that had not been possible under Southern domination) and at the same time a rapid expansion of industrial capital, especially with the expansion of the steel industry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.  Between World War I and World War II, industrial capital became proportionally larger than railroad capital.

The second sector affected by the end of the slavery was the labor movement.  Karl Marx had written about slave and free labor that labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.   He also famously predicted that ending slavery would lead to a rapid expansion of organized labor across the country “in 7 league boots” .  It is again no coincidence that 10 years after the cessation of military action the first national general strike took place – starting among railroad workers; and that the fight for the 8 hour day culminated in massive demonstrations May 1, 1886; and that the troops removed from military garrisons in the South at the end of Reconstruction were redeployed in the North to put down the strike movements of the workers.

The period from the end of the Civil War to the 1940’s in the South appeared to be a return to the pre-war days, without the name of “slavery.”  Perhaps nothing epitomizes this as much as the nefarious Plessy vs Ferguson decision in which the Supreme Court affirmed “separate but equal education. But the Market and Industrial Revolutions had changed the face of the nation forever and created the basis for further changes to take place.  The cotton picking machine finally ended the reliance on sharecropping, creating a vast section of unemployed that migrated into Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and New York, industrial centers in the North.  Black veterans returning from World War II were unwilling to re-integrate into second class citizenship.  And an American ruling class, poised on expansion supplanting the European colonial masters in Africa and Asia, began to position itself to represent a “democratic” alternative.  These forces, not entirely in agreement, took on the relics of the Democratic Party hanging on in the South.  Brown vs. Board of Education represents the judicial turning point, a reassertion of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

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So we return to where we started from, to recognize that the Constitution and its creation was and is a tremendously complex process. This has been a cursory overview, so cursory in fact that we have scarcely mentioned the First Amendment and its perils.  The Constitution is first and foremost the legal basis on which our society is constructed. Their time was the destruction of feudal society and the creation of capitalism; the invention of the steam engine and through that the creation of new classes and class relations. The Constitution was written to deal with these revolutionary changes.  But these are not our revolutionary changes.

We live in an age of the dominance of financial capital (since World War II), exacerbated by a microchip revolution that undercuts labor and consequently capital’s ability to profit from the labor of the worker.  Financial speculation is a response to this reality, represented also by new class relations and the growth of a social group that exists outside production, that has been expelled from relations in production.  This high-tech capitalism is perhaps the fundamental characteristic of what is called “neoliberalism.”  Flowing from this fundamental characteristic is the drive to turn everything into a commodity.  All public property becomes fair game, sold to the highest bidder or the inside trader. The watchword is “privatization.”  Corporations merge with the government, assume whatever mantle assures them most power (including but not limited to “personhood,” and all efforts at reform are met with refusal and then violence. Mass incarceration, disinvestment in education, privatization of public health (and other services) follow a familiar pattern, codified in the original Constitution in the 3/5 Clause, that focuses on Blacks and Latinos in order to attack the poor as a whole.  The racism of the 19th century is raised to a higher power to attack the “race” of the poor.

Whether we like it or not, the Constitution is the authority for what is most heinous in our society, including corporate personhood and other features of “neoliberalism.”  It is also the authority for what is most revolutionary in our history, no matter how restricted or how little envisioned by our founders.  Our attitude toward the Constitution requires that we reclaim from it whatever is revolutionary, while recognizing that our time is different.  Still, the demands that echo from that time to ours reflect the striving of centuries of fighters for a new society organized to provide justice, peace and equality.

We are taking up that banner.  The State system erected by the Constitution, and the corporations with which it is merging, can no longer contain or answer the demands of a population excluded from the benefits that the society can produce in abundance.  It is the “Right of the People to Alter or Abolish” a destructive government. That is our birth right.  It is our responsibility.

Suggested Readings:

Beard, Charles An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (MacMillan)

Foner, Eric  Give Me Liberty  (WW Norton)

Keller, John  Power in America  (Vanguard Books)

Peery, Nelson  The Future is Up To Us  (Speakers For A New America)

Film Showing & Discussion: King and Chicago Then And Now

King and Chicago:  Then and Now

Sunday Jan. 15
7:15- 9 pm @ Mess Hall
6932 N Glenwood (@Morse Ave)On the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday, city of Chicago politicians may decide this week that the kind of protests, for which Dr. King is famous, will be illegal. Occupy Rogers Park has our own plan to celebrate this important date. We begin a series of educational programs with King in Chicago, a video presentation and discussion of Chicago then & now, similarities and differences, race and class, featuring

• Allen Harris: journalist and member of Occupy the South Side,

• Joe Peery: Founding member of the Chicago Gary Area Union of The Homeless in 1986. Led effort to fill public housing’s empty units with homeless during the 1980s and 1990s. Formerly a Youth Organizer in Cabrini Green. Former resident of Cabrini Green. Currently a reporter for the People’s Tribune. Currently a resident in the mixed income housing that was built to replace Cabrini Green and fighting the unequal apartheid like treatment of CHA residents residing there.

Dinnerluck/potluck precedes program, which begins at 7:30 sharp, Mess Hall, 6932 N Glenwood just south of Morse. Presented by Occupy Rogers Park, in conjunction with Mess Hall.