Why America Needs a Left

A Historical Argument

Eli Zaretsky

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745644851
  9780745644844
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745656564
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse.

Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

1

Abolitionism and Racial Equality

The abolitionists active in the United States between the 1830s and the 1860s did not think of themselves as a left. Instead, like so many American activists and radicals, they mostly thought of themselves as evangelical Protestants, doing God’s work, although one of the leading figures, Ernestine Rose, was Jewish. Nonetheless, by any reasonable historical assessment the abolitionists, or at least their “immediatist” or Garrisonian wing, about whom I will mostly be writing, did constitute an American left. Not only that, they constituted the first American left.

Many of them free blacks, the abolitionists flourished amid an enormous wave of reform movements, Fourierist, Owenite and other utopian and socialist communities, and the huge explosion of democratic self-awareness that characterized Jacksonian America. I have chosen to focus on them, however, because as much as or more than any of their contemporaries they invented so much of the repertoire of the subsequent American left, including nonviolent resistance, democratic agitation, cultural and sexual experimentation, and unremitting attempts to shame the liberal, hypocritical majority. They were among the first to explore the power of a principled minority to upset carefully constructed coalitions, that is to disrupt the control mechanisms built into the new mass parties. Above all they – or at least the more radical currents among them – were focused on the goal of bringing the American people to accept blacks as their fellow countrymen. For them political equality was inseparable from racial equality, especially in immediate, one-to-one relations, such as the abolition of the “negro pew” in churches, the integration of the elementary schools, and the legitimation of mixed marriages. Once the principle of racial equality was accepted, they believed, the imperative of abolishing slavery would become immediately clear.

The abolitionist focus on equality as the basis of American nationhood may be contrasted to the thinking of the American revolutionaries. No doubt, this question is complex and many histories stress the importance to the American radical tradition of figures like Thomas Paine, the very idea of a right of revolution, and the struggle not just over home rule, but over who should rule at home. Nonetheless, at a basic level, the Revolution of 1776 had the aim of national independence; it was not a crisis in the sense that the Civil War was a crisis. Indeed, it is important to my argument that, while the American Revolution was taken as a model for many later national independence movements, it is regularly contrasted with the movements identified with the left. Thus, Edmund Burke praised the American Revolution because it was based on long established rights of Englishmen, just as he attacked the French Revolution because it was based on abstract principles of universal equality. Friedrich von Gentz, a polemicist of the eighteenth century, wrote: “The American revolution was from beginning to end, on the part of the Americans, a defensive revolution; the French was from beginning to end, in the highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.” By this Gentz meant that the Americans were seeking to protect long-established rights, whereas the French were trying to create a new world. So compelling was this contrast that John Adams, the second President of the United States, translated and published Gentz’s pamphlet with the aim of freeing the American Revolution from the “disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as the French.”¹ In 1955 Russell Kirk, a founder of contemporary neo-conservatism, republished Adams’s translation as a mass-market paperback.

On the crucial question of slavery, the American Revolution emancipated the slaves in most Northern states, excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory and set an end to the Atlantic slave trade. But otherwise the Constitution aimed to remove the slavery question from national politics, to leave its disposition to the masters, and to allow for racial discrimination in the nonslave states. By contrast, the abolitionists believed that it was impossible to imagine the American nation except on the basis of racial equality. In the service of that end, they were not afraid to offend American patriotism. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1833 they reversed the clichéd contrast between British despotism and American freedom by regularly celebrating August 1 as the Black Fourth of July.² Neither simply “for” nor “against” their country, they refused to regard the United States as a completed entity. Treating the country instead as a project, they sought to revise America’s identity by insisting on the centrality of equality. This, too, set them apart from the revolutionaries of 1776. While independence is an objective fact to be celebrated and memorialized ever after, equality is a project, always in need of improvement and elaboration. In turning equality into the project that Richard Rorty called “achieving our country,” the abolitionists helped kick-start the American left.³

The story of the American left also begins with the abolitionists because as much as or more than their contemporaries, they invented a new and anomalous American type, the radical who was defined by his or her ideals. Combining “steadfastness of purpose with an almost reckless disregard of self-interest,” willing to court martyrdom rather than give in to the majority, the radical relied “on a direct appeal to the moral sense of other people.”⁴ What the immediatist abolitionists realized was that the American commitment to equality is often so shallow, so compromised, and so easily abandoned in the face of short-term opportunities and practical constraints, that America needs a permanent body of “extremists,” risk-takers and scolds. In Michael Walzer’s words, American politics needs Saints characterized by an “uncompromising and sustained commitment to a political ideal (which other men called hypocrisy), and by a pattern of rigorous and systematic labor in pursuit of that ideal (which other men called meddlesomeness).”⁵ Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States thirty years before the Civil War, was “astonished by the equanimity, indifference, [and] moral carelessness with which Americans managed to live with slavery.” The abolitionists did not share that indifference and they made indifference impossible for others, creating the space within which mainstream figures like Lincoln operated.

We also begin with the abolitionists because the Civil War was the country’s first and greatest crisis and the left, as I have argued, has a special relationship to crisis. Behind the war lay intensely rapid economic development as well as the growth of nationalism since Independence. Beginning in the 1830s or so, one can observe two different social systems pitted against one another: the North and West were republican, democratic, middle class, and believed in a wide dispersal of property. The South, though diverse, was still dominated by slaveholders convinced that patriarchal, hierarchical dependence was the basis of freedom. A struggle over control of the increasingly important national government precipitated the war. The Union’s victory brought not only the end of slavery, but the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which created national citizenship and guaranteed equality before the law. This outcome, however, proved reconcilable with racial hierarchy, as demonstrated by such elements of America’s post– Civil War history as the Black Codes, the disfranchisement of most Southern blacks, the institution of Jim Crow, widespread toleration of lynching, segregation of the armed forces, redlining, employment discrimination, and an almost infinite variety of other discriminations.

Abolitionism left a different legacy. The abolitionists created the model for the subsequent American lefts by insisting on equality as the way to resolve a national crisis. The crisis at issue had two aspects. As a system crisis, the Civil War may be understood in terms of powerful global forces, such as the rise of nationalism, democracy and self-government, forces that were at war with older forms of hierarchy. But as an identity crisis, the war posed the question of what it means to be an American. The abolitionists – black and white – answered that question by inflecting the meaning of American identity with racial equality. In doing so they presumed that white Americans, in spite of their racial prejudices, which white abolitionists knew they shared, believed in equality and could learn to live as coequals with blacks. To be sure, this extreme and minority viewpoint entered the American mainstream only by overcoming intense and pervasive resistance. However, the message was transmuted through the development of a great new mass party, the Republicans, through the terrible ordeal of the war, and through the efforts of many great leaders, including the greatest, Abraham Lincoln.

This, at any rate, is the argument of this chapter, which unfolds in three steps. First, I will show how slavery in the form of “primitive accumulation” was at the center of the national (not just Southern) economy. As such it infected the ideal of political equality, which is central to the republican tradition. Two innovative democratic institutions aimed to keep slavery out of national politics: the new, mass parties, and the cult of the family and “true womanhood.” These, however, also became the flashpoints through which abolitionism spread. In the second part I will show how the abolitionists grappled not just with slavery but especially with racial prejudice, which they related to America’s foundational and enduring tendency toward violence, to Indian Removal and to what we call today sexism. Finally, I will describe the crisis and the war, emphasizing the relations of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and the abolitionists and indicating both the success and the weakness of the abolitionist attempt to refound America on the basis of racial equality.

Slavery was integral to all aristocratic, patriarchal and paternal societies until the rise of democracy. In Hannah Arendt’s words, “All rulership had its original and its most legitimate [sic] source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men achieved such liberation, by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them.”⁶ Slavery was enshrined in such core Western documents as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the texts of Plato and Aristotle, the preachments of the Catholic Church (which owned many slaves), the Koran (the Muslims spread slavery throughout West Africa and elsewhere), and the great philosophical writings of the seventeenth century, such as those of Thomas Hobbes, for whom the slave was a vanquished warrior who promised absolute obedience in return for his life. Reflecting his or her dependence, the precapitalist slave was typically a member of a patriarchal household or, in the Islamic world, of a waqf (religious endowment). So common was such dependence that slavery was sometimes not a distinct status but simply the most extreme form of unfree labor, a category that also included serfdom, servitude, and indenture.

The men and women of the democratic revolutions understood freedom as the opposite of slavery. Just as slavery was rooted in violence and war, so freedom was rooted in the social contract. Just as slavery was rooted in privation and decline, so freedom was linked to abundance, and to the possibility of avoiding decline. Just as slavery pervaded the inner life, which was marked by sin and dependence, so freedom implied a revolutionary shift toward independence and self-reliance in human psychology. For defenders of slavery, the master had to oversee, guide and educate the bondsman just as the soul had to govern the body; to free or enlightened eyes, however, the slave-owner had put himself in God’s place.

Although the American ideal of freedom was based on this contrast, freedom could not emancipate itself so easily from slavery. American slavery was not ancient, patriarchal or aristocratic slavery but the new commercial – even bourgeois – slavery that emerged with early modern capitalism. Sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao from the Caribbean, tobacco, rice and indigo from North America, and gold and silver from South America supplied the basis for the new modern commercial empires – English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Although slavery prospered during the mercantilist era, the plantations were not built by the state but rather by the “new merchants” of seventeenth-century England and Holland, who traded in mass rather than luxury goods. Run out of banks, counting houses and law firms, based on an extensive system of credit and bills of exchange (indispensable for bulk growing of raw materials and long-term exchange), inseparable from shipbuilding, banking, textiles and other key industries, the slave plantations constituted the sinews of commercial capitalism.

As a result, the newly emerging market societies were thoroughly saturated with racial violence. Insofar as slaves had been members of patriarchal households or religious endowments, they had been protected from the most brutal forms of violence, at least in part. On the capitalist plantations, by contrast, they were treated as factors of production: commodities. As a result, their condition worsened dramatically. As David Brion Davis has noted, from the 1440s, when the Portuguese began transporting black slaves to Iberia, to the 1860s, when the illegal slave trade to Cuba came to an end, an estimated 11 million slaves entered the New World. By 1820, however, when 2 million European immigrants had become 12 million, the 11 million Africans had left only 6 million descendants.⁷ This almost incomprehensible destruction laid the basis for the first great crisis of American capitalism, a crisis that arose from the fact that the American republic as a whole was deeply entwined with racial slavery.

In theory, America was a “yeoman democracy,” resting on a wide distribution of land and property. The English encouraged large-scale emigration to North America, so freehold agriculture developed alongside the plantations. In England inequality based on unequal land tenure had been ingrained for centuries, but in the colonies indentured servants, criminals and propertyless immigrants could attain independence. The result was basic to American republicanism. As Charles Sellers explains:

Cheap land, virtually free at first, not only elevated the mass but imposed a limit on wealth by making labor expensive. With farm ownership readily attainable, Euro/Americans would not labor for others except briefly and at high wages. A few years of high wages financed enough cheap land to yield a comfort and independence inconceivable to poor Europeans. With wages too high for most farmers to pay, production was limited – no matter how much land they had – by the family labor available. While raising European immigrants to an exhilarating rural well-being, the person/land ratio inhibited further accumulation. The resulting society of roughly equal landowning families was the seedbed of American republicanism.⁸

In practice, though, republicanism coexisted with slavery. Not only did the plantations dominate the rural economy, but they served as forerunners for the factories of the industrial revolution.⁹ Paradoxically, the democratic revolutions, by releasing men of property from clerical and royal controls, had thereby freed them to develop a new level of intensive organization reflected in the gang system, “an incessant cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting, and night work in the mill, adding up to eighteen hour days.” Planters turned plantations into total environments, bent toward “diligent and systematic behavior aimed at profit maximization.” The larger plantations were subject to every advance in scientific management, including “simplification and repetition of tasks,” coordination of labor, “precise calibration of labor inputs and subordination to mechanical rhythms,” dietary experiments, and smallpox inoculation, even as plantations also relied on the natural economy, with slaves building their own huts and growing their own food.¹⁰

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made both slavery and industry profitable and linked them tightly together. Southern plantations, securing the markets that Santo Domingo (today’s Haiti) lost after abolishing slavery, became indispensable to the British textile industry. Begun with the resale of high value Indian manufactured goods, especially calico, the industry switched to importing cotton and manufacturing cloth at home. As a result, it relied on the superprofits of American slavery to provide the capital and on the slaves to provide the cotton. Slave-trade ports such as Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool became centers of textile production. According to Eric Hobsbawm, “the cotton industry was thus launched, like a glider, by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached; a trade which promised not only great, but rapid and above all unpredictable expansion.”¹¹ Fueled by the “insatiable and rocketing demands” of Britain’s “satanic” m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: America’s Three Great Crises and Three Lefts
• 1 Abolitionism and Racial Equality
• 2 The Popular Front and Social Equality
• 3 The New Left and Participatory Democracy
• Conclusion: The American Left Today
• Notes
• Index