James Oakes - The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War

After reading the book about loathing Lincoln here I go again with another book on slavery and the war.
P. 13 Abolitionists knew about military emancipation, but they were not counting on it to get the job done.  Events changed everything.
P. 18  Freeing slaves was a normal and accepted practice in war.  Eric Foner pointed this out in his presentation at UAB last November.
P. 19  But universal military emancipation was something new in American history.
P. 20  The destruction was not inevitable just as the war was not inevitable. Who knew that Joshua Chamberlain could lead his mean to hold on to Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg.  Nobody knew before it happened that the Constitution would have to be modified to officially end slavery or until late in the game that Lincoln would win reelection so that the Republicans could finish the job.
P. 21  Compromise failed.  The war came.  How did it all come down?
P. 25  The scorpion's sting was the metaphor by which opponents of slavery saw it's eventual demise.  Surround slavery with freedom and eventually the states would end the institution on their own in their states, the federal government doing what it could to help.  Seeing no means of escape Eventually the scorpion will sting itself to death.
P. 26 According to the Constitution, the federal government could not go into any state and abolish slavery, but it could create conditions so that the states would want to do it themselves.
P.  27  Would the scorpion technique---surrounding the slave states with freedom--- have eventually extinguished slavery short of war?  We will never know.
P.  28  The Republican policy of slow strangulation by encirclement is why the Southern states seceded.
P.  28 The Republican belief was that slavery was strictly a state institution.  It did not reach beyond the state that recognized it.  Outside the slave states the Constitution recognized freedom.  Slavery sectional; freedom national.
P.  34  Most antislavery advocates thought that abolition would proceed on a state-by-state basis.
P.  36  A cordon of freedom around the slave states along with compensated gradual emancipation was the peaceful way to national emancipation, preferable to wartime military emancipation.
P.  50  Despite Republican policy to not interfere with slavery in the states where it existed, slaveholders understood the Republican intention to surround the slave state with free states so as to force the slave states to eventually end the institution. Slavery had to expand or die. This is why they seceded.
P.  52  The point of the scorpion's sting was to surround slavery until it killed itself, and crucial to this purpose was to ban slavery in the territories.  So from this view the war was only superficially over the expansion of slavery; in reality it was a conflict over slavery itself.
P.  53  The word slavery has been understood in different ways.  The kind of slavery in the American South has to be carefully understood and distinguished.  It is unfortunate that historically and in the present the words slave and slavery are thrown around indiscriminately and inaccurate inequality comparisons are made to Southern slavery. Slavery is not just another form of inequality.
P.  56  The issue is chattel slavery.  The word chattel is the point.  Chattel slaves were commodity property.  This distinguishes chattel slavery from other forms of inequality.
P.  56  The nation went to war because of a difference of opinion over two different labor systems.  The difference was over the chattel principle: property in man.
P.  57  Did the natural right of property take precedence over the natural right of freedom?  For slave defenders, the right of property took precedence.
P.  58  The right of property preceded the Constitution.  This is implied in the Constitution.
P.  58  Thus slavery was sanctioned by principles of natural right that transcended mere statutes.
P.  81  In theory, the argument against slavery was easier because it required only a single step.  Once you rejected the legitimacy of property rights in human beings, you were done.
P.  85  The debate about "race" in American history eventually comes down to political power.
P.  98  In the Dred Scott decision, the Taney court in effect said blacks could not be US citizens.
P. 100 The Dred Scott decision set the tone for the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.
P. 102 The irreconcilable conflict over slavery was an irreconcilable conflict over racial equality.
P. 104 The wars over Revolutionary wartime emancipation is an intriguing story.
P. 117 British emancipation of American slaves was a subject for the peace negotiations.  The British wouldn't budge over their emancipation activities.  American demands for the return of slaves was "odious."
P. 118 Alexander Hamilton defended British emancipation and resisted re-enslaving freed slaves.  Return of property is one thing; the return of human beings to slavery is something else entirely.
P. 119 Hamilton said the British did not have to compensate for slaves liberated during the way.
P. 121 Hamilton says that to reenslave a person who has been freed by war is odious and immoral.
P.130 Arguments over Jay's Treaty and the Treaty of Paris partially involved slaves freed by by the British but in the US when the Revolutionary and Wars of 1812 ended.
P. 132 Arguments ensued over the wording regarding slaves in the treaties.
P. 151 JQA seemed to change his views over the years to favor emancipation.
P. 153 JQA is a hero to the emancipation movement during his time.
P. 165 The novelty of this country is that the seceding state made it clear they were forming a country based on slavery and the inherent inequality of human beings.
P. 166 The British had trouble seeing that the Civil War was always over slavery.

If there's one thing that stands out in the book, it's the part that military emancipation played in eliminating slavery in this country.

What It's All About

It's  all about defending the 1 percent from the threat of higher taxes and other actions that might limit top incomes.

JFK

JFK would have been 97 years today. In honor of him:

“If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone…who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people--their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-- then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal.” -- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

True Crime and Crime Fiction

Thursday, May 29, 2014 05:59 PM CDT

Sleazy, bloody and surprisingly smart: In defense of true crime

This stigmatized genre has much to teach us about the way crime and justice really work

Laura Miller


Give me a book that begins with a time and a date and a boring address, something along the lines of “At 9:36 on March 24, 1982, Dep. Frank McGruff of the Huntington County Sheriff’s Department was dispatched to 234 Maple Street in Pleasantville, North Carolina, a quiet, suburb 10 miles west of Raleigh, to follow up on reports of gunshots and screams.”



There is nothing more generic than this sort of sentence — which is why I was easily able to make one up on the fly — and yet there’s nothing more seductive, either. In it is promised: the regular-guy lawman (who always seems to have a new baby at home), the horrific crime scene (there is always more blood than anyone expects), the enigmatic object found lying in the foyer (marked with an X in the helpfully provided floor plan), the minute-by-minute timeline of that fatal half-hour, the witness reports that don’t add up, the fractal-like multiplication of scenarios and theories and complications.



I’ve always felt somewhat sheepish about my appetite for true crime narratives, associated as they are with fat, flimsy paperbacks scavenged from the 25-cent box at garage sales, their battered covers branded with screaming two-word titles stamped in silver foil, blood dripping luridly from the last letter. The most famous practitioners of this louche genre — Joe McGinniss, Ann Rule, Vincent Bugliosi — come coated with a thin, greasy film of dubious repute and poor taste. (Can there ever be a valid reason to title a book “A Rose for Her Grave”?) True crime is also the mother’s milk of risible tabloid journalism, of endless trashy news cycles in which the same photo of a wide-eyed innocent bride (where is she?); a gap-toothed kindergarten student (who killed him?); a bleary-eyed, stubbled suspect (why did he do it?) appear over and over and over again.



Occasionally, true crime is where literary writers go to slum and, not coincidentally, make some real money: Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.” It’s not the Great American Novel, yet somehow such books have a tendency to end up the most admired works of a celebrated author’s career. Is it because better writers tease something out of the genre that pulp peddlers can’t, or is it just that their blue-chip names give readers a free pass to indulge a guilty pleasure?


By contrast, crime fiction has a better rep. It is the most respectable form of genre fiction, the one that even the snootiest literary critics will admit to enjoying now and then. They justly praise the innovative prose styles of Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard as vehicles for a distinctively American voice. And crime — transgression of the social and moral order — is one of literature’s central themes, after all. Isn’t one of the greatest novels of all time called “Crime and Punishment”? Plus, from Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” many novels by literary titans are crime fiction by another name.



True crime, however, labors always under the stigma of voyeurism, or worse. It’s not just unseemly to linger over the bloodied bodies of the dead and the hideous sufferings inflicted upon them in their final hours, it’s also kind of sick. Gillian Flynn’s second novel, “Dark Places,” describes the wincing interactions between its narrator — survivor of a notorious multiple murder like the Clutter killings of “In Cold Blood” — and a creepy subculture of murder “fans” and collectors; when she’s hard up for cash, she’s forced to auction off family memorabilia at their conventions. Yuck.



The very thing that makes true crime compelling — this really happened — also makes it distasteful: the use of human agony for the purposes of entertainment. Of course, what is the novel if not a voyeuristic enterprise, an attempt to glimpse inside the minds and hearts of other people? But with fiction, no actual people are exploited in the making.



I love crime fiction, too, but lately I’ve come to appreciate true crime more, specifically for its lack of certain features that crime fiction nearly always supplies: solutions, explanations, answers. Even if the culprit isn’t always caught and brought to justice in a detective novel, we expect to find out whodunit, and that expectation had better be satisfied. A novelist who dares to build her narrative around a murder and then refuses to collar the perp by the last chapter — as Donna Tartt did in her sumptuous, underappreciated second novel, “The Little Friend” — will never hear the end of it. Readers of books and viewers of television and film demand not only to know who did it but why, preferably with a tidy little back story about a molesting uncle, bullying schoolmates or a mom who tricked with sailors in the next room. We believe in evil, but we also want pop psychology to explain it away.



Crime fiction reassures us that for every murder there is a sleuth as obsessed as we are with getting to the bottom of the puzzle. There are the formulaic clashes between the committed police detective and the self-serving brass, the feds who interfere with the locals (or vice versa) for purely territorial reasons, the nagging spouse and the occasional sloppy, time-serving colleague who just wants to wrap this thing up before he’s set to retire with a full pension. But there’s also always someone, the hero — whether public officer or private dick — who really, really wants to find out the truth and has the brains (and sometimes the brawn) required to do it.



Because most of us have a lot more experience with crime fiction — TV and movies, but also books — than we do with actual crime, our sense of how law enforcement works has been distorted by the imperatives of entertainment. Forensic scientists often complain that the public expects them to possess and deploy the wizardly high-tech tools they see every week on “CSI.” Because the “CSI” team’s gear is presented as omniscient and infallible, legal professionals must contend with jurors’ overinflated confidence in forensic evidence. Even the most appalling news stories of incompetent or corrupt lab workers will never register as deeply as watching Gil Grissam and his earnest sidekicks stay up all night and ruin their marriages for the sake of seeing justice done.



For all their lingering shots of mangled bodies and gooey, maggot-ridden corpses, these TV procedurals paint a too-pretty picture. If Jack Nicholson were a true-crime author, he’d be telling the audience for such pseudo-gritty shows that they can’t handle the truth. Finding myself seated next to a criminal prosecutor-turned-defense attorney at a wedding several years ago, I asked him what pop culture gets the most wrong about crime and punishment in America. After a long pause, he said, “I’m torn between two answers: How much police care about getting it right and how competent they are to do it.”



True crime is not above trafficking in misleading clichés — because, let’s face it, there’s not much that true crime is above. The majority of the genre is cheap sensationalism, deploying the most shopworn clichés: tragic maidens; idyllic small towns; smiling devils; winsome, doomed tots. Much true crime has achieved its goals if it gives its readers something to shiver over late at night or to whisper about at school. (Most of my early knowledge of true crime classics like “Helter Skelter” came from other girls who got ahold of the books while baby sitting and recounted the most horrific details to a breathless audience on the playground the next day.) Plenty of it offers a comforting message similar to that of crime fiction: that, for all the bewildering and seemingly random violence of this world, it is usually possible for us to know what really happened and who’s responsible.



But we also live in a golden age when it comes to a more challenging vein of true crime. These books include Robert Kolker’s “Lost Girls,” about 14 unsolved murders in Long Island; Raymond Bonner’s “Anatomy of Injustice,” about the wrongful capital conviction of a black handyman for the rape and murder of an elderly white widow in South Carolina; Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” about the celebrated journalist’s inability to accept the guilty verdict against a young mother accused of hiring a man to murder her ex-husband; and Errol Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error,” which is in part a challenge to another milestone in the genre, Joe McGinniss’ “Fatal Vision.” Coming up next month is another landmark, “The Wrong Carlos,” by James Liebman and the Columbia DeLuna Project, an exhaustively researched consideration of a 1980s case in which the state of Texas most likely executed the wrong man.



Even true crime books in which the identity of the killer is uncontested can open up welcome vistas of uncertainty. Recently, Anand Giridharadas’ “The True American” examines the lives of two men: the sole survivor of a hate-crime spree, who forgave and tried to save his would-be killer, and the killer himself, who seems to have become a different man before his 2011 execution; who was he, really? Dave Cullen’s masterful “Columbine,” published in 2009, offers the most definitive account of the infamous school shooting and clears up many misperceptions, but still leaves the reader with a sense that the reasons for such acts may be fundamentally unknowable. Several years ago, when I was interviewing Margaret Atwood about “Alias Grace,” her novel about a maid convicted of killing her master in 19th-century Canada, she remarked that murderers themselves often don’t seem to understand their own crimes. They describe the acts as something that “just happened” or as if they were committed by someone else even as they acknowledge they did it. The true crime accounts I’ve read confirm what Atwood said.



Most important of all, true crime reminds its readers over and over again that most detectives aren’t fantastically clever, that most investigations make dozens of significant mistakes and that even the most seemingly hard evidence can become as indeterminate as a quantum particle under sustained study. Sometimes the confusion is understandable. Jeff Guinn’s “Manson,” a biography of the murderous cult leader published last year, recounts how long the LAPD spent pursuing a bogus scenario in investigating the massacre at Sharon Tate’s home.



Investigators assumed that because drugs were found on the premises, the motive was probably a drug deal or connection gone bad. Manson had his followers plant “clues,” in the form of weird words written on the wall in blood, with the bizarre idea that the police would instantly link these words to the Black Panthers. (They instead assumed it was just crazy druggie writing, which of course it was.) Much time was lost before the cops were put on the right track by an informant. This, incidentally, is how most real-life whodunits, such as the Unabomber attacks, seem to be solved. There’s nothing like true crime to dispel the notion that criminals get caught because of a detective’s brilliant reading of the clues. Rather, they get caught because someone rats them out.



Nowhere is the danger of investigators’ tendency to settle too early on a theory of the crime more evident than in stories of wrongful conviction. As “Anatomy of Injustice” tells it, police decided that Edward Lee Elmore, the simple-minded African-American man who had mowed the victim’s lawn for years, suddenly turned on her. Under the influence of a suspiciously meddlesome neighbor, a local city councilman, they ignored significant evidence contradicting this theory, and eventually resorted to falsifying evidence, while Elmore’s own lawyers barely bothered to defend him at all. Finally, thanks to the efforts of an attorney working for South Carolina’s Center for Capital Litigation, the conviction was overturned. The actual murderer has never been identified, but at least an innocent man has escaped death row.



Investigations aren’t always led astray by deliberate manipulation, however. In “The Wrong Carlos,” confused and inept handling of the crime scene, witnesses and hunt for the man who stabbed a convenience store clerk in Corpus Christi combined with coincidence and bad luck to lead to the unjust execution of Carlos DeLuna. He was the spitting image of the likely culprit to the degree that even people who knew either of the men quite well couldn’t tell photos of them apart. Under the aegis of Liebman, 12 Columbia Law School students pored over the records of the case, producing a meticulous and highly detailed report on the crime investigation and trial — which, while sobering, is also catnip for the amateur detective. It strongly suggests DeLuna was innocent and it’s so convincing that even the victim’s brother agrees.



Robert Kolker’s “Lost Girls” and Errol Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error” may be the most accomplished true crime narratives I’ve read in recent years. The killer or killers responsible for dumping bodies along a lonely Long Island road have yet to be identified. The investigation appears to be stalled for a variety of reasons having to do with the personalities and ambitions of local officials. So Kolker’s “Lost Girls” focuses instead on the lives and families of the dead, young women who drifted into the world of prostitution and could not succeed at pulling themselves out again. It’s a portrait of underclass life, frayed by substance abuse, domestic violence, crime and fecklessness, and it asks not what circumstances create a monster but which ones forge his victims.



“A Wilderness of Error” is remarkable not just for questioning a murder investigation and conviction but also for condemning the famous true-crime narrative written about them. Morris is a master of the genre, albeit in a different medium (documentary film) and can even claim to have gotten an innocent man out of jail by making “The Thin Blue Line” in 1988. Above all, he is preoccupied with how we establish what’s true. His first book, “Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography,” dismantles our faith in the facticity of photographed images. “A Wilderness of Error,” his second, concerns the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of murdering his wife and two small children in 1970. The crimes were the center of a bestselling book, “Fatal Vision” by Joe McGinniss, later made into a TV movie, that pressed home McGinniss’ theory that MacDonald was a psychopath.



The writing of “Fatal Vision” was the subject of yet another book, Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” devoted to probing the moral soft spots in all journalists’ relationships to their subjects, but Morris believes these murders were insufficiently investigated and that MacDonald did not get a fair trial. Many aficionados of the trial find Morris’ arguments unconvincing, but that is partly Morris’ point. Just like the cops, outside observers settle on a story about what happened and become invested in it. They then ignore or dismiss any evidence that undermines that story, often with a vehemence that increases as the counter-evidence mounts. Certainty, an emotional state all too common today, is less a testament to the merits of a belief than a measure of how much we want to go on believing it.



At the very least, Morris presents a convincing case that an uncertain McGinniss was pushed into endorsing MacDonald’s guilt by his publisher because offering a conclusion would make for a more satisfying book. Later, of course, the author had no choice but to double down on that conclusion, and whether or not he believed it before his editor urged him to declare the case solved in his own mind, he seems to have fully believed it in the end. All this would be meat for an interesting consideration of the nature of truth and whether it can ever be meaningfully detached from desire, but as Morris keeps pointing out, when it comes to true crime, real lives and real justice are at stake. Crime fiction can afford to go on telling us what we want to hear, but at its best true crime insists on telling us what we can’t afford to forget.

Obama is like Ike (and that's a good thing in this case)

He's Like Ike
Obama, haunted by war and skeptical of heroics, echoes Eisenhower's foreign policy.

Peter Beinart

May 29 2014, 11:14 AM ET
The debate between President Obama and his hawkish critics comes down to this. Obama is—as he said yesterday at West Point—“haunted” by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His hawkish critics are haunted by the fact that he’s haunted.



From this core divide comes a fundamentally different reading of the history of American foreign policy. For hawks, the story of the last 75 years goes something like this: From Franklin Roosevelt through Harry Truman through John F. Kennedy, the United States pursued a muscular, internationalist and moral foreign policy. Then, because of Vietnam, America’s leaders lost faith in American might and American ideals. As a result, the Soviet Union began to win the Cold War, until Ronald Reagan rebuilt American power and American pride, and the Cold War was won. Now, as a result of Afghanistan and Iraq, another American leader—Obama—is losing faith in American power. The enemies of freedom are again gaining strength. And they will keep gaining strength until a new Reagan saves the day.



For Obama, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan reveal a recurring pattern of American hubris.In this narrative, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan don’t matter much in and of themselves. They were either winnable wars lost through a failure of will or honest mistakes that say nothing important about the limits or fallibility of American power. The problem isn’t the wars themselves. It’s the way American leaders reacted to them. Jimmy Carter’s sin was to believe that Vietnam called into question the wisdom of intervening militarily against communist movements. Obama’s sin is to believe that Iraq and Afghanistan call into question the wisdom of intervening militarily against terrorist movements and anti-American dictators.



For Obama, by contrast, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not aberrations. They reveal a recurring pattern of American hubris. “Since World War II,” he told the cadets, “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.” For Obama, that hubris stems from an excessive fear of America’s enemies, who America can generally defeat by building alliances and harnessing our democratic legitimacy and economic strength, as the United States is doing in Ukraine. And it stems from an excessive faith in war, which once unleashed often spirals out of America’s control.



It’s no surprise that at West Point, Obama yet again quoted Dwight Eisenhower. Like Obama, Eisenhower spent much of his presidency arguing against critics who claimed that the United States needed to spend more on defense, or intervene more militarily, because America’s enemies were gaining ground. Ike never believed that. He worried less that the Soviet Union would vanquish the U.S. militarily than that it would provoke an overreaction that bankrupted America economically. The Soviets, he argued, “have hoped to force upon America and the free world an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster.”



Eisenhower feared that by endorsing NSC-68, the document that committed America to spend virtually unlimited sums battling global communism, the Truman administration was giving the Soviets exactly what they wanted. He fought back by ensuring that his secretary of the treasury and budget director sat in on all National Security Council meetings. (Obama did something similar when he conspicuously brought Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag into meetings on the Afghan surge). Ike worked so hard to keep the defense budget low that three army chiefs of staff quit. He ended the Korean War, although many in his party wanted to escalate it. And he refused to intervene to save the French in Vietnam.



That’s clearly Obama’s model: End costly, unwinnable wars, don’t start new ones, and rebuild the economic foundation of American power. I suspect Obama takes comfort in the fact that for the past several decades, many historians have applauded Eisenhower’s foreign policy. One influential academic essay even calls him a foreign-policy “genius.”



The bad news is that by the end of his presidency, Eisenhower was widely derided as passive and weak, a practitioner, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., of “the politics of fatigue.” Behold the Eisenhower doll, went a joke at the time: Wind it up and it does nothing for eight years.



Obama's model is clear: End costly, unwinnable wars, don’t start new ones, and rebuild the economic foundation of American power.Eisenhower’s problem was that his foreign policy was not heroic. He was content, in Obama’s words, to “hit singles.” He had, after all, seen more than enough bloodstained heroism on the beaches and meadows of Europe. At West Point, Obama quoted him as calling war “mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly.” The idea—so common in today’s foreign-policy discourse—that an inclination to use military force represents “idealism” would have struck Ike as beneath contempt.



I suspect Obama feels the same way. “I am haunted by those deaths,” he said about the cadets who died in the Afghan surge. “I am haunted by those wounds.”



Thank goodness. Obama should be haunted. We should all be, because there was nothing in Iraq, or in the fight against the Taliban (as opposed to al-Qaeda) worth sending young men and women to die for. And we should be extremely wary of letting people who have still not reckoned with their role in those catastrophes push the United States toward military action in places about which they are equally ignorant.



At West Point, Obama said he would not be pushed. Ike would be proud.

A Box of Chocolates

.Life is like a box chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. Or so somebody once said. (I forget who. Mr. Rogers? Bugs Bunny? Joseph Stalin?) The truth is that you usually do know what you're gonna get. Look before you choose. Take time to know that chocolate. Consider carefully. For example, if the piece is green you probably won't like it. If it smells like turpentine you probably won't like it. If it looks smooth and creamy you probably WILL like it. Consider carefully and prayerfully. Advice to the wise.

Maya Angelou dead at 86

I must admit I have never read any of her writings.

Stephen A. Smith on Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, commented last week about race in the wake of Donald Sterling. To me, nothing that Cuban said is controversial, wrong, or problematic, or even profound or insightful, really. Rather, it is refreshing that someone is willing to comment honestly and truthfully about race. It is ridiculous that he has been criticized for his remarks. It is sad that this country is so sensitive that we cannot have a thoughtful discussion about anything without criticism and backlash. Stephen A. Smith, an ESPN personality, fully supports what Cuban said, and I agree with Smith:

It Wasn't Just the Emancipation Proclamation

Monday, May 26, 2014 02:30 PM CDT


It wasn’t just Abraham Lincoln: The policies beyond Emancipation Proclamation which really helped end slavery

Historians focus on Emancipation Proclamation, and it was important. But other activists and policies mattered too

by James Oakes



Excerpted from "The Scorpion's Sting: Anti-slavery and the Coming of the Civil War"

The men and women who struggled to abolish slavery were not counting on a war to get the job done. Of course they knew about military emancipation. Freeing slaves as a “military necessity” in wartime was an ancient practice, familiar to the histories of Greece and Rome, the African continent, Latin America and the United States. But abolitionists and antislavery politicians were not planning for a war so that the U.S. Army could sweep through the South emancipating as it went. If there was a war or rebellion, the federal government would certainly have the power to free slaves as a military necessity. But slavery’s opponents most often put their faith in an entirely different program designed to bring about the “ultimate extinction” of slavery. They would withdraw all federal support for slavery, surround the South with a “cordon of freedom,” pressuring the slave states to abolish the institution on their own. “Like a scorpion girt by fire,” antislavery activists argued, slavery would eventually sting itself to death. When the slave states seceded from the Union beginning in late 1860, they were not fleeing the prospect of military emancipation, they were hoping to avoid the scorpion’s sting.



By specifying exactly what slavery’s opponents hoped to accomplish we can see more clearly why none of the secession-winter proposals for sectional compromise succeeded in averting war. The second chapter does something similar, but from a different angle. It begins by clarifying the definition of slavery — which Americans understood to mean property rights in human beings—so that we can better understand what a debate over slavery might have looked like. This in turn makes it easier to see why disputes over seemingly marginal issues—slavery in the territories, fugitive slaves or abolition in Washington, D.C. — were always driven by an underlying conflict over the right versus the wrong of “property in man.” New World slavery was also “racial” in that it restricted enslavement to sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, a broad constellation of human beings widely supposed to constitute a distinct “race.” This made it impossible to argue about slavery without arguing about racial equality. Chapter three recovers that argument. Together these three chapters highlight the depth and significance of the Republican Party’s threat to slavery on the eve of the Civil War.


That threat did not include military emancipation, at least not before the secession crisis. By surveying the long history of military emancipation in the United States, chapter four demonstrates that freeing slaves in wartime was a mainstream idea whose origins lay well outside the abolitionist movement. This last point requires some elaboration.



The Emancipation Proclamation occupies center stage in most accounts of slavery’s destruction. It’s easy to see why. Issued on January 1, 1863, at the midpoint of the Civil War, the proclamation provides a convenient climax to a large and dramatic story. It transformed the nature of the war. It altered Union policy on the ground in the southern states. It was an attempt to use military emancipation not simply as a weapon of war but as a means of destroying slavery. Although military emancipation had been commonplace in human history, including American history, it was not at all common to proclaim all slaves free as a military necessity. It’s no wonder we spend so much time thinking about Lincoln’s proclamation.



But like an exploded supernova, the Emancipation Proclamation has become a gravitational force so dense that other important antislavery policies — state abolition and the Thirteenth Amendment — too often disappear into the black hole of military emancipation. Interpretations of slavery’s demise pull us almost irresistibly toward January 1, 1863. Lincoln idolaters sometimes write as if he were destined to free the slaves from the time he was a young man. Skeptics, recoiling from the excesses of Great Man History, have instead constructed what might be called a Reluctance Narrative that, ironically, depends on the very same end point — universal military emancipation. Lincoln worshippers posit a “political genius” who skillfully prepared the ground for the proclamation, a man so exquisitely attuned to the movement of public opinion that he alone could sense the precise moment when the American people were at last ready to accept a policy of universal military emancipation. Skeptics, by contrast, start from the premise that Lincoln could have or should have issued the Emancipation Proclamation as soon as the war started in April 1861. The skeptical narrative then sweeps through the events of the next twenty months, stopping at the various points along the way to show how every law passed by Congress and every order issued by Lincoln failed to measure up to the standard of universal military emancipation, and from that succession of failures the skeptics infer a reluctance to emancipate.



To say that these interpretations put too much emphasis on Lincoln’s proclamation is not to deny the importance of the origins and evolution of universal military emancipation. But military emancipation turned out to be a brutal and ineffective way to destroy slavery. No matter how aggressively implemented, military emancipation could not reach the majority of slaves, nor could it guarantee the permanent freedom of those it did reach. All along, Lincoln had higher hopes for the cordon of freedom leading to the eventual abolition of slavery on a state-by-state basis. But that didn’t work either, and in the end the complete destruction of slavery required yet a third policy — a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution.



Lincoln did not dream up the idea of state-by-state abolition on his own. The North had abolished slavery that way in the late eighteenth century. But a concerted federal policy designed to get the southern states to abolish slavery — that idea came from the abolitionists. When they began petitioning Congress to shift the bias of federal policy away from slavery and toward freedom, they demanded things like the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., a ban on slavery in the territories, state rather than federal enforcement of the fugitive-slave clause, the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, and the withdrawal of all federal support for slavery on the high seas. This set of policies became the centerpiece of the radical antislavery agenda. Wartime emancipation imposed by the military was always an option, but nobody thought it was a particularly good way to abolish slavery. John Quincy Adams first speculated that it could be done, and others — Joshua Giddings, for example — agreed that slavery could be abolished by means of military emancipation. But it wasn’t the way they wanted to end slavery. The American Antislavery Society never advocated military emancipation as a means of freeing all the slaves. It was not part of the Liberty Party platform. The Free Soilers didn’t talk about it. By the mid-1850s local Republican Party organizations across the North were adopting resolutions urging the federal government to implement many of the policies first advocated by antislavery radicals, but their resolutions never included military emancipation.



Having been elected on a promise to put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction by surrounding it with a cordon of freedom, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans proceeded to do just that. In the very first regular session of Congress over which they had control — between December 1861 and July 1862 — Lincoln and the Republicans abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., banned slavery from the territories, stopped enforcing the fugitive-slave clause in the northern states, signed a treaty with Great Britain to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, and required the new state of West Virginia to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union. Republicans took advantage of the war by putting enormous pressure on the Border States to abolish slavery on their own. The policy was, to a remarkable degree, successful. Between 1804 and 1860 not a single state abolished slavery, but by the time the Civil War ended six more states had done so.



But much of that history is obscured by the nearly exclusive focus on military emancipation and its apotheosis, the Emancipation Proclamation. This is one of the points I want to make in these pages: the scorpion’s sting was the radical policy, born of the abolitionist movement, adopted in principle by the Republican Party in the 1850s, and substantially implemented during the first year of the Civil War.



And yet Republicans began threatening military emancipation during the secession crisis when war suddenly seemed imminent, and they began freeing slaves as a military necessity shortly after the war began. At first glance this seems odd. Not only were antislavery radicals not counting on a war, they did not believe a war was necessary to get slavery abolished. When those advocating abolition raised the prospect of military emancipation, it was usually to dismiss the likelihood of secession. They assumed that the South would never secede because that would mean war and with war came military emancipation. But this was a background assumption, something people took for granted because freeing slaves was what belligerents always did during wars. Far from being a distinctively radical idea, military emancipation was a conventional proposition, accepted by radicals and conservatives alike, a policy so deeply embedded in American history that it could be assumed without being asserted.



Secession and war suddenly brought into the foreground what had always been there in the background. Threats of military emancipation poured forth from Republican presses all through the secession crisis and within a few months after Fort Sumter Republican lawmakers and a Republican administration began freeing slaves as a military necessity. At first they stayed within the familiar precedents for wartime emancipation by offering freedom only to slaves who came within Union lines from areas in rebellion or from rebel masters. As they came to realize how weak Unionism was in the South, how loyal the slaves were, and how much resistance there was to abolition in the Border States, however, Republicans moved closer to adopting a policy of universal military emancipation. With the Second Confiscation Act of July 1862, as fully implemented by the Emancipation Proclamation several months later, universal military emancipation took its place alongside state abolition as a means of destroying slavery in the South.



Nobody could have predicted this would happen. Everybody knew about military emancipation, but few imagined that it would become as important as it did by 1863, and there were no precedents in American history for universal military emancipation. Instead, federal antislavery policy evolved in unforeseen ways over the course of the war, an evolution driven by events on the ground in the slave states, by shifts in national politics, and by the contingencies of war itself. When the fighting began, few Northerners thought that slavery would prove so durable or that the slaveholders would put up such a ferocious fight to save it. The Republicans were confident that slaves would run for their freedom to Union lines; slaves always did that. But the slaves understood better than the Republicans how many roadblocks their masters could throw down in the way, and in any case federal policy makers were not prepared to handle the number of slaves who overcame the obstacles and made it to Union lines. Then, too, there were the uncertainties of the war itself. A few insiders might have been able to predict that Robert E. Lee would prove so formidable on the field of battle, but nobody thought that about Ulysses Grant and none foresaw that George B. McClellan would prove so inadequate or that somebody named Joshua Chamberlain would inspire his men to hold on to Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg. Few people imagined that Abraham Lincoln would turn out to be such an effective president. Everybody knew in 1861 that the fate of slavery hung in the balance, but nobody could have predicted that under the intense pressure of war six states would abolish slavery, that military emancipation would be universalized, but that neither would be enough to destroy slavery. Hardly anybody in 1861 imagined that the Constitution would have to be rewritten for slavery to be destroyed, and nobody knew, as late as the summer of 1864, whether Lincoln and the Republicans would hold on to Congress and the presidency long enough, and in large enough numbers, to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed.



It’s possible, even tempting, to make the abolition of slavery seem as inevitable as the war itself can be made to seem, to construct a narrative arc in which each different antislavery policy led inexorably to its logical successor. But history doesn’t work that way. The Republicans hated slavery and intended to destroy it, but intentions don’t make outcomes inevitable. After all, the slaveholders intended to preserve slavery, and that didn’t ensure slavery’s survival. To show how slavery was destroyed is not to show that the destruction of slavery was inevitable.



The same thing can be said of the Civil War itself. The conflict was so long, so destructive, and so murderous that historians understandably spend a lot of their time considering the various proposals for sectional compromise that might have worked but for some reason or other did not. This sustained search for the alternatives to what happened is often driven by a deep and justifiable horror of the war that did, finally, come. It’s a humane impulse, and it can be a salutary one—it keeps us on guard against the tendency to make the war seem inevitable. No account of the coming of the Civil War can afford to ignore the possibility that it might have gone some other way. But in the end the historian must explain what actually did happen and why. The war came. Compromise failed. And these chapters are a partial attempt to explain what was at stake in the sectional crisis and why the conflict over slavery had become irreconcilable. They may also help explain why an irreconcilable conflict over slavery did not make the abolition of slavery inevitable.



Excerpted from “The Scorpion’s Sting: Anti-slavery and the Coming of the Civil War” by James Oakes. Published by W.W. Norton and Co. Copyright 2014 by James Oakes. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Who is that Man Behind the Curtain?

Who IS that man behind the curtain? Forget about the rumor that it's Fred Hudson. It isn't me! It isn't Barack Obama. He was in Afghanistan yesterday. It isn't Art Linkletter, it isn't Judge Scalia, and it isn't Joe Biden. This I know. Here's a scary thought. What if it's a woman behind the curtain? I shudder at the thought. Better watch it men if this is the case. Better gird your loins in that case. I guess we'll have to wait for Toto to make the revelation. Meantime everyone carry on.

John McKee Barr - Loathing Lincoln

After finishing the Johnny Cash biography I have been enjoying this book recounting the history of Lincoln hating in this country since Appomattox.  I will be filling in this post with excerpts and comments.
P. 1     Why was Abraham Lincoln so hated?  Why was the man who probably is generally considered our greatest President also would have to be considered our most hated and despised President?
P. 151 The original version of "I'll Take My Stand" was published in 1930 defending the "agrarian" way of life in the South and loathing Lincoln.
P. 185 Robert Penn Warren, a Southern Agrarian and famous writer and poet, has a more nuanced view of Lincoln.  He tries to bring Lincoln into a modern and sophisticated, pro-Southern as much as is possible view of the man.
P. 187 The most powerful attack on Lincoln during the interwar years was by Edgar Lee Masters.  The Lee is from Robert E. Lee.  Masters's hero was Stephen Douglas.  Whew!  What an over-the-top screed!
P. 191 Masters's work expressed his preference for a white-only, Jeffersonian America that was gone forever, anxious for a country whose racial makeup was changing.
P. 206 Lincoln was of periphal concern to economists Hayek and Von Mises.
P. 242 Literary critic Edmund Wilson weighed in on Lincoln.  I did not know this.
P. 246 The war led to the inevitable grown of the federal goverment which led to US imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  This is another thing I didn't realize.
P. 254 An interesting discussion of Vidal's novel Lincoln.
P. 268 The author covers the founding of the League of the South in 1964 with Dr. Michael Hill.  This group and this man from Winfield are a big part of the Neo-Confederacy of our time.
P. 269 It is no accident that in these days of movement conservatism that Neo-Confederate criticism of Lincoln has increased dramatically.
P. 270 Even Patrick Buchanan says that the war was fought over tariffs and not slavery.
P. 278 In discussing Lerone Bennett the author points out that the idea that Lincoln was forced to free the slaves was not new with Bennett.  Lincoln admitted that he did not control events but that events controlled him.  Bennett says that Lincoln was beneficiary of events rather than the creater of events.
P. 279 Bennett says that Lincoln's presidency was the turning point in American history because Lincoln failed to establish an all-white country.
P. 282 The response of McPherson and Foner to Bennett.
P. 283 Did Neely refute Butler?  We will never know for sure if Lincoln finally ceased believing in colonization.
P. 306 Arguments over whether secession was constitutional or not are irrelevant.  The fact is that eleven Southern states DID seceded.  Legality doesn't matter because they did it legally or not.
P. 322 Some of Lincoln critics seem to blame him for every bad thing that has happened in the world since 1865.
P. 332 The idea that Lincoln laid the basis for an American empire is ludicrous.
P. 333 The question of whether Lincoln waged a brutal and inhumane war is a live question.
P. 334 I did not realize the extent that some criticized Lincoln for being crude, vulgar, and an atheist.
P. 335 Lincoln's focus on natural rights bears further thought.
P. 337 I think you have to draw a distinction between Lincoln himself---what he believed, what he said, what he did, the part he played in the instigation and the prosecution of the war---and the results of the war---the inevitable enhancement of federal power, the Civil War Amendments, the progressive legislation that was passed during the war, and the triumph and tragedy of Reconstruction.
P. 339 "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."  George Orwell.
P. 339 What Americans think of Lincoln mirrors what they think of themselves and their country.  Which is to say: people find what they want to find in Abraham Lincoln.
P. 342 As time goes on if the critics of Lincoln succeed in eradicating his principled contributions to our country, the country will lose and I hope I am living in a country that has dismissed Abraham Lincoln.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is not a big deal to me.  Maybe it's because I did not serve and did not come from a military family.  I believe in the holiday for we should pay continuing tribute to our military.  It's just that it's not personal for me.

The Top 17 Books That Make You Feel Dumb

BY Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Book Riot
21 May 2014

Rioter Swapna struck a nerve last month when she wrote about the perils of feeling dumb while reading, and we decided to find out which titles really left you scratching your head. It’s a phenomenon every reader has experienced at some point–maybe you read something everyone else loves and you just don’t see the appeal; maybe you read something everyone else loves and they actively make you feel like you’re dumb for not loving it; and maybe you read something that’s supposed to rock your world and you just plain don’t get it.

463 Riot readers completed our latest survey, sharing 406 unique titles that made them feel dumb (each respondent could provide up to three answers). We didn’t ask for specifics, so we’re not going to speculate about how these titles ended up on the list. But we’re sure interested in your take! Here are the top 17 titles, and here’s the full data set for your perusal.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce (71 votes)
2. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (43)
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (22)
4. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (18)
5. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (17)
6. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (15)
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (15)
8. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (14)
9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (14)
10. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (14)
11. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien (13)
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (13)
13. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (12)
14. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (11)
15. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole (10)
16. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (10)
17. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (10)

What do you make of this list? Have you tried these titles and also felt dumb for some reason?

Sarah Palin: Veterans Died Waiting for VA Care Because ‘Barack Obama is Lazy’

BY David Edwards
The Raw Story
22 May 2014

Fox News contributor and half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said this week that veterans had died waiting for health care from Veterans Affairs facilities because President Barack Obama was “lazy” due to his upbringing.

“The problem starts at the top, and when you have a commander-in-chief who has not been engaged, and was told six years ago about the problems at the VA, and has just pooh-poohed the problems,” Palin told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “Nothing is going to happen while Obama is in charge of our military, and the VA, and our federal government in general.”

Hannity wondered if Palin had any insight into why the president would refuse to hold people accountable for problems at the VA or problems or the Healthcare.gov website, even though the government spent more money “than in history of mankind” to fix the website.

“When you hold someone accountable, it takes some energy and some resource, and Barack Obama is lazy,” Palin opined. “In fact, he warned us that he was lazy. And he attributed that to having brought up in Hawaii. It’s his words, not mine.”

Watch the video below from Fox News’ Hannity, broadcast May 21, 2014.

The Case for Reparations (3)

here, is to entail upon them a curse.


IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”

America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”





Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress)When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.



One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.



This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.



For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.



“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”



In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”





In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated at a slave auction. (Library of Congress)The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.



Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”



Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.



When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:



The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.

In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”



V. The Quiet Plunder

The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.





Click the image above to view the full document.“This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”



In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”



Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.





A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy.The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.



“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”



The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”

AdvertisementIn Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”



But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”



The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline.





In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”



That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”



The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.



One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued.



The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.



VI. Making The Second Ghetto

Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.



Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.



It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.



In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.



Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.



In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.





The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a major city. (Associated Press)When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.



VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”

Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.



To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.



“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.”



Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.





Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League.Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks.”



Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ”



In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’



“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.”



White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering.Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ”



I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.



“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”



“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected.





Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz)“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.”



Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.





Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media)“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ”



VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”

On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”



Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.”



Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.”





Watch VideoVisit North Lawndale today with Billy BrooksWe walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.



“That’s their corner,” he said.



We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.”

AdvertisementBrooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.”



From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.



Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.



After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.”



reporter’s notebook

White Racism vs. White Resentment

“The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the greatest argument made for reparations—like ever.”

Read moreThe urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.



This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”



Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.



Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.



The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.





Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.



Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them.



The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ”



IX. Toward A New Country

When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.



“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.”



Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.”



When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body.



And this was just one of their losses.



Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.



To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.



When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.



The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.



And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.



On some level, we have always grasped this.



“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.



Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.



And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.



Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.



What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.



X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”

We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.



In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.



reporter’s notebook

The Auschwitz All Around Us

“It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.”

Read more“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”



Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”



Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.



“If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.”Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”



Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.



Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.”





Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center), signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was carried out in silence. (Associated Press)Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia.



Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.”



The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”



Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.



Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.



Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:



For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.

Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”





In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.



John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.



In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.



“Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches.”“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.”



Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”



“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”



In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.


Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.