Category: history

culture

A Short Bit About School

There’s a scene from that marvelous film, The Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams playing teacher John Keating has a brief conversation with Mr. Nolan, the headmaster of the school played by Norman Lloyd, about the purpose of his job.

“I thought my job was to teach them to think,” says Keating.

“Not on your life,” Mr. Nolan snaps back.  “They can learn that in college.”

Or something like that.  You get the point, anyway.

I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto’s thick, data-packed screed on American public schools, The Underground History of American Education.  Gatto taught in New York City for 30 years and the year he achieved teacher-of-the-year status, both citywide and statewide, he resigned, fed up finally with fighting a losing battle against a system he declares page after page in this book to be fundamentally malign.

Not that the people who either set it up or run it are bad people—they did what they did and do what they do because they believe in it.  And, Gatto stresses, like all true believers, their vision supersedes the reality in which they find themselves.

I found a lot in this book with which to disagree.  Gatto’s history is right on the borderlands of conspiracy theory.  He mentions the masons a few times and once at least accompanied the reference with a suggestive “I wonder what that is all about” line.  But he insists this was never done with ill-intent in mind.

Ill intent or not, the result was a system that does not educate, by and large, except by accident.  It is a system that chews up idealistic teachers and students on a daily basis because neither realize what exactly it is they are there to do.  The system knows, has it built into its basic make-up, and after a century and a half of accrued inertia, the system cannot change.  Not easily and not effectively.  Those who charge the windmill get tossed thoughtlessly and sometimes crushed.  He details instances where perfectly fine teachers have been summarily fired or forced to resign because they elected to do what they thought they were supposed to do instead of what was required of them and the further infuriating instances of teachers and administrators who resignedly continue doing things they know won’t work because they want their pension and sinecure.

So what is it that he suggests schools do?

To my surprise, it turns out to be what I’ve been suggesting for decades.

I’ve written about this before, but in this context it’s worth repeating.  I hated school.  Loathed it.  Practically from the first year on.  And it was a weird hatred because I would return every fall determined to like it, to get something out of it.  This is something my parents likely would not believe, since from their point of view I wasted my time in school.  But I showed up every year hoping something good would happen.  It did, occasionally.  One or two of my teachers were actually pretty good.  But in toto the 12 years was a dreary, mind-numbing, frustrating experience…and I didn’t know why!

Learning was never a problem for me.  I picked things up quickly.  Once learned, however, I wanted to move on.  The class, however, stayed stuck making me prove over and over again that I knew what I already did—and then occasionally making me feel like I really didn’t know it.  Homework completely dismayed me.  Some of it, true, I wasn’t very adept at—I didn’t do well in arithmetic (although I can do percentages in my head, as well as multiply and do some rudimentary fractions—a career in photography is impossible without some math skills, at least the way I practiced it)—but other things, once the teacher said I knew it, I was ready for the next thing.  Which didn’t happen.

I was reading ahead of my grade practically from the beginning (I entered kindergarten knowing how to read, albeit my main reading was comic books) and that often was met with the kind of disapproval from my teachers that’s hard to pin down.  I knew by their attitude and sometimes their actions that I was doing something wrong, but I for the life of me couldn’t understand what.

And then of course there was the social aspect.  I was bullied from 1st grade to 8th.  There was, I soon learned, nothing that would be done about it by the teachers.

Looking back on it now, I can characterize it handily—school was a prison.  I had to be there, locked in a room with other prisoners who didn’t like being there, and the sociology of the playground was in its much milder way the sociology of the prison yard.  Students had no power except over other students and it was exercised in cruel but, once the circumstances are clear, perfectly understandable ways.  This also explained why there was such antagonism toward “good students”—they were seen as suck-ups, people who were trying to curry favor with the bosses and make an escape “for good behavior.”

Some schools were worse than others.  There were public schools in my childhood everyone knew were bad places to go.  No learning of any worth took place in them and the main requirement was to be tough.

My experience in school is consistent with Mr. Gatto’s diagnosis—public schools are not intended to educate but to socialize.  They were established to take kids out of the home and turn them into “useful citizens.”  Useful to whom and for what changes from time to time, but when you recognize the immense contributions of men like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to the establishment of modern public schooling, you start to get a hint.  When I went to Roosevelt High School I was told that it was a traditional “blue collar” school—which meant it was there to turn out factory workers for local St. Louis industries.  Some of the class selections made by the older counselors on behalf of students—who by then didn’t care all that much, school was school, what difference did it make what they had to take—reflected this idea.

Although at the time it made little real sense because the culture at large had changed during the Sixties and most of this was done by rote, because it had always been done, and wasn’t leading the students anywhere useful, even by the questionable standards of the early 20th Century.

One of the most telling statements in Gatto’s book concerns the era of court mandated overhauls and their many failures.  “The problem [I’m paraphrasing] is not that all the money failed to fix the system, but that no one realized that the system wasn’t broken, not by its own metrics.  it did what it did very well and all that money just gave it more to do the same with.”

In those places and schools where someone realized that the way things were being run was fundamentally flawed, real change happened.  But these instances are rare.

You have to ask a basic question:  in the instance of a situation like Garfield High School in East L.A. where a dedicate educator, Jaime Escalante, took dead-end kids and taught them to do calculus, why can’t this happen everywhere?  Escalante proved that it wasn’t a lack of intelligence on the part of the students.  If anything, they were brighter than their better-off counterparts, possibly because just surviving require a raw intelligence honed to a sharper edge.  So what is it?

Kids know instinctively when they’re being handed a bad deal.  After three years in many schools, the light is said to go out in many kids’ eyes.  By then they realize that it was all a game—they aren’t there to learn, they are there to be turned into consumers.  Maybe they can’t describe it that way, but they know they’re being handed a bill of goods.  So the system becomes a nanny system, designed to get them to adulthood pliant and cooperative.

Gatto goes much farther.  I am not so convinced as he is of the precision of the process.  And the fact is, real learning does happen here and there, even within this cockamamie system.

What did I do?  I paid little attention in class unless something was going on that interested me.  I took charge of my own education, and believe me that was not the best idea.  But no one stopped me.  I ended up my senior year cutting two and three days a week.  Most of those days I spent in the local library, a few blocks up the street from school, reading for five or six hours.  It was a wholly unguided regimen, haphazard and chaotic—but I read a lot of good books.  Gradually over time I was fortunate enough to find people who, all unknowingly, helped build a framework inside which all that reading turned into something coherent.

I agree the public school system as it stands in many places today probably ought to go away.  It does not serve the people attending.  But I have a profound antipathy for the current political cries for its demise—they have nothing to recommend to put in its place and because the system is not what we need doesn’t mean we don’t need one.

blog

Slogging Through

I’ve been going through this novel like a reaper, cutting and slashing, removing viscera, changing things around.  It’s fun so far.  The request was to knock between 50 and 100 pages out of the manuscript, which roughly equates to between twelve and twenty thousand words.  So far I have flensed the text of seven thousand.  This may sound like a lot, but the book was nearly 140,000 to start with, so it can lose a little weight and probably be much better for it.

The weather has been beautiful and since I am working in my front room, by the big picture window, it’s been pleasant.  At the rate I’m going I ought to have a new draft of the book in a few more weeks.  At which point I have a half dozen other things in need of tending.

Meantime, as well, I’m slogging through Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern: 1815 – 1830.  It is the estimable Mr. Johnson’s contention that these were the years which gave birth to our modern world, the period during which everything changed from the old system to the new, and, 400 pages in, he’s making a good case for it.  Of course, any historical period like this is going to have some sprawl.  He’s had to go back to just prior to the American Revolution and look forward to the Civil War (using a purely American point of reference, even though the book is attempting to be global).  I can think of worse markers than the end of the Napoleonic Era for an argument like this and he is certainly one of the more readable historians.  Occasionally his observations are a bit surprising, but in the main this is a credible piece of work.

I read his Modern Times a few years ago and found it very useful, even though some of his interpretations of major 20th Century events I found surprising.  As always, it is necessary to have more than one source when studying history.  Interpretation is a bay with hidden shoals and can be perilous.  But this one is a good one.

Just updating.  Go back to what you were doing.

culture

The Debate: part seven

In an earlier post on this topic I made the claim that the thing which changed everything in this country was the rise of capitalism as the dominant economic model.  It’s time to make good on that claim.

Firstly, we need to understand, once and for all, just what Capitalism is and how it is misunderstood in these sorts of discussions.

Capitalism is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of practices under one general heading, practices like mercantilism, industrialization, and interest-based lending.  But to be precise, all these different practices overlap but are not themselves capitalism.

Capitalism is the strategic use of money to determine the value of money and thereby transfer latent wealth from one sector of an economy to another.

This simple distinction does much to explain the animosity throughout the 19th Century toward any kind of centralized bank, including the Jacksonian war on the United States Bank, and Jeffersonian suspicion of corporate power.  It is nothing less than the ability of a small group to determine the value of local currency and the buying power of a community, all through the manipulation of currency exchange markets (like Wall Street), regardless of intrinsic values of manufactures and production.

But we have so conflated this with all other aspects of our much-vaunted “free” enterprise system that to criticize capitalism is seen as an attack on the American Way of Life.  It is not.  Although many Left attacks on it become hopelessly mired in broad attacks on wealth, it is not so much an attack on wealth per se—that is, wealth based on the prosperity of a community—but wealth derived at the expense of the community.

Which is what we are seeing take place today.  Which has taken place often in our history.

The difficulty is, this has been one of the most successful economic systems ever for creating prosperity, especially for the individual who understands it and works it, and, if properly regulated, has been the foundation of American achievement, at least materially.  So any critique can be made to seem like a critique of America itself.  This fact has been useful to plutocrats defending their practices against attempts to rein in and control abuses.  The coupling of what in extremes are parasitic practices of economic pillage with grass roots patriotism has been the most difficult combination to deal with in our history.  In its contemporary guise, it couches itself in an argument that socially responsible community-based efforts to address economic and resource inequality are Socialist and therefore fundamentally un-American.  This is historically inaccurate and strategically manipulative, but the bounds between the anti-federalist sentiments that began even before the revolution and became quasi-religious among certain groups in the aftermath of the Civil War are many and strange and need teasing apart to understand.

The central myth of our national ethos is this: an American is self-made, independent, capable all on his own of creating his life and success and by virtue of a unique freedom from government interference has made a success not only of his personal life but of the country as a whole, being a nation comprised of millions of separate, vital, omnicompetent, self-motivated, natural-born geniuses.  The fact that the frontiers have generally been initially settled by independent people who faced the challenges with little or not help from a central government, and that many if not most of them succeeded in creating viable homesteads that eventually melded into vital and prosperous communities feeds this myth with the substance of reality, although never a reality consistent with the myth.  Through successive waves of redefintion as each frontier became “back east” how the myth played out in the popular imagination changed while leaving intact the core idea that an American builds his life all on his own and the worst thing that could happen was for a government to interfere with that process.

The reality was always different.  We could examine the process of frontier community building in detail and find variations, but a constant has always been the call for military aid in confronting Indians and the second generation establishment of courts of law enforcement as quickly as possible once something resembling a town emerged.  The “independence” was in force only until such time as a community identity developed that could collectively request all the services these settlers were presumably fleeing in their westward quest.

Because the fact was, what these people overwhelmingly were doing was going in search of independent wealth—not here defined as a capacity to own their own leisure but rather the ability to provide a dependable source of provender and security.  They came for the land.  They came to be free of eastern industrial wage-penury.  They came to own something outright.  But most recognized they could not be secure in that ownership without the body of law and the structure of government to defend it, maintain it, and make it viable over many generations.  While it may be true that some groups fled the east to get away from certain government practices, the fact remained that as soon as they could they erected a government, taking those elements they thought workable and, hopefully, leaving out what they disliked.  Eventually, it emerged that they needed much more of what they left behind than perhaps they originally thought—but the whole purpose of petitioning for statehood, which was a popular movement, was to secure the benefit of federal laws that sometimes restricted the abuses of territorial governments but brought the benefits of a national law system that was seen as superior to local, often improvised, systems.

Perhaps the epitome of the independent American in popular myth is the Mountain Man.  But even here, a close examination shows that the most prominent and successful of these apparent hermits were anything but social self-exiles.  Many were educated businessmen.  They hazarded extreme hardship and risk to bring to market products they expected would bring high prices.  They depended absolutely on the communities popular fiction suggests they had no use for.

This is not to say there were no such men of lore, but they were singular examples and not an example of the norm.  To suggest that our national economy and politics should be constructed to accommodate their example is absurd, but it seems that is often what the Right is suggesting.

However, despite the trend, there were and are pockets of entrenched resentment to any and all government.  I have identified sources of these strains—political, religious, and economic.  They feed into a river of anti-federal thinking that is often simply contrarian, but not to be lightly dismissed. Many of these can be loosely described as Libertarian, but even that can be deceptive.

The threads are these:

Because of British law that forbade westward settlement and then imposed taxes on unrepresented colonists, a strain of resentment toward government that seemed to favor external concerns over citizen’s concerns fed into the break with England.

Because of Alexander Hamilton’s experiment in internal taxes and community engineering to establish a national industrial base at the expense of subsistence enterprise, there developed a suspicion of all central government and taxes.

Because of the Millennarian nature of many of the religious movements in America, parallel ethics developed—one that tied Christian probity and salvation to hard work and disinterested success, the other that elevated moral prerogatives above secular law and rejected interference from the larger community in matters of law, behavior, and individual rights.

Because of the perceived imposition of modes of living and commerce by the North on the South after the Civil War, a pool of entrenched resentment toward federal governments was created that worked continually against the hegemony of Washington D.C.

These threads, combined with the myth of the American, created a large, often disparate, and usually unorganized base of people poised to resist anything that smacked of a national paradigm emerging from the federal government.  Along with this you can add intransigent tax rebels, racists, and a vein of self-educated conspiracy theorists, all of which adds up to an ill-defined but persistent Right at the grass roots level.

The recent element is organization.  From the mid Seventies on we have seen a growing coalition of all these disparate groups into a unified block that has consistently voted Republican.  Since the mid Sixties and Johnson’s revolutionary civil rights activism drove the Southern Democrats to join and become a large part of a diminished Republican Party, the core of of the Right have sought a base from which to attack liberalism in general, social reconstruction in particular, and a little more than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act they found their core constituency in the Moral Majority, which combined most of the religious components of a revitalized conservatism.  Under Reagan, who successfully rallied the anti-federal sentiments—government is the problem—these religious reactionaries joined the fiscal conservatives and the anti-federalists to become the foundation of our contemporary, ever-more reactionary Right.

What has happened since Reagan, however, is even more troubling.  What began in many instances as a grass roots reaction to government and social change has been manipulated by the moneyed interests to target government regulation and tax structures that barred corporate pillage.  By feeding an angry voter block with the idea that their causes are one with the top two percent, they have successfully distorted the national dialogue to their advantage to undo decades of financial regulation and now are mounting a growing and evermore successful attack on all manner of collective activism that traditionally protects and promotes the interests of working class and middle class people.

The historical roots beneath all these different conservative groups extend back to the beginnings of our history, but never before have they all been so successfully merged into a solid block of voters.  But any legitimacy these ideas may have had has been corrupted by the usurpation of corporate manipulation.

The question needs to be asked—if, as it is believed by these groups, big government is a fundamental problem, how is it any different in the case of big corporations?  It would seem obvious that the operative word is Big.  Some corporations, multinationals all, have achieved such a size as to function as de facto nation-states.  Except for the fact that they have no national boundaries, they meet all other criteria.  Yet no one seems to be addressing this reality.

Another question—if it is the desire of the Right that government be stripped of its ability to address equity issues, who then will do that work?  Because the government stepped in initially because no one else could.  Arguments over the ethics of states’ rights fall when it is remembered that states did not address civil liberties issues.  It required federal intervention to assert what should have been recognized as not only the law of the land but common decency in matters of race, gender, and economic disparity.

A final question for this present essay—why is it that people who are losing ground economically, socially, and institutionally seem so willing to vote against their own interests in support of a false representation of what America is?  That is a more difficult question to answer and I will not here attempt to do so.  In this and the last six posts I have laid out the historical threads of the Right’s current manifestation.  Conclusions may be drawn from there.

I will address one thing here.  I said corporate pillage.  We have been witnessing since the Eighties large and growing transfers of wealth from the community to private hands.  We have been told that these transfers have been necessary to keep our private institutions from collapsing and causing even more havoc.  In a case by case analysis, there may be some truth in certain instances, but overall this has been a con.  I say this because the transfers came largely with no conditions on the recipients and practices which produced and exacerbated the calamities of 2008.  To pay for these transfers, the Republicans have waged a persistent and successful battle to defund and end programs which they claim we cannot afford.  Here, however, is a chart that shows the dollar-for-dollar transfers.  However one may feel about the nature of the programs affected, it is obvious that this is in no way to the general taxpayer benefit.  This is all special interest, corporate plunder, and in return programs that enable the possibility of social equity and potential upward mobility among struggling Americans are put in jeopardy.  When the Right bleats about class warfare, here is where it is actually being waged.

The issue of tax fairness is a constant in this country.  In the last few decades, the rhetoric has been added about who is benefiting and why certain people have the right to benefit from “my” taxes.  It sounds like an equity issue.  But the way it plays out is an excuse to extract wealth from the community.

Let me explain.  It has to do with a concept called latent value.

Latent value can best be understood as the wealth held in reserve, stored, if you will, after periods of labor to build.  “Unmarketed” value, so to speak.  We tap into this each time we take out a home equity loan.  The assumed value of your property is used as collateral to guarantee the fungible manifestation of the loan.  We have paid into the property over years.  More than that, we have maintained it, added on, upgraded, taken care of it to maintain or improve that value.

The same is true for entire communities and a business taps into that latent value when it opens its doors.  It hires people from the community, relies on the roads, the electricity, water, sewer services.  It utilizes local government offices for licensing, inspection, zoning.  It depends on the laws of that community to protect it from arbitrary attack, it uses the banks to underwrite its operations, and on and on.  The community as a whole is a resource and it “lends” part of its latent value to the business.

In return, that business owes it to that community to add to its latent value.  This is done in a variety of ways, including taxes that can be used to maintain or add services and infrastructure for public use.  If all works as it should, the business gets to generate a profit from what it does and the community gets value added from the new activity.  Both benefit.

That has in many instances changed.  At a certain level, there has been a de facto repudiation of this relationship on the part of business.  Some of this has always been the case, but it has not reached such criminal levels since before the Great Depression.

What is happening now is that business is extracting wealth from the community.  It is leaching the latent value out of the community.  This is sometimes known as “WalMart Syndrome.”

Let me describe it as it happens in business.  Say Company A comes in and buys Company B.  Company B has existed for decades, it has a successful product, employs a few hundred people, but has recently been struggling (or, what is ever more common, it has gone public and the shareholders are not happy with their returns).  Company A is in a position to acquire it.  This could be a good thing—with the greater resources of Company A, Company B could once more become healthy, and continue on.  That is, if Company A is at all interested in continuing Company B for the profits is generates as a going concern.  (Please note—there are many Company A’s who do just that, take a struggling smaller firm, fix it, and make it profitable again.  I stress this point because I want it clear that this system can work.  What more often happens is not necessary!)

However, the aim of Company A is to extract the latent value out of Company B as quickly as possible.  The operations are reorganized.  Maintenance is cut back to the bare minimum and in some instances eliminated completely.  Staff is laid off.  Production is increased.  The cost of manufacturing is drastically lowered per unit.  As things break, they are not replaced.  The good name of Company B continues to sell the product on the open market until it becomes clear that all the cuts have resulted in an inferior product.  When gross sales dip below a certain level, the company is shut down, everyone laid off, and the remaining stock sold as salvage.  Company B is destroyed, but before it is gone the wealth is has built up, latent in its very substance, has been extracted in short order by Company A and added to its bottom line.

All this is driven by shareholder and corporate greed.  No investment is made in Company B at all and in the process a great many workers lose employment, and, depending on the size of the community in which Company B exists, the local town may be terribly crippled.

The continual assault on taxes with the concomitant bribery by communities to attract businesses that then fail repeatedly to invest in that community even while they use the resources—the latent value—of that community is exactly the same process and it is tearing this country down.

It is not Socialism that we expect investment that seeks to raise the standards and expectations of the people in general, and the payment of taxes, horribly distorted because of the special deals made to a small number of extremely rich entities, is not punishment but a way to raise the value of the whole.  We are no longer a frontier country.  That mythology is being used to convince people to vote in such a way that the latent wealth embedded in our national fabric can be more easily converted into transferable funds and extracted by those with no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves and their own class.  (And not even each other—at this level, they will pillage and ruin one of their own just as readily as an essentially defenseless middle class or poor community.)

Because the strains of historical animosity and intransigence that have existed throughout the two plus centuries of our existence, the Right has managed to codify and effective propaganda campaign to destroy essentially progressive, socially responsible government, all to the benefit of a class that may well establish themselves as a new aristocracy, with feudal powers.  The only thing that is enabling all this is superior organization and obsessiveness.

It should be obvious by now that all this Right wing activism has nothing to do with anyone’s rights.  Everything that functionally protects the rights of people who do not own their own wealth—in other word, the ninety-five percent of us who work for a living because we can’t live on the interest from our holdings—is under attack.

But the one thing that needs to be understood in all this is that to push back is not to repudiate the idea of American success.  Making money, succeeding, is not at issue.  What is at issue is a resurgent capitalism that no longer has a country.

culture

The Debate: part six

We need to make one more side trip into the 19th Century.  The Civil War.

No other event so defines us.  I would argue that not even the Revolution is as important to who we are today as the Civil War is.  This event, along with World War II, established the national identity in ways with which we still struggle to accommodate today.

Shelby Foote, in his majestic narrative about the Civil War, pointed out the central change of the aftermath.  “Before the war, we said ‘the United States are.’  After, we said ‘the United States is.'”  A simple enough thing to say, but to comprehend the meaning is to understand that the country underwent a fundamental realignment of perspective.  It was a shock, a stunning blow to what had been an assumed association of separate nations in a voluntary coalition.  The most prominent of the Virginia Founders spoke often of their country, by which they meant Virginia.  When Jefferson Davis asked Robert E. Lee to assume overall command of all the Confederate armies, Lee refused, saying that he was willing only to defend his country—Virginia.

This separateness went without saying until the Civil War.  When South Carolina seceded and fired upon Fort Sumter, they assumed the position of a separate country at war with another one.  All the states that seceded took it as given that they could leave the Union any time they chose.  Lincoln decided that ratification of the Constitution and all that went with the establishment of a federal government that represented all the states as one nation argued against that presumption.

The opinions over the issues of the War continue to be debated.  Was it over slavery?  Was it over the presumed right to be free of federal interference?  Certainly for most of the foot soldiers of the South, slavery was hardly and issue, but the idea that federal troops could march into their states and tell them what to do was.  These men were ill-served by the people who instigated secession, who knew very well what the issue was about, and often cloaked their defense of an economic system in the rhetoric of liberty and revolutionary politics.

We need not rehash the Civil War here except to point out that the issue was slavery, though in most ways it was not about the slaves.  This is perhaps a slippery point to grasp.  The institution of slavery was crippling the ability of congress to function across national lines.  The five-eighths rule gave southern plantation owners an unwarranted electoral advantage even while they denied the rights they were exercising to the people they used.  But it was the increasing rancor over the admission of states to the union, whether they would be free or slave, that drove the South finally to break with the United States.  The way of life of the major propertied citizens of the southern states was directly threatened by northern industrialization and the westward expansion of free state settlers.  Eventually, their ability to maintain a useful majority in congress would be eroded to nothing and domination by free state politics would start undoing them financially and socially.  The sticking point was slavery.  It had to go.  The north was beginning to “carry” the south.  Things had to change.

The moral issues coincided this time.

But what concerns us here is what happened afterward.  Functionally, the United States of America assumed prominence across all state and territorially borders and, at least implicitly, federal law trumped state law.  Reconstruction was intended to rebuild the South, both materially and politically.  The program, however, involved military governorships in charge of vast areas of the South—the so-called Satraps—and much that occurred was arbitrary, experimental, and occasionally capricious, fueling the resentments left over from defeat.  It is within this time frame that we first see the sentiments of “taking our country back” expressed by embittered southerners who hated the federal government and the north for essentially destroying their way of life.

The Ku Klux Klan and other clandestine groups notoriously struck back locally to nullify many of the emancipation measures, but what concerns us here is the political action taken by southern politicians who carried out a propaganda campaign over several years that tied federal programs to corruption.

This was certainly nothing new.  There had always been a degree of mistrust over Washington’s handling of money and public programs.  But the southern Democrats did such a thorough job of connecting the two things in the public mind that “government project” automatically meant “corruption!”  There was, by the time they finished, no way for there to be a federal program that wasn’t corrupt—the idea became an oxymoron in the public mind, especially in the south and subsequently in the west.  It was one of the most successful campaigns of its sort ever and it has lingered with us to this day.  In the wake of that, the issue of State’s Rights became bigger and bigger.

This was almost wiped away during the Great Depression.  FDR became a savior to many people and “government aid” lost much of its former opprobrium during a decade of extreme need and effective federal aid.  World War II cashed in on some of that new-made good will and, along with the other patriotic sentiments of the war years, brought this country together in ways it never was before and has drifted from since.

In the wake of both the Great Depression and World War II, federal activism increased as never before.  The ability of the central government to address problems of national concern achieved an almost unquestioned dominance.  The failure of traditional approaches to economic downturns, periods of recession and depression that had plagued our economy throughout in boom and bust cycles, was finally demonstrated sufficiently and laws passed that it became a given that some control over what had been regarded as “natural” cycles could be exerted to the benefit of the entire country.  With the economic boom and world dominance that came in the wake of World War II, America entered a long period of federal triumphalism which finally broke with the high inflation and interest rates in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the effective challenges to American global hegemony demonstrated by the OPEC oil embargo.

But the pool of resentment left over from the Civil War never disappeared.  It found purchase in the Cold War and expressed itself as skepticism of government in general, using the example of Soviet-style dictatorship as the gold standard for the inevitable result of excess federal control.  The mania of the McCarthy Era was only one, very prominent example of the push back against the federal government, with its continued accusations of deep infiltration by the politically suspect in the Washington bureaucracy.  With each new wave of federal override of local prerogative—in education, in voting, in civil rights, in race equality, in First Amendment issues over free speech and religion—the assertion that these actions were part and parcel of a worldwide communist conspiracy informed the frantic reaction on the part of people who had inherited the cultural resentment of government in general.

It came to a head under President Johnson when he pushed through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the southern Democrats as a block deserted him and became the core of a revitalized Republican Party.  From that point on, their strategy has been simple—to seize on any issue that can be made to look like federal usurpation of local or even individual rights.  What this amounted to was a culture war, because the resentments all were directed at social legislation and court decisions that seemed to run counter to common values.  But as the movement continued, it was clear that much more was at stake than simply drawing a line against a changing culture that no longer approved racism, gender discrimination, or arbitrary censorship.  As the Seventies became the Eighties, the Right included in their list of “corrections” any economic measures that could be seen as “leveling” measures—anti-unionism increased, attacks against federal financial rules increased, news organizations that did not appear to support a conservative, business-friendly program were attacked or purchased.  The role of money became dominant.

What had happened clearly was that the financial sector had found a useful foil in the social reactionaries who were attacking the dominant federalism on cultural grounds.  Corporate strategists found they could easily usurp social anger and make it one with a desire to roll back fiscal controls in place since the Great Depression, by aligning the rights of the wealthy with the rage of social conservatives.

All of which goes back to the post-Civil War resentment of disempowered elites who felt they had been stripped of their natural rights to dictate community norms.  It was not until the massive union movements that sprang up during and after the Gilded Age, coupled with Theodore Roosevelts activist trust busting, that the wealthy of the north and east found common cause with this reservoir of anti-federal resentments.  They were derailed by the Great Depression and it took a couple of generations and the mischaracterization and fear brought about by the Cold War before an effective momentum could be achieved to regain traditional patrician privileges and strip the middle class and the poor of any ability to redress social and economic inequities.  The success of the movement can be seen in the numbers of disenfranchised blue collar, middle, and lower middle class people who vote the programs of this group in complete rejection of their own best interests.  Somehow The Enemy has become anyone who advocates higher education for all people, economic controls, and great personal liberties, including a free press not dominated by corporate interests.

I’ll see if I can’t wrap this up next time.

culture

The Debate: part five

The fervor with which assaults on liberalism are launched of late possess a zealotry difficult to understand in any reasonable sense.  There is a religious element to it, a battle of ideologies that seem to leave the precincts of fact, data, and logic very quickly, often on both sides.  The inability of Left to talk to Right is the equivalent of the sectarian babbling between any two apparently irreconcilable religious groups, both of whom insist on their point of view being not only correct but the only one.

After decades of more or less rational political discourse in this country, many people have been caught completely by surprise at the level of bitterness that, upon examination, seem unsupportable by the issues (with the possible exception of abortion—but even that is ramped up far more than it ought to be given the middle ground of contraceptive use).

Where did this come from?

Once more, we look back to the early republic.

When claims are made that this was established as a Christian Nation, such claims are both right and wrong. Wrong in that the structure of law and institutions created in the aftermath of the revolutionary war are the most secular such governmental constructs ever created. The establishment of the United States as a nation is not Christian or any other religion, and this was done very intentionally. More, perhaps, as break with all European traditions in which religion was politicized and churches were arms of the government, conjoining common faith with political hegemony, but nevertheless those who claim that the United States, in the form of the Constitution and the subsequent offices and conduct, was established as a Christian edifice are flat wrong.

However, the fact that this was a country of Christians is undeniable and the fervor of religious embrace was profound.

The old grade school lesson that the first colonists came here to escape religious persecution is mostly true.  It doesn’t go quite far enough, though, and explain that these religious exiles were themselves probably more religious than the states from which they fled, states where religious observance was akin to a loyalty oath.

Which is, of course, how you get debacles like the Salem Witch Trials where you might expect a more rational approach.  The Enlightenment veneer that overlay the revolutionary period and informed the political philosophy that manifested in the Constitution was pretty much just that—a veneer.  City-bound for the most part, once you got out into the hinterland, on the frontiers, religious sentiment was a living, breathing reality that was as if not more important than any political principles in currency at the time.  For many Americans of that generation, Liberty meant the freedom to worship God without a bishop or priest telling you where, when, or how.

Coming to North America must have been a surreal experience for these people.  They had come from a crowded, dirty place—just about any city in Europe at that time—where they had constantly to worry about the next upheaval that would require a realignment of political (and sometimes religious) affiliations.  Disease, high mortality, sometimes opulent wealth within walking distance of soul-crushing squalor.  But for the most part a world that had become and was becoming more urbanized.  Making landfall in the New World must have been like time travel, taking them back to a primeval land of myth.  No buildings, no roads, nothing to indicate human beings had ever been there, huge, dense forests undisturbed by the axe.

Many brought with them a full suite of superstitions about old forests and just trying to live here must have required unbelievable courage—or unimaginable desperation.  But they made a go of it, cut some trees down, built the first villages, and after a hundred years the east coast was beginning to look a bit like the world they had left.

But in pushing back that frightening forest they had clung to their faiths and relied on it hourly.  Many early colonists believed Satan lived in those forests, and certainly many of the encounters with the near-naked natives who didn’t seem to know the first thing about God or Jesus did nothing to dissuade them of that idea.  Pushing that forest back was not only consistent with their belief in Improvement but necessary to keep the devil a little further away.

By the mid 18th Century, The Great Awakening gripped the colonies, a series of revival movements spurred by open-air preaching based on emotional reactions to arminian accommodations embraced by the seaport cities that were becoming comfortable with material success.  In a way it was a repeat of the movement that caused early pilgrims of Presbyterian and Calvinist theologies to cross the Atlantic in the first place.  The daily struggle against the unknown happening in the rural frontiers was poorly served by churches that preached a moderate, calming theology with a God that seemed less and less concerned with sin in the face of worldly success.  What happened in the hinterland evoked comparisons to the “heretical” movements of the Middle Ages which the Catholic Church worked to subdue and ended up with in the massive splits of the Reformation.

In his examination of the market phenomena that defined much of the early Republic, The Market Revolution,  Charles Sellers writes:

“Our secular mythology renders almost incomprehensible the religious mythology that organized experience for early rural America.  The gnostic cosmology and stoic resignation of peasant forebears, who likewise lived at the mercy of nature and invoked its fertility with daily labor, sacralized the behavioral norms demanded by the subsistence mode of production…for centuries peasant animism had magicalized the patriarchal Christian God who reconciled Europeans to hazards of weather, terrors of plague, and exactions of fathers and rulers.  The Protestant Reformation revitalized this magical patriarchalism to cope with the Old World market’s initial surge.  The awesome Jehovah proclaimed by Geneva’s Protestant theologian John Calvin was brought to the New World by uprooted emigrants and preached from Congregational meetinghouses of New England Puritans, the Presbyterian kirks of the Scotch-Irish, and the Reformed churches of Germans, Dutch, and French Huguenots.  Calvinism’s thrilling promise of divine encounter sacralized deep springs of animistic magic and mystery to arm rural Euro/Americans with invidious power against capricious fate.  The more vividly they felt Jehovah’s omnipotence, the safer they felt in a hazardous world.”

Preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards took the Message to the wilderness, creating a surge of revivalist meetings that poured from New England southward, sweeping rural populations into the fold of highly emotional religious experiences, complete with swooning, ecstasies, visions, possibly glossolalia, all of which offended the stabilizing, order-hungry seaboard churches which reacted both from the pulpit and legislatively, fueling the growing political embrace of strict separations of church and state.

By the time of the revolution, although the revivalist movements had fractured and splintered into numerous disputatious denominations, a basic sympathy existed informing all of them with the idea that God was not the property of the government, that in fact God disapproved of governments that interposed law between individuals and what they perceived as the natural right to encounter creation without intermediary or interpretation.  (This latter sentiment came to inform the idea that the government should, in fact, say nothing whatever, pro or con, regarding religion, and ought to remove even the appearance of favoritism toward either specific faiths or religious experience in general.)  A tremendous pool of resentment toward the government on this issue rippled beneath the surface of all other resentments that combined to cause the break with England.  The colonial governments were often seen as collusive with the King’s government in this regard and there was no doubt an expectation that this would be redressed once independence was achieved.  (It took a while—direct state sponsorship of certain churches did not end for some time, although the federal government had removed itself from such connections.)

It was the Second Great Awakening, which began after the establishment of the United States and ratification of the Constitution that created the odd coupling of capitalist zeal and religious fervor.  Competing traditions, old and new, sought to achieve dominance in a rapidly expanding nation that quite obviously embraced worldly success as a natural right, one of the chief goals of the revolution.  In Europe, the established churches, as arms of the state, muffled themes of denouncing the world and its attributes, a trend that could be trace all the way back to the first establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of Rome.  Governments did not wish to discourage wealth-building because this was a source of political power.  The older churches had long since found accommodation with attention to money and rarely preached against self-improvement, at least among the merchant classes.  This same trend was taking place in America where seaboard financial dynasties were emerging and the class-free society that had been in place in practice if not legally for a long time promoted wealth-building across all social lines.  Interest in salvation appeared to wane with the rise of temporal comfort.

The successors of Edwards, Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight in particular, wrestled with the fact that mercantile growth was inevitable and followed the frontier like a wave, and with it a, to them, diluted religious apprehension known as Deism.  Deism was an Enlightenment accommodation which greatly diffused religious experience, rendering it almost a wholly philosophical matter rather than one of spiritual rebirth.  It was Deism that permitted the Founders to avoid the question of a national religion in drafting the Constitution—a movement hard to argue with given the antipathy of the rural settlers to any state sponsored church—but which the inheritors of Calvin found spiritually troubling.  They feared an abandonment of Christianity as worldly success and comfort grew.  The Second Great Awakening restarted the revivals, took them further west, and south, as a firebreak to a perceived ambivalence to spiritual matters in the east.

The central difficulty of keeping religious ethics in the face of successful nation-building affected both traditions and the older churches, in New York and Boston, adopted some of the rhetoric of what was called the New Light, and took advantage of the new printing technologies to create the first wide-spread Bible and Tract Societies.  For a time, Bibles were the largest selling book throughout America because they were the cheapest, along with the tracts accompanying them.  Mass printing drove the price per copy down drastically and endangered all other forms of popular publishing except newspapers.

The battle was between Enlightenment rationalism—which was concerned with man’s rights in this world, now—and the emotionalism of Millennarian religious experience, which proclaimed that the concern must be on the state of the soul for the next world.  In Europe a similar confrontation was occurring which would result in the rise of Romanticism—a more or less secular embrace of emotionalism over rationality—while here is resulted in an entrenched Evangelicalism, centered not on the primacy of sentiment and emotionalism concerning the self and the world but on the emotionalism found in a rebirth in God.

The accommodation that emerged was one that coupled all the driving ambition of worldly success with a strict self-abnegation—temperance, chastity, and a severe scrupulousness in business—that made the only sanctified outlet of worldly ambition the very success in business that had a generation before been seen as the biggest threat to spiritual matters.

This engendered a reversal of certain themes—for instance, the Millennium, the return of Christ to Earth, now became something that had to happen before Jesus came back, not when—but the success of this led to half a century of expanding church attendance and the growing influence of religion in political movements, i.e. abolition and temperance.

What this meant for our present examination is that a pool of religious sentiment tied to Millennarian anticipation, rejection of rationalism, and an embrace of antinomianism (the belief that one can be so possessed of grace/salvation that manmade laws no longer apply) became a popularly maintained constant.  The antipathy against government is fed by this select exceptionalism to give this group a belief in the rightness of their cause from a source irredressable in secular institutions.

The 19th Century is littered with small groups of religious isolates who chose westward migration rather than life under a growing secular government.  Most failed, but some became notable successes—the Mormons for one—but by and large all these groups have been partially absorbed into mainstream American life.  They bring these traditions with them, of course, just as any other self-identified group does.

What effect this has in practice is a manifestation in the belief in a higher law that overrides the legislative, judicial, and common law and seeks to challenge institutions on the basis of what could be seen as a “natural law” position.  At almost every turn, with a few prominent exceptions, this has been a defense of status quo not politically so much as culturally.  (On both sides of the slavery issue we find strong, entrenched religious sentiment dictating moral positions.  While abolition can be seen as revolutionary, at base it was very much a defense of the doctrine of voluntary salvation and the denigration of “worldliness” by people from a Congregationalist-Puritan-Quaker tradition.  However, the net effect was revolutionary.)

I’ll go over what this means to us today in the next part.

current affairs

The Debate: part four

We left off with the Whiskey Rebellion, which more or less blew up in Alexander Hamilton’s face.  The tax he pushed through congress on whiskey that triggered the entire affair was shortly thereafter repealed and it was a while before the federal government tried to impose internal taxes.  One of the stated goals of the revolution was to end taxation without representation, but in practical terms this meant an end to taxation, period.

The federal government used tariffs and land sales to pay off the debt incurred by the revolutionary war.  Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was still done by a combination of the two plus borrowing.  Generally, tariffs were kept low, to encourage volume of trade.  Some high tariffs were employed in the 1820s and 1830s as protectionist measures to level the field with Britain, which was in the midst of its “workshop of the world” period.  The South hated these tariffs because it raised the price of manufactures and shipping, which impacted on their trade which was almost entirely agricultural.

It was different in the states.  Property taxes early became a source of state revenue.  The definition of “property” for the purposes of such taxes stretched far beyond the bounds we would recognize or accept today and under Jackson came to include just about anything a person owned.  Local reaction to such impositions varied by city and state, but rarely rose to the level of rebellion.

Federal internal taxes did not come into play until the Civil War.  The need to raise revenue in huge amounts and quickly necessitated the creation of the first income tax, among others, including a vast array of excise taxes and licensing.   There were special corporate taxes, stamp taxes for legal documents, and inheritance taxes.

Most of these were phased out after the Civil War.  Interestingly, the Republicans—a new party formed just before the Civil War which became the second national party, supplanting the archaic Whigs—kept two elements of the new tax system: high tariffs and taxes on liquor and tobacco.  High tariffs were protectionist measures.  The excises on liquor and tobacco were not greatly challenged because they coincided with the growing Temperance Movement, which was becoming politically significant.

(Also interestingly, calls for reform led to a new income tax in 1894.  However, the Supreme Court, in Pollock vs Farmers Loan and Trust Co. ruled it unconstitutional.  The income tax became a popular movement and led to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, legalizing a federal income tax, which was ratified and passed in 1913.)

With World War I, taxes were passed for the first time on corporate income and taxes on wage earners were rejected.  The balance seemed then to be in favor of taxing wealth.

So what changed?

Let’s back up for a bit and look at the aftermath of the Founding Generation.

With the election of Thomas Jefferson as president, Federalism seemed to be in retreat.  The swift program inaugurated under Washington, by Hamilton, and continued under Adams of centralizing national affairs in a strong federal government was denounced and Jeffersonianism embraced.  Federalists were seen as partners with industrialists and corporations, the party of money, in opposition to the small freeholder.  After the debacle of the Whiskey Rebellion, internal taxes on the federal level were seen as tools to corral independent artisans, farmers, and small merchants under a corporate umbrella and establish a tyranny.  New lands opening to the west gave the impression that no one need bow to central authority, not even on the local level, if they had the wherewithal to pick up and move.

During this period, two things were going on that fed directly into the American obsession with wealth.  The first one is easy enough to understand—the relative ease with which it was possible to make a great deal of money here, because of the complete absence of legal class boundaries.  That and the extremely open economic policies of the early republic—laissez-faire capitalism, which suffered no government constraint.  Among the positive effects of this, of course, came down-sides, namely the rise of speculation, initially in land deals through various companies with their roots back before the French and Indian Wars.

Speculation was then and continued to be a scourge, and yet it seems to be ineradicable, mainly because it’s tied inextricably with our ideas of market freedom.  Nor is it always a bad thing.  Speculation can concentrate attention, organize work, and produce a desired effect by calling attention to a project that needs funding and supporters.  But it just as often destroys individual aspirations, damages communities, and artificially creates divisions which can sometimes linger for generations, especially when it comes to land.

Arguments and court fights over claims for tracts of land almost defined the migrations into the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, then later into Georgia and Alabama.  Settlers moved into lllinois in such numbers that almost 75% of it was claimed by squatters, making it a fait accompli that took decades more to undo.  Federalist jurists favored large, single landowners who could then sell small tracts and generate profits that could be used for further expansion along lines that fell into step with Manifest Destiny sentiments.  It was in the interests of the federal government to unload land to large purchasers rather than get into the business of becoming a banker for thousands upon thousands of individual buyers, many of whom might find it difficult to pay in specie.  Questions of currency from state to state and in the territories complicated any such arrangement and in this the federal government became collusive with speculators for perfectly understandable reasons.  The federal government was using the sale of tracts to augment funding sources and for that a reliable payment schedule and solid currency was required.

But the principle of “Improvement” was very much at the fore in everyone’s mind and this is what drove national policy even from the earliest Colonial days.  It was the idea of Improvement that determined the fate of the native peoples.  Improvement was bound up with Christian principles of moral behavior and fed into the second of the two trends I’m examining in this essay.

The idea of Improvement was the conviction that a moral man should take wilderness and turn it into productive land, for the good of the family, the community, possibly the country, but also because this was the charge given by God to Adam.  Wilderness was viewed as a test, as the raw material to build a christian community.  To find yourself in the midst of wilderness and do nothing to “improve” it—cut down the trees, put the land to the plow, build houses, roads, etc—was sinful.  Hence the native Americans were viewed as “fallen” because they didn’t improve the land.

(A good deal of missionary work was done all through the Colonial and into the post-Colonial period to teach Indians how to do this and there was considerable success.  Many tribes, seeing the writing on the wall, quite ably adapted themselves and built towns and turned to intensive agriculture.  That these efforts were mostly ignored and later destroyed—the worst example being what happened to the Cherokee in Georgia and Alabama—is the consequence of whites refusing to admit that simple Improvement was ever the point.  If the money did not flow into white hands, if the power remained vested in the townships, then the work had to be denied and eradicated.  Proof that the Indians could do what they were told was expected of them had to be denied at every turn.  Their inability to adapt was maintained, even in fictional form, as evidence that whites had to have the control.  To be sure, this did not simply fall on the Indians—many small, isolationist white communities ended up similarly destroyed by syndicates and large-scale speculators when these tiny efforts stood in the way of large-scale profiteering.)

The land companies formed before and after the French and Indian War were vested in moving Indians off the land and selling it to settlers.  The federal government became the “owner” of these lands and sold huge parcels to these companies or even to individual speculators.  Local battles staged by individual settlers or groups of settlers who could afford to hire attorneys raged against these essentially absentee landlords and various accommodations were made based on varying degrees of improvements.  One basic complaint was the right of the person living on the land and working it in opposition to the man who simply “owned” it on paper.  This evolved eventually into fights between individuals and cartels, fights we still see playing out today.

But in this way, speculation and the federal government grew into a symbiotic relationship that proved awkward at times but maintained a momentum throughout much of the 19th Century.  Andrew Jackson belatedly tried to disrupt this relationship with his war on the United States Bank, with the result that the one good thing the bank was doing—stabilizing currency—was ended and whole regions of the country slipped into depression due to an inability to maintain stable currency on their own. Jackson was an opponent of the centralized role the government was playing in dispossessing small landholders through support of blanket policies favoring big concerns, banks primarily.

It was during this period that sectional conflicts began to grow into serious threats to the Union.  Morality aside, this went directly to the matter of property.  Slavery had been a subject of intense division from the very beginning, the north largely opposed to it, the south claiming it a necessity.  Southern states had threatened to leave the Union should any move be made to outlaw slavery—which could only be done federally if the states were not willing to do.  Some states did ban it, but mostly such states had not relied much on it for labor in the first place.

Using the rhetoric of individual liberty, southern slaveholders became more and more strident in their denunciations of northern “interference” in the presumed rights of property owners in the south.  The fact that the south was engaged mostly in plantation agriculture complicated matters, because this type of farming—mostly for cotton—was incredibly debilitating to the soil.  As the soil was exhausted, plantations had to move west to new fields.  The question of how new states would enter the union—slave or free—became an issue of life and death for southern plantation owners and fueled the conflict.  As western lands were opened by the federal government to more settlement, small landowners were faced with the prospect of competition from large slave-owning concerns that could potentially outcompete them (in the short run) and buy them out.  (Something similar happened later in the range wars over cattle.)  Also, most new settlers, who were buying land from speculators in the north, carried with them a religious conviction that slaveholding was wrong.  The companies selling them the land were anxious to assure them they would be settling in land that would be free, otherwise land values might plummet.

All this was further exacerbated by the railroads that were getting tremendous quantities of federal land as leeways, which often cut through communities or just as often bypassed them, which lent another layer of life and death to the equation.

In every respect, the federal government drew some fire from just about everyone.  Washington favored the railroads over and above settlers’ rights.  Washington was becoming aligned with the north against the agrarian south because of industrial influences that challenged southern economies and controlled shipping costs.  Washington supported slavery because it refused to do anything legislatively about it.  In just about all viewpoints, Washington was in the center of what was wrong.

What was wrong was simply that the industrial revolution and capitalism were gaining irresistible momentum and eventually the nonindustrial south would find itself isolated, bought out, and dominated by Yankee corporations.  The only tool they possessed to fight it was through Congress and the only advantage they possessed was the five-eights rules which allowed slaveholders to vote their slaves as representing five-eights of a man each (which included the women, coincidentally, making a profound irony in a country that still denied free women the right to vote).  The south fought every national project that came before Congress, seeing such things as blows against them.  They lost as often as they won, but the lines were drawn.  It was becoming increasing difficult, though, to move legislation through Congress and the south’s position threatened infrastructure projects.

The south saw itself as the proper heirs of the revolution, the Jeffersonian version.  But the yeoman freeholder had grown into bloated plantation owners who not only lorded it over their slaves but also made it very difficult for the true individual landowner to make a living.  Even so, southern politicians successfully drew a connection between plantations and small farmers to make the case that all of their lifestyles were in danger from northern aggression, making the impoverished southern farmer a patriotic ally to the master of Tara in confronting Washington federalist domination.

In this were the seeds of modern anti-federal sentiment.  When the Civil War broke out, these sentiments grew into deep philosophical resentments, which Reconstruction cemented in place.  Washington D.C. became evil incarnate, to be fought at every turn, and the fiascoes of Reconstruction congresses fed the divisions with continually filibustered legislatures and the presumed corruption under Ulysses S. Grant.

But if the Civil War was the flower of national unity in action on behalf of the citizens—and to large extent it was—then what happened to eventually turn even the north against the federal government?

Well, it didn’t happen right away.  After the Civil War and with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, private enterprise and federal policy marched in lock-step as never before until the end of the Gilded Age and the days of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting.  It was after WWII that the problems began again and to understand that we have to look at the Second Great Awakening and the “christianization” of wealth-building.  Next time.

culture

The Debate, part three

There are two aspects of the whole Colonial/Post Colonial period of American history which most people either pay no attention to or flat know nothing about.  Among those who are acquainted with these events, many misunderstand their meaning or discount that meaning, preferring to talk about the years in between which make up the actual revolution.  Both of these things I’m about to talk about are vital to any understanding of where we come from and why we seem to be where we are today.  Anyone who tells you that events that occurred two hundred plus years ago don’t matter to the present have no real grasp of history.  There’s a reason the Right likes to keep harking back to the Founders and why they so often mischaracterize what happened.

The first event—or really set of events—took place before, during, and after the Seven Years War.  We like to call this war the French and Indian War, making it nicely central to our history, and indeed it was because it led almost inevitably, given the personalities and finances involved, to the revolution.  But in fact is in many respects the first world war.  As far as England and France were concerned, events on the Continent, across the oceans, in the Caribbean, and in the Indian subcontinent were just as important as the North American theater.  This was a contest between them, the two great powers of the day, and the outcome would determine who called the shots for the next several decades.  As it turned out, with a hiccup for the Napoleonic Wars, the winner called the shots for more than a century afterward.

But it began here.  And George Washington, childless father of our country, was right in the thick of it.

Trans Appalachia was a demarcation of considerable interest both to England and to France.  It led to both Kentucky and to the Ohio Valley, regions both countries saw as part of their future.  The only problem, of course, was all the Indians still living there, among them tribes that had already migrated from the east coast to escape the burgeoning population of Europeans and their slaves.  The French, from Canada in the north and New Orleans in the south, already had entree to the interior of North America, but they were small in numbers compared to the British, Scottish, and Irish colonials rapidly building up the coasts from Maine down to the southern end of Georgia.  Florida was claimed by Spain.

The Colonials had their own interests.  Land.  The thing that brought more people here in the 18th Century than anything else was the prospect of cheap land, land an individual could actually own, the cheapest land on the globe, and for all intents and purposes not a king or duke or count in sight to tell the commoners that it couldn’t be theirs.  This is vitally important to everything that follows, unto the present.  At a time when owning land was the privilege of the elites—aristocrats and their immediate supporters—the idea that some peasant from Northumbria or County Cork or anywhere else could own his land and do with it what he wanted was the holy grail.  It was surreal.  It was unheard of at least since the height of the Roman Empire and even then there were conditions.  This is the single biggest attractor of immigration the 18th Century and well into the 19th and the idea of personal ownership, free of any by-your-leave from the local nobleman still drew people from the rest of the world here through a good part of the 20th Century.  Ownership.

For the wealthier colonials whose families had already been here a while, this meant something further—more wealth.  Land speculation companies sprung up like mushrooms after rain before the Seven Years War and resumed after it was over.

The Ohio Company was one of these.  This company had a royal grant to lands in the Ohio Valley, to survey, parcel, and sell to settlers.  The problem was, the French were moving into the area and fomenting discord among the Indians living there against the English settlers.  Washington was appointed Lt. Colonel and put in charge of 300 militia by Virginia to go out and enforce the royal grant on behalf of the Ohio Company.  In the course of the endeavor he had his hat handed to him in the debacle of Fort Necessity and the wars were triggered.

Washington later was part of another land speculation company with interests in the same area.  Many of the Founders had a piece of land speculation companies.  They invested in this land, hired surveyors with the intent of parceling it for sale, and they fully expected to make a lot of money.  Many of them used their public offices and military careers to further these efforts.  There was no illegality in this as the idea of conflict of interest was then nebulous at best.  What was illegal was pursuit of settlement after the Treaty of Paris that ended the conflict.  Britain had treaties with the Indian tribes in the region and the deal was that this land, so coveted by the colonists, was off limits.

Many of these men had a lot of money invested in land deals that were now not going to happen because of a treaty signed between England and France.  Worse still, England intended to tax the colonies for the privilege of “defending” them during the war and, as far as the colonists were concerned, preventing them from pursuing the one thing that made coming to America worth while—getting rich.

Speculation companies continued to be formed, surveyors sent over the mountains, and deals struck despite the law and the more the British tried to enforce the barrier and relieve their debt burden by taxing the colonists.  It might be argued that one (minor, but important) reason Britain was loathe to grant the colonists seats in Parliament was the obvious consequence that these new M.P.s would work to undo the Treaty of Paris so these speculators could reap the profits of their investments.  In any case, it should never be forgotten that while the Founders risked much—in fact, everything—in pursuing independence, one of the things they fought for was the freedom to make money.  And after the revolution, make it they did.

Which brings us to the next event that ties all this together.

The Whiskey Rebellion is often characterized as settlers in western Pennsylvania rising up in arms to protest a tax laid on them by the federal government without their consent.  The tax is characterized as the first internal tax and a tax on a luxury—whiskey.

This misrepresents the entire affair.

In the wake of the revolution, two completely incompatible views of what the new nation should look like emerged and famously fought it out.  What is bandied about as Jeffersonian Republicanism is the one that lost the fight.  Basically, this was the view that America should be a nation of independent stakeholders, largely agrarian, with subsistence economies at work.  The idea was that each family, however it was defined, would own the land, the equipment, and the means to support itself and perhaps produce enough extra to sell at local markets.  Decentralization was key and concentrations of wealth and political power the antithesis.  Jefferson’s “yeoman farmers” were to be the freeborn ideal of this system, which would deny the possibility of powerful central governments through diffusion and the independence of its citizens.  (Interesting such an idea should come from a slaveholding plantation owner.  Still…)

Federalism countered this.  One of its strongest advocates was Alexander Hamilton, who was the brilliant mind behind our economic system, our first treasurer, close adviser to President Washington, and staunch enemy of Thomas Jefferson.  (Interestingly enough, Adams didn’t like Hamilton much, either, and Adams supported Federalism, at least more than the Jeffersonian idea.)

Hamilton from the beginning advocated a strong central government that would not only establish the law of the land but, most significantly, would take on the debt of the states. (This would give us credibility in dealing with foreign banks and potentates, among other things.)  Hamilton wanted a stable currency and he argued—correctly—this was unachievable if every state set its own currency and exchange rates.  That work had to be centralized.  Hamilton wanted a central bank.  Hamilton wanted the infant United States to build its industrial might as quickly as possible because, he argued, we were vulnerable to the depredations of the world at large without the kind of unity of purpose and finance and industry that can only be brought to bear under centralized authority.

To the man in the street (or on the farm), centralized authority was everything they had just finished fighting and bleeding to be rid of.

But the politicking was being done in the well-settled east and businessmen recognized the utility in all these proposals.  The more agrarian south, as usual, disliked much of Hamilton’s plans, but they lacked the votes to carry the day in congress.

The Whiskey Tax was Hamilton’s first venture in large scale nation-building with a view toward subjugating Jefferson’s “yeomanry.”  The Frontier was a problem for Hamilton because it frayed away from control.  People on the frontier set themselves up any way that made sense for them in their location and rarely did these new institutions conform to establish business models in the east, which for Hamilton was the preferred template.  Remember, he wanted to build a strong, unified nation, able to forge cannon, float warships, raise armies, and compete with Europe.  All through the war there had been problems keeping soldiers fed, clothed, and armed and in the army.  Farmers would leave when they felt they needed to tend their steads.  It was difficult getting states to pay up to support the men in the field.  They weren’t plagued by desertions so much as an inability to maintain something to which to remain committed.  Hamilton looked at the more disciplined and usually better-supplied British troops and understood what needed to be in place to duplicate it.  And duplicate it he believed we must just to survive.

Convincing individual freeholders of this necessary was another matter.  What he intended to do, then, was bring them all under control through economics and the best tool for this was a tax.  Or so he thought.  Even in England, internal taxes were difficult, fey things that failed as often as they succeeded.  But for this first one he thought he had one no one could object to.  A tax on a luxury—whiskey.

None of the distillers in the cities of the east objected.  They passed the tax on to their customers and ended up out of pocket nothing.  But in Western Pennsylvania, it was a completely different matter.  There, whiskey was not a luxury.  It was currency.

Here’s what Hamilton did.  He based his tax on capacity, basically a tax on the volume a given still could produce.  That made it simple to estimate.  For a distiller who was in business to bottle whiskey and wholesale it to distributors, this offered little burden, and they sold everything they produced and they produced usually to capacity.

But that was their business.  For a farmer outside Pittsburgh in 1790, whiskey was the way he put aside excess grain production.  For him, that still was a way to offset losses because it was so far from major markets.  Rather than store the grain as harvested and see it rot, he would convert unsold quantities to whiskey, which had no shelf life, and then use it as liquid money.  He sold some retail, sure, but a lot of it was used to pay debts to merchants.  Moreover, it was rare that his still produced to capacity.  To tax him on what his still could produce overlooked the fact that he rarely produced that much and that what production he did have was erratic at best.  So this tax on a so-called luxury was for him a huge imposition.

Hamilton claimed later not to understand their complaint.  He kept telling them, through their representatives, that all they had to do was pass to expense on to their customers.  What he seemed not to understand was that these people were not distillers.  They were subsistence farmers.  This was not a business expense for them, it was an attack on their livelihood at its base.  When the first tax collectors showed up to start assessing and collecting, the uprising began.

Hamilton urged Washington to act and act massively.  Washington raised one of the largest armies to date of Americans, over 13,000, and marched on Pittsburgh.  The rebellion was over before he got there, but Hamilton held trials anyway.  The tax was suspended afterward.

In fact, Hamilton knew very well what he was doing.  He was crushing individual entrepreneurs to establish a pattern in which only those who could afford to play were allowed to play.  It was the first American war on mom-and-pop enterprises.  Hamilton wanted these people under the umbrella of industrial concerns so he could pool the collective resources into the building of his mighty nation.  Taxes structured to benefit a particular model of business and destroy competing forms, especially forms that served exclusively individual, familial, or even village needs, as such forms were inefficient and could be too easily kept from serving the national interest.

These two aspects of colonial and post-colonial America are important to understanding how we got here, today, and what it is the Right is trying to do.  Almost at the outset, this country has tacitly recognized that there are citizens and there is everybody else.  Citizens have money, have power, have the capacity to generate wealth.  Everybody else is, well, everybody else.  The Revolution was fought on the principle of self-determination.  But once the shooting stopped and constitution-building began, it emerged quickly that these Founders were deeply suspicious of democracy, of “the people” and formed a republic instead in which the franchise was limited to white males with property.  Certainly many of the Founders wrote warnings about the growth of corporate power and certainly provisions were built into the Constitution to enable people to fight the encroaching feudalism that might potentially dominate, but it was still there from the beginning—this country was founded for people who wanted to be rich and the rich were the ones everyone expected to call the tune.

Everyone can mull this over for a while.  Stayed tuned for part four.

culture

The Debate, part two

We left off with the Right wing idea that creative individuals owe the community nothing.  By creative here, I refer to builders—industrialists, bankers, corporate giants, what in an earlier age might have been called Robber Barons.  (I said in the first post that I have a point of view and a critique, that this would not be an unbiased set of posts.)  I characterized this as sophomoric.  It is, in fact, best codified by the writings of Ayn Rand, who wrote some interesting novels and a great deal of philosophical defense of greed.  Rand is a hero to those who wish to see themselves as above it all, apart from the masses, a singular individual with gifts and abilities far beyond those of mortal men…

Forgive me, the temptation to hyperbole was irresistible.  I have no illusions, however, that very many people on the Right will bother to read this.  If they read the first one, they will likely have decided where my leanings are and that reading further would be a waste of their valuable time.  They would be wrong, on both counts.  They really would not know what my leanings are and I suspect anything that even by a smidgen opens someone to the possibility of a new point of view is a total waste of time.

Please note, I have been using the term Right in discussing certain folks, because I genuinely believe that there is a conservative viewpoint that is perfectly valid and important to the political discourse.  We need both voices.  But the voice on the Right of late has not been the voice of conservatism except by accident.  I’ll get back to that, probably in a later post.

The basic argument of autonomy in these instances runs this way: “I took it upon myself to develop, create, and build something which did not exist before and which has been found useful by others.  Had I not built it, it would not exist.  The community did not build it, did not hire me to build it, did not even suggest it.  I built it, therefore I can claim sole authorship and the benefits to be derived from what use the community makes of it morally devolve to me.  Having built it, I offered it to others for a price.  If they did not want it, found it not worthwhile, they had the freedom to ignore it, to not pay me, and I would have had to go elsewhere or do something else for compensation.  I owe them no more than the work itself, for which they compensate me in an arrangement devised to our mutual benefit.  Beyond the price of my services, and the requirement that I provide said service/product at that price, I owe nothing further.”

In this way, the individual entrepreneur justifies his or her anger and displeasure over taxation or other community “interferences” with his or her business.  In this view, the individual and the community are like two separate island-states, negotiating over a specific resource, the one providing it, the other paying for it.  In this scenario, it is absurd for the community island to lay a burden on the individual island for anything not having to do directly with the product being offered, i.e. a widget.

Simple.  Actually, simplistic.  It ignores everything to do with how the entrepreneur reached the point of being able to create the widget and offer it for sale and it ignores everything that happens after the widget becomes part of the daily life of both the community and the individual.  It treats the construction of the business—a notable achievement, not to be undervalued—as an event which occurs in isolation from the world in which it seeks to exist.

Functionally, this description of the entrepreneur is closer to Robinson Crusoe than Bill Gates.  If you go off to a spot of land all by yourself and with your own hands build your home, grow your food, make your own clothes, and take care of your own needs with what is available to hand, then you can make a decent argument that you are the sole creator of your life’s work.  But that requires you to be a bit of hermit and that’s where the similarities break down altogether.

We don’t do anything without the work of other people being involved, to greater or lesser degrees.  But more importantly, we have no possibility of doing something like building a business without work already in place done by thousands if not millions of people we don’t know but on whom we will depend for any kind of success we might desire.  And I am not talking about the simple metric of The Market.

At its most basic, the community has provided the builder with a place and a circumstance in which what has been built has meaning.  The community allows it to exist, makes use of it after its built, probably provides assistance in the building, and then guarantees that you may benefit from what you’ve built in ways that make it worth while.  I’m not talking about money, although that’s part of it.  What good is the most beautiful bridge in the world if no one wants to cross it?  Or there’s nowhere to go once you do cross it?  Without that community, be it a neighborhood, a village, town, city, or country, what Robinson Crusoe might want to build has no meaning other than to himself and even that, probably, not for very long.

The Right seems to be trying to assert the Robinson Crusoe argument of entrepreneurship, as if that community is irrelevant.  More precisely, they act as if everyone in a community is just another Robinson Crusoe, doing their own thing for their own reasons, regardless of any connections to anyone else.  By making the argument that “What I’ve built is mine!  Just like whatever you build is yours!  You have no right to what’s mine!” they are trying to put forward a model of human relations that would make everyone their own little state and everything they do is subject to contract negotiations with everyone else around them.  It reduces responsibility to a matter of terms rather than a dynamic and strips everyone of any moral connection with anyone else.

This is not to claim that individuals cannot be abused and overburdened by the community.  An obverse claim that the individual does nothing and can claim nothing of his or her own has many examples throughout history and can extend so far as to claim that there is no such thing as The Individual.  This is idiocy in the other direction, but I hesitate to say it is to the Left, at least not anymore.

The shifting context of what we label Left or Right can be baffling when the history is examined.  At a time when “conservative” or Right Wing politics rested squarely with The State, Leftist ideology was squarely in support of the individual in opposition to the status quo—which makes the American Revolution appear to be a Leftist event.  Individual freedoms were part of the goal sought by the rebels and the cause for the drafting of the Bill of Rights.   It needs to be remembered that during the Constitutional Convention, a vote of ten to zero defeated a proposal to appoint a committee to draft exactly such a bill.  Federalists opposed specifying individual rights and it emerged that this action became the single largest barrier to ratification.  Federalists maintained that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the only powers delegated to the federal government would not threaten liberties.  They further argued that an incomplete Bill of Rights would be dangerous because it would imply the abandonment of liberties not listed. (Hence the inclusion of the Ninth Amendment, which is often troublesome, often ignored.)  Despite their opposition, in order to achieve ratification a promise that the first congress would take up the matter was made.

Most Federalists ran for office in opposition to a Bill of Rights.  The pattern was therefore set early on that the national government tended to be oppressive of individual liberties, even though by the mid 20th Century this was clearly not the case as the federal government became the guarantor of personal freedoms in the face of local violations and oppressions.

However, the Federalist opposition to a Bill of Rights sheds light on another trend in our history that is today manifesting itself mightily, and that is the arrogation of privilege to a select group of self-appointed “true” citizens.  We can see this most clearly in an event that almost toppled President Washington’s image and nearly split the country.  The Whiskey Rebellion is one of the first and most often misunderstood challenges to aggregate authority and underscores everything that followed pertaining to individual liberties versus collective power—but furthermore anchors the trend toward separating out people who “mattered” from those who don’t.  I’ll get to that next time.

current affairs

The Debate, part one

The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State.  The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral.  The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.

That’s the basics of the debate.  The Right says no, people should look out for themselves.  The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets.  The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system.  The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate.  Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance.  The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved.  The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives.

Well.

Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong.  They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable.  In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky.  The government can functionally do nothing about any of that.

The argument falls apart on its face.  Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State.  The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private.  The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts.  It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement.  It is only a promise of access.  Because people are not equal as individuals.

They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it.  Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd.

The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual.   They discount social obstacles.  Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life.  So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story.  The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else.

Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice.  Exclusively.  Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures.

This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality.

The reality is quite different.  Opportunity is not equally distributed.  It depends on where you are born, where you go to school (if you go to school), who your friends are, your religion, your ethnic group, your gender, your health, the laws in place in your community, the local economics, how much money your parents have, local environmental conditions.  What you are able to do is determined as much if not more by those parts of your life in which you have no say whatsoever as any kind of innate ability, quality of mind, or willful intention.

Yes, there are many examples of individuals born into situations which would seem to guarantee failure who succeed.  They are remarkable and should be recognized.  But the Right has elected to see them as the normative factor rather than the vaster numbers of those from the same background who did not succeed.  Why?  They claim that the exceptional is the nominal and blame the true nominal conditions on personal failure on the part of all those who are not exceptional, then defend a status quo in which no community responsibility is justified to address the conditions which act as both barriers and weights on people left behind by the exceptional.

Why?

One argument put forward is that the tax burden to redress social conditions is onerous and ends up punishing success.  But this argument only has merit if the individual so encumbered has no obligation to the community that allowed his or her success.  This leads us to a further statement, Libertarian in nature, that says personal achievement does, in fact, owe nothing to the community, that simply the decision to act is something unique and the effort to succeed is separate from anything the community may provide or contribute, making the successful entrepreneur, for instance, a completely self-made individual.

If true, then morally the argument is sound.  That individual could claim that what he or she has made has been made entirely apart from the community, that the community then takes advantage of that work and therefore owes the builder, and the builder owes nothing in return.  Certainly not to those who failed to achieve on their own.

This is sophomoric philosophy at best, the credo of selfish people.

Why?

I’ll let this stand for a few days for anyone who might read it to mull over.  Comments are welcome.

culture

People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing

I’m a tad upset.  The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

Why?

Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception.  Jail.  Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.

Again, why?  This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives.  Privacy.  The ability to control your own person.  The responsible management of your own life.  But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality.  I have said this before, but I think it bears repeating, that the right wing jeremiad against abortion has little to do with abortion—it is a war on sex.

Planned Parenthood is the number one provider of gynecological services for poor women, under and uninsured women, women with few other options if any.  The fact is that no federal dollars have been spent on abortion since the Hyde amendment was passed in 1976, and yet—and yet—this persecution continues.  It only makes sense if we stop thinking that this has anything to do with fetuses.

There is a very silly movie from 1964 called Kisses For My President.  It starred Polly Bergen as the first woman president of the United States and Fred MacMurray as her hapless husband.  You can imagine what the bulk of it is about—he has to fill the role of First Lady.  It’s a comedy.  Ostensibly.  As the frustrations of his position mount (I choose my words carefully) he clearly resents his position and decides to do something about it.  His solution?  He gets his wife pregnant.

Now, for some reason which today would be head-scratchable, she has to resign as president.  On this occasion, she yields to the inevitable and MacMurray is beaming like a man once more in charge.

Does anyone not see the horror in that scenario?

In 1964 businesses were still firing women who became pregnant.  There were no laws to prevent this.  The idea that a woman might want some say over her own life was still bizarre.  The sexual revolution was just underway and most Americans didn’t like it so much—not because they minded the idea of more sex so much as they hated the idea that their kids would be doing it.  Once it was well underway, though, it became far clearer that underlying all the cheesy jokes and Playboy aesthetics was the very serious issue of providing half the population with the ability to manage their own lives, their own dreams, their own futures.  Roe v. Wade was the capstone of this movement because—

This must be stressed today because we have generations that have grown up not knowing this history, not having to live under these conditions.

—because the inability of women to say no in matters of personal sexuality and to control their own fertility trapped many of them in cycles of dependence and poverty.  The fruits of the sexual revolution were not that boys got to get laid a lot more but that women have the final say in whether, when, if, how, and with whom any laying was going to take place.

For women who yearn for a baby and live in circumstances in which such an advent is welcome, wanted, and cherished and is not a crushing weight and a drain on small resources, it may be difficult to understand what a calamity an unwanted pregnancy might be.  But for any woman who wants to have a say in her own procreative decisions, there should be no question today that the Right, through the instrument of the Republican Party, is trying to turn this country back to a time when the movie cited above makes perfect sense and offers a welcome message.

What it really means is that if you don’t have the means in hand, and you’re a woman, these people want you to be silent, subservient, and second-class.

The reality is that women with money have always had access to abortion.  The euphemistic “time in the country” mentioned in so many mauve novels meant just that.  If you were poor, you went to a butcher in a dirty room and took your chances whether it was successful or you ended up with an infection that would kill you or a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.

The Republican Party is tied to a constituency of moneyed interests and moral morons who care nothing for average people.  Why we continue to vote them into power is a testament to a propaganda machine that has worked tirelessly to convince us that our interests are best served by having all protections stripped from us if we live below a certain income level.  They are marching us forward in our goal to become the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.