Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Uncle Billy Sherman's "bummers" route song-"Marching Through Georgia".
MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
LYRICS
Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.
"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.
So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
*In Honor of Charles Darwin- In Defense Of Science And The Scientific Method
Click on title to link to AboutDarwin.com web site.
COMMENTARY
This a repost of an entry of March 24, 2007. I have placed it here in honor of the 200th Birthday Anniversary year of Charles Darwin and the 150th Anniversary year of the publishing of his seminal "Origin Of The Species". Kudos, Brother Darwin and Happy Birthday.
March 24, 2007
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH. MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. EVERY MONTH IS DEFENSE OF SCIENCE MONTH
From global warming and its effects to stem cell research to the 'theory' of intelligent design the hard fought gains of science and the scientific method are under attack by politicians of every ilk and their allies. Apparently gone are the days when the bourgeoisie desperately fought for the scientific method against feudal reaction and church obscurantism. Also apparent is that the fight for preservation of the scientific method is one of the tasks of today's leftist militants. This article is a contribution in that fight.
Workers Vanguard No. 854 16 September 2005
The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression
Hail Charles Darwin!
If ever there were an argument against "intelligent design," it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they're stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the "E" word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt "pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!
A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed "think tanks" (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The "Wedge Document," an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" (New York Times, 21 August).
For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the "original intent" of the slaveowning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, "women's lib" and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.
Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.
A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding "scientific" justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people "far below" whites "in the scale of created beings" and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that awhite man was bound to respect.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate "races." The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amid curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:
"Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modification' is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.
"To the organizations here filing as amid curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man's quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority."
The Materialist View of History
Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:
"The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change."
—Science and History (1954)
Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:
"The revolutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level."
—"Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism," WVNo. 797, 14 February 2003
Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the "social Darwinists" who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term "survival of the fittest" as "scientific" evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, "Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.... Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!"
Evolution is not "progressive," nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word "evolution" because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist "scientific" illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term "descent with modification" and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): "Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn't care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought."
Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the "Academia" to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Segur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:
"Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an 'apostle of dirt worship'."
Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.
Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the "intelligent design" argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book's theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:
"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" (Pocono Record, 28 August).
Darwin's discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:
"Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically.... In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years."
Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been "concealed by an overgrowth of ideology." As Engels remarked in his 1883 "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx":
"The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."
Engels drew directly on Darwin's work in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man." Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, "the hand had become free," allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:
"Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion."
The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and "all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind." So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.
Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
You Can't Fight Republicans with Democrats
While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word "om" is hidden in the word "communism"?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposes of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site's banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.
It's not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, "A Debate Over Darwin," makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Parry opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute's purpose by accepting the logic of Bush's demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.
We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler"), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):
"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."
Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of "all the news that's fit to print" in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of "intelligent design" was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the "little guy."
The "culture wars" in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton's 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.
These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the "lesser evil" is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to "end welfare as we know it," by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being "born again" from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against "godless Communism."
Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions
America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, "Hispanics may be of any race." Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.
America's other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.
Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight "godless Communism," immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the "World's Christian Fundamentals Association" was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic "crimes against society" and "conspiracies against the government," and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.
The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that "education today is chained to the devil's throne," Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against "the old bastard theory of evolution." Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:
"Thousands attended Men's Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies' Night. The newspaper reported that '15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God's glory' on Negro Night. An equal number of 'Kluxers'— some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night."
That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In 1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation's capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn't as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.
John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee's statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being "finally, the highest type of all." A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the "feebleminded" through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed "eugenically unfit." In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for "poor white trash," black people and immigrants.
Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, "Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons."
John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan's religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment."
Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God's gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.
What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists." They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in "the thousand-year reign of Christ." Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in "Welcome to Doomsday" (New York Review of Books, 24 March):
"Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
"I'm not making this up."
Communism = America's Last Best Hope
Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution's philosophy of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism.
The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.
The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.
Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas' Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state's anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools' Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson's constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin's theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as "anachronistic."
So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today's deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.
Leningrad's Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what's changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.
Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that "communism is dead." With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world's, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for "democracy," the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.
Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.
The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie's own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can't be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.
To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn't possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin's theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.
COMMENTARY
This a repost of an entry of March 24, 2007. I have placed it here in honor of the 200th Birthday Anniversary year of Charles Darwin and the 150th Anniversary year of the publishing of his seminal "Origin Of The Species". Kudos, Brother Darwin and Happy Birthday.
March 24, 2007
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH. MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. EVERY MONTH IS DEFENSE OF SCIENCE MONTH
From global warming and its effects to stem cell research to the 'theory' of intelligent design the hard fought gains of science and the scientific method are under attack by politicians of every ilk and their allies. Apparently gone are the days when the bourgeoisie desperately fought for the scientific method against feudal reaction and church obscurantism. Also apparent is that the fight for preservation of the scientific method is one of the tasks of today's leftist militants. This article is a contribution in that fight.
Workers Vanguard No. 854 16 September 2005
The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression
Hail Charles Darwin!
If ever there were an argument against "intelligent design," it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they're stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the "E" word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt "pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!
A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed "think tanks" (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The "Wedge Document," an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" (New York Times, 21 August).
For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the "original intent" of the slaveowning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, "women's lib" and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.
Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.
A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding "scientific" justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people "far below" whites "in the scale of created beings" and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that awhite man was bound to respect.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate "races." The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amid curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:
"Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modification' is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.
"To the organizations here filing as amid curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man's quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority."
The Materialist View of History
Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:
"The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change."
—Science and History (1954)
Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:
"The revolutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level."
—"Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism," WVNo. 797, 14 February 2003
Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the "social Darwinists" who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term "survival of the fittest" as "scientific" evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, "Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.... Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!"
Evolution is not "progressive," nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word "evolution" because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist "scientific" illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term "descent with modification" and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): "Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn't care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought."
Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the "Academia" to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Segur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:
"Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an 'apostle of dirt worship'."
Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.
Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the "intelligent design" argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book's theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:
"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" (Pocono Record, 28 August).
Darwin's discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:
"Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically.... In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years."
Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been "concealed by an overgrowth of ideology." As Engels remarked in his 1883 "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx":
"The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."
Engels drew directly on Darwin's work in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man." Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, "the hand had become free," allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:
"Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion."
The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and "all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind." So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.
Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
You Can't Fight Republicans with Democrats
While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word "om" is hidden in the word "communism"?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposes of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site's banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.
It's not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, "A Debate Over Darwin," makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Parry opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute's purpose by accepting the logic of Bush's demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.
We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler"), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):
"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."
Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of "all the news that's fit to print" in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of "intelligent design" was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the "little guy."
The "culture wars" in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton's 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.
These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the "lesser evil" is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to "end welfare as we know it," by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being "born again" from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against "godless Communism."
Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions
America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, "Hispanics may be of any race." Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.
America's other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.
Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight "godless Communism," immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the "World's Christian Fundamentals Association" was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic "crimes against society" and "conspiracies against the government," and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.
The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that "education today is chained to the devil's throne," Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against "the old bastard theory of evolution." Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:
"Thousands attended Men's Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies' Night. The newspaper reported that '15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God's glory' on Negro Night. An equal number of 'Kluxers'— some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night."
That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In 1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation's capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn't as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.
John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee's statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being "finally, the highest type of all." A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the "feebleminded" through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed "eugenically unfit." In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for "poor white trash," black people and immigrants.
Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, "Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons."
John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan's religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment."
Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God's gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.
What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists." They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in "the thousand-year reign of Christ." Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in "Welcome to Doomsday" (New York Review of Books, 24 March):
"Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
"I'm not making this up."
Communism = America's Last Best Hope
Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution's philosophy of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism.
The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.
The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.
Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas' Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state's anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools' Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson's constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin's theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as "anachronistic."
So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today's deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.
Leningrad's Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what's changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.
Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that "communism is dead." With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world's, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for "democracy," the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.
Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.
The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie's own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can't be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.
To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn't possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin's theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
*The Family- The Fighting Unit For............Capitalism- Lawrence Stone's Historical Study
Click on title to link to Friedrich Engels' "Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State" for the basic Marxist take on this question. Note that some of Engels' work , as is almost always true with historical data and speculation, has needed updating or has been updated, especially over the past fifty years or so. His basic premises, however, remain valid. Forward to more a rational way to increase social solidarity!
BOOK REVIEW
March Is Woman’s History Month
The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500-1800, Abridged Edition, Lawrence Stone, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1979
Abolish the family! That was a slogan that resonated among those of us of the “Generation of “68” radical and counterculture movements of the 1960’s as we rebelled, justifiably so, against the straitjacket of the bourgeois nuclear family structures that we grew up in. Or, as was additionally true in the case of women (and not only women in the end) the struggle against the extra burdens imposed by the dominant male role models that women were seemingly forced to put up with (including in the radical movements). Well, since that time there have been some changes in the nuclear family structure; some dramatic as with the increased role outside the home for women in education, employment and political life and some changes that glaringly reveal the same old straitjacket of women’s continuing dominant role in childcare and domestic duties. In short, in its essentials the bourgeois nuclear family structure has, more or less, survived the onslaught of the 1960’s.
Although we are wiser now in our understanding that abolishing the family by proclamation was utopian nevertheless the need to replace that structure continues today. For those who argue that even that premise is utopian (if just plain not desirable) then Professor Lawrence Stone’s little treatise (well not so little, abridged it still comes to over 400 pages. One can only wonder what the full volume of over 800 pages entailed.) on the evolution of English family life between 1500 and 1800 (with a fair amount of carry over to America) does a great deal to demonstrate that even this seemingly eternal bourgeois nuclear family structure had made dramatic changes over time. As always with older books reviewed here use the material with the understanding that, particularly in this field with the tremendous rises in women’s studies since the 1970’s, that this is a place to start not finish.
Obviously, for those who are the least bit familiar with the historic rise of capitalism, particularly England’s vanguard role in that rise the period under discussion in Professor Stone’s book, is something of a primer for the changes in English society that would drive the industrial revolution of the later part of this period. Stone thus spends some worthwhile time on the decline of the old agrarian, almost feudal, family networks based on kinship and clientage that dominated in the early period, how these arrangements were undermined by the rise of the state, the rise of cities and the capitalization of agriculture. These are therefore the predicates to creating a national market in commodities, and in their wake family relationships.
No study of England in the period that includes the English revolution of the mid-17th century can ignore the importance to changes in family life and sexual mores that the temporary victory of what we call Puritanism brought with it. In many ways the Puritans, or at least their ethos, were the vanguard of the bourgeois nuclear family as we know it today. Consecrating on the individual biological family, the partnership of husband and wife and changes in attitudes toward child rearing are all given serious consideration by Stone. And as the professor repeatedly noted, many of the social mores developed during the flow and ebb of the whole revolutionary period survived the restoration.
In support of his general themes Professor Stone, after laying out the above-mentioned causes for the decline of the old fashioned patriarchal society (and the survival of vestiges of it well into the end of this period) and the rise of the more efficient nuclear family the evolved in the wake of the English revolution, goes into very specific details about some changes in this family structure. He covers such topics as changes in mating arrangements and ritual; the rise of individual choice in marriage outside the traditional parental arrangements; increased opportunities for women outside the home; more permissiveness in child rearing; and, with the increased possibilities of survival beyond childhood due to better economic circumstances and medical knowledge, closer affectionate relationships between the generations.
Professor Stone tops off his work with some very interesting tidbits about the sexual mores of the times using two old familiar characters from this period of English history, Samuel Pepys (17th century) and Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell (18th century) as his foils. The sexual exploits of these guys should make us all blush, right? But here is the ‘skinny’ on the importance of Professor Stone’s book. The next time someone tells you the family has always been and always will be as it is. Or worst, that it is the fighting unit for social change tell them the story is a little more complicated than that. And point them to this book.
BOOK REVIEW
March Is Woman’s History Month
The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500-1800, Abridged Edition, Lawrence Stone, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1979
Abolish the family! That was a slogan that resonated among those of us of the “Generation of “68” radical and counterculture movements of the 1960’s as we rebelled, justifiably so, against the straitjacket of the bourgeois nuclear family structures that we grew up in. Or, as was additionally true in the case of women (and not only women in the end) the struggle against the extra burdens imposed by the dominant male role models that women were seemingly forced to put up with (including in the radical movements). Well, since that time there have been some changes in the nuclear family structure; some dramatic as with the increased role outside the home for women in education, employment and political life and some changes that glaringly reveal the same old straitjacket of women’s continuing dominant role in childcare and domestic duties. In short, in its essentials the bourgeois nuclear family structure has, more or less, survived the onslaught of the 1960’s.
Although we are wiser now in our understanding that abolishing the family by proclamation was utopian nevertheless the need to replace that structure continues today. For those who argue that even that premise is utopian (if just plain not desirable) then Professor Lawrence Stone’s little treatise (well not so little, abridged it still comes to over 400 pages. One can only wonder what the full volume of over 800 pages entailed.) on the evolution of English family life between 1500 and 1800 (with a fair amount of carry over to America) does a great deal to demonstrate that even this seemingly eternal bourgeois nuclear family structure had made dramatic changes over time. As always with older books reviewed here use the material with the understanding that, particularly in this field with the tremendous rises in women’s studies since the 1970’s, that this is a place to start not finish.
Obviously, for those who are the least bit familiar with the historic rise of capitalism, particularly England’s vanguard role in that rise the period under discussion in Professor Stone’s book, is something of a primer for the changes in English society that would drive the industrial revolution of the later part of this period. Stone thus spends some worthwhile time on the decline of the old agrarian, almost feudal, family networks based on kinship and clientage that dominated in the early period, how these arrangements were undermined by the rise of the state, the rise of cities and the capitalization of agriculture. These are therefore the predicates to creating a national market in commodities, and in their wake family relationships.
No study of England in the period that includes the English revolution of the mid-17th century can ignore the importance to changes in family life and sexual mores that the temporary victory of what we call Puritanism brought with it. In many ways the Puritans, or at least their ethos, were the vanguard of the bourgeois nuclear family as we know it today. Consecrating on the individual biological family, the partnership of husband and wife and changes in attitudes toward child rearing are all given serious consideration by Stone. And as the professor repeatedly noted, many of the social mores developed during the flow and ebb of the whole revolutionary period survived the restoration.
In support of his general themes Professor Stone, after laying out the above-mentioned causes for the decline of the old fashioned patriarchal society (and the survival of vestiges of it well into the end of this period) and the rise of the more efficient nuclear family the evolved in the wake of the English revolution, goes into very specific details about some changes in this family structure. He covers such topics as changes in mating arrangements and ritual; the rise of individual choice in marriage outside the traditional parental arrangements; increased opportunities for women outside the home; more permissiveness in child rearing; and, with the increased possibilities of survival beyond childhood due to better economic circumstances and medical knowledge, closer affectionate relationships between the generations.
Professor Stone tops off his work with some very interesting tidbits about the sexual mores of the times using two old familiar characters from this period of English history, Samuel Pepys (17th century) and Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell (18th century) as his foils. The sexual exploits of these guys should make us all blush, right? But here is the ‘skinny’ on the importance of Professor Stone’s book. The next time someone tells you the family has always been and always will be as it is. Or worst, that it is the fighting unit for social change tell them the story is a little more complicated than that. And point them to this book.
Monday, March 30, 2009
*Lyrics, Etc. For "Two Trains Coming"
Here is a song in different variations and with some notes that tells the tale that playwright August Wilson presents in his "Two Trains Coming" play of the Century cycle. Markin
Two Trains Running
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
So far as is known, the Dead did this only once, on 15 December 1971. It's a fragment Pigpen inserted in Lovelight.
Well there's two trains a-coming
Two trains coming
One comes around midnight
Other one comes by day
The best-known recording under this title is probably that by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, credited on the album to "Davis". But it seems that the originas go back to early Muddy Waters and probably before that.
The lyrics of the Paul Butterfield version are:
Well there's two trains running
But there's not one going my way
Yeah one runs at midnight
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
I went down to my baby's house
And I sat down on her steps
She said come on in here baby
My old man just left
Yeah just now left
My old man just left
Yes I wish I was a catfish
Swimming in the deep blue sea
I'd have all you pretty women
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Well she's long and she's tall
And she shakes just like a willow tree
You say she's no good
But she's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
Little girl's all right, all right with me
She give me loving in the morning
[etc]
The Muddy Waters version was originally recorded in 1951 under the title "Still A Fool". Thanks to Anita Cantor for alerting me to this, and pointing me to a Rob Quinn transcription of the lyrics. According to Anita, Muddy Waters also recorded it with different lyrics under the title "She's All Right"
The Muddy Waters lyrics are:
Well now there's two
There's two trains runnin'
Well ain't not one, (ho!) goin' my way
Well now one run at midnight
And the other one runnin' just 'fore day
A runnin' just 'fore day
It's runnin' just 'fore day
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough then
Oh well
Hmm, (ho) (ho)
Somebody help me (ho) with these blues
Well now, she's the one I'm lovin'
She the one I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
Oh Lord
Sure enough I do
Oh well
I been crazy
Yes I been a fool
I been crazy, oh all my life
Well I done fell in love with her
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough I done
Oh well
Long, she's long and tall
'Til she weeps like a willow tree
Well now, then say she's no good
But she's all right
She's all right with me
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
Two Trains Running
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
So far as is known, the Dead did this only once, on 15 December 1971. It's a fragment Pigpen inserted in Lovelight.
Well there's two trains a-coming
Two trains coming
One comes around midnight
Other one comes by day
The best-known recording under this title is probably that by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, credited on the album to "Davis". But it seems that the originas go back to early Muddy Waters and probably before that.
The lyrics of the Paul Butterfield version are:
Well there's two trains running
But there's not one going my way
Yeah one runs at midnight
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
I went down to my baby's house
And I sat down on her steps
She said come on in here baby
My old man just left
Yeah just now left
My old man just left
Yes I wish I was a catfish
Swimming in the deep blue sea
I'd have all you pretty women
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Well she's long and she's tall
And she shakes just like a willow tree
You say she's no good
But she's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
Little girl's all right, all right with me
She give me loving in the morning
[etc]
The Muddy Waters version was originally recorded in 1951 under the title "Still A Fool". Thanks to Anita Cantor for alerting me to this, and pointing me to a Rob Quinn transcription of the lyrics. According to Anita, Muddy Waters also recorded it with different lyrics under the title "She's All Right"
The Muddy Waters lyrics are:
Well now there's two
There's two trains runnin'
Well ain't not one, (ho!) goin' my way
Well now one run at midnight
And the other one runnin' just 'fore day
A runnin' just 'fore day
It's runnin' just 'fore day
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough then
Oh well
Hmm, (ho) (ho)
Somebody help me (ho) with these blues
Well now, she's the one I'm lovin'
She the one I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
Oh Lord
Sure enough I do
Oh well
I been crazy
Yes I been a fool
I been crazy, oh all my life
Well I done fell in love with her
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough I done
Oh well
Long, she's long and tall
'Til she weeps like a willow tree
Well now, then say she's no good
But she's all right
She's all right with me
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
*The Struggle Continues- Playwright August Wilson's "Two Trains Coming"
Click On Title To Link To August Wilson Homepage.
Play Review
Two Trains Running (1969), August Wilson, Theater Communications Group, New York, 2007
By the time that this review appears I will have already reviewed five of the ten plays in August Wilson’s Century cycle. On the first five I believe that I ran out of fulsome praise for his work and particularly for his tightly woven story and dialogue. Rather than keep following that path for the next five plays I would prefer to concentrate on some of the dialogue that makes Brother Wilson’s work so compelling. For those who want to peek at my general observations you can look at my review of “Gem Of The Ocean” (the first play chronologically in the cycle).
In all previously reviewed plays I noticed some piece of dialogue that seemed to me to sum up the essence of the play. Sometimes that is done by the lead character as was the case with Troy Maxton in “Fences” when he (correctly) stated that there should have been “no too early” in regard to the possibilities of black achievement and prospects in America. Other times it is by a secondary character in the form of some handed down black folk wisdom to be followed in order to survive in racially-hardened America. In “Two Trains Running” this task falls to Holloway when he cuts through all the basic white assumptions about blacks being lazy. His retort: blacks are the most hard working people in the world. They worked for free for over three hundred years. And, to add a little dry humor to the situation, he stated that they didn’t take a lunch break.
That says more in a couple of sentences about a central aspect of black experience in America than many manifestos, treatises or sociological/psychological studies. That Wilson can weave that home truth into a play of less than one hundred pages and drive the plot line of a story that deals with the contradiction between black aspirations as a result of the promise of the militant civil rights movement down South in the early 1960’s and the reality of black segregation when the struggle headed North later to get hit, and get hit hard, with the ugly face of white racism in housing, jobs and education. That, my friends, is still something to consider in the “post-racial” Obamiad. We shall see.
Here is a song that tells the tale that Wilson presents. Markin
Two Trains Running
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
So far as is known, the Dead did this only once, on 15 December 1971. It's a fragment Pigpen inserted in Lovelight.
Well there's two trains a-coming
Two trains coming
One comes around midnight
Other one comes by day
The best-known recording under this title is probably that by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, credited on the album to "Davis". But it seems that the originas go back to early Muddy Waters and probably before that.
The lyrics of the Paul Butterfield version are:
Well there's two trains running
But there's not one going my way
Yeah one runs at midnight
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
I went down to my baby's house
And I sat down on her steps
She said come on in here baby
My old man just left
Yeah just now left
My old man just left
Yes I wish I was a catfish
Swimming in the deep blue sea
I'd have all you pretty women
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Well she's long and she's tall
And she shakes just like a willow tree
You say she's no good
But she's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
Little girl's all right, all right with me
She give me loving in the morning
[etc]
The Muddy Waters version was originally recorded in 1951 under the title "Still A Fool". Thanks to Anita Cantor for alerting me to this, and pointing me to a Rob Quinn transcription of the lyrics. According to Anita, Muddy Waters also recorded it with different lyrics under the title "She's All Right"
The Muddy Waters lyrics are:
Well now there's two
There's two trains runnin'
Well ain't not one, (ho!) goin' my way
Well now one run at midnight
And the other one runnin' just 'fore day
A runnin' just 'fore day
It's runnin' just 'fore day
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough then
Oh well
Hmm, (ho) (ho)
Somebody help me (ho) with these blues
Well now, she's the one I'm lovin'
She the one I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
Oh Lord
Sure enough I do
Oh well
I been crazy
Yes I been a fool
I been crazy, oh all my life
Well I done fell in love with her
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough I done
Oh well
Long, she's long and tall
'Til she weeps like a willow tree
Well now, then say she's no good
But she's all right
She's all right with me
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
Play Review
Two Trains Running (1969), August Wilson, Theater Communications Group, New York, 2007
By the time that this review appears I will have already reviewed five of the ten plays in August Wilson’s Century cycle. On the first five I believe that I ran out of fulsome praise for his work and particularly for his tightly woven story and dialogue. Rather than keep following that path for the next five plays I would prefer to concentrate on some of the dialogue that makes Brother Wilson’s work so compelling. For those who want to peek at my general observations you can look at my review of “Gem Of The Ocean” (the first play chronologically in the cycle).
In all previously reviewed plays I noticed some piece of dialogue that seemed to me to sum up the essence of the play. Sometimes that is done by the lead character as was the case with Troy Maxton in “Fences” when he (correctly) stated that there should have been “no too early” in regard to the possibilities of black achievement and prospects in America. Other times it is by a secondary character in the form of some handed down black folk wisdom to be followed in order to survive in racially-hardened America. In “Two Trains Running” this task falls to Holloway when he cuts through all the basic white assumptions about blacks being lazy. His retort: blacks are the most hard working people in the world. They worked for free for over three hundred years. And, to add a little dry humor to the situation, he stated that they didn’t take a lunch break.
That says more in a couple of sentences about a central aspect of black experience in America than many manifestos, treatises or sociological/psychological studies. That Wilson can weave that home truth into a play of less than one hundred pages and drive the plot line of a story that deals with the contradiction between black aspirations as a result of the promise of the militant civil rights movement down South in the early 1960’s and the reality of black segregation when the struggle headed North later to get hit, and get hit hard, with the ugly face of white racism in housing, jobs and education. That, my friends, is still something to consider in the “post-racial” Obamiad. We shall see.
Here is a song that tells the tale that Wilson presents. Markin
Two Trains Running
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
So far as is known, the Dead did this only once, on 15 December 1971. It's a fragment Pigpen inserted in Lovelight.
Well there's two trains a-coming
Two trains coming
One comes around midnight
Other one comes by day
The best-known recording under this title is probably that by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, credited on the album to "Davis". But it seems that the originas go back to early Muddy Waters and probably before that.
The lyrics of the Paul Butterfield version are:
Well there's two trains running
But there's not one going my way
Yeah one runs at midnight
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
Other's just for day
I went down to my baby's house
And I sat down on her steps
She said come on in here baby
My old man just left
Yeah just now left
My old man just left
Yes I wish I was a catfish
Swimming in the deep blue sea
I'd have all you pretty women
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Fishing after me
Well she's long and she's tall
And she shakes just like a willow tree
You say she's no good
But she's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
She's all right with me
Little girl's all right, all right with me
She give me loving in the morning
[etc]
The Muddy Waters version was originally recorded in 1951 under the title "Still A Fool". Thanks to Anita Cantor for alerting me to this, and pointing me to a Rob Quinn transcription of the lyrics. According to Anita, Muddy Waters also recorded it with different lyrics under the title "She's All Right"
The Muddy Waters lyrics are:
Well now there's two
There's two trains runnin'
Well ain't not one, (ho!) goin' my way
Well now one run at midnight
And the other one runnin' just 'fore day
A runnin' just 'fore day
It's runnin' just 'fore day
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough then
Oh well
Hmm, (ho) (ho)
Somebody help me (ho) with these blues
Well now, she's the one I'm lovin'
She the one I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
I do hate to lose
Oh Lord
Sure enough I do
Oh well
I been crazy
Yes I been a fool
I been crazy, oh all my life
Well I done fell in love with her
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
With another man's wife
Oh Lord
Sure 'nough I done
Oh well
Long, she's long and tall
'Til she weeps like a willow tree
Well now, then say she's no good
But she's all right
She's all right with me
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
She's all right
Sunday, March 29, 2009
*From The Archives of Woman's History- "The Declaration Of Sentiments" Of The Seneca Falls Woman's Righst Convention Of 1848
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
Guest Commentary
Most of the documentary material presented on this "American Left History" site tends to be socialist or communist-oriented from a later period of history. However sometimes the struggle around a democratic question, like the fight for woman's suffrage (and black suffrage, as well), is so compelling that it deserves inclusion here to let us remember how close a thing some fights have been.
March Is Woman's History Month
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, 19-20 July 1848
As published in the Selected Papers, Volume 1
©1997 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
On the morning of the 19th, the Convention assembled at 11 o'clock. . . . The Declaration of Sentiments, offered for the acceptance of the Convention, was then read by E. C. Stanton. A proposition was made to have it re-read by paragraph, and after much consideration, some changes were suggested and adopted. The propriety of obtaining the signatures of men to the Declaration was discussed in an animated manner: a vote in favor was given; but concluding that the final decision would be the legitimate business of the next day, it was referred.
[In the afternoon] The reading of the Declaration was called for, an addition having been inserted since the morning session. A vote taken upon the amendment was carried, and papers circulated to obtain signatures. The following resolutions were then read:
Whereas, the great precept of nature is conceded to be, "that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness," Blackstone, in his Commentaries, remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other.1 It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their validity, and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original; Therefore,
Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity; for this is "superior in obligation to any other.
Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.
Resolved, That woman is man's equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.
Resolved, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they -live, that they may no longer publish their degradation, by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.
Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak, and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.
Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior, that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same tranegressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.
Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in the feats of the circus.
Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.2
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.3
Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities.
Resolved, therefore, That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be regarded as self-evident falsehood, and at war with the interests of mankind.
Thursday Morning.
The Convention assembled at the hour appointed, James Mott, of Philadelphia, in the Chair. The minutes of the previous day having been read, E. C. Stanton again read the Declaration of Sentiments, which was freely discussed . . . and was unanimously adopted, as follows:
Declaration of Sentiments.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.4
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.5
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.6
He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation,—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf.We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.
At the appointed hour the meeting convened. The minutes having been read, the resolutions of the day before were read and taken up separately. Some, from their self-evident truth, elicited but little remark; others, after some criticism, much debate, and some slight alterations, were finally passed by a large majority.7
[At an evening session] Lucretia Mott offered and spoke to the following resolution:
Resolved, That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.
The Resolution was adopted.
Report of the Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848 (Rochester, 1848).
Prepared for the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997). ©Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Notes:
1 This entire paragraph and the sense of the one following are taken from the section, "Of the Nature of Laws in General," in the introductory book of William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books (New York, 1841), 1:27-28. The quotation marks are in Blackstone.
2 From a resolution by Angelina Grimke adopted at the female antislavery convention of 1837. (Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in New York City, May 9-12, 1837, ed. Dorothy Sterling [New York, 1987], 13.)
3 New York's constitution of 1846, like that of many states, defined eligible voters as "males." For white men it guaranteed universal suffrage. Black men could vote only if they owned sufficient property. Prior to 1848, claims that women shared an equal right to the franchise arose not only in debates about their property rights but also in connection with efforts to amend the constitution and grant equal political rights to African-American men. The restriction on black voting remained in place until after the Civil War. (New York Constitution of 1846, article II, section 1; Judith Wellman, "Women's Rights, Republicanism, and Revolutionary Rhetoric in Antebellum New York State," New York History 69 [July 1988]: 353-84.)
4 With this passage and the list of legal wrongs that follows, the authors join a debate about reforming American law to remove remnants of English common law. They point to the infamous passage in Blackstone's Commentaries about the effect of marriage on the woman: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing." From a considerable literature about married women's rights, legal reform, and the common law, the authors appear to have known the work of Elisha Powell Hurlbut especially well. Hurlbut (1807-?) was born and practiced law in Herkimer County, New York, until he moved to New York City in 1835. His Essays on Human Rights, and Their Political Guaranties, published in 1845, is an extreme statement of inalienable individual rights, informed by phrenology and legal history and laced with sarcasm. Reformers kept the book in print. The Scottish phrenologist George Combe added preface and notes for an edition published in Edinburgh in 1847, and the American firm of Fowlers and Wells reprinted Combe's edition between 1848 and 1853. Hurlbut was elected a judge of New York's Supreme Court at the same time as Daniel Cady in 1847, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met him in Albany in the 1840s. Like other legal reformers, Hurlbut rejected the English common law as a feudal artifact unsuited to modern America, but his criticism included a scathing portrait of male domination that is echoed in the Declaration of Sentiments. The common law, he wrote, was "the law of the male sex gathering unto themselves dominion and power at the sacrifice of the female." Its influence rendered the laws "touching the Rights of Woman, . . . at variance with the laws of the Creator; and the question is, Which shall stand?" In his chapter on "The Rights of Woman," he described woman's civil death; "in the eye of the law" the woman who marries "exists not at all," she is placed in a "legal tomb." Her property is conferred upon her husband because "every body knows that the dead cannot keep their property—and the wife is legally dead." The authors of the Declaration followed Hurlbut in all their examples. Of woman's criminal impunity, he asked, "Hash not woman a right to be ever regarded as a free moral agent?" He condemned any coercion of a wife "as an inferior and dependent," no matter how mild, and he singled out the male-defined laws of divorce and custody as proof that women needed a voice in legislation. (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:355; Elisha P. Hurlbut, Essays on Human Rights, and Their Political Guaranties [New York, 1848], 120-21, 148, 161, 163, 167; Henry H. Hurlbut, The Hurlbut Genealogy, or Record of the Descendants of Thomas Hurlbut, of Saybrook and Wetherefield, Conn. [Albany, 1888], 232, 350-51; E. C. Stanton to Editor, Boston Index, 16 October 1876, in P. G. Holland and A. D. Gordon, eds., Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, microfilm edition, reel 18, frames 1055-56.)
5 This statement omits New York's new Married Women's Property Act of 1848.
6 Oberlin College was the exception; it admitted women at its founding and granted them bachelor degrees in 1841.
7 Of this discussion and its outcome, E. W. Capron reported, the resolutions "were finally adopted, nearly as they were originally drawn up" by the women meeting alone on Wednesday morning; not even the lawyers who opposed "the equal rights of women, and who were present," dissented. In the History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that only the resolution about the elective franchise "was not unanimously adopted." "Those who took part in the debate," she recalled, "feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous." She and Frederick Douglass, who saw that suffrage "was the right by which all others could be secured," carried the resolution "by a small majority." (Auburn National Reformer, 3 August 1848; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 1:73.)
All Contents © Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Guest Commentary
Most of the documentary material presented on this "American Left History" site tends to be socialist or communist-oriented from a later period of history. However sometimes the struggle around a democratic question, like the fight for woman's suffrage (and black suffrage, as well), is so compelling that it deserves inclusion here to let us remember how close a thing some fights have been.
March Is Woman's History Month
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, 19-20 July 1848
As published in the Selected Papers, Volume 1
©1997 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
On the morning of the 19th, the Convention assembled at 11 o'clock. . . . The Declaration of Sentiments, offered for the acceptance of the Convention, was then read by E. C. Stanton. A proposition was made to have it re-read by paragraph, and after much consideration, some changes were suggested and adopted. The propriety of obtaining the signatures of men to the Declaration was discussed in an animated manner: a vote in favor was given; but concluding that the final decision would be the legitimate business of the next day, it was referred.
[In the afternoon] The reading of the Declaration was called for, an addition having been inserted since the morning session. A vote taken upon the amendment was carried, and papers circulated to obtain signatures. The following resolutions were then read:
Whereas, the great precept of nature is conceded to be, "that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness," Blackstone, in his Commentaries, remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other.1 It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their validity, and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original; Therefore,
Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity; for this is "superior in obligation to any other.
Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.
Resolved, That woman is man's equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.
Resolved, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they -live, that they may no longer publish their degradation, by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.
Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak, and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.
Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior, that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same tranegressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.
Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in the feats of the circus.
Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.2
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.3
Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities.
Resolved, therefore, That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be regarded as self-evident falsehood, and at war with the interests of mankind.
Thursday Morning.
The Convention assembled at the hour appointed, James Mott, of Philadelphia, in the Chair. The minutes of the previous day having been read, E. C. Stanton again read the Declaration of Sentiments, which was freely discussed . . . and was unanimously adopted, as follows:
Declaration of Sentiments.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.4
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.5
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.6
He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation,—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf.We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.
At the appointed hour the meeting convened. The minutes having been read, the resolutions of the day before were read and taken up separately. Some, from their self-evident truth, elicited but little remark; others, after some criticism, much debate, and some slight alterations, were finally passed by a large majority.7
[At an evening session] Lucretia Mott offered and spoke to the following resolution:
Resolved, That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.
The Resolution was adopted.
Report of the Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848 (Rochester, 1848).
Prepared for the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997). ©Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Notes:
1 This entire paragraph and the sense of the one following are taken from the section, "Of the Nature of Laws in General," in the introductory book of William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books (New York, 1841), 1:27-28. The quotation marks are in Blackstone.
2 From a resolution by Angelina Grimke adopted at the female antislavery convention of 1837. (Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in New York City, May 9-12, 1837, ed. Dorothy Sterling [New York, 1987], 13.)
3 New York's constitution of 1846, like that of many states, defined eligible voters as "males." For white men it guaranteed universal suffrage. Black men could vote only if they owned sufficient property. Prior to 1848, claims that women shared an equal right to the franchise arose not only in debates about their property rights but also in connection with efforts to amend the constitution and grant equal political rights to African-American men. The restriction on black voting remained in place until after the Civil War. (New York Constitution of 1846, article II, section 1; Judith Wellman, "Women's Rights, Republicanism, and Revolutionary Rhetoric in Antebellum New York State," New York History 69 [July 1988]: 353-84.)
4 With this passage and the list of legal wrongs that follows, the authors join a debate about reforming American law to remove remnants of English common law. They point to the infamous passage in Blackstone's Commentaries about the effect of marriage on the woman: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing." From a considerable literature about married women's rights, legal reform, and the common law, the authors appear to have known the work of Elisha Powell Hurlbut especially well. Hurlbut (1807-?) was born and practiced law in Herkimer County, New York, until he moved to New York City in 1835. His Essays on Human Rights, and Their Political Guaranties, published in 1845, is an extreme statement of inalienable individual rights, informed by phrenology and legal history and laced with sarcasm. Reformers kept the book in print. The Scottish phrenologist George Combe added preface and notes for an edition published in Edinburgh in 1847, and the American firm of Fowlers and Wells reprinted Combe's edition between 1848 and 1853. Hurlbut was elected a judge of New York's Supreme Court at the same time as Daniel Cady in 1847, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met him in Albany in the 1840s. Like other legal reformers, Hurlbut rejected the English common law as a feudal artifact unsuited to modern America, but his criticism included a scathing portrait of male domination that is echoed in the Declaration of Sentiments. The common law, he wrote, was "the law of the male sex gathering unto themselves dominion and power at the sacrifice of the female." Its influence rendered the laws "touching the Rights of Woman, . . . at variance with the laws of the Creator; and the question is, Which shall stand?" In his chapter on "The Rights of Woman," he described woman's civil death; "in the eye of the law" the woman who marries "exists not at all," she is placed in a "legal tomb." Her property is conferred upon her husband because "every body knows that the dead cannot keep their property—and the wife is legally dead." The authors of the Declaration followed Hurlbut in all their examples. Of woman's criminal impunity, he asked, "Hash not woman a right to be ever regarded as a free moral agent?" He condemned any coercion of a wife "as an inferior and dependent," no matter how mild, and he singled out the male-defined laws of divorce and custody as proof that women needed a voice in legislation. (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:355; Elisha P. Hurlbut, Essays on Human Rights, and Their Political Guaranties [New York, 1848], 120-21, 148, 161, 163, 167; Henry H. Hurlbut, The Hurlbut Genealogy, or Record of the Descendants of Thomas Hurlbut, of Saybrook and Wetherefield, Conn. [Albany, 1888], 232, 350-51; E. C. Stanton to Editor, Boston Index, 16 October 1876, in P. G. Holland and A. D. Gordon, eds., Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, microfilm edition, reel 18, frames 1055-56.)
5 This statement omits New York's new Married Women's Property Act of 1848.
6 Oberlin College was the exception; it admitted women at its founding and granted them bachelor degrees in 1841.
7 Of this discussion and its outcome, E. W. Capron reported, the resolutions "were finally adopted, nearly as they were originally drawn up" by the women meeting alone on Wednesday morning; not even the lawyers who opposed "the equal rights of women, and who were present," dissented. In the History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that only the resolution about the elective franchise "was not unanimously adopted." "Those who took part in the debate," she recalled, "feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous." She and Frederick Douglass, who saw that suffrage "was the right by which all others could be secured," carried the resolution "by a small majority." (Auburn National Reformer, 3 August 1848; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 1:73.)
All Contents © Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Friday, March 27, 2009
*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War
Click on the headline to link to Part Two Of the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Workers Vanguard No. 933
27 March 2009
Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War
Finish the Civil War!
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Part One)
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by Jacob Zorn of the Spartacist League at a February 28 New York City forum.
This forum is being held in celebration of Black History Month. This is the first time that there is a black president of the United States, which in its own way is historic, especially given the history of black oppression in this country. American imperialism is bogged down in two increasingly unpopular wars and occupations abroad and an economic crisis that deepens each day. Thus, for the bourgeoisie, the fact that there is now a black president, not to mention a president who can put together an English sentence, is used to try to give a facelift to this brutal system, in order to refurbish its very threadbare “democratic” credentials—even as the capitalists plan to jack up brutal exploitation and oppression here and abroad.
Voting for the Democratic Party is counterposed to the interests of the working class and oppressed. During the elections, the Spartacist League called to break with the Democrats and for a class-struggle workers party. We did not vote for the Democrats. Nor do we think that a black president will serve to eliminate racial oppression here in the United States. Black oppression is deeply rooted in the history of the development of capitalism here, and only socialist revolution, which places the wealth of society in the hands of the multiracial working class, can liberate black people and all of the oppressed. This is why we call to finish the Civil War and for black liberation through socialist revolution.
In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico. When the United States finally left, it was only after forcing Mexico to give up about half of its national territory, including all or most of modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada, as well as Texas. In this forum, I want to look at how the oppression of black people here in the United States is rooted in the history of the United States, how the U.S. invasion of Mexico was a key part of this history, and how workers struggles in the United States and Mexico are inextricably linked.
The war was fought by the Southern slavocracy in order to further the expansion of the slave system into new land, as a way of solidifying the slave system’s domination of this country. The United States in the early 19th century was integrated into the developing world capitalist system, and the North had begun to develop into a very dynamic capitalist power. But this growth was hampered by the slave system in the South, which dominated the U.S. politically and economically. This coexistence of slavery and capitalism could not continue indefinitely. By the middle of the 19th century, what was called the “irrepressible conflict” came ever closer to breaking out into the open. The U.S. invasion of Mexico was an important signpost in the lead-up to the Civil War. As Marx put it in an article he wrote in 1861, during the Civil War:
“The present struggle between the South and the North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”
—“The Civil War in the United States” (1861)
Here in the United States, the invasion of Mexico is often either ignored or justified as inevitable; this was certainly my experience growing up in Arizona, which is part of the land taken from Mexico. In Mexico the war is much better known. No town or village is complete without its memorial or street dedicated to the “Boy Heroes” who fought against the U.S. There, the invasion is used to bolster Mexican nationalism, with its premise that the country needs to stand as one, regardless of class differences, to maintain eternal vigilance against the monolithic aggressor across the Río Bravo. As Marxists here in the “belly of the beast,” it is necessary to oppose any instance of U.S. aggression toward Latin America and to stand for the class solidarity of the working class throughout the Americas—to fight for workers revolutions throughout the continent, from Alaska to Argentina. Part of this is understanding the 1846 invasion of Mexico and why it happened.
At the same time, it is important to understand the class forces that contributed to the invasion. Yes, on the part of the United States the war was based on a desire to take over Mexican land, with a good deal of anti-Mexican, anti-indigenous and anti-Catholic bigotry thrown in. But more fundamentally, the invasion of Mexico was developed out of the historic division of the United States between capitalist and slave systems. This very division led, less than 20 years later, to America’s second revolution, the Civil War, which smashed the Southern slave system and paved the way for the unfettered development of capitalism in the United States.
For us, as for Marx and Engels, not to mention Frederick Douglass and the millions of slaves in the South, the Civil War was a just war on the side of the North. This is ABC. It’s embarrassing that one has to assert this, but it still seems to be far beyond the grasp of many even so-called Marxists, like for example the Progressive Labor Party. They recently debated for several months about the Civil War in the pages of Challenge—and seemed never to have really reached a conclusion (see “PL vs. Karl Marx (and Abraham Lincoln),” WV No. 919, 29 August 2008). For us, the problem is that the task of black liberation was not completed, and black oppression remains integral to American capitalism.
In order to understand this, it’s necessary to understand the role of slavery in the early United States. The basic task of a bourgeois revolution is to create a unified bourgeois nation: in this sense, the first American Revolution was incomplete. During the War of Independence against Britain, the “founding fathers,” both in the North and in the South, agreed that the 13 colonies would be better off outside the control of the British Empire. But they represented different propertied classes: the budding Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern slaveholding landowners. In 1776, both the Northern merchant capitalists and the Southern planter aristocracy supported independence from the British imperial system, and for several decades it was beneficial for both to coexist in the same economy and the same country.
The new republic was not an equal partnership—the Southern slavocracy was in control. Without understanding this, the entire first half of American history doesn’t make a lot of sense. Increasing cotton production in the 19th century clinched a common economic interest between the plantation owners of the South and the Northern bankers and merchants who profited from the export of cotton to Britain and its manufacture into goods. The “slave power” of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was codified a decade later in the U.S. Constitution, which was written in 1787.
When he was running for president, Barack Obama claimed “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution.” This is a lie: while the Constitution never actually uses the word “slave,” it gave the slave South extra power, despite the fact that its population grew at a much slower rate than the free North. The “three-fifths clause” not only declared a slave three-fifths of a person, but also gave slaveowners extra power within the electoral system. And then there is the Senate, which gives each state the same representation regardless of its population. And when the Constitution was written, the Senate was not elected. Southerners held the presidency more often than not for most of the history of the early United States. This made it all but impossible to legally abolish slavery. Thus both in economic terms and in political terms, human slavery was the cornerstone of the early American republic.
Slavery eventually died out in the North, where the last state to abolish slavery was New Jersey in 1846. By the mid 19th century, Northern capitalism had developed to such a point that it was increasingly fettered by the Southern slavocracy. The envelope for this tension was often expansionism. From the original 13 colonies, the United States had already grown extensively, especially with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Both the slave South and the capitalist North shared expansionist aims. This was later called “Manifest Destiny.” But this expansion meant different things for each section. Northern capitalists and farmers wanted to expand to the west. This included much of what was then called Oregon—which is not only the current state of Oregon but also much of western Canada, which was claimed by Britain. They wanted to expand a market for manufactured goods, obtain raw materials, develop a hinterland for the North, and expand toward Asian markets through the Pacific Rim.
The Southern slaveowners wanted to expand the slave system and deepen its power over the country in order to guarantee that slavery would continue to exist. Immigration and population growth in the North threatened to offset the three-fifths clause, and new free states would mean less power for the slave South in Congress. So politicians from both sides concocted a series of so-called “compromises” to maintain the North/South balance. One example is the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which divided the Louisiana Territory into slave and free zones.
No sooner had one “compromise” been effected than the next crisis would arise. In 1861, after the Civil War broke out, Marx explained this:
“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North.”
—“The American Question in England” (1861)
The Democratic Party at the time was, in the South, the main party of the slaveholders. In the North, it comprised both merchant capitalists who traded with the South and the urban poor. In both regions, it was thoroughly racist.
Plantation-based cotton agriculture is very hard on the soil, especially as it was practiced in the South. Therefore the slavocracy had a constant demand for new land. Many Southerners wanted to create what they called an “empire for slavery,” which would include much of Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to make sure that there would always be plantation slavery in the United States. British military power was an obstacle to the North’s wish to expand to the northwest in Oregon, but Mexico appeared to be a scintillating morsel to the slave South.
Mexico After Independence
Both the U.S. and Mexico bore the marks of their colonizing powers. British North America, including later the United States, was largely based on the mercantile model of Britain, which was by the mid 18th century one of the most dynamic European economies and the first industrial capitalist country. Spain by this time was one of the most backward and bankrupt European powers; it had already squandered the wealth that it had taken from its American colonies. Rather than develop the productive forces of New Spain, the Spanish crown focused on getting as much gold and silver from its colony as it could and sending this wealth back to the Iberian Peninsula. Between 1808 and 1821, Spain was beset by various problems in Europe, and it lost control of its empire. Almost all of its American colonies became independent in this period, the exceptions being Cuba and Puerto Rico, which remained Spanish colonies until the United States took them in the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s.
I want to touch on African slavery in Mexico for a moment. The Spanish were in fact the first European power in the Americas to use African slaves. And the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, such as Santo Domingo, were based on slavery. The first black slaves arrived in Mexico with Hernán Cortés, and slaves were important in early colonial Mexico—something that is often ignored by contemporary Mexican nationalists. But the main source of labor in Mexico was indigenous peasants, not African slaves, and by the 19th century slavery had died out in Mexico. So at its independence, Mexico abolished slavery, but this was more a symbolic than a real act—except, as we’ll see, in Texas.
Shortly after its independence in 1821, Mexico was crippled by the legacy of Spanish colonialism, which had left the country underdeveloped and economically weak and heavily indebted. Mexico was very unstable; it had no real central government. Its extreme southern territories, including modern-day Guatemala, and its far northern territories were not under control of Mexico City. Between independence in 1821 and 1861, Mexico had 56 presidents, suffered several coups, and faced invasions by Spain in 1829 and France in 1838 in addition to the U.S. invasion in 1846. Mexico, in short, was not a modern nation-state. Local caciques opposed central control and political power alternated between Federalists who favored a decentralized government and conservative Centralists who wanted to place power in the hands of the government in Mexico City. One of the central figures in this period was the adventurer General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who himself ruled Mexico eleven times.
The U.S. had long had its eyes on Latin America. One example of this was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which told European countries to keep their hands off the Western Hemisphere. Mexico—or as the Spanish colonialists called it, New Spain—was particularly enticing for the United States. At the same time, the United States was pulling northern Mexico into its economy, and central Mexico was very distant. Just to give an example, one of the largest settlements in far northern Mexico was Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it took 60 days to get to Santa Fe from Missouri. But to get to Santa Fe from Mexico City it took some six months! As the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz allegedly put it almost a century later, Mexico was so far from God and so close to the United States.
Texas
I want to talk a bit about Texas, because it’s quite important. By the 19th century, Spain had already lost its territories in Florida and Louisiana. In 1819, the U.S. had signed a treaty with Spain, the Adams-Onís Treaty that established the boundary between the U.S. and Spanish territory at the Sabine River, and the U.S. renounced “forever” any claim to Texas—but Spain was still worried that its sparsely populated northern territory was vulnerable. So to populate the northern part of its territory, the Spanish government encouraged English-speaking North Americans, so-called Anglos, who were mainly citizens of the United States, to settle in Texas. The newly independent Mexican government continued the same policy. These immigrants were required to formally convert to Catholicism, which was the only legal religion in Mexico at the time, and the idea was that they would become Mexicans. But many of the immigrants had very little intention of actually doing so. Instead, they were mainly Southerners who wanted to extend slavery as far as possible into Mexican territory.
The first large-scale Anglo settlement in Texas was founded by Moses Austin and his son Stephen. By 1825, it had 1,800 inhabitants; 443 of them were slaves. Soon, Anglo immigrants and slaves outnumbered Mexicans in Texas ten-to-one, although it’s important to keep in mind that Native Americans outnumbered both. The links between far northern and central Mexico diminished even more as trade with the increasingly dynamic United States grew, and the Mexican government was too weak to force the Americans in Texas to do much of anything.
Slavery was a very special issue in this relationship. It was illegal in Mexico but was central to the economy in Texas, just as it was in the economy in the Southern United States. The Mexican government saw limiting slavery as a way to rein in these settlers, and it repeatedly reasserted its opposition to slavery, while not doing much to actually limit its practice in Texas. In 1829, the Mexican president Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery but allowed Texas to maintain slavery as long as no more slaves were admitted. The Texans got around even this by forcing their slaves to sign so-called “contracts” with their masters that virtually guaranteed their perpetual servitude.
The Texas “Revolution”: Pro-Slavery Coup d’Etat
There’s a lot of mythology about what’s called the “Texas Revolution” of 1835-36, in which Texas broke away from Mexico. But at bottom this was a slaveholders’ rebellion, fought to guarantee the existence of human slavery. Sometimes it is depicted as a reaction to a growing Mexican central government—this is what I was told when I visited the Alamo several years ago. I haven’t forgotten. But as veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser put it in an unpublished study of the development of black oppression in the United States, “The colonists didn’t care what government sat in Mexico City as long as slavery was tolerated. What they feared was that a stronger central government would most assuredly move against their practice of slavery.” Stephen Austin, a founder of Texas, himself argued: “Texas must be a slave country.” And in fact, as a state, Texas would become fervently pro-slavery and joined the Confederacy in the Civil War. The University of Texas has something called the “Handbook of Texas Online” and it describes:
“The Texas Revolution assured slaveholders of the future of their institution. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836) provided that slaves would remain the property of their owners, that the Texas Congress could not prohibit the immigration of slaveholders bringing their property, and that slaves could be imported from the United States (although not from Africa). Given those protections, slavery expanded rapidly during the period of the republic.”
Many slaves in Texas saw the Mexican army during the so-called “revolution” as an army of liberation. Since Mexico had abolished slavery, slaves in independent Texas escaped to the south. As one former slave put it: “All we had to do was walk, but walk south and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free.” At least 4,000 slaves escaped to Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s.
The Texans of course defeated General Santa Anna in 1836 and won de facto independence, although it’s a funny type of independence, because as soon as they became independent many Texans wanted to join the United States. The slavocracy wanted to annex Texas, but to do so threatened to undo the balance between the North and South and also to provoke war with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas’s independence.
“Manifest Destiny”
Now as I mentioned earlier, there was a shared expansionism in both the North and the South. This was called Manifest Destiny, the idea that God had a unique plan for white, English-speaking, Protestant North Americans to conquer and “civilize” all of America. By the 1840s, the slavocracy and the Northern capitalists were increasingly at odds over the nature of this destiny, of this expansionism. To the North, it was tied to the growth of capitalism, the expansion of free labor and markets and more influence in Congress. Oregon, as I said, was very important. To the South, expansionism meant increasing the reach of slavery and bolstering its power in government. The more the country expanded, the greater the tensions between slavery and capitalism became.
At the time, Texas remained a lightning rod. Many Southerners were anxious that Britain would try to make Texas a client state and abolish slavery there. James Polk, a Southern Democrat, was elected president in 1844 as a militant advocate of Manifest Destiny. Polk, like many American presidents, was a representative of the slavocracy: he owned a 920-acre plantation and 34 slaves—he bought 19 of them while he was president of the United States. According to historian Joseph Wheelan, he was “an unrepentant slaveholder” who “as a congressman had consistently sided with Southern interests in blocking attempts to interfere with slavery” (Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 [2007]). In his presidential campaign, Polk promised to expand into Oregon and to annex Texas. In 1845, under this pressure, lame-duck president John Tyler—himself a slaveholder from Virginia—announced the annexation of Texas.
This was a provocation against both Mexico and the Northern free states and would lead to a war with each. The pretext for invading Mexico was the border between Mexico and Texas. The border between Texas and the rest of Mexico had always been the Río Nueces, but after annexing Texas, the United States claimed that the border was actually the Río Bravo del Norte (called the Rio Grande in the United States), which is some 160 miles to the south. This not only meant making Texas bigger, but also it expanded the U.S. claim to much of New Mexico as well, which concretely meant the possibility of creating several more slave states. In his Personal Memoirs, former president Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in Mexico, argued: “The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition.”
The Invasion
The U.S. provoked a war with Mexico by stationing troops in this disputed area and then, when an American soldier was killed, claiming that, in Polk’s words, “American blood has been shed on American soil.” This was the first in a list of lies that have been used by the U.S. to justify invasions of different countries—the USS Maine (Cuba), the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam) and most recently supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (Iraq).
In the war, the U.S. had a three-pronged strategy. Stephen Watts Kearny invaded westward, into New Mexico and California (the latter with John C. Frémont). Zachary Taylor invaded northern Mexico, occupying Monterrey, and Winfield Scott invaded Mexico City from the Caribbean port city of Veracruz. Polk wanted a short war; he feared that if the war lasted too long, Taylor and Scott, who were Whigs, would become too popular. However, the war lasted longer than he expected, since Mexico did not surrender until forced to. The Marine Corps’ hymn still celebrates this invasion, asserting the U.S power in the “Halls of Montezuma,” that is to say, in Mexico City.
The war served as a testing ground for future military leaders in the Civil War and was the first war in which West Point graduates played a key role. From Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the Confederate side to George McClellan and U.S. Grant on the Union side, most of the commanding officers in the Civil War had fought in the invasion of Mexico.
Many of these officers had very different takes on the war. In the case of Grant, he later called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” To use one example, there’s the northern city of Monterrey, which was occupied for almost two years. Historian Miguel Ángel González Quiroga describes how “the city was subjected to a furious onslaught unlike any it has witnessed before or since. The fighting left devastation and ruin that converted the town, in the words of one eyewitness, into a vast cemetery.”
Even though Mexico had a larger army, the U.S. won the war. This was a reflection not of Manifest Destiny but of the superior organization and wealth of the United States. Incidentally, Karl Marx thought that the United States won despite its leadership. He called General Scott “a common, petty, untalented, carping, envious cur and humbug.” The Mexican army was officer heavy; at one point, Santa Anna commanded an army of 24,000 officers and only 20,000 enlisted men. According to historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, the “conditions of the [Mexican] army were disastrous, it was tired, poorly fed and unarmed, it was large but untrained and confronted an army that was small, but disciplined, equipped, fed and regularly paid” (De la Rebelión de Texas a la Guerra del 47 [1994]). One thing I’ll mention about the U.S. side, it should be noted that many Catholic Irish and German immigrants in the U.S. Army resented the Protestant leadership, and there were even Irish-American soldiers who defected to Mexico, forming the San Patricio Battalion. Remember that during the 19th century, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry was rife in the U.S.
Furthermore, the Mexican government was divided; it was unstable and unable to mobilize the resources necessary to fend off the United States. Mexican soldiers—largely indigenous and mestizo peasants—had little incentive to fight for a largely white landlord class of hacendados. During the war, there were numerous changes of government in Mexico itself and there were rebellions, for example, in southern Mexico. As many as 200,000 people died or were dislocated in the so-called Caste War of Yucatán by 1848. The Mexican army was used to attacking other Mexicans, not fighting foreign armies. The U.S. also had better artillery. And to top it all off, Mexico was led by General Santa Anna—who was more concerned with holding on to his own power than winning the war. And as we will see, the war itself was not popular in the Northern part of the United States.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on the headline to link to Part Two of the article.
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Workers Vanguard No. 933
27 March 2009
Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War
Finish the Civil War!
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Part One)
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by Jacob Zorn of the Spartacist League at a February 28 New York City forum.
This forum is being held in celebration of Black History Month. This is the first time that there is a black president of the United States, which in its own way is historic, especially given the history of black oppression in this country. American imperialism is bogged down in two increasingly unpopular wars and occupations abroad and an economic crisis that deepens each day. Thus, for the bourgeoisie, the fact that there is now a black president, not to mention a president who can put together an English sentence, is used to try to give a facelift to this brutal system, in order to refurbish its very threadbare “democratic” credentials—even as the capitalists plan to jack up brutal exploitation and oppression here and abroad.
Voting for the Democratic Party is counterposed to the interests of the working class and oppressed. During the elections, the Spartacist League called to break with the Democrats and for a class-struggle workers party. We did not vote for the Democrats. Nor do we think that a black president will serve to eliminate racial oppression here in the United States. Black oppression is deeply rooted in the history of the development of capitalism here, and only socialist revolution, which places the wealth of society in the hands of the multiracial working class, can liberate black people and all of the oppressed. This is why we call to finish the Civil War and for black liberation through socialist revolution.
In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico. When the United States finally left, it was only after forcing Mexico to give up about half of its national territory, including all or most of modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada, as well as Texas. In this forum, I want to look at how the oppression of black people here in the United States is rooted in the history of the United States, how the U.S. invasion of Mexico was a key part of this history, and how workers struggles in the United States and Mexico are inextricably linked.
The war was fought by the Southern slavocracy in order to further the expansion of the slave system into new land, as a way of solidifying the slave system’s domination of this country. The United States in the early 19th century was integrated into the developing world capitalist system, and the North had begun to develop into a very dynamic capitalist power. But this growth was hampered by the slave system in the South, which dominated the U.S. politically and economically. This coexistence of slavery and capitalism could not continue indefinitely. By the middle of the 19th century, what was called the “irrepressible conflict” came ever closer to breaking out into the open. The U.S. invasion of Mexico was an important signpost in the lead-up to the Civil War. As Marx put it in an article he wrote in 1861, during the Civil War:
“The present struggle between the South and the North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”
—“The Civil War in the United States” (1861)
Here in the United States, the invasion of Mexico is often either ignored or justified as inevitable; this was certainly my experience growing up in Arizona, which is part of the land taken from Mexico. In Mexico the war is much better known. No town or village is complete without its memorial or street dedicated to the “Boy Heroes” who fought against the U.S. There, the invasion is used to bolster Mexican nationalism, with its premise that the country needs to stand as one, regardless of class differences, to maintain eternal vigilance against the monolithic aggressor across the Río Bravo. As Marxists here in the “belly of the beast,” it is necessary to oppose any instance of U.S. aggression toward Latin America and to stand for the class solidarity of the working class throughout the Americas—to fight for workers revolutions throughout the continent, from Alaska to Argentina. Part of this is understanding the 1846 invasion of Mexico and why it happened.
At the same time, it is important to understand the class forces that contributed to the invasion. Yes, on the part of the United States the war was based on a desire to take over Mexican land, with a good deal of anti-Mexican, anti-indigenous and anti-Catholic bigotry thrown in. But more fundamentally, the invasion of Mexico was developed out of the historic division of the United States between capitalist and slave systems. This very division led, less than 20 years later, to America’s second revolution, the Civil War, which smashed the Southern slave system and paved the way for the unfettered development of capitalism in the United States.
For us, as for Marx and Engels, not to mention Frederick Douglass and the millions of slaves in the South, the Civil War was a just war on the side of the North. This is ABC. It’s embarrassing that one has to assert this, but it still seems to be far beyond the grasp of many even so-called Marxists, like for example the Progressive Labor Party. They recently debated for several months about the Civil War in the pages of Challenge—and seemed never to have really reached a conclusion (see “PL vs. Karl Marx (and Abraham Lincoln),” WV No. 919, 29 August 2008). For us, the problem is that the task of black liberation was not completed, and black oppression remains integral to American capitalism.
In order to understand this, it’s necessary to understand the role of slavery in the early United States. The basic task of a bourgeois revolution is to create a unified bourgeois nation: in this sense, the first American Revolution was incomplete. During the War of Independence against Britain, the “founding fathers,” both in the North and in the South, agreed that the 13 colonies would be better off outside the control of the British Empire. But they represented different propertied classes: the budding Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern slaveholding landowners. In 1776, both the Northern merchant capitalists and the Southern planter aristocracy supported independence from the British imperial system, and for several decades it was beneficial for both to coexist in the same economy and the same country.
The new republic was not an equal partnership—the Southern slavocracy was in control. Without understanding this, the entire first half of American history doesn’t make a lot of sense. Increasing cotton production in the 19th century clinched a common economic interest between the plantation owners of the South and the Northern bankers and merchants who profited from the export of cotton to Britain and its manufacture into goods. The “slave power” of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was codified a decade later in the U.S. Constitution, which was written in 1787.
When he was running for president, Barack Obama claimed “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution.” This is a lie: while the Constitution never actually uses the word “slave,” it gave the slave South extra power, despite the fact that its population grew at a much slower rate than the free North. The “three-fifths clause” not only declared a slave three-fifths of a person, but also gave slaveowners extra power within the electoral system. And then there is the Senate, which gives each state the same representation regardless of its population. And when the Constitution was written, the Senate was not elected. Southerners held the presidency more often than not for most of the history of the early United States. This made it all but impossible to legally abolish slavery. Thus both in economic terms and in political terms, human slavery was the cornerstone of the early American republic.
Slavery eventually died out in the North, where the last state to abolish slavery was New Jersey in 1846. By the mid 19th century, Northern capitalism had developed to such a point that it was increasingly fettered by the Southern slavocracy. The envelope for this tension was often expansionism. From the original 13 colonies, the United States had already grown extensively, especially with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Both the slave South and the capitalist North shared expansionist aims. This was later called “Manifest Destiny.” But this expansion meant different things for each section. Northern capitalists and farmers wanted to expand to the west. This included much of what was then called Oregon—which is not only the current state of Oregon but also much of western Canada, which was claimed by Britain. They wanted to expand a market for manufactured goods, obtain raw materials, develop a hinterland for the North, and expand toward Asian markets through the Pacific Rim.
The Southern slaveowners wanted to expand the slave system and deepen its power over the country in order to guarantee that slavery would continue to exist. Immigration and population growth in the North threatened to offset the three-fifths clause, and new free states would mean less power for the slave South in Congress. So politicians from both sides concocted a series of so-called “compromises” to maintain the North/South balance. One example is the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which divided the Louisiana Territory into slave and free zones.
No sooner had one “compromise” been effected than the next crisis would arise. In 1861, after the Civil War broke out, Marx explained this:
“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North.”
—“The American Question in England” (1861)
The Democratic Party at the time was, in the South, the main party of the slaveholders. In the North, it comprised both merchant capitalists who traded with the South and the urban poor. In both regions, it was thoroughly racist.
Plantation-based cotton agriculture is very hard on the soil, especially as it was practiced in the South. Therefore the slavocracy had a constant demand for new land. Many Southerners wanted to create what they called an “empire for slavery,” which would include much of Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to make sure that there would always be plantation slavery in the United States. British military power was an obstacle to the North’s wish to expand to the northwest in Oregon, but Mexico appeared to be a scintillating morsel to the slave South.
Mexico After Independence
Both the U.S. and Mexico bore the marks of their colonizing powers. British North America, including later the United States, was largely based on the mercantile model of Britain, which was by the mid 18th century one of the most dynamic European economies and the first industrial capitalist country. Spain by this time was one of the most backward and bankrupt European powers; it had already squandered the wealth that it had taken from its American colonies. Rather than develop the productive forces of New Spain, the Spanish crown focused on getting as much gold and silver from its colony as it could and sending this wealth back to the Iberian Peninsula. Between 1808 and 1821, Spain was beset by various problems in Europe, and it lost control of its empire. Almost all of its American colonies became independent in this period, the exceptions being Cuba and Puerto Rico, which remained Spanish colonies until the United States took them in the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s.
I want to touch on African slavery in Mexico for a moment. The Spanish were in fact the first European power in the Americas to use African slaves. And the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, such as Santo Domingo, were based on slavery. The first black slaves arrived in Mexico with Hernán Cortés, and slaves were important in early colonial Mexico—something that is often ignored by contemporary Mexican nationalists. But the main source of labor in Mexico was indigenous peasants, not African slaves, and by the 19th century slavery had died out in Mexico. So at its independence, Mexico abolished slavery, but this was more a symbolic than a real act—except, as we’ll see, in Texas.
Shortly after its independence in 1821, Mexico was crippled by the legacy of Spanish colonialism, which had left the country underdeveloped and economically weak and heavily indebted. Mexico was very unstable; it had no real central government. Its extreme southern territories, including modern-day Guatemala, and its far northern territories were not under control of Mexico City. Between independence in 1821 and 1861, Mexico had 56 presidents, suffered several coups, and faced invasions by Spain in 1829 and France in 1838 in addition to the U.S. invasion in 1846. Mexico, in short, was not a modern nation-state. Local caciques opposed central control and political power alternated between Federalists who favored a decentralized government and conservative Centralists who wanted to place power in the hands of the government in Mexico City. One of the central figures in this period was the adventurer General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who himself ruled Mexico eleven times.
The U.S. had long had its eyes on Latin America. One example of this was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which told European countries to keep their hands off the Western Hemisphere. Mexico—or as the Spanish colonialists called it, New Spain—was particularly enticing for the United States. At the same time, the United States was pulling northern Mexico into its economy, and central Mexico was very distant. Just to give an example, one of the largest settlements in far northern Mexico was Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it took 60 days to get to Santa Fe from Missouri. But to get to Santa Fe from Mexico City it took some six months! As the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz allegedly put it almost a century later, Mexico was so far from God and so close to the United States.
Texas
I want to talk a bit about Texas, because it’s quite important. By the 19th century, Spain had already lost its territories in Florida and Louisiana. In 1819, the U.S. had signed a treaty with Spain, the Adams-Onís Treaty that established the boundary between the U.S. and Spanish territory at the Sabine River, and the U.S. renounced “forever” any claim to Texas—but Spain was still worried that its sparsely populated northern territory was vulnerable. So to populate the northern part of its territory, the Spanish government encouraged English-speaking North Americans, so-called Anglos, who were mainly citizens of the United States, to settle in Texas. The newly independent Mexican government continued the same policy. These immigrants were required to formally convert to Catholicism, which was the only legal religion in Mexico at the time, and the idea was that they would become Mexicans. But many of the immigrants had very little intention of actually doing so. Instead, they were mainly Southerners who wanted to extend slavery as far as possible into Mexican territory.
The first large-scale Anglo settlement in Texas was founded by Moses Austin and his son Stephen. By 1825, it had 1,800 inhabitants; 443 of them were slaves. Soon, Anglo immigrants and slaves outnumbered Mexicans in Texas ten-to-one, although it’s important to keep in mind that Native Americans outnumbered both. The links between far northern and central Mexico diminished even more as trade with the increasingly dynamic United States grew, and the Mexican government was too weak to force the Americans in Texas to do much of anything.
Slavery was a very special issue in this relationship. It was illegal in Mexico but was central to the economy in Texas, just as it was in the economy in the Southern United States. The Mexican government saw limiting slavery as a way to rein in these settlers, and it repeatedly reasserted its opposition to slavery, while not doing much to actually limit its practice in Texas. In 1829, the Mexican president Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery but allowed Texas to maintain slavery as long as no more slaves were admitted. The Texans got around even this by forcing their slaves to sign so-called “contracts” with their masters that virtually guaranteed their perpetual servitude.
The Texas “Revolution”: Pro-Slavery Coup d’Etat
There’s a lot of mythology about what’s called the “Texas Revolution” of 1835-36, in which Texas broke away from Mexico. But at bottom this was a slaveholders’ rebellion, fought to guarantee the existence of human slavery. Sometimes it is depicted as a reaction to a growing Mexican central government—this is what I was told when I visited the Alamo several years ago. I haven’t forgotten. But as veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser put it in an unpublished study of the development of black oppression in the United States, “The colonists didn’t care what government sat in Mexico City as long as slavery was tolerated. What they feared was that a stronger central government would most assuredly move against their practice of slavery.” Stephen Austin, a founder of Texas, himself argued: “Texas must be a slave country.” And in fact, as a state, Texas would become fervently pro-slavery and joined the Confederacy in the Civil War. The University of Texas has something called the “Handbook of Texas Online” and it describes:
“The Texas Revolution assured slaveholders of the future of their institution. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836) provided that slaves would remain the property of their owners, that the Texas Congress could not prohibit the immigration of slaveholders bringing their property, and that slaves could be imported from the United States (although not from Africa). Given those protections, slavery expanded rapidly during the period of the republic.”
Many slaves in Texas saw the Mexican army during the so-called “revolution” as an army of liberation. Since Mexico had abolished slavery, slaves in independent Texas escaped to the south. As one former slave put it: “All we had to do was walk, but walk south and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free.” At least 4,000 slaves escaped to Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s.
The Texans of course defeated General Santa Anna in 1836 and won de facto independence, although it’s a funny type of independence, because as soon as they became independent many Texans wanted to join the United States. The slavocracy wanted to annex Texas, but to do so threatened to undo the balance between the North and South and also to provoke war with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas’s independence.
“Manifest Destiny”
Now as I mentioned earlier, there was a shared expansionism in both the North and the South. This was called Manifest Destiny, the idea that God had a unique plan for white, English-speaking, Protestant North Americans to conquer and “civilize” all of America. By the 1840s, the slavocracy and the Northern capitalists were increasingly at odds over the nature of this destiny, of this expansionism. To the North, it was tied to the growth of capitalism, the expansion of free labor and markets and more influence in Congress. Oregon, as I said, was very important. To the South, expansionism meant increasing the reach of slavery and bolstering its power in government. The more the country expanded, the greater the tensions between slavery and capitalism became.
At the time, Texas remained a lightning rod. Many Southerners were anxious that Britain would try to make Texas a client state and abolish slavery there. James Polk, a Southern Democrat, was elected president in 1844 as a militant advocate of Manifest Destiny. Polk, like many American presidents, was a representative of the slavocracy: he owned a 920-acre plantation and 34 slaves—he bought 19 of them while he was president of the United States. According to historian Joseph Wheelan, he was “an unrepentant slaveholder” who “as a congressman had consistently sided with Southern interests in blocking attempts to interfere with slavery” (Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 [2007]). In his presidential campaign, Polk promised to expand into Oregon and to annex Texas. In 1845, under this pressure, lame-duck president John Tyler—himself a slaveholder from Virginia—announced the annexation of Texas.
This was a provocation against both Mexico and the Northern free states and would lead to a war with each. The pretext for invading Mexico was the border between Mexico and Texas. The border between Texas and the rest of Mexico had always been the Río Nueces, but after annexing Texas, the United States claimed that the border was actually the Río Bravo del Norte (called the Rio Grande in the United States), which is some 160 miles to the south. This not only meant making Texas bigger, but also it expanded the U.S. claim to much of New Mexico as well, which concretely meant the possibility of creating several more slave states. In his Personal Memoirs, former president Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in Mexico, argued: “The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition.”
The Invasion
The U.S. provoked a war with Mexico by stationing troops in this disputed area and then, when an American soldier was killed, claiming that, in Polk’s words, “American blood has been shed on American soil.” This was the first in a list of lies that have been used by the U.S. to justify invasions of different countries—the USS Maine (Cuba), the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam) and most recently supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (Iraq).
In the war, the U.S. had a three-pronged strategy. Stephen Watts Kearny invaded westward, into New Mexico and California (the latter with John C. Frémont). Zachary Taylor invaded northern Mexico, occupying Monterrey, and Winfield Scott invaded Mexico City from the Caribbean port city of Veracruz. Polk wanted a short war; he feared that if the war lasted too long, Taylor and Scott, who were Whigs, would become too popular. However, the war lasted longer than he expected, since Mexico did not surrender until forced to. The Marine Corps’ hymn still celebrates this invasion, asserting the U.S power in the “Halls of Montezuma,” that is to say, in Mexico City.
The war served as a testing ground for future military leaders in the Civil War and was the first war in which West Point graduates played a key role. From Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the Confederate side to George McClellan and U.S. Grant on the Union side, most of the commanding officers in the Civil War had fought in the invasion of Mexico.
Many of these officers had very different takes on the war. In the case of Grant, he later called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” To use one example, there’s the northern city of Monterrey, which was occupied for almost two years. Historian Miguel Ángel González Quiroga describes how “the city was subjected to a furious onslaught unlike any it has witnessed before or since. The fighting left devastation and ruin that converted the town, in the words of one eyewitness, into a vast cemetery.”
Even though Mexico had a larger army, the U.S. won the war. This was a reflection not of Manifest Destiny but of the superior organization and wealth of the United States. Incidentally, Karl Marx thought that the United States won despite its leadership. He called General Scott “a common, petty, untalented, carping, envious cur and humbug.” The Mexican army was officer heavy; at one point, Santa Anna commanded an army of 24,000 officers and only 20,000 enlisted men. According to historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, the “conditions of the [Mexican] army were disastrous, it was tired, poorly fed and unarmed, it was large but untrained and confronted an army that was small, but disciplined, equipped, fed and regularly paid” (De la Rebelión de Texas a la Guerra del 47 [1994]). One thing I’ll mention about the U.S. side, it should be noted that many Catholic Irish and German immigrants in the U.S. Army resented the Protestant leadership, and there were even Irish-American soldiers who defected to Mexico, forming the San Patricio Battalion. Remember that during the 19th century, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry was rife in the U.S.
Furthermore, the Mexican government was divided; it was unstable and unable to mobilize the resources necessary to fend off the United States. Mexican soldiers—largely indigenous and mestizo peasants—had little incentive to fight for a largely white landlord class of hacendados. During the war, there were numerous changes of government in Mexico itself and there were rebellions, for example, in southern Mexico. As many as 200,000 people died or were dislocated in the so-called Caste War of Yucatán by 1848. The Mexican army was used to attacking other Mexicans, not fighting foreign armies. The U.S. also had better artillery. And to top it all off, Mexico was led by General Santa Anna—who was more concerned with holding on to his own power than winning the war. And as we will see, the war itself was not popular in the Northern part of the United States.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on the headline to link to Part Two of the article.
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