Broadly, all groups, but the rich, have been historically and chronically short-changed by American politics and socioeconomics no matter the color of their skin- per below.
I apologize if this installment comes off a little cryptic. I’ve read both the source subject matter and some criticism of this man’s work- namely, that he wasn’t a legitimate historian, his presentation wasn’t as original as we first supposed, that he neglected certain truths while passing off anecdotal evidence as historical fact. He was a socialist, and too many of his conclusions promote a socialist’s view. We should ignore the torrent of truth because of a droplet of seeming cantankerous un-Americanism. There are always going to be class divisions in this country. But the economic and influential disparity of those classes started out extreme, again per below and continues to expand as it keeps stretching into infinity like the outer reaches of space.
One, apparently legitimate historian, wrote this about the man I'm referencing, with his work under question, after some reluctant and back-handed complements: "The problem with [his] work, however, is that it sometimes tries so hard to assault our complacency that it fails to offer an honest account of how political change actually happens." Criticism of one man's historical view,
Kyle Williams, March 9, 2020.
How does political change actually happen in this country? Mostly, it doesn't. Sure, there are labor disputes and public outcries of support for one cause or another, but all that energy spent in view of the country mostly immune to its effects are definitely ignorant of its causes (probably a paraphrase of a Madison quote from Federalist #10). We, the historically subjected lesser economic classes, fight for rights mostly granted a generation or two too late, if at all. The kind of America we have is largely left up to the miasma and stench of power-brokers and corporate elites. I don't know that I'd put a lot of stock in a rebuttal where the leading critique of someone bringing that much truth to the discussion- (see below), is that he's naive, and I don't care if the source of that criticism had been granted, by god, a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Heaven-ville.
The book I'm referencing is 688 pages, not including a 19 page bibliography.
So, what really has changed.
Well, we aren't gunned down in the back by Rockefeller-hired detective agents as was the case in the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, because "mostly foreign-born--Greeks, Italians, Serbs" who worked for a Colorado mining company and went on strike "against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies." (pg. 354) So, that's good right, that we aren't gunned down.
However, companies are still bringing in foreign workers to compete for jobs with people who are already here, which guards against strikes and keeps controllable costs/employee salaries low. It used to be the Irish, Hungarians and Chinese, then Latinos, etc. who were imported, now it is Indians. The ancillary benefit of that import, only slowed recently by Trump's visa suspension Trump visa suspension, Michael D. Shear and Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, June 22, 2020.
The ancillary benefit of all that importation is that all of those workers become consumers and contribute to the GDP. Convenient. The importation of tens of thousands of foreign workers into technology sectors isn't a check against black people; that is a wage check against anyone with a certain type of skill set, given their experience. And why pay someone with 20 years of experience who is at the upper tier of the salary structure when you can pay someone else far less, give them a tryout as a contractor, while not supplement what they’re paying for medical benefits, and then bring them on at a severely reduced salary, letting experienced people go in the process. Forgive me if some of the results of this Visa suspension seem to indicate that it is a net loss for America; it is a gross loss for this particular writer, as I’ve already once had my job shipped to India, and once had IT competition shuffle me into the churn of the job search world without my consent. Sorry, but I can’t care if some extra doctors, nurses, or IT professionals aren’t admitted to my country, when I’ve got a mortgage, three kids and the responsibility to fund my retirement for which I’ve been saving my whole life.
The globalization pandemic means that the country doesn't even have to physically bring people into the country to compete for American jobs. The visa suspension wouldn't necessarily slow that avenue for the rich to continue to build their wealth/maintain their advantages. And lord knows that the rich don't just spend their money on homes, vacations, expensive dinners and boats when there are candidates for government offices to support in their re-election campaigns. Since the supreme court has granted free speech rights in the name of campaign contributions, nothing has changed there either, and you can go back well past the 2010 Citizens United verdict to see how much it hasn't changed.
Along with that, there's a recession scheduled about every six years. There have been twelve in the seventy-five years since the end of WWII. A recession is defined as "a contraction in economic growth lasting two quarters or more as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP)." History of recessions, Dave Roos, April 29, 2020. If you think companies won't use any official recession indicators, or plenty of unofficial ones, to justify a dip in the salary structure or to communicate salaries or bonuses were negatively impacted, well then, the reason for lower salaries this year is because not enough bird-houses were refinanced by squirrels in the last 18 months, so you're only getting a 1.25% salary bump for all the hard work we were told you did last year.
Companies are so hell-bent on outlining the ways in which they measure up in the self-congratulatory corporate social responsibility index, in many cases, why would paying an employee the salary they've earned be all that important, as there is nothing left in the self-awareness department.
One last appetizing diversion before heading to the main course. The author I'm spotlighting this time out wrote this on page 441: "The distribution of wealth was still unequal [following WWII]. From 1944 to 1961, it had not changed much: the lowest fifth of all families received 5 percent of all the income; the highest fifth received 45 percent of all income. In 1953, 1.6 percent of the adult population owned more than 80 percent of the corporate stock . . . About 200 giant corporations out of 200,000 corporations--one tenth of 1 percent . . . controlled 60 percent of the manufacturing wealth of the nation." If the pages of the book were torn out and crumpled up into a hat, someone drawing them out would have a 50% chance of selecting one with a fact like that, or a quote worthy of any article someone could write to justify the historical economic advantages of the rich and how little has changed on the topic of wealth and income disparity.
And by god, I'm a capitalist, but there are other words for what we have going on here (oligarchy, plutocracy, etc.), and one of those, in the case of economics, which is something not enough people are paying attention to, is not racism. Pew income and wealth inequality Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik and Rakesh Kochhar, January 9, 2020; "Trend in Income and Wealth Inequality.
Overall, the next source proves my point, but in fairness, I don't agree with their presentation of point #3, that "In the U.S., black-white income gap has held steady since 1970." Fifty years ago whites made $24k more than blacks; in 2018 that difference is $33k. I don't call that holding steady- that's a difference of $9,000. That difference, adjusted for comparing the workforce job responsibilities, regions of the country and industry, should be $0.
Pew research- 6 facts economic inequality. Katherine Schaeffer, February 7, 2020.
Point #5 of that same article, is the one to focus on- "The wealth gap between America's richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016 . . . Another way of measuring inequality is to look at household wealth, also known as net worth, or the value of assets owned by a family, such as a home or a savings account, minus outstanding debt, such as a mortgage or student loan." Someone could spend a week consuming and digesting similar articles from the last ten years about income inequality. I defy anyone who can find a reputable site/article which would boast that the income disparity between the richest 5% of the U.S. population has not grown, or is not growing, at a rate that is difficult to comprehend. On cue- "For the top 5%, [since the start of the Great Recession in 2007 to 2016, net worth] increased by 4%, to $4.8 million. In contrast, the median net worth of families in lower tiers of wealth decreased by at least 20%."
The reason it is the one to focus on is because it doesn't take race into account. People can't tell me the larger issue at this stage of the socieconomic game is not this country's problem with the color green. Let's naively find out if that has changed.
Let us assume that there can be, metaphorically speaking, because of the equal mixing of black and white, plenty of grey areas, on any topic. People can hide their thoughts and feelings in the grey areas. They can make accusations and require the burden of proof of others because our world, and our issues, are so complex. This one time, I’ll make it easy. The difference between right and wrong is easy. This time, with a global pandemic and systemic racism as the backdrop, it's time to focus on a new headline. Let’s focus on the larger systemic issue- the historical subjection of the lesser economic classes, and not continue to embrace the uncertainty of all things, including what actually did or didn’t happen, what was or was not said, who was or wasn't elected, which are all things that Oliver Stone focused on in his 2012 documentary about the "Untold History of the United States" which largely focuses on 20th century military and political entanglements.
I ask specifically, so we do not need to live immersed in the shade of grey, so we can declare definitively in order to share a common understanding. Are these pieces of American history not true? Did the events below not occur? Are the rich misunderstood and misrepresented by the man compiling this information? Who is the revisionist- the man who offers a different look at the nation’s glossed over history based on input from the types of people unilaterally shortchanged in that department, or those who are content to nitpick at individual conclusions who miss the light of all the stars because they are distracted by the moon?
Did the citizens in the lower classes not feel and think the way the author presents? Is he providing facts that aren't true, or misquoting the person in question? Please tell me, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup, that you haven't brought us here, to answer questions/read articles about phone calls and foot lockers, when the author I'm highlighting has written about a CODE RED! You're God-damn [write he] did!!!
Due to space these are mere targeted selections to offer my reasons for contending our country’s problem is more complicated than black v. white, from a volume of some renown:
Pg. 37: “Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. Via Edmund Morgan- “ ‘There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It was common . . . for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.’”
Pg. 47: “It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and poor became sharper. By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia with wealth equivalent to 50,000 pounds . . . who lived off the labor of black slaves and white servants . . .”
Pg. 49: “. . . the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power. A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent--1 percent of the of the population--consisted of fifty reich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770 the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth [back then] loss of property meant loss of voting rights.”
Pg. 56: “Along with the very rich and the very poor, there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites.”
Pg. 73: “ . . . just a few years after [John Locke] had written his Second Treatise [on Government] . . . As advisor to the Carolinas, he had suggested a government of slaveowners run by wealthy land barons.” It is important to keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence was based on Locke’s, among others, Enlightenment era model of government.
Pg. 75: “Four days after the reading, [of the Declaration of Independence]” . . . the [Boston] townsmen were ordered “to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve.”
Pg. 85: “Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): “ ‘The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.’ George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston Merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer.”
Pg. 91: “Four groups . . . were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups.”
From pages 103-124 is a chapter outlining the ways in which the female gender was oppressed followed by a chapter about the oppression of Native Americans (pgs.125-148), followed by a chapter about the expansion of American dominion in North America with a focus on Texas statehood, the acquisition of California, Nevada and Arizona, etc. (pgs 149-169). All are suitable topics to explore independently, and all are regrettable in breadth and depth, but none are fit material for a review of class antagonism, although a reading of those chapters would not grant the wealthy immunity from the overwhelming blame due to them because of their subjection of any class lower than theirs.
I could have chosen twenty items from among the dubious historical actions transacted against the less powerful by those in command, given the resources (due to numbers, finances, or lawful or sexist controls). Blacks aren’t the only race or gender that has suffered because of the famous, rich and powerful: (pg. 108) “Anne Hutchinson . . . defied the church fathers in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by insisting that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for themselves . . . soon groups of sixty or more were gathering at her home in Boston to listen to her criticisms of local ministers. John Winthrop, the governor, described her as ‘a woman of . . .’" You know what- it doesn’t matter how that a-hole described her. Giving him a voice is something he didn’t allow her, so to hell with him. Let me just say it was unkind, dismissive and likely, since she had so many followers, dead wrong. She challenged his narrow view of the world and since he was in a position to silence her, he did so. He was rich and politically well-connected and a member of the elite ruling class, so he could stifle her views because he was in control and had the power to, not because he was white. See, there is a difference between one’s race and one’s way of thinking and acting toward other people because of their economic position- no matter the time period. Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638.
Pg. 176: “The instances where poor whites helped slaves were not frequent, but sufficient to show the need for setting one group against the other. [Eugene] Genovese says:
‘The slaveholders . . . suspected that non-slaveholders would encourage disobedience and even rebellion, not so much out of sympathy for the blacks as out of hatred for the rich planters and resentment of their own poverty. White men sometimes were linked to slave insurrectionary plots, and each such incident rekindled fears.’ ”
Pg. 177: “The need for slave control led to an ingenious device, paying poor whites--themselves so troublesome for two hundred years of southern history--to be overseers of black labor and therefore buffers for black hatred.” When the Slave Patrol is referenced, keep in mind that it wasn’t devised by the middle class white man.
Pg. 187: “It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property.” Anyone who hasn’t read much about the meandering highest court in the land, and their inconsistent deference to justice is in for a treat.
Pg. 210: “ . . . W. E. B. Du bois, saw the late-nineteenth century betrayal of the Negro as part of a larger happening in the United States, something happening not only to poor blacks but to poor whites. In his book Black Reconstruction [he thought there was a] new capitalism as part of a process of exploitation and bribery taking place in all the ‘civilized’ countries of the world:
‘Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands . . .’
Was Du Bois right--that in that growth of American capitalism, before and after the Civil War, whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves?” It is difficult for me to put servants and economically abused whites on the same level as “slaves.” The economic and political elite did not abuse each of them equally it seems. But the whites on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and the black slaves who rank even lower, have many more similarities than differences, just like today. Not much has changed in the 400 years since the nation was colonized.
Pg. 216: “The stories of the Anti-Renter movement and Dorr’s Rebellion are not usually found in textbooks on United States history. In these books, given to millions of young Americans, there is little on class struggle in the nineteenth century. The period before and after the Civil War is filled with politics, elections, slavery, and the race question. Even where specialized books on the Jacksonian period deal with labor and economic issues they center on the presidency, and thus perpetuate the traditional dependency on heroic leaders rather than people’s struggles.”
Pg. 235: “The Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service: they could pay $300 or buy a substitute.” One stanza from an 1863 tune “Song of the Conscripts”:
"We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.”
Pg. 244: German socialists in Chicago: “The present system has enabled capitalists to make laws in their own interests to the injury and oppression of the workers.”
Pg. 261: “ . . . the Supreme Court had accepted the argument that corporations were ‘persons’ and
their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Supposedly, the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth
Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with
the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations.”
The discovery of how complicit the supreme court has traditionally been in maintaining the socioeconomic and political power broker and corporate elite status quo may await you. Enjoy. Purposeful, constitutionally law-abiding when there are no words in that document to base opinions on, for or against, or indiscriminately incompetent, it doesn’t matter. The supreme court has been too ineffectual, not just when it decides cases, historically, but when it refuses to hear them- supreme court denies hearing of qualified immunity
Pg. 291: “The laws that took the vote away from blacks--poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications--also often ensured that poor whites would not vote . . . a Populist leader of Georgia, pleaded for racial unity:
‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.’"
In fairness, that same “leader” denounced any black support obtained for his party when it no longer suited his purposes. Including this information, just as the author of this book had done, to be even-handed about the despicable abuses of blacks, to show how complicated and multi-faceted is the interconnectedness of the race (black v. white) issue with the green issue, while also showing how duplicitous the power brokers can be.
Many times, antagonism with other countries was manufactured, or opportunities for economic expansion were hatched. Teddy Roosevelt, whose likeness does NOT need to be wiped from the side of a mountain in South Dakota, wrote in a letter to a friend- “In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”(pg. 297)
(Pgs. 306-307) The Maine exploded in February of 1898, and that was enough to precipitate the Spanish-American War, against the wishes of many American labor unions. Meanwhile most of the 19 workers who were killed, in the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, were shot in the back. Among them, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians and Germans, and, presumably none of them black. If they were, the author of this book would have mentioned it. I’m including this because it is indicative of the labor v. business entanglements that are hallmarks of the American system, exclusive of any intrusion of the obvious race concerns by which everyone is so easily distracted.
I’ve included the previous example because to stress another point which would challenge the typical 21st Century conservative. If someone defends a union, one isn’t a socialist, any more than one is a racist by objectively calling attention to the missteps of blacks while echoing their justifiable frustrations. I think capitalism is the best economic approach which has been tried, but I don’t like the contrivances, both underhanded and overtly violent, which can be easily traced to its historical success. Violence?
Yes. If one has not been acquainted with the stream of misguided supreme court opinions and now centuries old fights for fair wages, again, they have work to do.
An elite power structure whose biggest goal is to stay in power, like most politician’s prime concern is staying in office- do the masses of people think that independently wealthy, or corporate elitists, who stand to lose what anyone else would stand to gain at their expense, care what color someone’s skin is?
Now, has the race of white people generally benefited (in terms of competition for jobs, salary, homes, etc.) from the even worse subjection of black people? Of course. But hasn't he stood to lose economically by the importation of workers for competitive wage purposes? Of course. And I would rather we not have subjected black Americans to second-class citizenship through the ages. I would rather they were paid equal to whites in fields now highly populated with Indians, green-carded into the country to compete for technical jobs, so that employers could keep salaries low by providing competition to people who have spent their whole lives here, while simultaneously, importing millions of consumers to replenish the aging populace with fresh subjects to help contribute to the nation’s GDP.
I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks the skin color problem is bigger than our green problem, maintained by a corrupt political duopoly financed by our corporate elites, both wanting to retain influence and power, given all that I’ve referenced above, and hundreds of other citations I could have made to further prove my point, from our 400 years on this continent, is simply not paying attention. Perhaps
People think this nation's racial divide is easier to bridge than our economic one and we'll eventually all hold the richest of our countrymen accountable together. Ah, that I would like to see.
The book, from which the references above are derived, is A People’s History of the United States, written by Howard Zinn. If you read one book about American history in your life- first of all, don't do that, but if you do, it should be Zinn's.
The End.
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