The ignorant white mobs, instigated by Faubus, Ross and their ilk in the Deep South who have been on the rampage ever since the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools, may not know it, but the free public education from which they want the Negroes excluded, was first instituted in the South by the Negro during the much-maligned Reconstruction period. The Negro and white legislatures of the post-Civil War period gave the South the only democracy it had ever known - and has since forgotten.15
No one can rewrite history, which records that also for the first time, universal manhood suffrage as well as equal political, civil and legal rights for its citizens then became a way of life for the South. That such elementary democracy had to be brought there on bayonets and then only after the white supremacist secessionists were finally defeated in a bloody war lasting four years is only further proof of the philosophy of unfreedom of the aristocratic South that lorded it over the bent back of human beings reduced to slavery. This expression, "philosophy of unfreedom," - coined by the great German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, to characterize India's caste system - perfectly describes the ideology of the dominant South.
Even as an unfinished revolution the achievements of the Civil War, however, cannot be expunged from the historic record which is reflected in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, added to the Constitution by a radical Republican Congress and approved by the whole nation, which abolished slavery and thereby achieved Union.
No one can rewrite history, which, unfortunately, also records that these were virtually nullified once the Army was withdrawn. The counter-revolution in the South, however, was not of regional make only, although it was instigated there by the slavocrats who lost the war but won the peace once they learned to accept the dictates of Northern capital. In enacting the infamous "Black Codes," the unreconstructed South knew it could do so with impunity once the Army was out. The withdrawal of the Army was not, however, the cause, but the consequence of the new, expansive development of Northern capitalism and the betrayal of four million newly-freed human beings who did not own the land they tilled.
The new phase of Northern capitalist development had, of course, been a motivating force for the Civil War. But, the economic determinist view notwithstanding, it was not the propellent. The Second American Revolution was far more than an "economic revolution." Much as the industrialists wished to break the monopoly of commercial over industrial capital, of American slavishness to British textile manufacturing, cash and compromise was too ingrained an element of American capitalism for the industrialists to venture forth into civil war. Only the most prodigious revolutionary exertions by slaves, Abolitionists and, in many of its stages, labor, could tear apart the power link of cash and compromise that bound together cotton and textiles; cotton growers, cotton shippers and financiers.
"If Lincoln has grown," wrote Wendell Phillips after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, "it is quite natural. We watered him." At the same time, however, it was no accident that Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson as his running mate for the second term, in place of the Vice-President of the first term, Hannibal Hamlin who was a friend of the Abolitionists. The objective compulsion of capitalist industrialization held Lincoln in thrall. The Civil War brought to a climax and summed up the paradox of the Jefferson-Jackson-Lincoln liberal presidential tradition.
In office, Jefferson and the Jeffersonians were fulfilled Hamiltonians. In office, Jacksonian democracy turned out to be something very different from the rule of farmer and mechanic against Eastern finance capital. As a present-day admirer of Andrew Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. phrased it in his Age of Jackson: "The fate of the Jacksonian economic legislation was that common historical irony: it on the whole promoted the very ends it was intended to defeat. The general laws sprinkled holy waters on corporations, cleansing them of the legal status of monopoly, and sending them forth as the benevolent agencies of free competition."
In the same manner, Lincoln, in office, developed the "American System" more in line with the concept of the "Great Compromiser," Henry Clay, than in the spirit of a "Great Emancipator" heading the Second American Revolution. This made it easy for that Tenessee Jacksonian, Andrew Johnson, in his own treacherous ways, to see that the revolution remained unfinished.
Surely it was not too sharp a change from the Credit Mobilier scandal-wracked Grant Administration to the consummate betrayal that was to take place in 1876. Upon the understanding that Federal troops would be withdrawn from the South the Electoral College voted for the minority presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to become the President who would carry out the betrayal of the black freedmen.
The three basic constituents of the betrayal, that is to say, the unfinished state of revolution, were: (1) the freedmen did not get "the 40 acres and a mule" they were promised; (2) the old slave owners did get back their planations and thus the power to institute a mode of production to suit cotton culture; and (3) the crop lien system was introduced with "new" labor: share cropping. Historians who state that "the Negro problem" is rooted in slavery, and stop there, fail to see the crux of the question. The "stigma" of slavery could not have persisted so long if the economic remains of slavery - share-cropping and tenancy - had not persisted. Within the economic remains of slavery the roots of the Negro Question lie. Once Congress, in 1867, failed to pass Thaddeus Stevens' Land Division Act which would have given each freedman 40 acres and $50 for a homestead, the rest was inevitable.
It is this backwardness of the agricultural economy which led Lenin, in his 1913 study, "New Data on the Laws of Development of Capitalism and Agriculture," to remark about "the striking similarity between the economic position of the American Negro and that of the former serf of the central agricultural provinces in Russia." Even in Russia, where there was some fraudulent attempt to give the serf the land, it was impossible for the Russian serf to rise above the needs of the backward economy. All the more where the Negro did not get his "40 acres and a mule." Cotton remaining dominant, semi-feudal relationships were inevitable. The division of labor set up by the cotton economy may not be disturbed. The social relations arising on the basis of the cotton economy remain "less changed than the soil itself on which the cotton is grown."16
Naturally the infamous "Black Codes" which the plantation owners now enacted and were free to execute and "the gentleman's agreement" with Northern capital, as well as with the help of the KKK, paved the royal road back for white supremacy South. But once we place the problem in its proper economic framework, the human factors can emerge and then we see the limitations of all laws, written and unwritten. Nowhere is this clearer than in the benighted South as the counter-revolution comes into head-on collision with masses in revolt in the decade of the 1880's and 1890's and Populism sweeps the South. When this new attempt at revolutionary change occurred, "the boss and black" relationship was fully dominant.
The cropper has neither control of the nature of his crop nor the marketing of it. The cropper owns nothing but his labor power, and must part with half of the crop for "furnishings." Somehow the rest of the crop seems likewise to go to the merchant upon whom he depends for his every purchase of clothing, food, implements and fertilizer. The cropper is charged exorbitant prices but he must not question the word of the boss who keeps the books and makes the "settlement," at which time the cropper finds himself in debt and thus unable to leave the land.
To this day more than one-third of the croppers is one and one-half years behind in debt. The "plot" for the maintenance of "white supremacy" in the South arose from the actual process of cotton production. There was a "gentleman's agreement" that Southern industry-textiles-develop -under the condition that it leave untouched the black labor supply of the plantations.
When the New Deal came South, "the paternalism of the planter, the dependency of the tenant so meticulously maintained, the stern objections on the part of the landlord to any change in the traditional relationship" (17) made it difficult and in some cases impossible for the Government to deal with the cropper directly. The fear of the planter that the cropper be removed from his influence and learn that he is not personally dependent upon him set up well-nigh insurmountable barriers to the cropper's getting any benefits from the A.A.A.
The county agent in charge of the A.A.A. payments, for instance, had to make the credit store the point of distribution of A.A.A. checks. The result was that the merchant retained the check either for "unpaid debts" or for "future furnishings" to his tenant. Or the merchant would suggest that the checks be given to him outright. Under the prevailing relationship in the rural South, such a "suggestion" is tantamount to an edict that the Government agent has to obey.
The prevailing relationship which makes such a suggestion a law is known as the "boss and black" relationship, and its economic root is the cotton culture. That is so pervading a relationship that it still holds though cropping is no longer an exclusively Negro occupation - there are in the old South now five and a half million white tenants to over three million Negro tenants, though of the croppers, the Negroes still constitute the majority.
"The old boss and black attitude," write the authors of the most concise economic study of cotton culture, "pervades the whole system. . . . The fixed custom of exploitation has carried over to the white tenant."17 Nothing fundamental changed in Southern agriculture during the half century that separates the New Deal from the year of betrayal, 1877.
As we wrote at the time of the New Deal, "What the Southern Block bellows in Congress may irritate the sensitive ears of the Harvard man in the White House, but when he comes down South they tell him what to do." Nothing has changed, in the two decades since, except that JFK, instead of FDR, now occupies the White House. No wonder we have advanced so little from 1877 when Union, "one and indivisible," meant unity forged in the struggle against labor for imperialist adventures. To understand today's racism as well as tokenism, it is necessary to return to that page in history when the "gentleman's agreement" of Northern capital with the South set the stage for the unbridled violence against labor.
1877, the year the Federal troops were removed from the South, was the year they were used to crush the railroad strikes stretching from Pennsylvania to Texas. The Pennsylvania Governor not only threatened labor with "a sharp use of bayonet and musket," but the Federal Government did exactly that at the behest of the captains of industry. The peace pact with the Southern bourbons meant unrestrained violence on the part of the rulers, both North and South, against labor. On the other hand, labor began the decade of the 1870's in Europe with the Paris Commune, the first workers' state in world history. So numerous were the American followers of the Paris Commune that Wendell Phillips said that all that was needed to meet a Communard was "to scratch a New Yorker."
The ruthlessness with which capital asserted its rule over labor that worked long hours for little pay, which was further cut at the will of the factory owners every time a financial crisis hit the country, drove labor underground. The first National Labor Union had a very short span of life. The Knights of Labor that replaced it organized white and black alike, with the result that, at its height (1886) out of a total membership of one million no less than 90,000 were Negroes. Nevertheless, no Northern organization could possibly get to the mass base of Negroes who remained overwhelmingly, preponderantly in the South. For, along with being freed from slavery, the Negroes were freed also from a way to make a living. Landless were the new freedmen, and penniless.
As the 1869 Congress Resolution of the National Labor Union put it, "American citizenship for the black man is a complete failure if he is proscribed from the workshops of the country." When Northern labor emerged as a new force in the 1877 railroad strikes, Negro labor was still South and still in agriculture.
The severe financial crisis of 1873 dealt a death blow to the Eight Hour Leagues, but not to the idea for an eight-hour day. In 1884 not only the idea, but the actions to put it into effect, were once again initiated, this time by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, later to be known as the American Federation of Labor.
The struggle for the eight-hour day during the decade of 1880's, however, got a blood bath from the counter-revolution initiated by the capitalist corporations aided amply by the government. The anarchist labor leaders, Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel, were railroaded to the gallows.
The year was 1886, a year which became the dividing line in American labor. On the one hand, it was the year when no less than 80,000 were out on strike for the eight-hour day. On the other hand, it was the year in which the counter-revolution succeeded in breaking the back of the most militant sections of the labor movement through the hanging and imprisonment of its leaders.
It was the year the A. F. of L. "took over" the struggle for the eight-hour day. On the one hand it was undeterred by the hysteria or the backing away from the movement by the Knights of Labor which in that year reached its highest point of development and began its decline. On the other hand, the union restricted labor organization to a craft basis. Its reliance on the upper stratum of labor-its skilled trades-was to impel it toward "business unionism" and acceptance, with capital, of membership in so-called civic federations. It was itself involved in racism with its demand for the "Chinese Exclusion" act, not to mention racially separate locals for Negroes. Its indifference to the unskilled was to cause such isolation from the Negro that it would become impossible to organize heavy industry without breaking away from that craft union stranglehold.
And yet in the 1880's it formed the transition from diffuse to concentrated labor struggles. During the heart-breaking 1890's such historic battles were fought as the steel battle of Homestead, Pa., 1892; the silver mines at Coeur d'Alene in Idaho; and the great Pullman (Illinois) strike of 1894, led by Eugene V. Debs who, while in jail, was to be won over to socialism. As he put it:
"In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. The capitalist class. The working class. The class struggle."
In retrospect, even bourgeois historians have had to record: "If the Homestead skirmish introduced the nation to the use of private armies by captains of industry, the Pullman conflict made it familiar with two powerful engines of the federal government-the judicial ukase, known as the writ of injunction, and the use of regular soldiers in industrial dispute."18
During the late 1880's and 1890's too, despite Gompers' concept of "pure and simple trade unions" without political overtones, much less international relations, it was the A.F. of L. which sent delegates to the newly formed second Marxist International and got it to approve the American suggestion for a general strike, world-wide if possible, for the eight-hour day. "Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon for May 1, 1889," read the International Resolution, "this day is accepted for the international demonstration." As we see, far from May I having been "imported" from Russia, it was exported the world over by American labor.
Surely today, when in every country in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, the cry is for agricultural reforms - and a never-ending deluge of American books keep preaching for it "so that Communism should not be the victor" - surely we ought finally to understand the relationship of land and peasant in our own South and not keep piling stupidity upon stupidity to explain away "the Negro Question." To just such a betrayal of peasant revolt during the Lutheran Reformation Marx attributed the state of backwardness of the Germany of his day. In his Peasant Wars in Germany, Frederick Engels, the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx, pointed out that it was not only the peasants who were betrayed when they did not get the land during the 16th century German Reformation, but Germany itself "disappeared for three centuries from the ranks of countries playing an independent part in history."
In the case of the white supremacy Solid South, its re-establishment, at first, was short lived. The violent KKK lynch lawlessness, rope and faggot rule was shaken to its very foundations within one short decade after the removal of the Union Army. This revolutionary upheaval came from within, not without. It arose out of the great discontent of the farmers with the new form of monopoly planter-merchant-railroad vested interests which brought the "new South" its greatest crisis. Populism spread like a prairie fire bringing the "Solid South" a more fundamental challenge than even the Civil War.
Most amazing of all was the organization of the National Colored Farmers' Alliance. Just as the history of the slave revolts, when it was finally revealed, put an end to the myth of Negro docility, so this still little-known glorious chapter puts an end to the myth that the Negro "can't be organized." Think of it:
At the very height of the prejudice-ridden post-Reconstruction period, when the South was supposedly solidly white in thought and action, the Populist movement that was sweeping the country found its most radical expression in the South.
The National Colored Farmers' Alliance alone numbered one and one-quarter million members and, although separately organized from the white agrarians, waged their class battles as one. It was a power to be reckoned with both in state and national politics, and was instrumental in the elections of Populist governors as well as national and state representatives.
"Now the People's Party says to these two men," the reference was to one white and one Negro, and the speaker was white Georgian Tom Watson, "You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because on 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."
Fantastic as it may sound coming from the mouth of one who, with the turn of the century, was to become the typical white supremacist, it was characteristic during the height of the Populist groundswell in the South. Populists not only spoke that way but acted as the Abolitionists had in their day. When a young Negro preacher, H. S. Doyle, was threatened with lynching, Watson not only hid him in his home, but sent a call for Populists to protect him. Farmers rode all night to get there, and with arms stacked on Watson's veranda, and fully 2,000 farmers there as a defense guard, Watson said: "We are determined that in this free country that the humblest white or black man who wants to talk our doctrine shall do it, and the man doesn't live who shall touch a hair on his head without fighting every man in the People's Party."
Watson made hundreds of such speeches in the decade of the 1890's. He spoke repeatedly from the same platform with Negro speakers to mixed audiences of Negro and white farmers, all on the theme of the need of white and Negro solidarity to fight "the money kings" who are to use "the accident of color" to divide the unified struggles: "This is not a political fight and politicians cannot lead or direct it. It is a movement of the masses, an uprising of the people, and they, and not the politicians, will direct it. The people need spokesmen, not leaders, men in the front who will obey, not command."
Here is how the distinguished Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, no fire-eyed radical, sums up the decade of the 1890's in his study of Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel: "Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles." The unity of white and black was soon, in turn, shattered by the combined interests of the Bourbon South with monopoly capital that had won the struggle over labor in the North, and spread its tentacles over the Caribbean and the Pacific. Monopoly capital's growth into imperialism puts the last nail in the coffin of Southern democracy and thus not only re-establishes racism in the South but brings it to the North.
The unbridled violence of private capital - its Pinkerton detectives and armed thugs as strikebreakers; the Supreme Court, with its use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, not against the corporations armed to the teeth, but against the unarmed strikers battling for the elementary right to a livelihood; all finding their full class expression in the use of troops by the Federal Government, compelled both labor and agriculture to challenge capital's monopoly of the seats of government. It did so with a new mass party - the People's Party - more popularly called Populism, which reached its highest point in the 1896 election.
The class struggles of the two decades, 1877 to 1897, had shaken up capital. While labor did not succeed in freeing itself from capital's stranglehold, it had seriously challenged its dominance. During the same period agrarian discontent resulting from the agrarian depressions of the '80's and '90's completely overturned the uninhibited rule of the Southern plantocracy. Despite the removal of the Federal troops, despite its now unlimited power, the violence of the KKK and the more bestial lynchings, the new South experienced a greater overturn in social relations than during the Civil War itself. This civil war didn't come there on the point of a Yankee bayonet. It was internal and it succeeded in establishing white and black solidarity under the banner of Populism, at the very time when the class struggles in the North gave socialism its native roots among workers and farmers. Matching the agricultural was the industrial unrest which, from 1881 through 1900, recorded 22,793 strikes involving no fewer than 6,105,694 workers.
The emergence of labor as a new power affected every aspect of life. The resulting intellectual ferment gave birth to muckrakers as well as theoreticians, to writers of Utopias as well as such professional associations as the American Economic Association (AEA). The associations were born under a leadership that stressed the need to abandon ruthless "laissez faire," and instead "to humanize" economics.
As founder of the AEA, Richard T. Ely had praised Marx's CAPITAL as one of the "ablest politico-economic treatises ever written." His colleague, John R. Commons, laid entirely new foundations for a world view of American history with his 11 volume Documentary History of Industrial Society and two volume History of Labor. He had also laid a totally new basis for education with his advice to his students "to visit workingmen in their homes and to join a labor union for only then could the needs and aspiration of the working class be really understood" since "books did not teach and educated man did not know reasons for workingmen's behavior."19
The hack writers, however, followed big capital in judging Richard T. Ely's The Labor Movement in America as "ravings of an anarchist or the dream of a socialist."
Nor were the fathers of American sociology unaware of the class struggles and the need to humanize social relations. The muckrakers even more than sociologists, historians and theoreticians did indeed produce as great a disturbance in "public opinion" as the labor struggles did.
It was not any single event like the Utopias described by Edward Bellamy in his Looking Backward, or a theory like Henry George's single tax (though his Progress and Property certainly stirred up a political movement), or an expose of Standard Oil by Henry Demarest Lloyd.20 In Wealth Against Commonwealth his exposure of private capital was interlaced with attacks on legislature, like the statement that "Standard Oil had done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except to refine it."
It was that all together their attacks on "invisible government" - monopoly's stranglehold on all life - brought to the light of day the corruption in government, shook up legislatures as well as public opinion. Unfortunately the muckrakers were so busy searching for the invisible government that they didn't see the very visible march of monopoly toward imperialism. They wanted government "cleansed of corruption," not shorn of its organism, its class composition, even as the professional societies wished to "humanize" economics, not to establish a humanism, that is to say, a classless, non-exploitative society. Monopoly's expansion into imperialistic adventures took them by surprise.
15 Black Reconstruction, by W. E. B. Du Bois, is the only scholarly work on the subject. Yet to this day it is disregarded by white historians, Northern as well as Southern.
16 Deep South, by Davis, Gardner, and Warner, p. 266.
17 The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, by Johnson, Embree and Alexander.
18 The Rise of American Civilization, by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, 1945 edition.
19 The Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. Ill, 1865-1914, by Joseph Dorfman.
20 The most comprehensive study is the famous work of Ida Tarbell, History of Standard Oil.