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Showing posts with label abraham lincoln. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abraham lincoln. Show all posts
Click on title to link to a discussion about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and the early Marxist movement that hailed Lincoln's leadership of the 'Second American Revolution'.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
I wish to highlight the following paragraph from the "Workers Vanguard" reply to Joel in the linked article above:
"Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role."
Every radical, every revolutionary, hell, every serious liberal should think long and hard about this paragraph. The progressive days of the capitalist system are over, long over. Every attempt, including many in the old days by this writer, to deny that reality and try to forge a strategic alliance (as opposed to an occasional episodic united front on a specific issue) with even ONE representative of that class today, in 2009, is political folly, or worst. And that is true even if that ONE representative is the high-flying Barack Obama whom many are still giving a political 'free ride' despite his much demonstrated undying devotion to the preservation of the American empire and the international capitalist system.
Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America
Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865 [A]
Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]
Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:
George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.
[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:
"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."
[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:
"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."
Ambassador Adams Replies
Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865
Sir:
I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.
So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.
The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.
Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of a New York Regiment performing We Are Coming Father Abraham.
In the 150th anniversary year of the start of the American Civil War.
This is an example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, "Civil War Curiosities" by Webb Garrison.
In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.
WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!
CHORUS
If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!
CHORUS
You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday
…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch might have made him, well, just plain), yes, warts and all he (and thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon daughters, or so it seemed), all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips,jesus.), all keep the races split, let them, the blacks (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out ofChi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so muchas a lining up his beliefs with his walk the walk talk.
So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison (hell, no, he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria), or a righteous son of Captain John Brown, late of Kansas and Harpers Ferry (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate), but to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over, sounds familiar) and were able to touch up a picture or two he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.
And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown proud to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, break down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. More like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.
…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 946
6 November 2009
On Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
(Letter)
Massachusetts
30 August 2009
I had a few thoughts on your article “Honor Abraham Lincoln” (Workers Vanguard, No. 938). I just finished Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 and reread some articles by Marx on the US Civil War. One of the things that’s striking is that Marx gave what is basically (critical) political support to a capitalist party, by congratulating Lincoln on re-election (see Karl Marx on Lincoln Re-Election, supra). Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.
It was essential to give military support to the North, but political support presumes that a class is performing a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat. This is actually a time when the concept of a “two stage revolution” makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time. The US working class was small, unorganized and without the social weight it would possess a generation or more later. Chattel slavery was heinous in itself, but beyond that, as Marx said, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in its white skin, wherein its black it is branded.” It was inconceivable that there would be an advance in the class struggle, in terms of unions, never mind socialist revolution, while slavery existed. The aftermath of the Civil War, in particular Radical Reconstruction, gave birth to labor struggles and a modest rise in socialist consciousness in the US. Reconstruction’s defeat, symbolized by the withdrawal of federal troops to crush the rail strike of 1877, ended capitalism’s progressive role.
Marx was also writing about the US before the experience of the Paris Commune. (I cannot find any writings by Marx or Engels dealing with Reconstruction.) Marx’s writings on the US Civil War, along with radical abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the whole thrust of Radical Reconstruction, presumed that one could use the capitalist state for progressive ends. The Paris Commune proved that false, or at least put that historical era clearly at an end. That task today can be fulfilled only by the proletariat.
Joel
WV replies:
The Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the greatest event in U.S. history. By defeating the South, the industrialized system in the North uprooted the nearly 250-year-old institution of chattel slavery and paved the way for the expansion of capitalist property relations from one end of North America to the other.
Joel rightly emphasizes that the Northern ruling class in the Civil War era played a historically progressive role at a time when the small and unorganized working class lacked the social weight to supplant bourgeois rule. He concludes correctly that the class struggle, unionization and the prospect of socialist revolution could not advance as long as slavery existed.
However, Joel intimates that there is a common thread between Karl Marx’s congratulations to Abraham Lincoln for his re-election to the presidency in 1864 and the reformists’ political support for “liberal” bourgeois forces today: “Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.”
Marx supported Lincoln because he was a bourgeois revolutionary in a period when, as Joel himself notes, the U.S. bourgeoisie was playing “a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat.” Thus, this support has nothing whatsoever in common with the politics of today’s fake socialists, whose pro-Democratic Party program helps chain workers and the oppressed to their capitalist class enemies.
Joel correctly notes that the defeat of Reconstruction “ended capitalism’s progressive role.” Following the Civil War, the U.S. began to play an increasingly bellicose role abroad, waging war against Korea and clashing with its European competitors over Asia, the South Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. While the Republican Party had championed the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War and supported the great expansion of black rights during Reconstruction, it was quickly becoming the party of the big capitalists, who had little interest in the rights and advancement of black people. The years of the Grant administration saw the creation of new corporations that were, as described by Henry Adams at the time, “more powerful than a sovereign State” (quoted in “On Henry Adams and Democracy,” New York Review of Books, 27 March 2003). Moreover, as we noted in Part One of “The Grant Administration (1869-1877) and the Rise of U.S. Imperialism” (WV No. 938, 5 June), we see in this period “shades of the imperial presidency to come.” By the late 19th century, the U.S. had become an imperialist power, bringing death and destruction to subject countries such as the Philippines.
Joel suggests that the Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in history, showed that one could no longer use the capitalist state for progressive ends. Actually, what the Paris Commune confirmed was that the proletariat, victorious in its social revolution, “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” as Marx underlined in The Civil War in France (1871). What the Paris Commune showed was that the working class must smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and replace it with its own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The real issue at hand, in the case of the U.S. Civil War, is the question of when the bourgeoisie as a class ceases to play a historically progressive role. For various historical reasons, that question played out differently in Europe and the U.S. In fact, as early as 1848, amid the European revolutions of that year, Marx skewered the conservatism of the German bourgeoisie, writing, “The German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly, timidly and slowly that at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw menacingly confronting it the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat” (“The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” [1848]).
The 1848 revolutions marked the period when the European bourgeoisies ceased to play a historically progressive role. Indeed, they feared the prospect of revolutionary upheaval more than the dominance of the landed nobility, and allied themselves with the aristocracy against the working and artisan masses in revolt. At the same time, the proletariat was still too weak to immediately vie for power. It was the experience of the betrayals by the bourgeoisies in the 1848 revolutions that led Marx to emphasize the necessity of organizing the proletariat in a party independent of all other classes.
In the case of the U.S., as Joel himself notes, the working class could not play an independent role so long as the institution of slavery continued to exist. The North’s momentous suppression of the slaveholders’ rebellion gave great impetus to the industrialization of the country and fostered the development of the proletariat—capitalism’s gravedigger. The Civil War and Reconstruction represented the last progressive acts of the U.S. bourgeoisie.
Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role.
Discussing this stagist strategy, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky remarked: “The Menshevik idea of the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie actually signified the subjection to the liberals of both the workers and the peasants” (“Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” [1939]). All manner of Stalinists and fake socialists have sought to justify their “two stage” betrayals of the proletariat by pointing to Marx’s support to Lincoln and other similar instances. From the Mensheviks’ support to bourgeois liberalism during the 1917 Russian Revolution to the defeats of the Second Chinese Revolution in the late 1920s and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the two-stage framework has always been a straitjacket for the working class and a program for bloody counterrevolution.
Everything depends on time, place and circumstance, as Engels was fond of saying. In contrast to the Republican Party of the early 1860s, which fought to uproot black chattel slavery, the capitalist Republican and Democratic Parties today are the gendarmes of world reaction. Imperialism can be put out of business only by a series of working-class revolutions that overthrow capitalism, expropriate the bourgeoisie and prepare the way for a communist future for all of humanity. We struggle to build internationalist revolutionary parties dedicated to that goal.
The following was written as a contribution for a Spartacist League internal educational series.
February 12 marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Since the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, revolutionaries have held Lincoln in high esteem. His world-historic achievement—the single most important event in American history
—was to lead the North in a horrendously bloody civil war that smashed the Southern Confederacy and abolished slavery in the United States. In “Comments on the North American Events” (7 October 1862), Marx wrote with characteristic eloquence:
“Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothurnus [dignified, somewhat stilted style of ancient tragedy], no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be ‘fighting for an idea,’ when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an idea, talks about ‘square feet.’ He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances ‘to act the lion.’…
“Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”
Many opponents of revolutionary Marxism, from black nationalists to reformist leftists, have made a virtual cottage industry out of the slander that “Honest Abe” was a racist or even a white-supremacist. The reformist who impugns Lincoln for his bourgeois conceptions, which in fact reflected his time, place and position, does not hesitate for a moment to ally with unctuous “progressives” today who praise “diversity” while fighting tooth and nail to maintain the racial oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism that are endemic to this most brutal of imperialist countries.
Take the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In Cold Truth, Liberating Truth: How This System Has Always Oppressed Black People, And How All Oppression Can Finally Be Ended, a pamphlet originally published in 1989 and reprinted in Revolution (17 February 2008), the RCP writes:
“It is a lie that ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’ because he was morally outraged over slavery. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (and not all the slaves at first, but only those in the states that had joined the southern Confederacy) because he saw that it would be impossible to win the Civil War against that southern Confederacy without freeing these slaves and allowing them to fight in the Union army.
“Lincoln spoke and acted for the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he conducted the war in their interests” (emphasis in original).
Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that Lincoln was not an opponent of slavery who abhorred that “peculiar institution,” the RCP rejects Marxist materialism in favor of liberal moralizing, denying that against the reactionary class of slaveholders and the antiquated slave system, the Northern capitalists represented a revolutionary class whose victory was in the interests of historical progress. Presenting the goals of the North and South as equally rapacious, the RCP neither sides with the North nor characterizes its victory as the consummation of a social revolution.
Indeed, the Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, which began with the English Civil War of the 17th century and found their culmination in the French Revolution of the 18th. For the RCP, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever in condemning Lincoln as a representative of the 19th-century American bourgeoisie while doing everything in its power to embrace bourgeois liberalism today—from its antiwar coalitions with capitalist spokesmen to its implicit support for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama in the name of “drive out the Bush regime.”
Abraham Lincoln: Bourgeois Revolutionary
In the preface to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote that in studying the transformation of the whole immense superstructure that arises from revolutionary changes in the economic foundation:
“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”
The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies. Because the task of the Second American Revolution was to eradicate an antiquated social system based on chattel slavery and erect in its place the dominion of industrial capitalism based on wage labor from one end of the North American landmass to the other, it could not eradicate every form of class and social oppression—the hallmark of all propertied classes throughout the history of class society. As materialists, Marxists do not judge historical figures primarily based on the ideas in their heads but on how well they fulfilled the tasks of their epoch. While Lincoln had bourgeois conceptions—how could it be otherwise!—he was uniquely qualified to carry out the task before him, and in the last analysis he rose to the occasion as no other. That is the essence of his historical greatness.
While bestowing begrudging praise on Lincoln’s achievements with the left hand, the leftist critic often takes it back with the right. Lincoln, the critic will admit, opposed slavery; he came to see that a hard war was necessary and prepared to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, the critic is more concerned with Lincoln’s attitudes than his deeds: Lincoln was not John Brown, he was not Frederick Douglass, he was not Marx and Engels, he was not even as left-wing as his Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase. For example, while Lincoln agreed with John Brown in thinking slavery wrong, he could not excuse Brown’s violence, bloodshed and “acts of treason” in attempting to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to spark a slave rebellion on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, the critic will argue, while Marx and Engels from 3,000 miles away knew that the American Civil War was about slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans sought to ignore the root of the problem and wage the conflict on constitutional grounds to save the Union. Such facts are indisputable, but they must be seen in their historical context.
In his Abraham Lincoln (2009), James M. McPherson remarks:
“Only after years of studying the powerful crosscurrents of political and military pressures on Lincoln did I come to appreciate the skill with which he steered between the numerous shoals of conservatism and radicalism, free states and slave states, abolitionists, Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists to maintain a steady course that brought the nation to victory—and the abolition of slavery—in the end. If he had moved decisively against slavery in the war’s first year, as radicals pressed him to do, he might well have fractured his war coalition, driven border-state Unionists over to the Confederacy, lost the war, and witnessed the survival of slavery for at least another generation.”
Facing innumerable pressures when the war broke out in April 1861, Lincoln grappled with how to respond to them. But the pressures—as intense as they were—were not merely strategic in nature. As the president of a constitutional republic, Lincoln believed that it was his duty to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. While he detested slavery, he believed it was not his right to abolish it. That ideology flowed from the whole bourgeois constitutional framework of the United States.
In the first year of the war, Lincoln pursued a policy of conciliating the four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—in an effort to retain their loyalty to the Union. Marx and Engels criticized this policy because it weakened the Union’s war effort and emboldened the slaveholders. However, did this policy stem from disdain for the enslaved black masses or from a desire on Lincoln’s part to let bygones be bygones—i.e., coexist with the slave South? No. It flowed from the whole previous history of the United States. In 1776, 1800 and even as late as 1820, the North and South had similar values and institutions. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the North surged ahead in virtually every area—railroads, canals, literacy, inventions—while the South stagnated. Yet the two regions remained part of the same nation, setting the stage for compromise after compromise. For a whole historical period, Lincoln was hardly alone in seeking détente. In 1848, even the more left-wing Salmon Chase rejected the view espoused by radicals in his Liberty Party that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states, preferring a bloc with antislavery Whigs and Democrats that would agitate merely for keeping slavery out of the territories.
While he conciliated the border states for a time, Lincoln stood firm against secession, countering his cabinet members’ willingness to compromise in the face of the Confederacy’s belligerence. After his fateful election in 1860, which set the stage for the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, Lincoln reined in his future secretary of state William H. Seward for advocating support to the Crittenden Compromise, an attempt to allow slavery to flourish anywhere south of 36°30'. Then Lincoln rejected Seward’s proposal to abandon Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Had it not been for Lincoln’s relentless efforts to goad his officers to fight and his stubborn support for Ulysses S. Grant in the face of substantial Northern opposition, the North might not have vanquished the slavocracy in that time and place. Lincoln’s resoluteness, his iron determination to achieve victory and his refusal to stand down to the Confederacy are hallmarks of his revolutionary role and enduring testaments to his greatness.
Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution. In contrast to this remarkable personal transformation, the Great French Revolution required a series of tumultuous stages to reach its revolutionary climax, a protracted process that was marked by the domination of different and antagonistic groupings—from the Girondins to the Montagnards to the Committee of Public Safety. The Mensheviks were also reformists, but they didn’t become revolutionaries but counterrevolutionaries.
Was Lincoln a Racist?
Although it is beyond dispute that Lincoln occasionally appealed to racist consciousness and expressed racist opinions, the record is not as cut-and-dried as the typical liberal moralist or his leftist cousin will assert. Before a proslavery crowd in Charleston, Illinois, during the fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas on 18 September 1858, Lincoln declared:
“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Yet two months earlier in Chicago, Lincoln had insisted, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position; discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
However, more important than these words were Lincoln’s actions in defense of the slaves, the freedmen and the black troops in the Union Army. For example, in the autumn of 1864, pressure mounted for Lincoln to consummate a prisoner exchange that would exclude black soldiers. Some Republican leaders warned that Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. Ignoring these threats, Lincoln’s agent in the exchange negotiations asserted, “The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]).
That’s not all. Confronting growing defeatist sentiment in the North, the grim prospect of defeat in the impending 1864 presidential elections and a cacophony of demands to abandon the Emancipation Proclamation from Democrats and even staunch Republicans, Lincoln stood firm. In response to fulminations such as “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” Lincoln responded, “If they [the black soldiers] stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Emphasizing the point, he maintained, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”
In the last months of the war, the emancipation of the slaves began to raise broader political and economic questions. When reports filtered northward of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s indifference toward the thousands of freedmen that had attached themselves to his army, Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, in January 1865 to talk with Sherman and consult with black leaders. As a result of Stanton’s visit, Sherman issued “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which granted the freed slaves rich plantation land belonging to former slaveholders.
Indignantly protesting that Lincoln valued the restoration of the Union over the emancipation of the slaves, the RCP cites his famous letter to Horace Greeley of 22 August 1862, which declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The RCP neglects to add that a month later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Commenting on this momentous event, Marx called Lincoln’s manifesto abolishing slavery “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”
What was more important for Lincoln’s cause, Union or emancipation? The very question betrays a subjective idealist approach that ignores the objective reality of the time. The two tasks had become inextricably intertwined in the reality of a war that pitted a modern industrial capitalist mode of production in the North against an archaic agrarian slave system in the South. Restoration of the Union required emancipation, and emancipation required a Union victory. For embodying and melding those two great tasks, Lincoln will forever occupy an honored place in history.
Much Ado About Colonization
An oft-repeated theme among Lincoln’s detractors is that the 16th president—a racist to his bones, they assert—was dedicated above all else to deporting the freed black slaves to distant shores. The most caustic purveyor of this timeworn slander is Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor emeritus of Ebony and the author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000). Bennett shrieks that “Abraham Lincoln’s deepest desire was to deport all black people and create an all-white nation. It’s—sounds like a wild idea now and it is a wild idea, but from about 1852 until his death, he worked feverishly to try to create deportation plans, colonization plans to send black people either to Africa or to...South America, or to the islands of the sea” (interview with Brian Lamb, 10 September 2000, www.booknotes.org/transcript/?programID=1581).
Lincoln did not invent the idea of colonization. Schemes to remove black people from the United States went back to the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. Very much a product of his times, Lincoln was long a supporter of colonization because he believed that the ideal of racial harmony in America was impossible. Although reprehensible and misguided, Lincoln’s colonization schemes were motivated not by racist antipathy toward black people but by his perceptions of enduring white racism in America. In the course of meeting with black leaders at the White House on 14 July 1862, Lincoln declared:
“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated….
“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”
— cited in “Report on Colonization and Emigration, Made to the Secretary of the Interior, by the Agent of Emigration” (1862)
It is therefore not surprising that Lincoln advocated colonization most strenuously at the very moment that he was preparing his Provisional Emancipation Proclamation following the watershed Union victory at Antietam, which Marx said “decided the fate of the American Civil War.” With his colonization proposals, Lincoln sought to sweeten what many whites considered the bitter pill of black emancipation.
However indefensible the idea of colonization was, Lincoln insisted that it must be voluntary. Even then, blacks overwhelmingly rejected colonization as both racist and impractical, holding anticolonization meetings in Chicago and Springfield to protest it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass declared in September 1862: “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” One of the administration’s two concrete moves to implement colonization, the Île à Vache fiasco, led to the deaths of dozens of freed blacks. However, when Lincoln learned of the disaster, he did the honorable thing and ordered the Navy to return the survivors to the United States.
Besides free blacks and Radical Abolitionists, many other contemporaries of Lincoln were incensed at his colonization efforts. Publications like Harper’s Weekly considered the proposal to resettle millions of people to distant shores insane. In Eric Foner’s words, “For what idea was more utopian and impractical than this fantastic scheme?” (“Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed., Eric Foner [2008]).
By the waning days of the war, Lincoln’s utterances on colonization—if not his attitude—had evolved. In a diary entry dated 1 July 1864, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay remarked, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization.” But much more to the point than attempts to decipher Lincoln’s attitudes is the indisputable fact that Lincoln’s policies on the ground were progressively rendering his colonization schemes a dead letter. Foner writes that in 1863 and 1864, Lincoln began to consider the role that blacks would play in a post-slavery America. He showed particular interest in efforts that were under way to establish schools for blacks in the South Carolina Sea Islands and in how former slaves were being put to work on plantations in the Mississippi Valley. In August 1863, he instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a system in Louisiana during wartime Reconstruction in which “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”
Historian Richard N. Current wrote, “By the end of war, Lincoln had abandoned the idea of resettling free slaves outside the United States. He had come to accept the fact that Negroes, as a matter of justice as well as practicality, must be allowed to remain in the only homeland they knew, given education and opportunities for self-support, and started on the way to complete assimilation into American society” (cited at “Mr. Lincoln and Freedom,” www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org). Indeed, on 11 April 1865, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared that literate blacks and black Union Army veterans should have the right to vote in a reconstructed Union—an early step toward the 14th Amendment and citizenship for the freed slaves.
A dishonest charlatan that considers Lincoln no better than Hitler, Lerone Bennett brings the very concept of scholarship into disrepute. In disgust at Bennett’s diatribes, one critic, Edward Steers Jr., sarcastically titled his review, “Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?” And McPherson wrote that while Lincoln “was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves” (“Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times, 27 August 2000).
Honor Lincoln— Finish the Civil War!
At times, Frederick Douglass was highly critical of Lincoln’s moderation and his relegation of black people to the status of what he called “step-children.” But Douglass also saw another side of the 16th president. In his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), the great abolitionist wrote of his meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 1864:
“The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace.… What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”
Rather than weigh the “good” Lincoln against the “bad” in search of the golden mean, Marxists must seek to understand that he was a bourgeois politician in a time of war and revolution—“a big, inconsistent, brave man,” in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois (cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Was Lincoln a Racist?” The Root, available at www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist).
With the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, bourgeois media pundits are acting as if he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Billboards show a huge portrait of Lincoln with Obama’s face superimposed on it. Obama takes the presidential oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Liberal students go a step further, preferring Obama over Lincoln because Lincoln, they assert, was a racist who would have disapproved of a black president. In fact, U.S. imperialism’s current Commander-in-Chief has as much in common with the bourgeois revolutionary Abraham Lincoln as British prime minister Gordon Brown has with the great English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell or French president Nicolas Sarkozy has with the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.
In condemning Lincoln as a racist and besmirching his supreme role in the liquidation of slavery, fake leftists like the RCP surely must have a hard time with Marx’s November 1864 letter to Lincoln on behalf of the First International congratulating the American people for his re-election as president (see accompanying box). By declaring that the European workers saw the star-spangled banner as carrying the destiny of their class, was Marx forsaking the red flag of communism? Not at all. For Marx and the workers of the Old World, Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the irreversibility of the Emancipation Proclamation; it meant that the Union Army—first and foremost its “black warriors”—did not fight in vain. And they understood that with the demise of the slave power, the unbridled growth of capitalism would lay the foundation for the growth of the American proletariat—capitalism’s future gravedigger.
At bottom, the impulse to denounce Lincoln and to minimize his monumental role in history denies that political people—even great ones—are constrained by objective reality. If only poor Lincoln had not lacked the necessary will to eradicate all forms of racial oppression! As Marx explained, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The elimination of racial oppression in all its forms was not possible in 1861 or 1865 because the objective means to accomplish it were not yet present—the unfettered growth of industrial capitalism in America and the development of the working class.
Lincoln accomplished the task placed before him by history: the abolition of slavery. He could do so despite, and because of, the conceptions in his head. The task of Trotskyists—revolutionary Marxists—is different. Our aim is proletarian revolution. Our perspective is revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, we underline that liberating black people from racial oppression and poverty—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only by establishing an egalitarian socialist society. Building such a society requires the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. This is possible only by forging a revolutionary, internationalist working-class party that champions the rights of all the oppressed and declares war on all manifestations of social, class and sexual oppression. That task will be fulfilled by a third American revolution—a workers revolution.
This article by Harvey Wasserman makes an interesting presentation on the question of Buchanan’s “gayness,” although there was also some to-do about his successor, Abraham Lincoln’s like “condition” a few years back, as well. However, and let’s keep our eyes on the prize here, whether Buchanan is a candidate for what W.H. Auden called the “Homintern” or not, he has much to answer for from history, from our left-wing, pro-Unionist, anti-slavery history, in letting the on-coming Southern Confederacy take wing in the period before Abraham Lincoln took office. There is a very good reason why he is almost universally rated at the bottom of the list for presidential efficacy, and it has nothing to do with his sexual orientation.
President James Buchanan. Image from Encyclopedia Dickensonia.
'Mister Fancy' James Buchanan:
Our gay Commander-in-Chief
By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2010
As “conservatives” scream and yell about gays in the military, they might remember that in all likelihood we have already had a gay Commander-in-Chief.
His name was James Buchanan. He was the 15th President of the United States.
A Democrat from Pennsylvania, Buchanan is discreetly referred to in official texts as “our only bachelor president.”
In fact, many historians believe that he may well have been “married” to William Rufus King, a pro-slavery Democrat from Alabama who was our only bachelor Vice President.
The two men lived together for years. Andrew Jackson, never one to shy from bullhorn bigotry, was among those who variously referred to them as “Aunt Nancy” and “Mr. Fancy.” Other Washington wags called them “Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan,” and the like.
The nature of their relationship was never officially confirmed or proclaimed in public. They were widely referred to as “Siamese twins,” slang at the time for a gay couple. But there was no incriminating gap dress or heartfelt double-ring ceremony, civil or otherwise. It was not uncommon at the time for men and women of the same gender to live together and even share a bed while remaining sexually uninvolved.
Buchanan was once engaged to marry a wealthy young woman named Ann Coleman. But the complex affair ended with her mysterious, untimely death. When King became ambassador to France in 1844, Buchanan complained that “I have gone wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any of them.”
With no Moral Majority or Bible thumping fundamentalists to plague them, the King-Buchanan liaison was generally embraced as a political and personal fact of life in a nation consumed with real issues of life and death, freedom and slavery.
In 1852 King was elected as Franklin Pierce’s Vice President. But on an official mission, King contracted a fever and died, leaving Buchanan alone and deeply distraught.
In 1856, Buchanan defeated John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate from the new Republican Party. Buchanan did not run for reelection in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was the victor.
Buchanan’s presidency was plagued by economic and sectional disaster. He was a “doughface” northerner with sympathies for southern slavery. Devoted to consensus and compromise, he was swept away by the intense polarization that led to Civil War.
Through his entire time in the White House, President Buchanan lived alone. His niece served as “First Lady.” He stayed unmarried, and had his personal letters burned upon his death, prompting further speculation on his sexual orientation.
Maybe it’s time those legislators who have been so fiercely opposed to gays in the military face the high likelihood that at least one Commander in Chief would probably be among them.
[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States S is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots “Thomas Paine,” which portrays George Washington as a gay potsmoker.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:07 AM
Labels: American History, American Presidents, Gay, Harvey Wasserman, Homosexuality, Rag Bloggers
Jonah Raskin : Historian Eric Foner: A Contemporary View of America's Past
Historian Eric Foner. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
A Rag Blog interview:
Lincoln biographer Eric Foner
tells history from the bottom up
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2010
The award-winning American historian, Eric Foner, has often written about the Republican Party -- its origins, icon leaders, and tipping points -- but Foner himself is not now nor has he ever been a front man for the Republicans.
A popular professor of history at Columbia University since 1981, he is the author most recently of The Fiery Trial: American Lincoln and American Slavery, in which he charts both the strengths and weaknesses of our 16th-president, and depicts him as an original thinker and as an adept politician in near-constant evolution.
Revered by students and fellow historians -- a past president of the American Historical Association -- and reviled by right-wing ideologies, Eric Foner seems to have been destined to write history. His father, Jack Foner, was an American historian who was blacklisted for years; his uncle Phil Foner was also a historian who wrote about nearly everything and everyone in American history -- from 19th-century New York merchants to Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the Black Panthers.
Like his father and his uncle, he is thoroughly immersed in the American past, and yet attuned to contemporary history as it unfolds today.
I met Eric Foner at Columbia in 1960 when we were both freshman, and members of Action -- a student-run organization and a forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- that protested nuclear testing, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the policies of a paternalist administration.
Even in 1960, at the age of 17, he already knew he would go on to teach and to write about American history, to see it from the bottom up and from the point of view of the underdog: the slave, the worker, the immigrant.
Fifty years on, and at the start of the 50th anniversary of the 1960s -- an era that shaped his own view of history -- Foner continues to teach, write, and speak out on controversial political issues of the day. This interview was conducted over the long Thanksgiving holiday and ranged over a wide variety of topics -- from Lincoln to Obama and Karl Marx to revolution.
Almost every day I go on line there's another piece about Lincoln? Why is this?
Lincoln is so iconic a figure in American culture -- the self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of the slaves -- that everyone wants to claim him as their own. Also, because the issues of his day still resonate with ours, he somehow seems to be our contemporary in ways other figures of our past do not.
If you could channel Lincoln what do you think he'd say about Obama?
Historians don't like to answer questions like this. Lincoln would no doubt be pleased and surprised that a black man was elected president but on bailouts, gay marriage, Afghanistan -- who knows?
And about Sarah Palin?
All that I’ll say on that subject is that Lincoln had great respect for learning and expertise.
You have a new book out on Lincoln and slavery. Why did it take so long for someone to write a book about a subject that seems to obvious?
There are previous books on Lincoln and slavery but they tend to be either hagiographies -- he was born ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation -- or prosecutorial briefs -- he was an inveterate racist. I think it requires someone from outside what a friend of mine calls the Lincoln-industrial complex to try to show the man in all his strengths and weaknesses, and how his views changed over time.
What does the reception to your book tell you about the state of our country today?
To the extent that people relate the book to the present it may reflect a longing for political leadership in which one can take pride and have confidence.
Was Lincoln a prophetic president? Did he see into the future and see the way U.S. society was developing?
Lincoln looked back more than forward. He thought of himself as fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution. He did not foresee the rise of the industrial state of the late 19th-century, which undermined many of his deep assumptions about the dignity of labor.
You became an historian in the 1960s. What do you see now as the impact of the 1960s as an historical era on the writing and the teaching of history?
The 1960s put on the agenda of historians, issues that had been very marginalized before then -- the history of race and racism; women's history; the history more generally of ordinary people, neglected groups. We are still trying to create a persuasive new overall view of U.S. history incorporating this expansion of the historical cast of characters.
You teach U.S. history to students now. Could you characterize how this generation views history and the past?
Like previous generations, they look to history for a sense of their own identity as individuals and Americans. Because students are today so much more diverse than in the past, so must history be.
American history is continually rewritten. Only recently I read a piece about the ways that the Boston Tea Party has been viewed through the ages. Which historical periods are rewritten and revised and rethought more than others?
Reconstruction after the Civil War has been revised most thoroughly by historians, although the general public has not really caught up. The role of slavery in American life has been completely rewritten. But every period is open to reinterpretation -- that's what historians do.
What do you think is the single most important thing we ought to learn from Lincoln?
Open-mindedness, willingness to listen to critics and not surround one's self with yes men, willingness to abandon ideas and policies that are not working and move to new ones, while maintaining one's core principles.
Karl Marx wrote about the U.S. in the 1850s; how astute was he about the U.S.?
Marx was a shrewd observer of the Civil War, understanding the revolutionary implications for the society of the emancipation of the slaves.
And on Lincoln?
Marx saw Lincoln as a man willing to take radical steps to achieve his goals, but to couch them in mundane language like a lawyer. He also saw freeing the slaves as an essential step toward liberating labor more generally.
Do you think it's impossible for there to be another civil war in the U.S. -- a third American Revolution?
Probably not. A third Reconstruction (the second being the civil rights movement) would be a good idea, however.
Are all the major events of our society behind us?
I doubt it. The most important things in history come as complete surprises. More surprises will come in the future.
[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.]
Click on title to link to a discussion about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and the early Marxist movement that hailed Lincoln's leadership of the 'Second American Revolution'.
Markin comment:
I wish to highlight the following paragraph from the "Workers Vanguard" reply to Joel in the linked article above:
"Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role."
Every radical, every revolutionary, hell, every serious liberal should think long and hard about this paragraph. The progressive days of the capitalist system are over, long over. Every attempt, including many in the old days by this writer, to deny that reality and try to forge a strategic alliance (as opposed to an occasional episodic united front on a specific issue) with even ONE representative of that class today, in 2009, is political folly, or worst. And that is true even if that ONE representative is the high-flying Barack Obama whom many are still giving a political 'free ride' despite his much demonstrated undying devotion to the preservation of the American empire and the international capitalist system.
Chalk it up to my recent reading of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery for being on the scent of the civil war theme, okay. A couple of days ago I placed William Butler Yeats’ somewhat flowery and mystical Meditation In The Time Of Civil War as an entry in this space with a short commentary that the political air, in the wake of the 2010 elections in America had, at first bloom, that sense of foreboding that I felt in reading Foner’s book as the American Civil War hit Lincoln right in the face and that I also believe Yeats was feeling in the period of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s.
Needless to say, in the age of the Internet, or maybe just in the age of the cantankerousness of some of my political co-workers that little seemingly off-hand comment could not just settle into cyberspace oblivion. In any case they were “worried” that I had gone off the political deep end in my somewhat simply analogy and unspecified talk of civil war. And I have to agree, at least to the point that the civil war analogy might be overblown. But hear me out as I try to quickly run out one train of thought on the question.
Of course the history of American election cycles has produced all kinds of “waves” (the current favored media term of usage for these quick mood swings by the electorate that shows up, or doesn’t). The 2010 elections can be taken, and at some level should be taken, as just an extreme example of that voter fickleness and quirkiness and just move on. However, when one looks at some of the underlying data, and as importantly, the anecdotal evidence that is beginning to accumulate that drumbeat that has been getting increasingly louder over the past couple of years (even before Obama’s election) by the Tea Party elements and right-wing yahoos in pursuit of their central slogan “We want to take our country back,” should give those of us of the left cause for pause. The case for this Tea-ish phenomenon as a racial backlash has already been fairly well made. More importantly, this election was an in-your-face victory by the “haves”, mainly the rich and well-off but also refracted through the working class, or that part of the working class that is still working.
Now all of this can add up to a tempest in a tea pot (to carry on with the tea-ish symbolism) and the addition of a few million jobs fast could break the populist back of such a movement. But that is not likely, not soon anyway according to those who claim to know. And have a vested interest in knowing. That is the point where I am starting to smell just the faintest whiff of gun powder in the air. To put it in American civil war terms, since I am, seemingly, under the spell of that event I think that we are right now in a period somewhere analogous to the period just after the ugly and ultimately futile Compromise of 1850 where the two sided were feeling each other out and both sides, and I mean both sides, were unhappy with that compromise. Moreover, the more far-sighted on both sides knew where things were heading. And that is what we of the extra-parliamentary left should be doing, paying very close attention to which way the winds are shifting. And organizing, organizing like crazy around our central slogan of fighting for a workers party that fights for a workers government.
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for poet Walt Whitman.
DVD Review
American Experience: Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman and various modern commentators, PBS Productions, 2008
Sure, it is always appropriate to thumb through the pages of the 19th century poet laureate of democracy Walt Whitman’s “Leaves Of Grass”. After wading through Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier and the other Brahmin and Brahmin wannabe poets who dominated the 19th century ‘aristocratic’ European-influenced American poetic academy old white-bearded Walt is like a breath of fresh air. And let’s put it this way, while everyone has, and should, take a peek at those other 19th century poets, if no other reason that to compare work, it is old Walt that those of us in the 21st century WANT to read. Therefore, it is appropriate that PBS’s “American Experience" in 2008 produce a documentary that is, while filled with biographic information, centered on Whitman’s long struggle to produce his masterpiece, “Leaves Of Grass”.
This documentary does yeoman’s service in setting the context in which Walt Whitman had to work, including the trials and tribulations of his long suffering over his troubled working class family affairs; his free-wheeling experiences in breaking out of the family and establishing himself as a newspaper writer in New York City in the pre-Civil War period; his invention of himself as a 'proto-hippie' in that city’s bohemian milieu: his various, mainly homosexual, romantic experiences that eventually find themselves noted heavily throughout his master work; his dramatic and traumatic Civil War time nursing services to the Union wounded; the shock of Lincoln’s death; and, his post-war struggles to expand and deepen his poetic works. That sets the pace for the many ‘talking head’ academic commentaries about the meaning of Whitman’s work, his place as the poetic, warts and all, 19th century democratic champion of the fragile American republican experience, and the breakthrough nature of the more or less explicit sexual, erotic and homoerotic passages in his work.
Finally, poets like other types of writers, run through period of fashion and neglect. My recent road back to an appreciation of Whitman is a case in point. I have been running through (for the nth time) and reviewing the work of the 1950s “beat” writer Jack Kerouac (himself the subject of the vicissitudes of fashion) in this space. Kerouac makes clear (as do many other writers and poets) that Whitman’s poems, his lifestyle and his championship of the “common man” deeply influenced him in his early formative days as he struggled to write. That is a very common story when the name Walt Whitman comes up. So if you need a little refresher on Whitman this well-done documentary fills the bill. But, really, go read some of his poems
Walt Whitman - One’s-Self I Sing.
ONE’S-SELF I sing—a simple, separate Person; Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.
Of Physiology from top to toe I sing; Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—I say the Form complete is worthier far; The Female equally with the male I sing.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
Walt Whitman - To a Historian.
YOU who celebrate bygones! Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races—the life that has exhibited itself; Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests; I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself, in his own rights, Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself;) Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, I project the history of the future.
Walt Whitman - Pioneers! O Pioneers!
1 COME, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready; Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!
2 For we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!
3 O you youths, western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you, western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers!
4 Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!
5 All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!
6 We detachments steady throwing, Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep, Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways, Pioneers! O pioneers!
7 We primeval forests felling, We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within; We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!
8 Colorado men are we, From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus, From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!
9 From Nebraska, from Arkansas, Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d; All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O pioneers!
10 O resistless, restless race! O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all! O I mourn and yet exult—I am rapt with love for all, Pioneers! O pioneers!
11 Raise the mighty mother mistress, Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,) Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress, Pioneers! O pioneers!
12 See, my children, resolute children, By those swarms upon our rear, we must never yield or falter, Ages back in ghostly millions, frowning there behind us urging, Pioneers! O pioneers!
13 On and on, the compact ranks, With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d, Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping, Pioneers! O pioneers!
14 O to die advancing on! Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come? Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d, Pioneers! O pioneers!
15 All the pulses of the world, Falling in, they beat for us, with the western movement beat; Holding single or together, steady moving, to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O pioneers!
16 Life’s involv’d and varied pageants, All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work, All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves, Pioneers! O pioneers!
17 All the hapless silent lovers, All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked, All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying, Pioneers! O pioneers!
18 I too with my soul and body, We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way, Through these shores, amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing, Pioneers! O pioneers!
19
Lo! the darting bowling orb! Lo! the brother orbs around! all the clustering suns and planets, All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!
20 These are of us, they are with us, All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind, We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!
21 O you daughters of the west! O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives! Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united, Pioneers! O pioneers!
22 Minstrels latent on the prairies! (Shrouded bards of other lands! you may sleep—you have done your work;) Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us, Pioneers! O pioneers!
23 Not for delectations sweet; Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious; Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment, Pioneers! O pioneers!
24 Do the feasters gluttonous feast? Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors? Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, Pioneers! O pioneers!
25 Has the night descended? Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged, nodding on our way? Yet a passing hour I yield you, in your tracks to pause oblivious, Pioneers! O pioneers!
26 Till with sound of trumpet, Far, far off the day-break call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind; Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places, Pioneers! O pioneers.
In addition to being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, this year also marks the 75th anniversary of the most wildly successful, poisonously syrupy and all-around trashiest justification for slavery produced in the U.S.: Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind. The continued popularity of such racist “entertainment” as this book and movie counters the myth, touted by President Barack Obama, that he has ushered in a “post-racial” society. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, countering the “smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in our society,” pointed out recently that the result of the histories written in the war’s aftermath “has been to blur the reality that slavery was at the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the brutal fighting, romanticize our own home-grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and distort the consequences of the Civil War that still intrude on our national life” (“A Conflict’s Acoustic Shadows,” New York Times, 12 April).
Atlanta will host Gone With the Wind celebrations once again this summer, billed as “a global pilgrimage to Atlanta.” On the occasion of the book’s 50th anniversary, the Atlanta area saw “Tara balls” ad nauseam, one of which was attended by then mayor Andrew Young and his wife, the only black people present amid the plethora of Confederate army uniforms. On that occasion, we wrote “‘Gone With the Wind’—50 Years of Racist Trash” (WV No. 407, 4 July 1986), excerpts from which are printed below.
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This book and the hugely successful movie based on it sprinkle “moonlight and magnolias” on one of the most brutal slave systems the world has ever known. The life of a slave meant backbreaking work from dawn to dusk; a slave’s child or spouse could be sold at any time; hunger was ever-present. The antebellum South was a totalitarian police state ever in fear of slave uprisings. This is the society Margaret Mitchell referred to as “glamorous,” writing at length about the happiness of the “childlike” slave and his devotion to his master. At one point, the novel’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, muses that “Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was loyalty in them that money couldn’t buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks.”…
Gone With the Wind, the novel, appeared in the mid-1930s in a period of unremittent lynch terror in the South, symbolized by the prolonged struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys from the hangman’s noose—while “liberals” like Franklin D. Roosevelt and the editor of the Atlanta Constitution opposed the anti-lynching law in Congress. The movie came out on the eve of World War II. The heritage of slavery and police-state oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South belied American imperialism’s fraudulent claim to be fighting for “democracy” against Nazi racism. Gone With the Wind shined up the tarnished image of racist America and in this way furthered Washington’s mobilization for war. Attacks on the struggle for black rights have always accompanied the U.S. rulers’ preparations for war.
Margaret Mitchell worshipped slave society. She grew up in a period that saw the rebirth of the Klan with the hanging of the innocent Jewish businessman Leo Frank, framed for the murder of a white girl, a period when the Klan off and on ran the Georgia state government for years. Mitchell was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution in an era when Georgia was trying to crush the life out of courageous black Communist Angelo Herndon. It says a lot about Mitchell that she was ten years old by the time her family broke the news to her that the South had lost the war!
Gone With the Wind is not just another trashy Harlequin romance, a piece of escapist fluff. It is about as politically innocent as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which openly glorified the Klan. It will take a third American revolution to truly finish the Civil War, set the record straight and relegate Gone With the Wind to the scrap heap of history. The cultural record of human emancipation will record this debunking with great relish.
