Thursday, September 4, 2014

From James Oakes

Was the Civil War actually about slavery?

A leading historian challenges the new orthodoxy about how slavery ended in America

James Oakes, Jacobin

This article originally appeared on Jacobin.

On 6 November 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party elected its first president. During the tense crisis months that followed – the “secession winter” of 1860–61 – practically all observers believed that Lincoln and the Republicans would begin attacking slavery as soon as they took power.

Democrats in the North blamed the Republican Party for the entire sectional crisis. They accused Republicans of plotting to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition against direct federal attacks on slavery. Republicans would instead allegedly try to squeeze slavery to death indirectly, by abolishing it in the territories and in Washington DC, suppressing it in the high seas, and refusing federal enforcement of the Slave Laws. The first to succumb to the Republican program of “ultimate extinction,” Democrats charged, would be the border states where slavery was most vulnerable. For Northern Democrats, this is what caused the crisis; the Republicans were to blame for trying to get around the Constitution.
Southern secessionists said almost exactly the same thing. The Republicans supposedly intended to bypass the Constitution’s protections for slavery by surrounding the South with free states, free territories, and free waters. What Republicans called a “cordon of freedom,” secessionists denounced as an inflammatory circle of fire.
The Southern cooperationists – those who opposed immediate secession – agreed with the secessionists’ and Northern Democrats’ analysis of Republican intentions. But they argued that the only way the Republicans would actually have the power to act on those intentions was if the Southern states seceded. If the slave states remained within the Union, the Republicans would not have the majorities in Congress to adopt their antislavery policies. And if the South did secede, all bets would be off. The rebellious states would forfeit all the constitutional protections of slavery. The South would get something much worse than a cordon of freedom. It would get direct military intervention, leading to the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of the slaves.
The slaves themselves seem to have understood this. They took an unusual interest in the 1860 election and had high hopes for what Lincoln’s victory would mean. They assumed that Lincoln’s inauguration would lead to war, that war would bring on a Union invasion of the South, and that the invading Union army would free the slaves.

But to read what historians have been saying for decades is to conclude that all of these people – the Democrats, the secessionists, the cooperationists, and the slaves – were all wrong. The Northern Democrats were just demagogues. The secessionists were hysterical. And the slaves were, alas, sadly misguided.
Unwilling to take seriously what contemporaries were saying, historians have constructed a narrative of Emancipation and the Civil War that begins with the premise that Republicans came into the war with no intention of attacking slavery – indeed, that they disavowed any antislavery intentions. The narrative is designed to demonstrate the original premise, according to which everyone at the time was mistaken about what the Republicans intended to do.
It’s a familiar chronology: Under the terms of the First Confiscation Act of August 1861, disloyal masters would “forfeit” the use of their slaves, but the slaves were not actually freed. Lincoln ordered General John C. Frémont to rescind his decree of that September freeing the slaves of rebels in Missouri, and several months later the President rescinded General Hunter’s order abolishing slavery in three states. As late as the summer of 1862, we are reminded, Lincoln was writing letters to Horace Greeley saying that if he could end the war without freeing a single slave, he would do so. Even after the President finally promised an emancipation proclamation, in September 1862, several months elapsed until the proclamation actually came on 1 January 1863.
Only then, according to the standard narrative, was the North committed to emancipation. Only then did the purpose of the Civil War expand from the mere restoration of the Union to include the overthrow of slavery.
In one form or another, this narrative is familiar to all scholars of the period. Historians who agree on little else will agree on this version of the story, even when they have entirely divergent interpretations of what it means.
But what if the original premise is wrong? What if, during the secession winter of 1860–1861, everybody was right about what the Republicans intended to do about slavery? What if the Republicans came into the war ready and willing to destroy slavery? What does that do for a narrative of emancipation?
For one thing, it flies in the face of the prevailing neo-revisionism in contemporary Civil War scholarship. The old revisionist interpretation, which reached its zenith of influence in the 1930s and 1940s, came in many varieties. But it always rested on an essentially negative proposition: whatever else the war was about, it was not about slavery. This viewpoint required one set of claims about the South, and another about the North.
Revisionists claimed that slavery was already dying in the South, that it was unprofitable, that it wasn’t important to Southern economy and society, that it had reached the natural limits of its expansion, and that Southern leaders were more concerned about defending state rights than protecting slavery. Most contemporary historians, though not all of them, now reject these old revisionist claims. Slavery was thriving and the Southern states seceded to protect it.
But revisionists also claimed that the North did not go to war over slavery. If there were “interests” involved, they were the interests of Northern capitalists against Southern agrarians. The Civil War was an accident brought on by bungling politicians. The abolitionists were a tiny, beleaguered minority; most Northerners shared the general conviction of black racial inferiority.  The South had slavery, the argument went, but the North was racist too. This argument, in turn, was really just a revival of the antebellum Democratic Party’s relentless efforts to shift the terms of debate from slavery to race.
Today, this revisionist interpretation of the North is alive and well. Indeed, it is pervasive among historians. We are repeatedly told that the North did not go to war over slavery. The Civil War is once again denounced as morally unjustified on the grounds that the North was not motivated by any substantial antislavery convictions. Emancipation itself is described as an accidental byproduct of a war the North fought for no purpose beyond the restoration of the Union. A recent study of the secession crisis states that during the war, slavery was abolished “inadvertently.”
Contemporary scholarship is saturated by this neo-revisionist premise. Like the antebellum Democrats and the Civil War revisionists, neo-revisionists have insistently shifted the terms of the debate from slavery to race. Virtually any Republican in 1860 would have recognized this argument as Democratic Party propaganda.
If I sound skeptical, that’s because I am. On the basis of my research, I can no longer accept the thesis that the Union did not begin emancipating slaves until  1 January 1863.
It was never my intention to overturn the conventional narrative. I began by accepting the standard assumption that that the first Confiscation Act achieved nothing. But I still wanted to know what Republicans thought they were doing when they passed the law. Why did the Act turn out to be so toothless? Why did it fail to free any slaves? Secondary accounts usually pass over this question; they couldn’t provide me with the answers I needed: who wrote the law, where did it come from, how did people talk about it?
To my astonishment, I discovered that Section Four of the Act, the clause specifically authorizing the forfeiture of slaves, was written by Senator Lyman Trumbull, chair of the Judiciary Committee, as an emancipation clause. Indeed, it was understood by everyone in Congress to be an emancipation clause. Trumbull’s proposal was denounced by Democrats and border-state congressmen as an emancipation clause, defended almost unanimously by congressional Republicans as an emancipation clause. These men thought they were writing an emancipation bill. That’s what they said at the time.
A full-scale congressional debate erupted in July of 1861, focusing on the legitimacy of the emancipation that Republicans were undertaking. When I read those debates I wondered where the arguments for emancipation had come from.
I went back to the secession debates. And sure enough, everything critics had accused the Republicans of planning to do was exactly what Republicans themselves were saying they were going to do.
The great mistake that historians have made, I realized, was a misreading of the constitutional premises of the Republican antislavery agenda. I doubt anything Lincoln said is more commonly repeated by historians than the promise he made in his inaugural address not to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. That little quotation is all the proof historians seem to require to demonstrate that when the war began, neither Lincoln nor the Republicans had any idea of emancipating slaves.
In fact, nearly every abolitionist (and just about every historian I can think of) would agree with Lincoln: the Founders had made a series of compromises resulting in a Constitution that did not allow the federal government to abolish slavery in any state where it existed.
William Lloyd Garrison wrote that consensus into the founding document of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the 1833 Declaration of Sentiments, which flatly declared that the power to abolish slavery rested exclusively with the states. Theodore Dwight Weld said the same thing. So did Joshua Giddings, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner. The federal government had no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed.
Which raises the obvious question: how did the abolitionists expect to get slavery abolished? A small group of nonpolitical abolitionists argued for moral suasion. An even smaller faction of antislavery radicals argued that the Constitution was an antislavery document. But most abolitionists believed, on the one hand, that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to abolish slavery in the states, but that on the other hand, political action was necessary for slavery to be abolished. Given the Constitution’s restrictions, what did opponents of slavery think could be done?
Coming out of the 1860 election, Republicans declared that there were two possible policies. The first was to make freedom national and restrict slavery to the states where it already existed. Republican policymakers would seal off the South: they would no longer enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause; slavery would be suppressed on the high seas; it would be abolished in Washington DC, banned from all the Western territories, and no new slave states would be admitted to the Union. A “cordon of freedom” would surround the slave states. Then Republicans would offer a series of incentives to the border states where slavery was weakest: compensation, subsidies for voluntary emigration of freed slaves, a gradual timetable for complete abolition.
Slavery was intrinsically weak, Republicans said. By denationalizing it, they could put it on a course of ultimate extinction. Surrounded on all sides, deprived of life-giving federal support, the slave states would one by one abolish slavery on their own, beginning with the border states. Each new defection would further diminish the strength of the remaining slave states, further accelerating the process of abolition. Yet because the decision to abolish slavery remained with the states, Republican policies would not violate the constitutional ban on direct federal interference in slavery.
The South would simply have to accept this. And if it couldn’t tolerate such a federal policy, it could leave the Union. But once it seceded, all bets would be off – it would lose the Constitutional protections that it had previously enjoyed. The Republicans would then implement the second policy: direct military emancipation, immediate and uncompensated.
Republicans said this openly during the secession crisis. And that’s what they were saying in Congress as they debated the Confiscation Act. It’s time to start rethinking our fundamental assumptions about the causes as well as the trajectory of the Civil War. And we can start by taking the perceptions of its contemporaries a great deal more seriously.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Textualism & Obamacare

Credit Photograph by Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

The Affordable Care Act is heading for another near-death experience in the Supreme Court. In July, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling in Halbig v. Burwell that would greatly limit the number of people who are eligible for subsidized health insurance. The problem has to do with how people are connected with insurance providers, how they learn about subsidies, and how they sign up for plans. As Congress originally conceived it, the A.C.A. called for each state to set up its own exchange with a Web site, which most of the blue states and a few of the red ones did. But two dozen of them did not, so the Obama Administration established a federal counterpart, centered on the Web site healthcare.gov. According to the D.C. Circuit majority, one line in the text of the A.C.A. makes the federal exchange invalid. The law says that subsidies are to be available through exchanges that are “established by a State,” without an explicit authorization of federal exchanges. Thus, according to the judges in the majority, five million or so people who have used the federal exchange to buy health insurance must now lose it.

The case is the latest chapter of the legal assault on Obamacare, but it is also the most prominent instance of a larger fight over an ascendant legal theory known as textualism. This approach, which was pioneered and advocated by, most prominently, Justice Antonin Scalia, holds that courts should interpret laws based solely on their own terms, and not on the basis of the intent of the legislators who create the statute. As Scalia has written, “We are governed by laws, not by the intentions of legislators.” The words of the statute should always prevail, Scalia believes, over “unenacted legislative intent.”
This all sounds reasonable enough in the abstract. But what happens when the text of the law is ambiguous, or if one part of the text conflicts with another? The limits of textualism are explored in a new book by Robert A. Katzmann, the chief judge on the Second Circuit, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1999. In “Judging Statutes,” which will be released next week, Katzmann makes a powerful case that judges should pay attention to legislative history—the words of members of Congress in debates, the committee reports explaining laws, and all of the source material that reflects how Congress really works. Moreover, Katzmann makes the apt point that textualism is especially inappropriate for judges who, like Scalia, profess to believe in judicial restraint—in the idea, that is, that judges should defer to the elected branches of government. Katzmann writes that “excluding legislative history is just as likely to expand a judge’s discretion as reduce it…. When a statute is ambiguous, barring legislative history leaves a judge only with words that could be interpreted in a variety of ways without contextual guidance as to what legislators may have thought. Lacking such guidance increases the probability that a judge will construe a law in a manner that the legislators did not intend.”
Katzmann’s warning underlines the problem with the D.C. Circuit’s decision. (He does not discuss the Obamacare case specifically.) When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, every member of Congress–supporters of the A.C.A. as well as opponents–understood that the federal government would have the right to establish exchanges in states that chose not to create them. As Judge Harry Edwards observed in his dissenting opinion in the A.C.A. case, “The Act empowers HHS to establish exchanges on behalf of the States, because parallel provisions indicate that Congress thought that federal subsidies would be provided on HHS-created exchanges, and, more importantly, because Congress established a careful legislative scheme by which individual subsidies were essential to the basic viability of individual insurance markets.”
A unanimous panel of Fourth Circuit judges made similar observations in upholding the federal exchanges. The conflict between the D.C. Circuit and the Fourth Circuit makes Supreme Court review of the issue more likely. (The Obama Administration has asked the full D.C. Circuit to hear the case, so a Supreme Court test of the issue may be several months away.)
Scalia and other textualists often assert that their approach drains their judgments of political content: they simply read the statutes, consult a dictionary, and render their verdicts. As the Halbig case demonstrates, textualism is as politically fraught as any other approach to judging. The Halbig case is not an attempt to police unclear drafting but rather the latest effort to destroy a law that is despised by many conservatives. The five appellate judges who voted to uphold the law were originally nominated by Democratic Presidents; the two who voted against it were chosen by Republicans. This reflects the real division over the Affordable Care Act–a political, rather than judicial, conflict. Textualism is not a dispassionate guide to a result; it’s merely a vehicle to a preferred outcome—the destruction of Obamacare.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Atlanta

Atlanta surrendered to Sherman and the Yankee invaders 150 years ago today. On September 2, 1864, the Confederacy was effectively doomed. The Union was saved. More bloodshed remained in the coming months, but the verdict was in. Ironically, Atlanta would become the symbol of the forthcoming "New South." But was The South really ever new?

Monday, September 1, 2014

Not Yet the End of History

By Adrienne LaFrance

It's Still Not the End of History

Twenty-five years after Francis Fukuyama's landmark essay, liberal democracy is increasingly beset. Its defenders need to go back to the basics.

Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee Sep 1 2014

A boy touches the east side of the former Berlin Wall. (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Most of us in the West are liberals, whether we admit it or not. We want equal rights for all, reject racial differences, cherish the freedom of worship while preserving the freedom to disagree, and seek an economic order that suits the ambitions of the individual. But there’s a growing sense that liberalism isn’t delivering at home and that it’s not as popular as we think it ought to be in the developing world. The problem is that hubris has blinded its defenders to the crisis consuming liberalism’s identity, leaving them unable or unwilling, to respond to pressing challenges around the world.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” and the inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist state—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. Since wealth-creation depends on the protection of private property, the “capitalist creep” would invariably demand greater legal protection for individual rights.
As many critics pointed out, Fukuyama’s logic was a bit too reminiscent of the pseudo-Hegelian historical determinism that Marxists and Fascists deployed to disastrous effect earlier in the 20th century, but when his article appeared in The National Interest, it was hard to disagree with him. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and the world was clamoring for the consumerist boom in an orgy of free-market excitement. Everything seemed to suggest that only liberal capitalist democracy allowed people to thrive in an increasingly globalized world, and that only the steady advance of laissez-faire economics would guarantee a future of free, democratic states, untroubled by want and oppression and living in peace and contentment.
Today, it’s hard to imagine Fukuyama being more wrong. History isn’t over and neither liberalism nor democracy is ascendant. The comfy Western consensus he inspired is under threat in ways he never predicted. A new Cold War has broken out. China’s “Marxist capitalism” suggests you can have wealth without freedom. And the advance of ISIS may herald a new, state-oriented Islamic fundamentalism.
But most disturbingly, the connection between capitalism, democracy, and liberalism upon which Fukuyama’s argument depended has itself been broken. In the wake of the credit crunch and the global economic downturn, it has become increasingly clear that prosperity is not, in fact, best served either by the pursuit of laissez-faire economics or by the inexorable extension of economic freedoms. Indeed, quite the opposite. As Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, free markets have not only enlarged the gap between rich and poor, but have also reduced average incomes across the developed and developing worlds. In the countries hardest hit by the recession—such as Greece and Hungary—voters have turned away from precisely that conception of liberalism that Fukuyama believed they would embrace with open arms. Across Europe, economic interventionism, nationalism, and even open racism have exerted a greater attraction for those casting their democratic votes than the causes of freedom, deregulation, and equality before the law. Liberal capitalist democracy hasn’t triumphed. Instead, the failures of capitalism have turned democracy against liberalism. In turn, liberalism’s intellectual self-identity has been left in tatters.
Sensing that Fukuyama’s titanic argument has hit something of an iceberg, liberal theorists have desperately been trying to keep the ship afloat. A raft of books have hit the shelves trying to breathe new life into liberalism, amongst which Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual and Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism: The Life of an Idea stand out. Both accept that Fukuyama’s hubris has been exposed by recent events, and are under no illusions about the challenges that liberalism faces. But instead of addressing those challenges head-on they have turned to the past for solace and validation. By labeling an arbitrary set of ideals “liberal” and trying to demonstrate how they have supposedly triumphed over all challengers down the centuries, they seek to craft a new historical narrative capable of “proving” the inherent righteousness of liberalism. Since “liberal” ideas have always triumphed, Siedentop and Fawcett argue, they are manifestly right, and while things might not be working out so well now, the logic of history shows that they will prevail in the end.
Leaders across the political spectrum have been quick to adopt this form of historical determinism. In Britain, David Cameron’s center-right government is proudly liberal, and has not been afraid to use history to mold the next generation of voters into an appropriately liberal form. Earlier this year, his former education minister, Michael Gove, tried to recast the First World War as an example of liberal values triumphing over Germany’s proto-fascism, and as “proof” of the undoubted righteousness of the sort of militant liberalism that neoconservatives adore. Closer to home, Hillary Clinton—now in the first stages of a barely denied run for the White House—has adapted a similar outlook in the realm of foreign policy. Looking back at the great ideal of America as established by the Founding Fathers through rose-tinted spectacles, she has subtly distanced herself from Barack Obama’s cautious realism abroad and instead used discrete references to the past to justify aggressively exporting liberal values across the globe as often as possible. Given that history has “proved” how great liberalism was in previous battles against tyranny, the argument goes, liberalism will inevitably win out if we pick enough fights and put enough muscle behind it.
But while this new liberal historicism may have a certain rhetorical appeal, it fails to convince. Instead of recognizing the weakness of Fukuyama’s original approach, Siedentop, Fawcett, Cameron, and Clinton have simply dusted down the same old historical determinism, just without the economics. It isn’t any more convincing than when Fukuyama tried it.
It was the great liberal philosopher Karl Popper who first exposed the weaknesses of historicism as a mode of political justification in his devastating critique of Marxist and fascist determinism. It is ironic that his arguments now apply to the liberalism he sought to defend. Following Popper’s argument, it’s easy to see at least two fundamental logical problems with the historicist approach to liberalism. First is the claim that anyone in the past who expressed any degree of egalitarianism or concern for individual conscience is a liberal. The idea that there is a straight line of human progress that leads from Saint Paul through Luther, the Philosophes, and Lloyd George to Jack Kennedy is patently absurd: They all had different definitions of freedom and what it ought to accomplish. Second, the idea that there is a “historical law” guiding the development of societies is fanciful. Even if there were some weird sort of pattern which suggested that “liberal” ideas did indeed “win out” in the past, it wouldn’t be anything more than a mere curiosity. It wouldn’t prove anything about liberalism in itself, nor would it say anything about the future. It would just tell us what happened before. To read meaning or predictive power into any pattern in the past is, in fact, about as intellectually respectable as reading tea leaves.
As the weaknesses of the new liberal historicists’ arguments show, liberalism is struggling to recover from its post-Fukuyama malaise because its defenders are just being too lazy. Siedentop, Fawcett, Cameron, and Clinton seem to assume that everyone with an ounce of sanity must be a liberal, and that there is hence no need to defend liberalism against its shortcomings. But no amount of retrospective back-patting will convince those who simply don’t think the same way. It’s no wonder, given their intellectual arrogance, that so many liberals are surprised when large parts of the world rejects them—or that people spurn their wise counsel when markets collapse and life savings are threatened by the accidents of free-market capitalism.
If liberalism is to survive and flourish, it has to be rescued from Fukuyama’s grasp and from the perils of historical determinism. It has to be defined and defended all over again. This of course raises the question of what liberalism actually is—and it’s notable that so many liberals skip this step in debate as though it was unimportant. In a recent issue of Foreign Policy dedicated exclusively to reevaluating Fukuyama’s legacy, the unresolved problem of “the liberal identity” was conspicuous by its absence. Article after article foundered in their attempts to defend liberal alternatives to populism or socialism precisely because they offered no satisfactory post-Fukuyama understanding of liberalism. But it is impossible to defend liberalism against its critics without making it clear precisely what it stands for. Skeptics can hardly be won over if liberals can’t tell them what they are being won over to or how it differs from the uninspiring mess created by Fukuyama and his continuators.
Surrounded by the confused, jargon-ridden babble of political commentators today, it is perhaps easy to forget that liberalism is defined by a commitment to liberty. At root, liberty is a concept grounded in the individual. It is the freedom to be all that one is, to actualize the fullness of one’s potential as a human being endowed with the capacity for creativity and the ability to make autonomous value judgments for ourselves.
It is, of course, true that liberty can be read many ways. As Isaiah Berlin observed, there is positive liberty, the freedom to do something; and there is negative liberty, the freedom from something; and depending on circumstances, one or the other can appear to be of greater importance. But while this distinction has tended to dominate debates in political philosophy since the Second World War, it is perhaps more useful to think back to the writings of Voltaire and the earliest Encyclopédistes and to remind ourselves that liberty in its purest form—both positive and negative—can be thought of as the realization of man’s inherent dignity as a human being.
This is more than just a matter of high-flown words. The concept of human dignity has two important implications, both of which were recognized by Cicero as far back as the first century B.C. but seem to have been forgotten today. The first is that we all share the same degree of dignity: No one has any less potential than any other, and no one’s humanity is any less pronounced than anyone else’s. The second is that our humanity imposes upon us the same basic needs. By virtue of our nature, we all require food, shelter, clothing, security, and a range of other basic goods necessary for sufficiency and survival. Though deceptively simple, these implications have profound meaning when we consider how individual liberty is to be translated into a social and political construct. If the liberty of each person is to be maintained and maximized, the principles of equity and the common good must be embedded in the structure of society. And since society is structured above all by law, the law must reflect these precepts. To have liberty is hence to live according to laws grounded on equity and the common good; and where law deviates to even the smallest degree from either, it necessarily becomes the instrument of private or factional interests, and liberty is lost.
Such liberty is, however, dependent upon the morality of the citizenry, especially those in office. While law may structure society, it is only the will of governors and people that gives it its character and force. It is only if everyone recognizes the dignity of the human person that they will recognize the inherent value of equity and the common good, and strive to defend and preserve not only their own liberty, but also that of all others in their society using law. As soon as the commitment to human dignity breaks down, society becomes a jungle in which it is everyone for himself; self-interest dominates, law becomes partial, and tyranny supplants liberty.
In short, a liberal politics must be a moral politics. Liberalism will not work if too much emphasis is placed on total human autonomy at the expense of all others, nor if it is obsessed with materialism and consumerism. In contrast to the Fukuyama model of yoking liberal values to economic self-interest—a combination that, when given free rein, has often damaged society at large in recent years—a model that emphasizes human dignity allows for a more positive, relevant kind of politics that constantly struggles to assert itself. Instead of encouraging us to rest easy in the assurance that liberalism will certainly triumph, a conception of liberty based on human dignity recognizes that there is nothing inevitable about its success. While each of us may wish to be free as an individual, it shows that individual freedom is dependent on us all being free; and that means that we all have to cling to our shared humanity, our shared dignity.
If liberalism has a future, therefore, it lies not in Fukuyama’s shattered determinism or the more recent liberal historicism of Siedentop, Fawcett, and Clinton, but in each of us. It lies not in economics, or the tides of history. It lies in the recognition of the worthiness of humanity itself.

Democrats Can't Just Suit Up Every Four Years

by Joan Walsh

Democrats have two months to make sure this election doesn’t turn out like 2010 did. It’s not about the president right now, and we shouldn’t wait until 2016 for a new magical president. The kind of thoroughgoing change we need won’t happen in eight years, or even 80. It’s an eternal battle, the constant effort to expand the realm of human freedom to everyone, against the constant crusade by the wealthy to ensure that the trappings of human dignity – education, leisure, family life, childhood itself – are reserved for those who can afford to pay for them. The Kochs and their allies are trying to repeal the 20th century. Progressives can’t just suit up for that battle every four years.

What is College For?

College Must Be More Than Just a Classy Trade School

Posted: 08/31/2014 11:08 am EDT Updated: 08/31/2014 1:59 pm EDT

There is a tradition in this country stretching back to Thomas Jefferson of lofty ideals for our colleges and universities. Liberal learning is said to prepare one for autonomy and for citizenship. As Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasized, it also led one away from the crowd; it helped one escape mere imitation and opened access to authenticity. Finally, education offered the opportunity to discover work that would be meaningful -- to find one's "passion."
But, as I describe in Beyond The University: Why Liberal Education Matters, there is another tradition stretching back just as far questioning the "real world" relevance of these lofty ideals. Is it right to speak of "finding meaningful work" when available work might necessarily involve drudgery and worse? Is it right to emphasize citizenship and finding one's passion to students who first and foremost are desperate to find a job? Such questions, so much on our minds today, were especially urgent for freed African slaves and their descendants at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1903, Booker T. Washington voiced the following complaint about education for African-Americans:

There were young men educated in foreign tongues, but few in carpentry or in mechanical or architectural drawing. Many were trained in Latin, but few as engineers and blacksmiths. Too many were taken from the farm and educated, but educated in everything but farming.

Washington was a passionate advocate for an intensely practical education for ex-slaves and their descendants. He was born a slave on a small farm in Virginia and after the Civil War found work in the mines of West Virginia. After his education at the Hampton Institute, Washington was convinced that only by achieving economic success would blacks ever be recognized by white Americans as full members of society. Education should make people self-reliant, in Emerson's ideal sense, but for Washington self-reliance was first and foremost the ability to earn a decent living.
Washington's fame was as a teacher, institution builder (especially at the Tuskegee Institute), fundraiser, and spokesperson for the view that American blacks needed an intensely practical, vocational education. He appealed to ex-slaves and their descendants who were looking for a path out of poverty, and he appealed to whites who appreciated his decision not to demand much in the way of political or cultural change. Washington was an "accomodationist," willing to work within the structures for legal subordination of blacks in the South as long as he was able to promote black economic advancement. His message resonated with wealthy industrialists, high-toned educators, and even presidents. He was the most famous black man in America at the end of the 19th century.
Born shortly after the Civil War, W.E.B. Du Bois came into his own just as Washington was reaching the height of his fame. Du Bois was a prodigious intellectual with a slew of degrees--bachelors diplomas from Fisk and Harvard, eventually a Ph.D. also from Harvard (he was the first black person to receive one there) with continued graduate work in Berlin. He was a classics professor and a historian who wrote sociology (highly praised by Max Weber), poetry, plays, and fiction--to name just some of the genres in which he worked.
Washington was impressed by the American desire for material success and wanted to build progress for African Americans based on their ability to be successful in the economy. Du Bois, on the other hand, emphasized political and civic equality, along with the Jeffersonian notion of "education of youth according to ability." Education was at the core of the differences between the two. "The pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head means little," Washington had written. "We want more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge must be harnessed to the things of real life." Du Bois agreed, but he wanted to broaden what might count as "the things of real life" so that the pursuit of happiness wouldn't be reduced to the pursuit of dollars:

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

Du Bois was acutely aware that the "fine adjustment" between life and knowledge was especially problematic in a society of oppressive racial inequality, a society that had denied many blacks the most rudimentary education in the years after emancipation. He was committed to the ideal that education was a path to freedom, but he also acknowledged the fact that different people need different kinds of educational opportunity:

How foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million souls! Shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of men--nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.

Educational institutions should aim to stimulate hunger for knowledge -- not just contain it or channel it into a narrow path destined for a job market that will quickly change. Education should not teach the person to conform to a function, a repetition of slavery, but should provide people with a wider horizon of choices.
Du Bois repeatedly defended liberal education against those who saw it as impractical. In an address at the Hampton Institute in the beginning of the century, he lamented that "there is an insistence on the practical in a manner and tone that would make Socrates an idiot and Jesus Christ a crank." At one of the centers of industrial learning for blacks, Du Bois argued that its doctrine of education was fundamentally false because it was so seriously limited. What mattered in education was not so much the curriculum on campus but an understanding that the aim of education went far beyond the university. And here is where Du Bois issued his challenge:

The aim of the higher training of the college is the development of power, the training of a self whose balanced assertion will mean as much as possible for the great ends of civilization. The aim of technical training on the other hand is to enable the student to master the present methods of earning a living in some particular way . . . We must give our youth a training designed above all to make them men of power, of thought, of trained and cultivated taste; men who know whither civilization is tending and what it means.

The differences between Washington and Du Bois, and the tensions between the lofty and practical ideals for higher education, are instructive for us today. Sure, we must pay attention to what our graduates will do with their education, and we must give them the skills to translate what they learn in classrooms to their lives after graduation. But we shouldn't reduce our understanding of "their lives after graduation" to their very first job -- which should be the worst job they'll ever have. We must recommit ourselves instead to ensuring that a broad, liberal education is also pragmatic -- in Washington's words, "harnessed to the things in real life," to productive skills valued beyond the university. By doing so, we will also achieve what Du Bois championed: practical idealism based in lifelong learning.

The Bloody Origin of Labor Day

The Bloody Origin Of Labor Day

Posted: 09/01/2014 7:30 am EDT Updated: 48 minutes ago

WASHINGTON -- Most people know Labor Day as an extra day off of work. Fewer know the holiday comes from a time when the government was offing workers.
It all started with a bad recession in the early 1890s that reduced demand for railway cars, prompting Chicago railway magnate George Pullman to lay off workers and reduce wages. Many of his workers went on strike. The sympathetic American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars, hampering commerce in many parts of the country.
"The boycott tapped the deep and pervasive alienation of labor in general," historian David Ray Papke wrote in his 1999 book The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America.

"Workers were mad about their situation," Papke wrote. "They were angry about their limited opportunities and about what they took to be the mean and arbitrary treatment they received from the distant owners of the industries in which they worked."
Pullman workers started their strike in May 1894. The following month, Congress passed legislation making the first Monday of September a day to recognize workers. (Such a holiday had already been a demand of the labor movement, though commentators have described the Labor Day legislation as an attempt to "appease" angry workers.) In July, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to crush the strike.
Illinois Gov. John Altgeld (D) resented the president's decision, as there had not yet been any large-scale rioting. "I protest against this uncalled for reflection upon our people, and again ask the immediate withdrawal of these troops," Altgeld wrote to the president.
Within a day of the troops' arrival, mobs started tipping railroad cars and setting them on fire. Troops cracked down with bayonets and bullets; the rioting and property destruction worsened. Dozens of people ultimately died in Chicago and elsewhere. The government restored order by the fall, and American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs was eventually convicted of defying a court order and sent to prison.
The U.S. Department of Labor's page on the history of Labor Day notes the holiday "is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers." It doesn't mention the Pullman strike or labor strife in general. Throughout American history, workers had to fight to get better pay and shorter hours -- evenings and weekends weren't just handed over by lawmakers and benevolent managers.
"I think most people consider Labor Day an end-of-summer three-day weekend," Papke, a law professor at Marquette University, said in an interview. "Very few Americans stop to reflect on the working man, on labor, on the union movement or any of those things."

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