Social Equality

Social intercourse and the suffrage.

"They suggest that we may confer political equality on the coloured people, without admitting them to social equality…. Now, sir, I submit to the gentlemen, whether these political rights, of which we are speaking, do not depend, for their preservation and right exercise, on social intercourse and equality. Not that every man, must associate with every man in the community, but I hold there must be that free and unrestrained interchange of sentiments on public questions, which can only attend a state of general equality, if we would properly prepare the mass of men to exercise political suffrage.... These separate circles or little societies which wealth or adventitious circumstances, and not our political institutions, have made distinct, have connecting links that extend the opinions thus formed by the contact of minds, from and to the extremities of the body politic, and keep up a sympathy between the whole and all its parts; and here is the foundation of the system of universal suffrage. For suffrage is only the expression of the opinions which are perpetually maturing under the influence of social intercourse and equality."--Woodward, delegate to the Pennsylvania constitutional convention, 1838.

I have argued, and continue to, that at least some of the resonance of 'social equality' in the post-bellum period as an obstacle to state intervention in civil rights came about because of it was strategically deployed by racial egalitarians who were attempting to secure rights of political and civil equality (for principled reasons, as well as the huge labor interest once slavery was abolished in ensuring that free blacks would not remain a helot class) against understandings of citizenship and belonging that remained anchored in the white male republic.

The counter, however, is that the opponents of black suffrage and civil rights in the antebellum period had their own sophisticated understanding of the importance of social equality: only under conditions of social equality and intercourse could there be the formation of sympathy with the whole, that the opinions exchanged, developed, and defended in these networks of equal intercourse incrementally structured a broad attachment of these "separate circles or little societies" with a community in formation. Absent this sympathy, it was class warfare, and universal suffrage would be simply a weapon in the hands of the property-less. And absent this sympathy, foreclosed by the lack of social intercourse on a plane of equality, the extension of the suffrage to blacks would have been creating a scenario in which electoral competition became an arena for race war.

Clearly the resonance of concerns over social equality come in part from the fact that both the advocates and opponents of black civil and political rights embraced this discourse, just as it is clearly the case that they embraced it because of its broader resonance. But by looking at the discourse from the perspective of the strategic calculus of racial egalitarians, we miss the nuanced concerns of antebellum white supremacists. And we should listen to these dead activists, however distasteful, because the specific content of these concerns--that suffrage and representative government requires a sympathy for the community, a belief in a common weal, and that these are rooted in patterns of social intercourse that are highly resilient in the face of state intervention--is one  that we need to take very seriously.

Let us now praise forgotten men

I wrote something a few days ago about the inability to find heroes in history. I don't want to suggest that I am looking for these, but when hanging out in their world there is an urge to find sympathetic persons to cheer on. 


Given my focus on suffrage, one obvious metric is whether someone supported the extension of the right to vote to all classes and races. Most come up short, with the class conservatives most likely to be taking the egalitarian position on race and vice versa. So those who defy this pattern, and defend an unambiguously egalitarian agenda, are worthy of note.


In the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1837-38, there were only between 5-8 members who supported both.[1] 


Earle, of Philadelphia
Clarke, of Indiana County
Dickey, of Beaver County
Farrelly, of Crawford County
Cleavinger, of Greene County
Hayhurts, of Columbia County
Purviance, of Butler County
and White, of Tioga County.


Even the beloved Thad. Stevens [2] would vote against removing the taxpayer qualification. All but Dickey and Purviance (who were Anti-Masons) were Democrats, which was the party most vigorously opposed to black suffrage, so their courage on this issue is even more notable. 


Earle is especially notable. He was a Democrat, the publisher of the Mechanics' Free Press and Reform Advocate, and would go on to be the Liberty Party's vice-presidential candidate in 1840, after losing favor with the Democrats for his stand on black suffrage. So, here's to Earle. The origins of the alliance between labor and the civil rights movement are further back in history than we usually believe, and Earle was one of the points of contact during the antebellum period.


[1] There were two votes on whether the suffrage should not differentiate between blacks and white: on the first, 8 voted against differentiation who also voted for the removal of the tax qualification, while only 5 did so on the second. 
[2] I love Thaddeus Stevens. And so should you. Not only was he a near constant vanguard advocate of far-reaching racial equality, he was accordingly "slandered" as Austin Stoneman, the Radical Republican leader (with a mulatto consort) in Birth of a Nation. His biographer describes him as "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, national Republican leader in the struggles against slavery in the United States and intrepid mainstay of the attempt to secure racial justice for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the only member of the House of Representatives ever to have been known, as the 'dictator' of Congress." (Trefousse, Hans L. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (1997) , p.xi). Personally, my favorite slander of Stevens came during his early career, as an Anti-Masonic delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1837-38: "the great unhinged of Adams county."

Cale and Warnes....

Empty bottles.

I've had a soft spot for Warnes entirely as a result of Famous Blue Raincoat. Knowing that she does Cale as well as Cohen carries her even further along in my esteem.

Paris, 1939

Enchanting? Yes..., but:

The woman who owned the flat had left for the south of France before the Second World War and never returned. But when she died recently aged 91, experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions and homed in on the flat near the Trinité church in Paris between the Pigalle red light district and Opera.

For 70 years the apartment had been left untouched, the rent dutifully paid. How does one continue to pay the rent for a place to which they must certainly know they will never return? Estate manager, presumably, responsible for their investments and diligently paying the bills as they arrive?

They dance to the beat of a different drum.[1]

What I found most interesting was not the million dollar Boldini, but rather the scene itself: walking into 1930s upper class Paris, the Mickey Mouse, the stuffed Ostrich, the smell of decay.

[1] They don't march. For that matter, do they dance to a drum's beat at all?

The only time I'll ever link to Bobby Jindal's webpage

Delegate Grymes, Louisiana State Constitutional Convention 1845:

"we may have an irruption of the inhabitants of Central Asia, of Affghanistan, and of the Hindoos; and if they cut down and fell our forests, without attempting to regulate our institutions, we will be fortunate indeed" (p.69)

Grymes is arguing against residence requirements for naturalized citizens before they can be eligible to be elected to public office. So, I link to Bobby Jindal, his official state site and his Wikipedia page. I disagree with Jindal on a range of issues (somewhere between 'every damn thing' and 'good lord, what is this man's problem'), but his election shuts up Grymes. (Yes, I know that death did that a long time ago, but this is the problem with living in the history.) Jindal was raised Hindu, converted to Catholicism, and is the first Indian-American governor in the United States. And it brings me a totally un-warranted pleasure to think that Voorhies would be aghast.

Reading the constitutional convention debates is fascinating; but with history being another country and all that jazz, I find it hard to be a partisan. That is, while it is very easy to find yourself repulsed by certain delegates (such as Grymes), and there is a definite attraction to other delegates, it is difficult to maintain these feelings across issue areas. This is largely because the ones defending (or even advancing) black suffrage are often the ones trying to impose restrictions on foreigners, or on poor whites. The lines of belonging parameterize the commitment to principle. There are some exceptions: Wisconsin in 1846 seems to be remarkable in that the people trying to expand the suffrage to blacks also want immigrant voting and are at the very least not rolling back white voting and are often loudly defending the unqualified right of the governed to vote, with at least some suggestions that this might include women. But generally, and to me surprisingly, finding heroes in the past is at least as difficult as finding them in the present--although villains abound in both.

Odious distinctions, solidarity forever

I suspect that the old language of the Democratic Party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson, the language of equal rights, against odious distinctions, still resonates:

"It taxes one class for the support of another, and what is worse, taxes the poor for the sake of the rich. It thus produces that inequality, which is the bane of republics; for it is in fact the influence of the few, or, in other worse, aristocracy. Now, though no just government will interfere, by sumptuary laws, to restrain the acquisition of wealth, and thereby prevent inequality, so neither will any just government, by fostering particular interests, at the expense of others, promote inequality. This is the opposite, and the worst extreme of sumptuary laws. Nor is the inequality which is produced by the interference of the law, by any means as harmless as that which results from different dispositions, and different capacities in human beings. Whilst the one may act as a salutary stimulus to industry, and its worst consequences are continually neutralized by the alienation and division of property, the other, by creating distrust in the government, produces despair, and depresses industry; and the dread of retributive justice, which always accompanies wealth unjustly acquired, so far from giving rise to division of property, inevitably leads to concentration and primogeniture,--to legal safeguards, corporations, charters, monopolies, and privileged orders." -- Report of the Committee on Agriculture, on the memorial of the Delegates of the United Agricultural Societies of sundry counties in the state of Virginia, February 2, 1821, p.55-56. 

The first bolded passage is the old mantra of the Democracy, the one that tied the working class to the southern planter. This resonates still, but its target is the poor. The idea that public policy is structured to tax the poor and distribute to the rich, while making occasional appearances, remains largely unformulated at the level of popular discourse these days.

I think that in the second bolded passage we find the central disconnect between those who believe the massive increase in inequality in recent decades is a problem, and those who believe that is a reflection of talent, however obtained, hard work, and luck. The passage suggests that inequality is not in itself problematic, but rather that it is inequality ill-gotten, achieved as a result of courtier leverage.

This brings to mind Elizabeth Warren's claim that "no on in this country got rich on their own." Warren's claim is about a broader understanding of the communal basis for individual success, and for a broader understanding of success. But much of what is animating popular support for Occupy Wall Street seems to be somewhat more narrow, and at the same time, something more politically tractable: that a sliver of people in this country got rich by taking, by having given to them, by appropriating from the damned rest of us, and that this appropriation was enabled and in some cases directly and deliberately accomplished by government action. And that, empowered by the state through the discriminatory policies of the conservative nanny state-- through the distribution of tax policy, trade policy, our largely hidden and poorly coordinated industrial policy--a privileged class has been erected, one that will be able to use its power to further entrench itself, to  wrap the commonwealth more tightly in its web.

I prefer the broadness of Warren's critique, its unwavering answer to the apologists of inequality who eulogize hard work, talent, brilliance. But I prefer the cut, the anger, the barely contained hatred of the latter. Inequality is not a very good motivator for political action. Theft from the public good, profiteering at the expense of the community, and odious distinctions between classes, especially those that distribute from the poor to pay for the luxury of the rich, have been wonderful motivators throughout American history, and I suspect they remain today.

So, raise the banner high and repeat the old mantra: They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn....

Science fiction in Virginia...

.... or, an early chapter in the rise of Skynet.

From the Virginia State Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830:

"But I am told that Universal Suffrage, (I am no advocate for Universal Suffrage,) or more correctly General Suffrage, was the invention of the age of the Lord Protector Cromwell--that it sprung up for the first time, during the Commonwealth of England. It is called novel doctrine. Were it so, that would not prove it false. Steamboats are a novel invention, and many other useful arts are comparative novelties. The new race of men which modern science has created and made, is a new invention. I mean the wooden, brazen and iron men, which neither eat, drink, sleep, nor get tired; which are adults without being infants, full grown men as soon as born. These new men, these novelties, are likely to be a very useful race; for when inspired by steam, they are as rational as our black population. England has two hundred millions of them, and these United States have more than ten million of them. They are all revolutionists and will as certainly revolutionize the world as ever did the art of printing, or any conquering invader." --Delegate Campbell, p.388 

"Inspired by steam." The fantastic conquerings of human ingenuity, and of course, the so-deeply ingrained that it is almost background white supremacy.

Homeward bound....

... one night on the deep.

I seem to only ever post about music and movies these days. The original goal of the blog was to provide an outlet for dissertation research. More of that later.

But for now I want to think of Lord Franklin.

The grotesque images delighted me as a child. The knowledge that my suspicions were right, that despite the implicit assurances otherwise, the damned cold could kill you, and worse, could preserve your body as a horrifying reminder of your miserable demise, has led to a preference for fire over ice, a preference that has no real rational basis but that I won't dismiss as mere sentiment. From what I've tasted of desire..., and all that. (Also, this. Or, the opening sentence from this. My childhood had a theme.)

And then there was this:


As I understand it, this was the version of the song that inspired "Bob Dylan's Dream." I prefer this. When I first heard it I believed it to be sung by an old man. I also preferred that. But I'm okay with any song from a second album entitled "Second Album." Gets to the point. 

Update: Comment: "For Dylan to have been inspired by Martin Carthy’s version (which appeared on Carthy’s Second Album – I also like the title – in 1966),  he would have had to have heard it Live by 1963 at the latest as that’s when “Bob Dylan’s Dream” appeared on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). This is very possible. All Music guide lists many versions, mostly British and Irish." Yes. But Carthy was playing this prior to 1966, and it seems likely that Dylan learned the song from Carthy when they met in London in December 1962. Or, from Paul Clayton, who had recorded the song for his 1957 album Whaling and Sailing Songs: From the Days of Moby Dick. This is all from Wikipedia though, so hardly definitive.