The United States Becomes Its Own Worst Enemy

by Doug Dowd

From Michael Keaney (ed.,) Economics with a Public Purpose: Essays in Honour of John Kenneth Galbraith (Routledge, 2000)

Introduction. Since the 1970s the United States has become increasingly captive to consumeristic frenzy and religious zeal at home and to an arrogant militarism abroad. As we do so, has not the following description come to fit us as a people?

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values...too great an attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism...

The fit is all too close; but those words were written to describe the people of the eleven states of the “New South” that evolved after 1877. The quotation is from The Mind of the South (1940); its author was the Carolinian journalist W. J. Cash.

The New South was a toxic brew of institutionalized cruelty and systemic irrationalities, fueled by fear, greed, and hatred; only the most deadly of its social crimes was the encouragement and immunity given to the lynching of thousands of blacks after 1877.

That the New South’s characteristics were embraced with fervor by virtually all of its whites is well-known; almost entirely forgotten or generally unknown is that in significant degree its roots were in our national history and its values shared to one degree or another throughout the nation — as noted by the historian Howard Zinn, after his many years of teaching and working in the South:

[It is] everything its revilers have charged, and more than its defenders have claimed. It is racist, violent, hypocritically pious, xenophobic, false in its elevation of women, nationalistic, conservative, and it harbors extreme poverty in the midst of ostentatious wealth. The only point I have to add is that the United States as a civilization embodies all of those same qualities. That the South possesses them with more intensity simply makes it easier for the nation to pass off its characteristics to the South, leaving itself innocent and righteous. (The Southern Mystique

Now our nation as a whole lurches toward a functional resemblance to that South. There are many differences, of course, but not all of them are for the better. To the degree that is so, it is vital for those who cherish “the American dream” to know just what kind of society we are becoming, how it came to be, and what its consequences were. After a summary discussion of its creation and its evolution, today’s national tendencies and their alarming probabilities will be examined.

A despicable triumph. From our beginnings, the South was an integral part of the U.S.A. and subject to its laws; it was never “another country.” Slavery, its key shaping element, is seen as its “peculiar institution”; but it was not all that peculiar.

Item: Article II, Section 9 of the Constitution permitted U.S. slavery to continue for 20 years, a permission quietly renewed until the 14th Amendment was passed in 1866.

Item: Four of our first five presidents were slave owners.

More to the point, southern slavery could not have flourished without the spirited slave traders of the North; nor could the North’s economy have gained its economic strength as quickly or substantially as it did without slavery. Veblen put it well, if also wryly:

The slave trade was never a ‘nice’ occupation or an altogether unexceptionable investment — ‘balanced on the edge of the permissible.’ But even though it may have been distasteful to one and another of its New England men of affairs, and though there always was a suspicion of moral obliquity attached to the slave trade, yet it had the good fortune to be drawn into the service of the greater good. In connection with its running-mate, the rum trade, it laid the foundation of some very reputable fortunes at that focus of commercial enterprise that presently became the center of American culture, and so gave rise to some of the country’s Best People. At least so they say. Perhaps also it was... in the early pursuit in this moral penumbra that American business enterprise learned how not to let its right hand know what its left hand is doing, and there is always something to be done that is best done with the left hand. (Absentee Ownership [1923])

The Civil War and the amended Constitution formally ended slavery in the U.S. Though blacks were formally free after 1877, their lives may be seen as having become even more miserable, for black slaves had one protection freed blacks did not have: Because they were property, they were treated with at least some care. Also needing explanation is the descent into misery of most whites.

The basis for the explanation lies in an 1877 congressional act put together “at night and by cloud.” (Veblen) Then as now, Congress was very much bought and paid for; its “buyers” were conservative northern Republicans and their counterpart southern Democrats; the sellers were congressmen of both parties. The deal came to be called “the Compromise of 1877.” How did it happen?

Much has been written in answer to that questions, but until the works of the historian C. Vann Woodward, the answers did more to obscure or conceal than to explain. Digging deeply, Woodward (himself a southerner) produced the definitive works on that legislation and the South it allowed to emerge: Reunion and Reaction (1951, 1956), and Origins of the New South, 1887–1913 (1951). Reunion... concerned itself with what his first chapter calls “The Unknown Compromise.” Origins... traces out the South’s resulting history. Unless otherwise indicated, the ensuing brief summary is drawn from those books.

The presidential election of 1876 was hotly contested. The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden (New York), was favored to defeat the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (Ohio). The rationale for a “compromise” was the need to avert a renewed civil war.

What was “arranged” were provisions meant to satisfy the demands of the dominating powers of both North and South: 1) northern capital fervidly desired unfettered access to the rich but undeveloped resources and beckoning economic possibilities of the South; 2) southern merchants, small bankers, and landowners also sought gain for themselves, but of equal importance and more relevantly and disastrously, to end military occupation and its enforcement of the Reconstruction’s policies allowing blacks the rights of citizens. In practice that meant a free hand to mistreat, oppress and murder blacks as, meanwhile, both northern and southern business prospered at the expense of “poor whites.”

The manner in which the Compromise was arranged could be seen as amusing had it not laid the basis for decades of disaster for the majority of the southern population, irrespective of color. We turn first to the sordid details concerning the stolen election.

The southern states were expected...to line up solidly behind Tilden. All except three of them, Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana were reported to have piled up substantial Democratic majorities, and the Republican chairmen in Louisiana and Florida were rumored to have conceded those states....

Even without those [states’] votes, Tilden had 184 electoral votes in the bag, only one short of the 185 required to elect. Hayes was trailing with 166 electoral votes....In popular votes. Tilden, according to official returns later, led his opponent by more than a quarter of a million [equivalent to more than 2 million today].

Then...'[I]t was announced that Hayes had 185 electoral votes and is elected.’ (Reunion)

Sound familiar? It should, and not only because it was Florida’s locally controlled electoral board that was decisive. The popular vote in favor of Tilden notwithstanding, an electoral victory of Hayes by that one vote placed Hayes in the White House. And its consequences? The symbol of what ensued in the South became the hooded Klansman at a riotous lynching party; for the North, its easy access to the South’s cheap natural and human resources served both to strengthen and greatly to speed up overall industrialization. Over the next several decades, the South’s economy became “modernized,” with what were almost entirely northern-owned — with “whites only” workers — textile factories, mines, railroads, steel mills and banks. However, in that “modernization” the overwhelming majority of both its white and its black population sank into deep poverty. What is especially striking were the political attitudes of the “poor whites” as their material lives worsened.

Increasing hardship for workers side-by-side with increasing national strength was not novel; Hobsbawm informs us that British workers’ life spans were reduced by 20 percent from the 1820s into the 1850s. Those “dark Satanic mills” (Blake) of the industrial revolution were imposed upon an initially demoralized but soon to be resistant working class. The response of southern white workers in the post-1877 years was to accept their always increasing material misery in exchange for “the wages of whiteness” (Roediger). And they were miserable:

By 1900 the cotton-mill worker was a pretty distinct type in the South, a type in some respects perhaps inferior to even that of the old poor white, which in general had been his to begin with. A dead-white skin, a sunken chest, and stooping shoulders were the earmarks of the breed. Chinless faces, microcephalic foreheads, rabbit teeth, goggling fish eyes, rickety limbs, and stunted bodies abounded — over and beyond the limit of their prevalence in the countryside....And the incidence of tuberculosis, of insanity and epilepsy, and, above all, of pellagra, the curious vitamin-deficiency disease which is nearly peculiar to the South, was increasing. (Cash; and see Woodward, Origins...; and Mitchell.)

It was not until World War II that southern white workers began to move toward material well-being; nor until the late 1960s that its black population began to move toward full citizenship. It was war production and its many industrial and military installations that made for southerners’ enhanced material well-being. For those who stayed, the numerous war plants and military bases were the key; in addition, millions of both blacks and whites moved out to the North, East, or West for jobs and/or served in the military. Directly and indirectly, the war had much to do with the postwar civil rights struggles; millions of blacks served in the armed forces, to fight against...what? Their grievances, added to the always rising demands for black dignity and freedom, made for a powerful movement.

Thus, when the South evolved toward living within the accepted ways and means of the nation as a whole after the war, it was because of influences importantly external in origin. However, the United States as a nation — now so much resembling the New South — cannot expect outside assistance to save us from ourselves.

The foregoing history could reasonably be seen as absurdly inaccurate by most, including — perhaps especially — students of U.S. history. My own graduate work was divided between economics and history at a leading university, and I knew nothing of this until after my student years. That my experience was not unique may be at verified by an examination of almost any accepted U.S. history text. Representative of that deficiency is what may be found in a widely used “dictionary” of American history. Although there is an entry for “The New South” there is no mention of “the compromise” that created that South or of its foul underside; what is discussed are its economic “triumphs.”

Worse, when political matters are discussed, we are informed that in the New South “Negro and white suffrage” increased....” However, as Woodward shows, there was a brutal decrease in average material well-being after 1877 for blacks and whites. As for political progress, a major element of the Civil Rights struggles in the South in the 1960s was merely to allow blacks to register to vote without fear of being beaten or killed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary to even begin to end that disgrace. Also left unmentioned is that even a moderate southern state such as Tennessee most blacks had no schools, no health care, disgraceful housing, and were overworked as sharecroppers at starvation incomes — as were the “poor whites,” as noted earlier.

The Mind of the United States. So what is it in today’s U.S.A. that gives relevance to the foregoing discussion? Setting aside the 2000 election, there has been no “compromise” greasing the skids for today’s reincarnation of the New South. However, whether or not intended, the ominous directions in which the U.S.A. now moves are again a product of a bizarre meeting of minds:

• Big business
• The wealthy
• Militarists
• Pro-gun individuals and groups
• Evangelical Christians
• Anti-abortionists
• Anti-gays
• Anti-environmentalists

Taken together they increasingly provide extraordinary amounts of political purchasing power and political passion — both absolutely and, up to now, relative to those on the other side of all those issues.

This rightward shift is feverishly egged on or acquiesced in by tens of millions of Americans who, reminiscent of the majority “poor whites” of the New South, are unwittingly bringing economic, political, and social damage upon themselves. There are, of course, many differences between the South’s past and our nation’s present; but some of those differences are more alarming than soothing: The South, a weak society in a strong nation, harmed mostly itself; our great power, as it is abused, threatens the well-being, peace and environmental survival of the entire globe.

Has it not always been thus with rulers of the past — of Rome, Napoleon’s France, the Britannia that “ruled the waves,” among others? It surely has, accompanied by their own forms of arrogance and pride and misdeeds at home and abroad. Most recently and relevantly for present purposes is what Britain brought upon itself and the world in the 19th century, and which greased the skids for World War I — and thus, an “interwar period” fraught with revolution and counter-revolution, history’s broadest, deepest, and longest depression and a considerably more disastrous second world war.

Even so, is it at all reasonable to fear that such chaos and convulsions once more lie ahead? If the answer is even to be a moderate yes, what are the worrisome tendencies today over which the U.S. presides?

They are all too many; here a summary look at their main elements at home and abroad, noting that each feeds upon and is fed by the others in processes of intensifying damage:

1) In the United States, an increasing concentration of already excessive economic and political power and pervasive corruption, guided by a White House whose arrogance, heedlessness, ignorance, and seeming indifference to realities at home and abroad go well beyond anything earlier

2) A uniquely fragile global economy critically dependent upon the already mountainous, household, corporate, national, and foreign debts of the United States, which must keep rising

3) A dangerously fragile U.S. economy, seriously weakened in its once matchless manufacturing sector (which has recently lost millions of jobs), now dominated by the financial sector and its gambling — most menacingly in housing, most disgustingly in pension funds

4) A set of rising and combined economic and political challenges to U.S.-guided globalization, whether in the already substantial and growing dissent from Latin America, the spreading weakness of European economies, or the spectacular rise in the strengths of both China and India

5) A notable arousal of U.S. militarism, accompanied and supported by intensifying racism and fundamentalist religion and the rising conflicts between “Jihad and McWorld” (Barber)

6) Increasing tensions and possibilities of conflict between the U.S.A. and China regarding Taiwan and, as well, North Korea and Iran — plus what appears to be a deepening “quagmire” in Iraq — while, at the same time, tensions both in Israel/Palestine and Saudi Arabia rise, as they do between India and Pakistan

7) The weakening of the always inadequate social policies of the U.S.A. and of the once substantial policies of Western Europe and Japan, with resulting social unrest, political uncertainties, and paralysis

8) The ways in which consumeristic borrowing and buying serve to detract attention and energy from reasoned political participation, in the U.S.A. and, as well, other countries

9) The role of the media as a) concerned more with spectacle than substance and b) serving as mostly complacent or complicit allies of those in power — just when the general public needs to become better informed and more politically involved

Throughout our history, we have seen ourselves as the land of opportunity, which indeed it has been for many; but never for all. Now, as the very wealthy become always more so (and pay lower taxes), in this richest company in world history, fewer are able to meet the basic needs of adequate nutrition, health care, housing, education, and opportunity. There is no acceptable reason for those needs not to be met, let alone to have to permit the worse on its way. The stage has been set for a convulsive political process; all the more so because our politicians and dominant attitudes blithely blather and behave as though “prosperity is here to stay.”

This evolving nightmare will not reversed from the top down; for our ideals to become realizable once more, “we the people” must bring it to life; must increase, spread, and deepen our political efforts.

In conclusion. As the 19th century ended, mainstream thinkers did not foresee anything like World War I, let alone the disasters that followed in its wake. Rising out of the chaos between the two wars was a new social system: fascism. Disturbingly, it was born in the two societies then seen as western civilization’s cultural, philosophical, and scientific leaders: Italy and Germany. Fascism has been designated as “capitalism with the gloves off.” (Laski) The “gloves” were those of political democracy. What the U.S. is moving toward now, with substantial variations, might well be seen as “fascism with the gloves on” — that is, the maintenance of political democracy within an effectively authoritarian regime ruling over an almost entirely obsequious citizenry.

But surely the United States, symbol of freedom and democracy could not descend into such a shameful state? A closer look at what happened to Germany should serve as a warning.

Ask most in the United States to characterize pre-Nazi Germany and it would be something of the order of “an uptight country of flagrant nationalism and spike-helmeted Soldaten, its people addicted to beer, sausage, and sauerkraut.” But as late as the mid-1920s until the early 1930s, Germany was deservedly seen in western artistic, scientific, engineering, and musical worlds as “the peak of western civilization.” All flocked to Berlin, as though magnetized. Then, after the 1933 election, as though by a diabolical magician’s wand, Germany permitted its President Hindenburg to give the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler (whose party had received only a third of the votes).

In 1941, as Cash was writing his book, the German socio-psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was writing his Escape from Freedom. In it, he sought to explain how and why his country fell from its glorious peak into history’s foulest pit — and could do so with what became a large majority that grudgingly accepted, unblinkingly supported, or hotly embraced the irrationalities, authoritarianism, and massive atrocities of German fascism.

Fromm’s explanation combined and went beyond both Freud and Marx, and took into account factors that are absent in the United States: Countless bitter veterans of World War I who, having expected to win easily, had disastrously lost the bloodiest war in history (up to then); who saw their country’s economic assets and territories, even a big slice of its population, taken away by the avaricious Treaty of Versailles; who went through the most spectacular inflation ever, 1918–1923, which shot prices up by 4 trillion times,(with accompanying miseries); a nation whose politics, wracked by divisions which always deepened, made effective government impossible — all that and more. (Brady, 1933; 1937; Gerschenkron)

There is little of that to be found here, today. What justifies looking at Germany now is not only that from about 1924 until 1930 it was an admirable, proud, strong, and respected society which, nonetheless, plunged toward the depths, but that beneath the developments of their time and ours are troublesome similarities. I recapitulate only the most relevant, all discussed earlier: abiding militarism and conformism, a tendency to look for and find scapegoats: for them the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and Communists; for us, also the conformism and militarism, plus nerves frazzled by job and debt worries, harsh attitudes toward and treatment of the poor compounded by racism — and now, near panic about terrorists. It is also important to note that the decades combining McCarthyism and Cold War institutionalized the inhibition of dissent. Social critics have never been held in high esteem here; now even “liberals” are portrayed as being sinister; or as just plain fools: “eggheads.”

Fromm also argued that in Germany’s 1920s “exploitation and manipulation produce[d] boredom and triviality; they cripple[d] man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or destroyer.” In today’s finely spun vocabulary we have softer words than exploitation, boredom and triviality to characterize the typically Overworked American and Overspent American. (Schor) But, and in ways different from Germany, those factors are hard at work here, and have been for many decades. As they have done so, we have become dangerous to ourselves and to others.

Without underestimating the horrors of either the New South or of Hitler’s Germany, it remains quite possible, now even probable, that the United States is being taken toward a preventable world economic crisis, environmental destruction, and a chain of wars — up to and including the use of “small” nuclear weapons and, thus toward what should be — but is not — an “unthinkable” major war. We used nuclear weapons on Japan, and have been ready since then to use nuclear weapons them again. (Ellsberg)

Impossible? No. Improbable? That depends — upon whether the millions of us who have taken the “American dream” seriously will also take politics more seriously.

In 1937, when German fascism was full-throated, Robert A. Brady wrote what remains the best study of its origins and nature: The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. On its title page he chose to quote Shakespeare’s Lear:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

Time had already run out for the Germans; there is still time for us “to tame these vile offences.”

References

Brady, Robert A. 1937. The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. New York: Viking Press.

Cash, W. J. 1941. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf.

Ellsberg, D. 2002. Secrets: A Memoir on Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking Penguin.

Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Gerschenkron, A. 1943. Bread and Democracy in Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hobsbawm, E. J. 1968. Industry and Empire. New York: Pantheon.

Laski, H. 1936. The Rise of European Liberalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Mitchell, B. 1921. The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Roediger, D. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso.

Schor, J. 1991. The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books.

_________ 1998. The Overspent American. New York: Basic Books.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1923, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. New York: Huebsch.

Woodward, C. V. 1951. The Origins of the New South, 1877–1923. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Zinn, H. 1964/2002. The Southern Mystique. New York: Knopf/South End Press.

August 20, 2005